Peru’s Politics Are a Disaster, but Does It Matter?
There was a meme going around among Peruvians a few months ago: a picture of the underside of a bottle cap, the kind that announces you’ve won a prize. “Congratulations,” the cap reads. “You’re the new President of Peru.”
There’s a sting of truth to this, of course. The turnover among Peruvian Presidents is such that, when one is forced out of office, it doesn’t even rate a mention on the various group chats I have with my family back in Peru; some heads of state have had such short tenures they had barely enough time to seat a Cabinet before they were shown the door. Whoever is sworn in this July will be the ninth President in a decade, and only the third to actually win an election. The other six ascended to the highest office in the land as a result of the dysfunction that has made Peru a punch line in political-science circles, a sad story of ungovernability played on a loop. In the past ten years, four Presidents have been impeached by Congress, and two have resigned. There have been three heads of state since October of last year, each uniquely unqualified to lead a nation.
Take, as an example, José Jerí, a thirty-nine-year-old legislator who spent the hours after his swearing-in frantically unfollowing pornographic Instagram accounts and deleting old tweets that were as pathetic as they were misogynistic (sample: “Good women are seduced by love, affection and respect. For all the others, there’s Mastercard”). He was deposed just a hundred and thirty-one days later, amid corruption allegations, and replaced by a caretaker President, the eighty-three-year-old leftist José María Balcázar, whose most deeply held political principle appears to be his unwavering support for child marriage. Four ex-Presidents are currently imprisoned. The former President Alberto Fujimori was convicted of crimes against humanity, corruption, and abuse of power, and locked up for fifteen years, before being released on humanitarian grounds in 2023, less than a year before his death. Another former President, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who spent nearly three years under house arrest, is banned from leaving the country until the end of 2026, and still faces the possibility of an eight-and-a-half-year prison term for alleged corruption. It’s no wonder that more than ninety per cent of Peruvians distrust their own government.
You might think that no one would aspire to a position with so little job security and such a high likelihood of incarceration, but, in fact, April’s first-round vote featured a record thirty-six candidates, their names and party affiliations crammed onto a ballot the size of a broadsheet. There were so many would-be Presidents that debates had to be staged over three consecutive nights. Among the candidates were a former professional soccer player, a comedian, the brother of a deposed ex-President convicted of bribery, a retired general, and a singer-songwriter. A poll published a few days before the election revealed that eighty per cent of voters didn’t understand the mechanics of, or legal requirements for, voting, and with a ballot so large—sixteen and a half by seventeen inches, the candidates split into five columns—it wasn’t surprising. To further complicate matters, one candidate died in a car accident after the ballots were printed, while another, Vladimir Cerrón, a neurosurgeon and a self-proclaimed Marxist, ran for President while a fugitive from the law, accused of corruption. It was as if Cerrón had decided to skip the intermediate step of actually being President and proceed directly to the dreary endgame that Peruvians have come to expect from their disgraced heads of state.
But perhaps the most surprising aspect of all this baroque dysfunction is how little it seems to have affected the economic life of the nation. Despite the tragicomic instability and the rotating cast of nobodies temporarily tasked with running the country, when seen in macroeconomic terms, Peru appears to be doing just fine, thank you. The national economy is heavily reliant on the price of gold and copper, both of which are close to historical peaks. Gold exports brought in more than twenty billion dollars last year, and copper nearly twenty-five billion. Mining investments grew by almost a quarter when compared with 2024. That’s a lot of legal money pouring into the Peruvian economy (to say nothing of illegal gains from unlicensed mining and drug trafficking, which, together, are estimated at five to seven per cent of the national G.D.P.). All of this means that Peru, unlike other countries in the region, can afford to pay its debts while borrowing money at relatively low interest rates. In mid-April, just after the first round of the election, Peru’s Central Bank announced that it had more than a hundred million dollars in foreign currency in its coffers, a record sum, equivalent to nearly thirty per cent of the country’s G.D.P. Last year, the economy grew at a rate of 3.4 per cent, one of the highest in the region, better than that of Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico. Inflation remains among the lowest in Latin America, debt is under control, interest payments are manageable, and the national credit is good, making for the kinds of indicators that Peru’s neighbors can only dream of. It’s as if the economy had simply decoupled from the malfunctioning political system.
