Globalism Has Peru in Its Crosshairs

Looting Resources and Stopping the New Silk Road in South America

by Luis Ernesto Vásquez Medina

[Print version of this article]

Feb. 13—The globalist powers that are today leading the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, through NATO’s proxy war against Russia, have put in place a sinister plan to seize South America’s strategic natural resources, which would allow them to cover their needs for their already announced upcoming war against China. In fact, they have announced 2027 as the date for that war. The globalists’ second goal, which is coherent with the first one, is to guarantee that South America never joins China’s Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the New Silk Road, and that the related project of the BRICS-Plus never succeeds. Given the complete collapse of the Trans-Atlantic financial system which is looting the region, both alternatives are particularly attractive to it.

The Current Crisis

To answer the question as to why Latin America is important, General Laura Richardson, head of the U.S. Southern Command, explained in a Jan. 3, 2023 event at the Atlantic Council, a NATO outpost in the United States, that its importance lies in its wealth of natural resources, especially its minerals and rare earth minerals, and in the Amazon.[fn_1]

These statements are an updated version of the neocolonial policies that Henry Kissinger enunciated in his infamous National Security Memorandum, NSSM 200 in 1974. They leave no doubt that the warhawks that run the United States today intend to eliminate every obstacle to implementing those Malthusian, resource-grabbing policies. To do that, they seek to reduce the region’s population growth and destroy the institutions required for its nation-states to survive.

Today, Peru runs the risk of becoming the first major victim of this geopolitical insanity. The first mestizo nation of Hispanic America, from a Renaissance standpoint,[fn_2] is on the brink of extinction as a nation-state. The demented greed of globalist powers to seize control of South America’s natural resources has provoked a brutal fratricidal conflict. Moving its chess pieces of the left and the right, British imperial geopolitics has unleashed an economic, social, political, and institutional crisis which is far worse than that of the last three decades of the 20th Century under the gruesome narcoterrorist war waged by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). Another element in this strategy is to provoke border, political, and even military conflicts among the neighboring, fraternal countries of the continent.

There are various elements in the current social confrontation which make it especially dangerous for national stability. First, its instigators are taking advantage of the population’s justified fury against the current system of extreme economic liberalism and total deregulation, which the IMF and World Bank imposed on Peru in the 1990s when they had a gun to its head, thanks to Sendero Luminoso’s terrorism. These neoliberal reforms turned Peru into a drug-trafficking financial paradise and a wide-open field for looting of its natural resources. The raw materials “boom” about which the economists of the so-called Peruvian “economic miracle” so bragged, was just a GDP accounting trick. That speculative “boom,” in fact, destroyed the physical economy and left the country without the health and education systems and formal employment needed for real development.

The Covid-19 pandemic then broke the system and revealed the miserable living conditions in which the vast majority of Peruvians lived. Absent a public health system or intensive care capability in hospitals, and without even the ability to produce medical oxygen, Covid-19 deaths rose to the hundreds of thousands. According to conservative official data, in relative terms (deaths per 1,000 inhabitants), Peru had, in worldwide terms, the most deaths due to the pandemic. The reality is that deaths from the pandemic approached half a million, and there is practically no Peruvian family that didn’t lose at least one family member as a result.

The justified rage against the extreme neo-liberal system is being used by the left hand of the global empire: Sendero Luminoso terrorism, the drug trade, and the illegal mining mafias. These elements unleashed a planned violence which has not stopped since former President Castillo’s failed coup attempt and ouster on Dec. 7. Seventy people have died in clashes between the police and violent protesters, with seven policemen assassinated on the weekend of Feb. 11-21 alone by narcoterrorists in Peru’s principal coca-growing region, the Valley of the Apurimac, Ene, and Mantaro Rivers, known as the VRAEM. Well-financed hordes have not only blockaded 80 national highways, causing shortages of food and medicine in dozens of cities; they have also set fire to many police stations and local government offices, and attacked three airports.

This is all part of the strategy directed by Sendero members who came to power with former President Pedro Castillo, whose government from the beginning aimed to take over key institutions and destroy what remained of the system of central government in the country.

Under the Leninist slogan “except for power, everything else is illusion,” which is frequently repeated by Vladimir Cerrón, the leader of the self-avowed Marxist-Maoist Peru Libre party that placed Castillo in the presidency, Castillo’s government dismantled the institutions of the state, replaced meritocracy, and took over all the ministries and executive-level institutions with a network of members of front groups for Sendero Luminoso.

