Perú

Peru cycled through six presidents in five years. Every president from 2001 to 2016 was investigated for corruption with the same Brazilian construction company. An intelligence chief paid television channels 100 times more than he paid judges, because media was the strongest check on power. The government forcibly sterilised over 314,000 women, most of them Indigenous, under a "population programme." The constitution that enshrines neoliberal economics was written under a dictator and remains in force 33 years later. Over 40% of the country's land is designated for mining extraction, and two-thirds of the population shares less than 2% of the water. When the first campesino president was removed from office, security forces killed 49 predominantly indigenous protesters — and the establishment labelled them terrorists. And through all of it, 6,000 comunidades campesinas govern the highlands, rondas campesinas administer justice where the state is absent, and communities shut down billion-dollar mines with roadblocks organised through governance traditions older than the Spanish conquest.

Power structures

Between 2018 and 2023, Peru cycled through six presidents: Kuczynski (resigned under impeachment threat), Vizcarra (removed by Congress on "moral incapacity"), Merino (lasted five days before protests forced his resignation after two demonstrators were killed), Sagasti (transitional), Castillo (arrested after attempting a self-coup hours before his third impeachment vote), and Boluarte (Peru's first female president, under whose government security forces killed 49 predominantly indigenous protesters). Congress has weaponised the 1993 Constitution's "moral incapacity" provision as a low-threshold impeachment mechanism, attempting or executing five presidential removals between 2017 and 2022.^[1] Congress removed Boluarte in turn in October 2025, and her successor, José Jerí, in February 2026.^[15] Congress then elected José María Balcázar, a former judge, as interim president. In the June 2026 runoff, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto Fujimori, defeated Roberto Sánchez by about 50.1% to 49.9%, and she was sworn in on 28 July 2026.^[17]

Alberto Fujimori's presidency (1990–2000) shaped Peru's current institutional architecture. His 1992 self-coup (autogolpe) dissolved Congress and suspended the judiciary with military backing and broad public support. The resulting 1993 Constitution enshrined neoliberal economics: privatisation, foreign investment protections, and the dismantling of the developmental state. Behind the constitutional facade, intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos constructed a system of surveillance, bribery, and intimidation. The "Vladivideos" — secretly recorded tapes showing Montesinos bribing congresspeople, judges, media owners, and military officers — revealed that bribing a congressional majority cost less than $400,000 per month, while a single television channel's bribe was four times larger than the total paid to all opposition politicians. By revealed preference, media was the strongest check on government power, which is why Montesinos spent the most to neutralise it.^[2]

In the 1990s, the Fujimori government’s family-planning programme sterilised hundreds of thousands of people through quotas, incentives and pressure. In 2001 a congressional investigative subcommittee concluded that between 1993 and 1999, 314,605 women and 24,563 men had been forcibly sterilised, most of them Indigenous, rural, poor or unable to read. In October 2024, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, citing at least 314,000 women, ruled that the policy constituted sex-based violence and intersectional discrimination.^[3]

Institutional capture

The Odebrecht corruption scandal implicated every Peruvian president from 2001 to 2016. Alejandro Toledo was convicted of accepting $35 million in bribes and sentenced to over 20 years in prison. Alan García shot himself as police arrived to arrest him in April 2019. Ollanta Humala was placed in preventive detention. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned and was placed under house arrest. The scandal revealed that corruption was not a matter of individual actors but a structural feature: every major public works contract was potentially a vehicle for illicit payments.^[4]

Peru is the world's second-largest producer of copper and zinc and among the top producers of silver, gold, tin, and lead. Mining accounts for roughly 60% of export revenue. Over 40% of Peru's land area is earmarked for mining and other extractive industries, with over 1,000 indigenous communities petitioning the government regarding 20 million hectares threatened by extraction. The mining canon — designed to redistribute 50% of mining tax revenues to subnational governments — has generated more tension than it resolved, with producing regions experiencing rapid but uneven revenue inflows while non-producing districts receive almost nothing.^[5]

Grupo El Comercio controls approximately 78% of Peru's newspaper market readership. In July 2018, over 63,000 leaked audio recordings from the Consejo Nacional de la Magistratura (CNM) revealed pervasive judicial corruption linking the judiciary to organised crime. The CNM was dissolved and replaced. The pattern is consistent with Montesinos-era capture: not individual misconduct but an organised network operating within formal institutional structures.^[6]

Inequality and extraction

Peru's Gini coefficient of 40.7 (2023) masks extreme geographic and racial disparities. In the coastal region of Ica, 15% live below the poverty line; in the adjacent highland region of Huancavelica, 85%. In the Andean highlands overall, 73% live below the poverty line, with 40% in extreme poverty, most of whom are indigenous. Nearly 90% of indigenous Peruvians have per capita income below 5,000 local currency units, compared to 75% of white Peruvians. Child stunting stands at 12.2% nationally but 26.8% in Huancavelica.^[7]

Water is the central flashpoint. Two-thirds of Peru's population shares less than 2% of the country's water, with mining operations located on the western Andean flank where scarcity is most acute. The Defensoría del Pueblo recorded 224 social conflicts in September 2023, approximately 67% mining-related. The Conga gold project ($4.8 billion, Newmont) would have destroyed four mountain lakes and was suspended by sustained community opposition. The Tía María copper expansion ($1.7 billion, Southern Copper) was suspended after six deaths. The Las Bambas copper mine has been repeatedly shut down by community blockades, taking one-fifth of Peru's copper output offline.^[8]