When I put this apparent contradiction to the Peruvian economist Carolina Trivelli, she was less than convinced, and she was not particularly enthused by the country’s medium- and long-term economic outlook. “The snapshot is pretty,” Trivelli conceded. “And compared to our neighbors, we look amazing.” What concerned her, though, was not the snapshot but the movie. With global metal prices so high, she told me, “We should be flying. With such a privileged position, you would expect more growth.” In 2010, for example, when global metal prices were lower than they are now, the growth rate of the Peruvian economy was more than eight per cent. By comparison, the current growth looks anemic.
What’s more, the windfall from high metal prices has not been used to make any meaningful investments in health care, education, or infrastructure. Even when money has been allocated, there has been no capacity to manage the execution: according to a World Bank study, nearly half of the country’s publicly financed projects begun since 2012 are unfinished. “So you have a lot of projects with an approved budget—to expand a highway or build a health center or a school. Someone wins the contract, gets the down payment, moves a few stones, then takes the money and disappears,” Trivelli said. “If you spend money to build a school, but you leave it half done, then, no, you didn’t improve anything.” There’s no question that this unfortunate cocktail of corruption, inefficiency, and simple incompetence is holding the country back. This year, owing to a mixup in the congressional budget, one of the government’s most important scholarships was left severely underfunded, depriving thousands of Peru’s neediest high-school graduates of the opportunity to continue their studies at local universities. Another program, known as Beca Bicentenario, which helps Peru’s top-performing students study abroad, was simply suspended.
Given this context, perhaps it’s not surprising that, even as foreign currency accumulates in the Central Bank, none of the short-lived governments of the past several years has been able to bring poverty back down to pre-pandemic levels, something that nearly every other country in the region has managed. To make matters worse, the weak or nonexistent executive branch—in the past decade, Peru has had eighteen ministers of economy and finance and twenty-nine ministers of the interior—has ceded its budgeting authority to a Congress that represents assorted local mafias (illegal logging, illegal mining, and traffickers of all sorts), hardly the kind of interest groups that are keen on fiscal responsibility or long-term planning. Unfortunately, Trivelli told me, “we’re spending every last cent, and spending it really badly.” The question, then, isn’t why the Peruvian economy is doing so well but what investments haven’t been made because no one is around long enough to see any particular project through.
Trivelli is a member of Peru’s Fiscal Council, a government entity whose mission is to advise Congress and the executive branch on matters of economic and fiscal policy. Its advice is nonbinding, but last month the Council took the unusual step of publicly sounding the alarm regarding newly mandated permanent spending obligations on improved pensions for retired police and military. These are the sorts of commitments that the treasury may not be able to meet, should gold prices drop or foreign investment dry up. The Council’s report identified sixty-three laws passed in the last five years that had created permanent new obligations for the state, including five whose combined impact was equivalent to more than nine per cent of the country’s G.D.P.
The consequences of this lack of planning may come all too soon. Forecasters are predicting a particularly powerful El Niño next year. The last Super El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, caused flooding and damages that cost Peru’s infrastructure about $3.5 billion. A nation that, for all intents and purposes, has had no one at the wheel for the better part of a decade is not going to be prepared to face similar disasters.
If the economic outlook isn’t as rosy as the indicators suggest, the political chaos may actually be worse than it appears. The political scientist Alberto Vergara explained that so much churn and instability have, perhaps inevitably, resulted in the disillusionment of an entire generation. When we spoke, Vergara shared a telling anecdote: one day, he asked the students in his class at Universidad del Pacífico, in Lima, what had happened in politics that morning. None of them knew. The answer, at least on the surface, was seismic: in the midst of a political crisis, the President had ordered a reshuffling of her Cabinet and sworn in four new ministers in a single day. In another era, Vergara told me, this would have been momentous, and he would, reasonably, have expected students of political science to be aware of it—but not today, not anymore. Perhaps his students were unimpressed, or unmotivated, or perhaps they had simply arrived at an intuitive understanding of the irrelevance of it all. “In Peru, caring about politics is not rational,” he said.
