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Health Ministry doctors take part in a protest before calling an indefinite nationwide strike calling starting September 18, in Lima on Aug. 29. Doctors demand a budget increase of 0.5 percent per year, promised by Peru's President Ollanta Humala. (Ernesto Benavides/AFP/GettyImages)
Thousands of doctors who went on strike for more than a month in Peru have said they will suspend the protest, it was reported Sunday.
Doctors’ union leader Cesar Palomino told the BBC that the striking medical workers would return to work. The strike left numerous poor Peruvians without medical care.
They went on strike because they say their pay did not increase even though Peru has experienced significant economic growth in recent years.
“Our country has been growing strongly but pay in the public sector for the last decade has fallen substantially. We haven’t received a cent of increases. Our buying power has fallen 30 or 40 percent,” Jesus Bonilla, the leader of the doctors’ union that was partaking in the strike, told Reuters last week.
Some 11,000 doctors and hundreds of hospital managers went on strike, according to the news agency.
It caused around 1.5 million medical appointments to be missed, reported the BBC.
But the government threatened the doctors that it would reduce their pay if they did not return to work.
Finance Minister Luis Miguel Castilla said last month: “Dialogue is always open, an offer has been made, but we won’t respond to blackmail,” reported Reuters.
He said that during the strike, “the people who are suffering the costs of this are the patients.”
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