As Peru loses its seventh president in 10 years, Washington is getting anxious about Lima’s burgeoning relationship with Beijing.
Peru loses another president
Yesterday’s vote in Peru’s congress to remove interim president José Jerí from office after just four months means the country will today get its eighth leader in a decade. The new president, who will be chosen from among the serving members of congress, will only govern until July before handing over to whoever wins an election scheduled for April 12th.
Jerí is under investigation following an undisclosed and clandestine meeting last December with two Chinese businessmen, one of whom has government contracts while the other is accused of illegal logging activity. The ousted president also faces questions over late-night meetings at his office with young women who were later appointed to jobs for which they were not obviously qualified.
Jerí’s two immediate predecessors were also removed from office and one of them, Pedro Castillo, was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison for attempting to overthrow the country’s institutions and rule by decree in 2022. The past decade of political stability has played out against the background of corruption scandals and a rise in violent crime, but its macroeconomic impact has been limited.
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One of the world’s biggest copper producers, Peru’s economy grew by 3.4 per cent last year with inflation at just 1.7 per cent. Stocks and bonds scarcely registered the turmoil in congress yesterday and markets appear to be relaxed about the outcome of April’s election.
Polls show Lima mayor Rafael López Aliaga from the conservative Popular Renewal party ahead in a crowded field, which also includes Keiko Fujimori of the right-wing populist Popular Force. She is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, the late Washington-backed dictator who was jailed for human rights abuses including ordering two massacres by the Grupo Colina death squad.
The scandal surrounding Jerí’s dealings with Chinese businessmen comes amid heightened scrutiny of Peru’s relationship with China, which overtook the United States to become its biggest trading partner in 2015.
China controls one of Peru’s biggest copper mines, buys 70 per cent of its copper, owns its largest electricity generators and accounts for 33 per cent of its trade, compared to the US’s 14 per cent.
A giant new port at Chancay outside Lima has reduced shipping times to China to just over three weeks and cut logistics costs by 20 per cent since it opened in November 2024. The $1.3 billion deepwater facility is majority owned by Chinese shipping giant Cosco, and a court ruled last week that because it is entirely financed by private capital, Chancay Port is not subject to oversight by Peru’s national transport infrastructure regulator Ositran.
Ositran is appealing the decision, which prompted the Trump administration to express concern that a port that was “under the jurisdiction of predatory Chinese owners” was beyond the oversight of the regulator.
“We support Peru’s sovereign right to oversee critical infrastructure in its own territory. Let this be a cautionary tale for the region and the world: cheap Chinese money costs sovereignty,” the US state department said.
Washington’s respect for the sovereign rights of independent Latin American states is such that it abducted Venezuela’s president last month and has threatened to overthrow Colombia’s leader, to bomb alleged drug cartels in Mexico and to topple the Cuban government by starving its people of energy and basic goods.
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