That may be the most salient cultural message of so much political instability. If it doesn’t matter who the President is, it certainly doesn’t matter who is in the Cabinet. After all, it won’t be long before the cast changes yet again. The goal of all this havoc is not to destroy democracy, according to Vergara—though that might be a welcome side effect, to some—but to torpedo the rule of law and thereby protect illicit financial gains. If Congress is ignoring the constitutionally required fiscal guardrails, as Trivelli and the Fiscal Council argue, it’s also changing laws to protect its own members, more than half of whom are being investigated for corruption. In the past few years, Congress has passed laws exempting specific businesses from paying a total of nearly eight billion dollars a year in taxes, created a statute of limitations on war crimes, taken the task of investigations away from the Attorney General, ignoring the concerns of prosecutors, and removed members of the Board of Justice who were looking into an influence-peddling scheme. Of course, all of this convenient acquiescence will sound familiar in the United States, where our own Congress and Department of Justice have been nothing if not servile to a brazenly corrupt executive. In any case, the result, in Peru as in the U.S., is the same: a kind of institutionalized lawlessness that can be very lucrative for those who weren’t much interested in the law to begin with.
Voting is mandatory in Peru, but more than six million Peruvians skipped the first round of this election, in April. Another three million went to the polls but left their ballots blank or made them unreadable, in protest. Taken together, the blank or spoiled ballots would have comfortably won the April vote, and the blank votes alone would have beaten thirty-four of the thirty-five candidates. The runoff, scheduled for Sunday, June 7th, pits Keiko Fujimori, a daughter of the former President (with seventeen per cent of the vote), against the congressman and former Minister of Trade and Tourism Roberto Sánchez (twelve per cent), whose late surge in the polls allowed him to squeak into the runoff ahead of Lima’s right-wing mayor. Both candidates, it should be mentioned, have been dogged by accusations of corruption, which they deny. Fujimori was sentenced to pretrial detention in October, 2018, and released two years later. This campaign is her fourth attempt to win the Presidency, a position that she has aspired to since her parents’ marriage collapsed, in an explosive public feud when she was a teen-ager, and she was named First Lady. Keiko, as she is known in Peru, is the heir and protector of her father’s political legacy—one that includes mass killings, the forced sterilization of thousands of Indigenous women, and a bribery scheme so vast that it ensnared virtually all of Lima’s political and media élites before finally ending his Presidency. Though Keiko has served only one term in Congress, she has spent the past two decades as a savvy, often unscrupulous political operator, the leader of a powerful congressional contingent that has been behind much of the disorder of the last decade. Meanwhile, Sánchez served in the Cabinet of the former President Pedro Castillo, who was arrested four years ago after a plot to dissolve Congress failed. Late in the campaign, Sánchez took to wearing Castillo’s signature sombrero, and seemed untroubled by his former boss’s attempted coup d’état. His first-round success was built on Castillo’s coalition, in fact, and he won most of his votes from outside Lima, sparking predictably outraged and racist responses from the city’s élites. (The capital’s mayor, the arch-conservative Rafael López Aliaga, known to all as Porky, missed the runoff by just twenty-one thousand votes, and refused to accept the results.) Sánchez and his party have promised to push for a new constitution and to redistribute wealth, though he has backed off from an earlier threat to remove the long-serving head of the Central Bank, Julio Velarde. Such a move would undoubtedly shock global investors, who have come to see Velarde as the adult in a dismayingly chaotic room, a stabilizing presence amid the seemingly endless political disruptions of the last decade.
Together, Sánchez and Fujimori won less than a third of the tallied vote. No matter who wins in the runoff, it’s unlikely that the new President of Peru will have a mandate, and Congress will continue to hold much of the power that it has wielded throughout the convulsions of the past decade. Day to day, ordinary Peruvians in the coastal cities and in the interior are dealing with escalating crime, fear of impending natural disasters, and corruption and incompetence at every level of government. Whether an actual functioning executive could do much to confront these crises is hard to say, and it’s reasonable to wonder how long the new President will last in the role, anyway. Whoever wins, perhaps the most important accomplishment that the next Peruvian head of state could manage would be simply to see out a five-year term. Even that, unfortunately, may be too much to ask. ♦