Secret meetings leading to Peruvian president’s ouster highlight China’s influence in America’s backyard.
The ouster of Peru’s president began with a secret late-night dinner. A series of clandestine encounters followed—dark glasses at one meeting, a hood over his face at another.
Then videos leaked. Amid a nationwide uproar, three-quarters of Peru’s lawmakers voted to censure the initially popular José Jerí, just four months into his presidency. He was the country’s seventh leader in 10 years.
“We ask to end this agony so we can truly create the transition citizens are hoping for,” said Ruth Luque, one of 75 lawmakers who voted to oust Jerí. “Not a transition with hidden interests, influence-peddling, secret meetings, and hooded figures. We don’t want that sort of transition.”
The man meeting with Jerí was Chinese restaurant and wholesale store owner Yang Zhihua, who is behind several major Chinese infrastructure deals in the country.
Dubbed “Chifagate,” a nod to fusion Peruvian-Chinese cuisine, the scandal has thrown another wrinkle into an already strained relationship between the two countries.
Currently, Lima is fighting to regain oversight over a major China-controlled port at Chancay, which has become a symbol of China’s footprint in Latin America.
Across the region, a deeply entrenched web of Chinese influence is enabling the communist regime to redefine dynamics in America’s backyard.
Starting with near-negligible investment levels in 2000, China has become a dominant force in Latin America and the Caribbean, with trade exceeding $500 billion in 2024. For many individual nations, such as Brazil and Peru, China has overtaken the United States as a key trading partner.
Along the way, Beijing has built enormous leverage, said Ding Hung-bin, associate dean at Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business and Management.
“The Chinese Communist Party is playing the long game in Latin America,” he told The Epoch Times.
With the money pouring in, Ding said, Beijing reaps political influence, biding its time to challenge the U.S.-led world order. After two decades, he said, “the fire has reached the U.S. doorstep.”
Washington is now making clear that this can’t continue. In its national security strategy released in November, the Trump administration made the region its top priority, describing a “great American strategic mistake of recent decades” in allowing “non-Hemispheric competitors” to take hold in the Western Hemisphere.
The past inaction, the document reads, has cost the United States both “economically in the present” and “strategically in the future.”
Within weeks of the strategy being released, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and brought that country’s courtship with China to a halt.
Just hours before his capture, Maduro hosted a Chinese envoy at the presidential palace. He accepted a porcelain vase and posed for photos with the Chinese delegates, then proclaimed on social media that the meeting reaffirmed the two countries’ “strong bonds of brotherhood” through “thick and thin.”
By Eva Fu