Far from governing or resolving urgent problems in the areas of health or education, Castillo spent his time creating a series of regional entities that worked in conjunction with the drug trade, illegal mining, and “graduates” of the neofascist military group run by Antauro Humala, brother of former President Ollanta Humala.

Thus, throughout the interior of the country, “self-defense committees” and peasant paramilitary groups, or ronderos, began to appear, and with the help of the so-called “caviars,”[fn_3] 300 prefects and subprefects—executive-level officials of varying ranks in the regions—were named, most of them members of front groups for Sendero Luminoso. Castillo’s primary goal was to organize the second “taking of Lima” to destroy national institutions based in the capital—the National Congress and Judicial branch—as the first step in a self-coup, and then name himself dictator of a “New Kind of Republic,” just as Abimael Guzmán, the leader of Sendero in the 1980s and 1990s, had dreamed of in his fervent Maoist doctrine of ‘prolonged popular war.’

These plans failed, but only barely, due primarily to the opposition of the Armed Forces. Nonetheless, in practice, the plans continue and violence increases daily with no signs of stopping.

Lest there be any doubt as to how the Peruvian crisis was orchestrated and the role of globalist intelligence agencies in it, one need only look at the recent propaganda campaign against China and Russia, which attempts to implicate them in support for the uprising that Sendero is running. This campaign began in the first week of February, when a large Russian flag was carried by the mob as it marched through the center of Lima. At the same time, on Feb. 6, Lima television programs reported statements of two Sendero drug traffickers from the coca-producing VRAEM region, who declared themselves followers of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and asked for their help to protect them from allegedly being killed for “defending the Fatherland.”

Who Will Stop the Violence?

This is the question the Peruvian people are asking. Current President Dina Boluarte, who ran on Castillo’s ticket as first Vice President, unfortunately cannot deal with the crisis that worsens by the day. It would appear she lacks the will and the means to restore order at the least possible cost. On the other hand, the Armed Forces today are not the same institution which defeated narcoterrorism at the end of the last century. Not only does it lack the President’s backing for such a mission, but the Armed Forces have also been considerably weakened by the systemic attack on the institution which succeeded in defeating Sendero Luminoso’s terrorism.

In practice, stopping violence in Peru requires an intelligence system that can detect the leaders and identify the routes of the money from narcoterrorism and illegal mining that finance this type of unconventional war. It is also necessary for the population’s urgent economic problems to be resolved. Unfortunately, the attack which the Armed Forces suffered, which we shall detail below, has destroyed any intelligence capability. Today, national intelligence has not only been largely dismantled, but what remains of it is thoroughly infiltrated, such that the most recent chief of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINE) named by Castillo just before reading his speech announcing his self-coup, was retired Gen. Wilson Barrantes, an avowed admirer of Sendero Luminoso.

Following the fall of Alberto Fujimori’s government at the beginning of the 2000s, Peru’s Armed Forces became the targets of a real witch hunt. They were hounded legally, their families ruined, and many of them are still in prison. The worst case was that of Gen. Nicolas Hermoza Rios, former commander of the Armed Forces, who is serving a life sentence and for the past five years has been in a vegetative state. He remains jailed in subhuman conditions.

NGOs tied to mega-speculator George Soros, and the funds provided by the large trans-Atlantic foundations paid international and national courts to carry out this monstruous persecution. After the fall of President Fujimori they put into practice all the methods described in EIR’s famous book The Plot to Destroy the Armed Forces and the Nations of Ibero-America.

During the governments of Valentín Paniagua (Nov. 2000–July 2001) and the mafioso Alejandro Toledo (July 2001–2006), under the direction of prominent drug-legalization campaigner Diego García-Sayán, recruited for the job by British intelligence, more than 5,000 terrorists were released from prison. The majority of them continued to work undercover in what Abimael Guzmán called the prolonged popular war for taking power. They are now the leaders in the field of the organized violence that Peru suffers today.

Another aspect of this process of nation-state destruction was the rewriting of the real history of what had happened in Peru. Millions of dollars from European banks, arranged by the Thatcherite fascist Mario Vargas Llosa, financed the construction of a grandiose “Museum of Memory,” which is the most cynical attack on the victory of the Armed Forces over Sendero Luminoso.[fn_4] It portrays the military victors as brutal assassins and violators of the human rights, and the Pol Pot-like terrorists as victims.

