LIMA, June 1—Everything indicates that Peru has become a hot spot in South America for the strategic confrontation between the old globalist order and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Recent actions by United States President Donald Trump’s administration confirm this.

Senior officials in the new U.S. administration have changed nothing from previous U.S. policy toward Ibero-America; for them the Teddy Roosevelt view that these countries constitute the United States’ “backyard” remains valid. This imperialist concept was clearly expressed by President Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, when he met with Peru’s Minister of Defense, retired General Walter Astudillo, and Peruvian Foreign Minister Elmer Schialer on May 5 at the Pentagon. At the meeting, Hegseth offered Peru a “partnership”—not to help Peru and its South American neighbors develop, but to kick China out of the region. Hegseth stated emphatically that countering China’s economic advance in Latin America is one of the Trump administration’s primary security objectives, describing China as a threat to continental peace.

“We recognize,” he asserted, “with very clear eyes the threat that China poses to our countries, to our people and to peace in the region.” He denounced China’s investment in development projects eagerly welcomed by Ibero-American and Caribbean nations, calling it “investing and operating in the region for unfair economic gain,” and pronounced that “together, in order to prevent conflict, we need to robustly deter China’s potential threats in the hemisphere. So, we look forward to being partners with you in that regard.” He added that the United States will seek to turn the next conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, to be held in Peru in 2026, into a “key event to secure a joint alliance between Latin American countries and Washington to prevent the advance of extra-regional actors such as China.”

That statement by Secretary Hegseth continues the Biden administration’s imperialist policy, expressed most bluntly by U.S. Southern Command head Gen. Laura Richardson when she came to Peru in September 2023 to warn Peruvian government and military officials that the United States would not allow China’s entry into South America, because the continent’s natural resources are considered an integral part of U.S. national security.[fn_1]

The Peruvian government, however, responded quickly and with great clarity to Hegseth’s demand that Peru “partner” with the United States against China. One week after the Hegseth Pentagon meeting, Foreign Minister Schialer told the May 13 China-CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) ministerial meeting in Beijing that “Peru considers China a friendly power, and its government sees great benefit in establishing an economic alliance with it.”

Enter the South American Bioceanic Railway Corridor

The backdrop to the United States’s stepped up threats to Peru—“partner against China, or else”—is the acceleration of discussions between Peru, Brazil, and China on the construction of the first transcontinental railway corridor across South America. The proposed corridor, linking the Chancay mega-port on the Pacific to Brazil’s ports on the Atlantic, would open up the interior of the continent for development, and thereby decisively strengthen the ability of the nations of the entire region to participate freely in the new global order free from geopolitics, which is being built through the cooperation of independent, sovereign nations.

That railway was high on the agenda of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s discussions with President Xi Jinping and other officials in his May 12-13 state visit to Beijing. In a May 26 meeting in Lima with the president of China’s National Railway Administration, Fei Dongbin, and China’s Ambassador Song Yang, Peru’s Ministers of Economics and Finance, and Transportation and Communications, Raúl Pérez Reyes and César Sandoval Pozo, respectively, proposed that Peru, Brazil, and China hold a high-level meeting in order to “align the strategic interests of the three countries and establish a framework agreement specifying the investment, demand and execution of the railway projects.” Further, Pérez Reyes announced that Peru is “willing to co-finance our part” of the railway (a first by the Peruvian government).

Several Chinese companies specializing in railways also visited both Brazil and Peru to begin final studies for the planned Bioceanic Railway Corridor. Chinese companies have even knocked on the doors of Peruvian universities to create a railway engineering degree program.

Beware U.S. Betrayal

The only sane United States policy would be to welcome and cooperate with these development efforts, which are critical to freeing the continent and its people from the terrors of the drug cartels. However, construction of the aforementioned railway will not be easy. It is to be expected that the war against it has just begun.

