Washington’s open intervention
Keiko Fujimori’s 2026 victory unfolded under the direct pressure of US imperialism. Washington has been systematically intervening in the internal affairs of Latin American countries to install far-right governments with the aims of ousting Chinese economic influence and preparing a crackdown on the working class in the event of social explosions.
At the center of Washington’s strategic concerns in Peru is the Chancay megaport, inaugurated in November 2025 and built by Chinese state company COSCO with an investment projected to reach $3.5 billion. Chancay transforms Peru into the primary logistics hub connecting South America to Asia. China already accounts for 36 percent of Peru’s total foreign trade, against 14 percent for the United States, and Chinese foreign direct investment in Peru stands at $30 billion, compared to $6.7 billion from the US.
The Trump administration has responded with military measures: the Pentagon allocated $1.5 billion to relocate Peru’s main naval base to a site 80 kilometers north of Chancay, and the State Department publicly labeled the port an instrument of Chinese “predatory ownership” threatening Peruvian sovereignty. In response, regulatory oversight of the megaport was transferred from COSCO to a Peruvian government body.
US Ambassador Bernie Navarro served as the on-the-ground organizer of the US intervention throughout Peru’s electoral process, fabricating a propaganda campaign alleging “Cuban interference” and declaring the US Embassy was “monitoring the electoral process.”
The efforts by Washington to install a more pliable regime predate Navarro. It was US Ambassador Lisa Kenna—a CIA veteran—who used back-channel pressure on the Peruvian military high command on December 7, 2022, the day of Castillo’s removal, to ensure the armed forces ignored Castillo’s order to dissolve Congress. The Biden administration then provided full political and material backing to the Boluarte government as it massacred protesters. Congress, in turn, approved the deployment of more than 1,200 US troops on Peruvian territory—including Marines in jungle operations and Air Force personnel in “Resolute Sentinel” exercises—for the entirety of 2025 and 2026.
A decade of accelerating institutional collapse
Keiko Fujimori will be Peru’s ninth president in a decade. The sequence encapsulates the terminal crisis of the bourgeois regime: Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (removed, 2018), Martín Vizcarra (impeached, 2020), Manuel Merino (resigned after six days amid mass protests, 2020), Francisco Sagasti (transitional, 2020–2021), Pedro Castillo (impeached and arrested, 2022), Dina Boluarte (2022–2025), José Jerí (removed after four months, 2026), José María Balcázar (transitional, 2026).
The response by the ruling class has been strictly aimed at securing its instruments of rule and self-enrichment, which includes falling back increasingly on US imperialism. Since 2016, Fujimorista-controlled Congresses have systematically amended or overridden judicial proceedings against their own members, passed laws shielding organized crime figures with political connections and most recently—in the weeks before the June 7 vote—pushed through legislation transferring crimes committed by police and military personnel to military tribunals, placing uniformed killers beyond the reach of civilian justice.
Jerí’s removal in early 2026 illustrated the political dynamics directly. The scandal that brought him down—dubbed “Chifagate”—involved clandestine meetings with a Chinese businessman. That this particular link became the detonating charge, in a Congress where between 70 and 85 percent of members face criminal investigations of their own, was not coincidental. It reflected Washington’s sustained pressure on the Peruvian ruling class to sever ties with China.
The social crisis the new government inherits
No bourgeois government has resolved, or can resolve, the structural crisis underlying Peru’s political instability. Around 30 percent of the population lives in poverty; 1.6 million in extreme poverty. Informal employment encompasses more than 72 percent of the workforce—the highest rate in Latin America according to a recent International Labor Organization study—with average incomes in small and micro-enterprises of 858 soles per month against a basic family basket for four of 1,848 soles. Youth unemployment stands at approximately 15.4 percent, roughly double the adult rate.
The social pressure has expressed itself in repeated waves of class struggle. Between 2024 and 2026: more than a dozen 24-hour national transport strikes in Lima and Callao driven primarily by the terror of organized extortion networks that killed an average of 20 bus drivers per week in early 2026; a militant strike by 60,000 EsSalud health workers; and sustained street mobilizations by Gen-Z youth confronting riot police.
Keiko Fujimori’s declared program—the death penalty, high-altitude prisons for organized crime figures, coordination between police and military intelligence—leaves entirely intact the pro-crime laws protecting politically connected mafias, congressmen, judges and prosecutors. Its function is the intensification of repression against the working class, not against the criminal networks embedded in the state apparatus.
The Boluarte government’s Ministry of Culture held a formal meeting with La Resistencia—a neo-Nazi organization that uses the Hitler salute and antisemitic rhetoric. Government officials have acted as the physical shock troops of the fujimorista establishment, having previously harassed the prosecutor who led the case against Alberto Fujimori, a signal about the direction the ruling class was preparing.
The pseudo-left and the union bureaucracy: the same role in every cycle
The defeat of Sánchez and the installation of Fujimori cannot be understood without examining the role played by the organizations that claim to represent the working class.
The Stalinist-led parties and union confederation CGTP have in every crisis cycle subordinated working class struggle to one or another bourgeois faction. Under Boluarte, the Nacional Coordinator of Struggles (CNUL), controlled by the CGTP bureaucracy, systematically refused to call general strikes or mobilize Lima’s industrial working class, confining the 2022–2023 uprising to isolated marches and road blockades. It channeled the genuine mass anger of millions toward the demand for a Constituent Assembly—a mechanism for refurbishing discredited institutions, not dismantling them.
The Morenoite Socialist Workers Party (PST) endorsed Sánchez in 2026, as it had endorsed Castillo in 2021—repeating the same logic that led the United Left to endorse Fujimori in 1990. The political effect in each case is identical: working class opposition is channeled behind a “lesser-evil” bourgeois politician, who then administers capitalist interests loyally and is able to temporarily suppress the class struggle, only to be removed and replaced. In the final outcome, the pseudo-left never bears any accountability for its role.
Conclusion
The return of Fujimorism to executive power represents the closing of a political cycle within the bourgeois order that has lasted more than three decades. It is also an exposure. Every tendency that has claimed, in that period, to represent a “left” or “progressive” alternative—the United Left, the APRA, the CGTP bureaucracy, Verónika Mendoza’s New Peru, the Castillo administration— has in practice functioned as the last line of defense of Peruvian capitalism, channeling social anger into electoral dead ends, providing “left” cover to bourgeois governments, and sabotaging independent working class action.
The crisis of that bourgeois rule is structural, not episodic: nine presidents in a decade; a Congress where a majority of members face criminal charges; an economy in which nearly three quarters of workers labor without legal protections; a state apparatus penetrated by organized crime at every level; US military personnel deployed on national territory; a megaport that has made Peru the battleground of inter-imperialist conflict; a working class that has demonstrated its combativeness repeatedly.
The only viable alternatives are fascist barbarism and war or international socialism. The task of our time is not to administer capitalism while dressing it up with a human face—that is impossible today—but to build an independent political alternative for the working class, a Peruvian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.