Accompanying this was perhaps one of the most important aspects of the plot against the Armed Forces and the nation: the so-called “democratic” re-education of the Peruvian military, directed primarily by Washington-based neoconservative centers, in order to change the entire outlook of the Peruvian military. This consisted of a brainwashing plan intended to wipe out all vestiges of the productive nationalism which had marked the Peruvian military. All officers were ordered to take courses on “human rights” in the nest of Soros’s “caviars,” the Catholic University of Peru. The national defense doctrine was changed, with the creation of the Secretary of Security and National Defense (SEDENA). Under the guise of “professionalization,” the Armed Forces’ mission was reduced to that of defending borders.

All of these changes were presented at the end of 2010 in the ‘White Book,’ a very British practice for carrying out profound changes in the character of national institutions. General (ret.) Roberto Enrique Chiabra, who at that time happened to be a political partner of the mafioso former President, Alejandro Toledo, had to sign this obscenity without blushing. It was written by anthropologist Enrique Obando of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has directed U.S. programs of irregular warfare (“color revolutions”) against other nations since it was founded under the direction of Henry Kissinger more than 35 years ago, and it begins by rejecting the postulates of the Treaty of Westphalia, denying the principle of national sovereignty.

The goal here was to erase once and for all any idea that, in an undeveloped country like Peru, the Armed Forces should be a leading agent for national development, as promoted by Peru’s Gaullist General José del Carmen Marín, who at the end of the 1940s established a system of civic-military education that produced the leading cadre able to carry out a “National Project” for development. Marín’s educational system began with the creation of military secondary schools throughout the Republic, and culminated with the establishment of the famous Center for High Military Studies (CAEM), which was to take charge of developing and refining the “National Project,” whose strategic goal was the development of the nation’s physical economy.

The plot to destroy the minds of military men required that the CAEM be shut down, and that by the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. It should be noted that American statesman Lyndon LaRouche had been invited to deliver a keynote speech at the 50th anniversary celebration, which was prevented by the launching of the coup against Fujimori. Today the CAEM does not exist. Its name has been changed to the Center for High National Studies (CAEN), which is just another run-of-the-mill civilian management postgraduate program.

Created in its place was the Center for Strategic Studies of the Peruvian Army (CEEEP), established in 2018 as the “think tank”—its website puts this in English—of the Peruvian Army. The CEEEP is affiliated with the U.S. Army War College. In fact, Evan Ellis, a research professor of Latin American Studies at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, is also a “Senior Analyst” at CEEEP. As EIR has documented, Ellis unabashedly attacks China’s presence in South America and asserts that Latin America will necessarily have to be involved in a future NATO war against China.[fn_5] Ellis is also a principal associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., which served as Henry Kissinger’s base of operations for decades.

Anyone who thinks that these actions against Peru’s Armed Forces are a thing of the past, need only look at the unexpected visits of high-ranking U.S. and British military officers who visited Peru in recent months. In October of 2022, a delegation led by Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. South Pacific fleet (that is, commander of the U.S.’s largest naval forces, since 70% of the entire U.S. fleet is now stationed in the Pacific), landed in Peru. He was accompanied by Rear Admiral James Aiken, commander of the United States Naval Forces Southern Command (Fourth Fleet). The two met with their Peruvian counterparts.

According to media reports, at the same time Admiral Sir Bey Key, First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, also visited Peru. As neoconservative and former George Soros scholar Francisco Tudela explained it, they all expressed their “justified” fear that the Port of Chancay, which the Chinese are building and will be the largest port in the South Pacific, could serve as a point of Chinese military penetration in South America.

In March of 2022, the Commander of the U.S. Army South, Maj. General William L. Thigpen, visited Peru, and more recently, in mid-January of 2023, the commander of the U.S. Naval Medical Forces Pacific, Rear Adm. Guido Valdes, paid a visit also.[fn_6]

The idea behind all these visits, as seen in the statements by Gen. Laura Richardson and Evan Ellis, is that the Pacific nations of South America should become an integral part of AUKUS (the recently spawned Australia-UK-US military alliance) or some similar mechanism to extend NATO to the south to wage Global NATO’s coming war against China in the Indo-Pacific.

