Peru president Pedro Castillo has been impeached by the country’s congress, hours after he tried to dissolve it.
Dina Boluarte – previously the vice-president – was sworn in after a dramatic day in Lima.
The 60-year-old lawyer took the oath of office and became the first female leader in the more than 200-year history of the independent republic.
Earlier in the day, Castillo had said he was replacing Congress with an “exceptional emergency government”.
Boluarte said her first order of business would be to address government corruption, ostensibly what felled Castillo.
“There has been an attempted coup … that has not found an echo in the institutions, nor in the street,” Boluarte said. She called for a political truce to install a national unity government.
“What I ask for is a space, a time to rescue the country,” she said.