In Madre de Dios, illegal artisanal gold mining has destroyed over 100,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest, releasing 180 tonnes of mercury annually into air, rivers, and soil. Approximately 78% of adults in Puerto Maldonado have mercury levels exceeding safe international standards. More than 470 oil spills have been documented in the Peruvian Amazon since 2000.^[9]

Cooperative and resistance traditions

Peru's Andean highlands preserve some of the oldest continuously operating communal governance systems in the Americas. The ayllu — a kinship-based collective organised around communal land tenure — regulates land use, resolves disputes, and coordinates collective work. Ayni (reciprocal household labour) and minka (community-wide collective labour for common projects) sustain infrastructure without monetary payment. Peru officially recognises approximately 6,000 comunidades campesinas that function as governance bodies mediating between communities and the state.^[10]

In December 1976, peasants in Cuyumalca, Cajamarca, organised the first ronda campesina — a village patrol formed to combat cattle rustling where the state was absent. The rondas spread across rural Peru, received legal recognition in 1986, and were granted authority to exercise community justice in 2003. Individual rondas range from 80 to 300 members. Their justice system is characterised by a peacebuilding orientation and deep roots in the Andean worldview. During the internal armed conflict, rondas played a significant role in self-defence against both Shining Path violence and state military abuses.^[11]

The removal of Pedro Castillo in December 2022 triggered the largest protests in two decades. Protesters — predominantly indigenous and campesino communities from the southern highlands — demanded his release, Boluarte's resignation, new elections, and a new constitution. Security forces responded with lethal force: Amnesty International documented 49 civilian deaths, including at least 20 possible extrajudicial executions and eight children under 18. The International Federation for Human Rights characterised the repression as potential crimes against humanity.^[12]

The Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found responsible for 54% of the deaths reported to it in a conflict that killed an estimated 69,280 people between 1980 and 2000,^[16] destroyed the social fabric of the communities whose oppression it claimed to address. Its lasting damage is also rhetorical: any organised resistance from highland or indigenous communities is routinely labelled "terrorism" by political elites and Lima-based media. This terruqueo — the conflation of dissent with terrorism — delegitimises structural critique and criminalises protest.

Political language

Vacancia

Vacancy — the constitutional provision for presidential removal on grounds of "moral incapacity," repurposed as a low-threshold impeachment weapon. Five attempts or executions between 2017 and 2022.

Autogolpe

Self-coup — a president dissolving the other branches of government. Fujimori did it successfully in 1992 with military backing. Castillo attempted it unsuccessfully in 2022 and was arrested.

Terruqueo

The practice of labelling any protest, critic, or social movement as "terrorist" or "Shining Path sympathiser." A rhetorical weapon that transforms the memory of genuine atrocity into a tool for silencing dissent.

Ronda campesina

Peasant patrol — village-level self-governance born from the state's absence. Not a vigilante group but a functioning justice system with legal recognition, rooted in Andean communal traditions.

Canon minero

Mining canon — the mechanism for redistributing 50% of mining tax revenue to subnational governments. Designed to translate extraction into development, it has instead generated territorial conflict over revenue distribution.

Minka

Community-wide collective labour for projects that benefit everyone — canals, roads, buildings. Not historical nostalgia but a living practice that built infrastructure across the Andes without monetary payment for centuries.

Unique structural features

Lima's metropolitan area contains approximately 11.3 million people — one-third of Peru's population — and generates roughly 50% of GDP. Political power, media, universities, corporate headquarters, and the judiciary are concentrated there. Provincial populations are systematically underrepresented. The centralisation is self-reinforcing: public investment flows disproportionately to Lima, attracting further migration, which concentrates demand for services, which justifies further investment.^[13]

Peru's informal economy employs approximately 73–77% of the workforce — roughly 13.2 million workers. The majority of Peruvians lack stable contracts, pensions, or labour rights. Peru's macroeconomic stability (low inflation, manageable debt) coexists with structural precariousness for the majority of the population. The informality is not a transitional phenomenon: projections place it above 30% until at least 2050.^[14]

Pedro Castillo's election in 2021 broke a fundamental barrier — the first campesino to reach the presidency. His rapid removal revealed the limits of electoral breakthrough: winning the presidency did not translate into governing power. Lima's institutional establishment — Congress, judiciary, media, military — maintained veto power over a president who lacked the social capital and institutional networks the political class accumulates over generations. Castillo's incompetence provided the proximate justification; the structural hostility was present from inauguration.

Legal and constitutional context

Fujimori's 1993 Constitution remains in force. Despite the democratic transition after 2000, no government has undertaken fundamental constitutional reform. The neoliberal economic framework — privatisation, foreign investment protections, limited state intervention — is constitutionally enshrined. Free trade agreements with the United States, the EU, and China further lock in the framework, constraining future governments' ability to impose export taxes on minerals, regulate foreign investment, or implement industrial policy.

Peru demonstrates a structural condition where democratic politics operates within institutional parameters set by an authoritarian regime. The country that produces the world's second-largest copper output has 73% highland poverty. The extractive model generates revenue without building institutional capacity to translate wealth into broadly shared development. Mining companies extract finite resources, communities bear environmental and health costs, and the fiscal benefits flow upward to Lima or outward to international shareholders. The constitution designed to facilitate this arrangement remains in force because the populations most harmed by it lack the institutional power to change it.