Race War and Tavistock’s Role

Today’s Peruvian crisis contains an even more dangerous element that was not present in the raging war that narcoterrorism unleashed during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s: A contrived racial conflict based on a confrontation between so-called “native peoples” and the supposedly “white” part of Peruvian society has been added. This is a racial construct dating from the 1930s, originating in the French anthropology school of Paul Rivet and Jacques Soustelle and the Nazi party (e.g., Axel Wenner-Gren) which promoted ‘indigenism’ as a fundamental category to explain social processes in Peru and in Hispanic-America.

From the beginning of the 1960s, this artificial interpretation was broadened and put into practice through mass-brainwashing operations by experts at London’s Tavistock Institute who, together with followers of the Frankfurt School, created the unfortunately popular “boom” of the so-called social sciences in Peru. For this, they had the financial backing of the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Viking Foundation of Alex Wenner-Gren, Hitler’s man in Hispanic-America. Tavistock’s influence on the social sciences was so great that it is commonly accepted today that to become a true historian or ‘social scientist,’ one must first become a psychoanalyst.

The role played by Tavistock and its most important Peruvian agents—Max Hernández and Francisco Sagasti—is key to understanding the situation today. Tavistock’s ability to destroy nations using racism as a pretext is notorious. Hernández, Tavistock’s chief “guru” in Peru, who has dedicated his entire career to destroying the work of the great humanist, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,[fn_7] met with President Pedro Castillo just one week before Castillo read his unfortunate message shutting down the Congress and naming himself de facto dictator.

It has also come to light that former President Sagasti, another product of the Tavistock Institute, acted unconstitutionally while still in office, so that Sendero-follower Pedro Castillo could take power.[fn_8] It was also recently made public that both Sagasti and Hernández made continuous secret visits to the Government Palace during the 18 months that Castillo served as President.[fn_9]

Tavistock’s efforts to insert a racial wedge into the current conflict has had a particularly negative impact in the southern part of the country, especially in the region bordering Bolivia. This requires additional discussion in order to understand what is happening.

Viceroy Toledo and Coca Consumption

Peru’s destabilization by globalist interests is aimed at dismembering both it and Bolivia so as to facilitate control of the immense region extending from southern Peru to the high Andean basin of Lake Titicaca, which Peru and Bolivia share. This zone contains reserves of the continent’s most important strategic minerals used for industrial purposes: copper, gold, silver, platinum, zinc, etc. In addition, there are enticing reserves of lithium, uranium, and rare earth minerals. Both in Puno and Macusani, huge deposits of uranium and lithium have just been identified.

This is why the imperial appetite in the region has such a long history. From the first years of the colonial period, in their search for sources of gold and silver, the Spaniards rediscovered the enormous veins of gold and silver along the Andean plateau of the Collao region (today part of Peru’s Puno department) that borders Lake Titicaca. Around 1545, they discovered Potosí’s prodigious veins of silver, today located in Bolivia, which made up an immense mountain of silver. A few years later, in 1566, 1,700 km north of Potosí, a mercury mine was discovered in Huancavelica—the only mercury mine in all of America until the middle of the 19th Century—which allowed for the production of the finest quality silver of the Spanish colonial period.

In fact, the route from Lima, with its mint, via Huancavelica, Potosí, and Rio de la Plata, as the transshipment port for the Atlantic, became the most important productive and trade axis of the Spanish colonial period for almost 300 years. With its mountain of silver, Potosí grew rapidly, and by the middle of the 1600s it had more than 160,000 inhabitants, the most populous city in South America.

Viceroy Toledo arrived in Peru in 1569 and imposed a monstrous system of looting so that the Spanish Crown could pay the debt it had contracted to finance its ethnic cleansing wars against Moors and Jews, and for the conquest of America. Viceroy Toledo, a product of the Council of Trent, ended the peace and coexistence that had existed in the first years of the conquest during the period of the so-called Catholic Incas of Vilcabamba and Cuzco. He organized the exploitation of gold and silver in that part of the Viceroyalty of Peru and Alto Peru; he founded the city of Huancavelica and forced Indians to accept the mita minera, or system of slave labor, on pain of death. He introduced coca and liquor as payment for work in the mines, using the lie that coca was a good food source.[fn_10]

In his “New Laws of the Indies” Toledo established a precise calendar and methodology for mass production of coca in the inter-Andean regions, by which he expanded coca consumption throughout the Peruvian and Bolivian Andean world, introducing the chacchado, the practice of chewing coca with lime. For 500 years, this custom has kept Indians and peasants of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes in a permanent state of generalized malnutrition. Unfortunately, some current political leaders who claim to be defenders of “indigenous people”—Evo Morales in Bolivia and the Peru Libre party in Peru—continue to promote this terrible practice.

Finally, it’s not true that direct coca consumption is a custom that originated with the Inca empire. On the contrary. Just as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega said, the Incas prohibited the hated chacchado custom.[fn_11] There is no question that the Black Legend about the Conquest began with Viceroy Toledo in his obsession to comply with the demands of the usurious European banks of that time.

To understand the importance of mining extraction in Spanish America, one need only examine the case of the Spanish currency known as the real de ocho, the famous “pieces of eight” made of the highest purity silver produced in Potosí, Lima, and Mexico. The many millions of real de ocho that the Spanish Crown circulated allowed for the economic and trade expansion of the Western world and beyond from 1600 until the middle of the 1800s. Known as the “Spanish dollar,” that currency was accepted in the trade of practically all European countries as well as in the Philippines and China. It was even accepted in the United States more than its own silver dollar, until the passage of the monetary law of 1857. Thus the real de ocho became the most accepted currency in history in the world market until the 1946 appearance of the Bretton Woods dollar.

Runasur and the Balkanization of Peru and Bolivia

The British Empire’s appetite did not wane with Ibero-America’s independence from Spain. The British Foreign Office dreamed of taking over the trade and mining routes that began in southern Peru, continued through the Peruvian-Bolivian highlands, and ended in the Rio de la Plata. British orders were transmitted by Belford Hinton Wilson, Simón Bolívar’s British aide-de-camp and permanent advisor during his campaigns in Gran Colombia and Peru.

Wilson was an agent of the British Foreign Office, first with Lord Canning and then with Lord Palmerston. Bolívar revealed his great affection for this British adviser, acknowledging him in his own words in his will.

After his work in South America concluded in 1841, Belford Wilson was named a Lord of the British Crown. He was present at the 1824 battle of Ayacucho, which signalled the end of the Spanish empire in the Americas. He was in charge of transmitting this news to Lord Canning, who then reported it to King George IV with these revealing words: “The deed is done. The nail is driven. Spanish America is free and if we do not mismanage our matters sadly, she is English.”

The central strategy to guarantee that Spanish America “will be English” was, and is, the region’s balkanization. For example, in 1836, the Peru-Bolivia Confederation was established, in a maneuver directed from London by Lord Palmerston and led, again, by Belford Wilson. Upon Bolívar’s death, Wilson became British Consul General in Peru and was the primary advisor and contact of Lord Palmerston and of General Andres de Santa Cruz, who had been one of Bolívar’s lieutenants.

The Confederation involved the partitioning of Peru into two: the Northern Peruvian and Southern Peruvian states, which together with Bolivia formed the so-called Confederation, which lasted from 1836 until 1839. Gen. Santa Cruz was named “Supreme Protector” of the Confederation for life. Today, unfortunately, this old British project has been reactivated, coming from the mouths of the spokesmen for Runasur, the network of indigenous and peasant social groupings linked to former Bolivian President Evo Morales.[fn_12] And in this world of “coincidences,” they are repeating the same arguments that Santa Cruz put forward in 1836: “the south has mines, and Lima lives off them; Lima is exploiting Peru’s south,” etc. These are the slogans heard today in the marches in southern Peru.

Since there are no coincidences in history, the truth is that Lord Palmerston’s plan, as transmitted by Belford Wilson, was aimed at taking control of the famous silver route for British interests. So clear were these intentions that, after the Battle of Paucarpata, when Santa Cruz won a temporary victory, the Confederation was placed under the protection of the British Crown. Nonetheless, the national resistance to this outrage continued for years until 1839, when, during the Battle of Yungay in northern Peru, the armies of Santa Cruz’s Confederation were defeated by Peruvian forces.

In 1839, the defeated Santa Cruz fled to southern Peru to the port of Islay and took refuge with the British consul, Crompton. Given Santa Cruz’s imminent capture by Peruvian troops, Crompton mobilized 60 of His Majesty’s sailors from the HMS Samarang, a ship of the British Royal fleet, who welcomed Santa Cruz aboard with a 21-gun salute. The British ship took him to Ecuador, where he remained in exile for the rest of his life.[fn_13]

The primary architect of the Peruvian victory was General Ramon Castilla, a leading figure of Peruvian nationalism. We can say that Grand Marshall Castilla, who also supported Mexico’s Benito Juarez in his fight against the 1862-1867 French invasion, was the initiator of the great current of anti-British imperialism within Peru’s Armed Forces. That was very visible in 1982 when Peru’s military overrode the indecision of then-President Fernando Belaunde and sent its best fleet of Mirage jets to fight against the British in the Malvinas War.

Although he may not be fully conscious of this, Evo Morales’s Runasur is a new version of Lord Palmerston’s Confederation, to which some new “native peoples” from the northern regions of Chile and Argentina have been added. Its goal is to further set the region on fire. Worse is the bestial conception of man on which the Runasur project is based, as seen clearly in its Decalogue.[fn_14]

Peru-Bolivia Cooperation within the New Silk Road

The best response to these divisive pretentions is to seek the unity of South American nations in the context of their participation in the New Silk Road, which is precisely what today’s globalist oligarchy most fears.

Peru and Bolivia can provide an example to the continent in this way: Forget conflict and go for cooperation, respecting national sovereignty to help forge a new international financial and security architecture modeled on the Peace of Westphalia. A good example of the kind of cooperation required is the still valid binational project that this author proposed in June of 2006 in the article “Nuclear Energy for Bolivia,” excerpts of which follow:

“The development of Bolivia, the poorest nation in South America, is absolutely necessary for the peace and development of the entire South American continent. To achieve that, it will be necessary to introduce the most advanced science and technology to that nation of the Andean altiplano (high plateau). Bolivia must enter the age of nuclear energy now. The ongoing sovereign discussion about how to develop Bolivia’s gas wealth provides a particularly favorable opportunity today for Bolivia to make that leap toward progress, through a political formula based on exchanging Bolivian gas for nuclear energy.

“Bolivia not only shares borders with the majority of South American nations; it also possesses the largest mineral, energy and fresh water reserves in the region. For international synarchist bankers these represent one of their most desirable targets and they constantly promote regional geopolitical conflicts to achieve their strategic goals. In his book Chile’s Geopolitics, the synarchist Augusto Pinochet even pointed out that, like it or not, in the long-term Chile will have to take control of those resources, especially the fresh water and gas located on Lake Titicaca’s plateau in southern Peru and western Bolivia.

“There’s no doubt that the development of nuclear energy could alleviate the shortage of energy and water in northern Chile....

“The Bolivian highlands, made up of the departments of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí as well as Peru’s Puno department requires cheap water and electricity for its development which can only be provided by a nuclear reactor. Studies carried out by Peru’s Atomic Energy Board and by the U.S.’s General Electric company at the beginning of the 1960s demonstrated the feasibility of industrializing this entire region with the building of a nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Titicaca….

“Currently, revenue from Bolivian gas would make the building of a modern 400 MW nuclear plant totally feasible, to industrialize the entire Bolivian highlands region and transfer water to eastern Bolivia for purposes of irrigation. With their nuclear technology, Brazil and Argentina should also participate in this project in addition to Peru and Chile. Recall that the IMF shut down the nuclear programs of Ibero-American countries whose goal had been to allow them to enter the nuclear age by the end of the 20th century on the basis of continental cooperation. Argentina’s transfer of nuclear technology to Peru resulted in the building of a 10 MW research reactor in Huarangal in northern Lima. That was to have been the first step toward building two nuclear reactors before the end of the 20th century, one in the northern part of the country and a second one on the shores of Lake Titicaca.

“Today, the collapse of the international financial system that prevented that technological advance is the perfect moment for our nations to again embrace these ideas of progress.”

The issue of nuclear energy as a decisive factor in achieving the real integration of the region and all of South America will be discussed in greater detail in a second in this series of articles. The next article will address four fundamental aspects that are crucial to resolve the crisis: 1) nuclear energy; 2) transcontinental railroads and related deep-water ports; 3) drug trafficking and drug consumption; 4) illegal mining.

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