Retired Admiral José Cueto, former head of the Peruvian Armed Forces, current Peruvian Congressman, and an ally of the current government of President Dina Boluarte, spoke bluntly about the U.S. intent in a May 16 interview with the Peruvian military news channel, Defensa.pe. Peru became a target of the United States’s anti-China policy in the Western Hemisphere when it was announced that the Chinese company COSCO Shipping would build the deepwater megaport in Chancay, Peru, he said; the U.S.’s sudden interest in Peru has nothing to do with concern for Peru; it is all about stopping China.

Peru’s Air Force is seeking to replace its aging fighter jets, and purchasing U.S. F-16’s is one option under consideration. That was one leading item on the agenda of the two Peruvian ministers when they visited the Pentagon. Adm. Cueto ironically remarked that the U.S. might even go so far as to offer to give Peru (old) F-16’s, if that would get Peru to break with China.

However, if it were up to him, he said, he would recommend that Peru not turn to the F-16’s, even as a gift, because the U.S. uses its military equipment to control the policy of its recipients. The example he gave for how devastating such control can be, is instructive for understanding how the Anglo-American elite fosters “failed states,” to maintain their dominance.

Cueto recounted that since at least 2001, on the pretext of an unfortunate but isolated accident, the United States has vetoed any type of air intervention by Peru against any small plane which illegally flies over Peruvian territory. There are hundreds of clandestine airstrips in the Peruvian jungle operated by drug cartels, which support more than 300 daily drug-trafficking flights entering and leaving the country, carrying drugs to other countries on the continent. Prior to the April 2001 accident, when the Peruvian Air Force shot down a small, unidentified plane which turned out to have U.S. missionaries aboard, Peru had carried out a very successful operation intercepting small drug trafficking planes operating in the Peruvian jungle, primarily forcing them to land, and shooting down only those few which did not identify themselves and refused to land. The United States, in fact, had been providing air surveillance intelligence for the operation.

For Admiral Cueto and many drug trafficking analysts in Peru, this U.S. policy, of vetoing interdiction, effectively serves as the best possible support for drug trafficking and illegal gold mining, crimes that plague Peru.

The ‘Failed State’ Strategy

The traditional mechanisms of political control that empires use against nations have come into play against Peru: unleashing a scenario of “uncontrolled” violence by left and right forces, combined with ferocious media campaigns against the government. A wave of savage urban and rural violence has begun to expand exponentially throughout the Peruvian territory. At the same time, almost all the Peruvian press accuse the government of being incapable of stopping it, and in some cases, even of creating it.

The population is suffering under this assault. A wave of indiscriminate violence has taken off in recent months, which in some cases does not even have any immediate criminal purpose. Hitmen attack individuals and commit mass murders, such as the one perpetrated in the mining area of the Pataz province in northern Peru two weeks ago, where 13 informal miners were murdered. Hitmen are placing dynamite at the door of schools in poor areas of the main cities of the country; private transport buses with passengers inside are machine-gunned. The destabilization situation has reached such a degree that recently, according to opinion polls, the popular approval of the president has dropped to 3% in some cities of the country, or practically zero. There have already been three national strikes so far this year, ostensibly in protest of the government’s inaction.

Peru is back to where we were in the 1980s and 1990s, torn apart by the implementation of the “failed state” strategy in which drugs and terrorism are used to make nations ungovernable. This strategy was implemented against Peru then under the direction of people like the Rand Corporation’s Luigi Einaudi, who became the leading State Department policymaker for Ibero-America for decades, earning the epithet of “Kissinger’s Kissinger for Latin America.” Einaudi and company deployed the bestial violence of the Shining Path and the MRTA narcoterrorists and a border conflict with Ecuador as a weapon in their attempt to end Peru as a sovereign nation-state.

What is happening now, again, points to a single outcome: to generate ungovernability, a “failed state,” and thereby halt the development projects on which Peru is staking its future, and above all, to counter the China-Peru alliance and Peru’s determination to be the door and the bridge in the realization of the Belt and Road in South America. Politically, it is evident that the objective is to overthrow the government or, failing that, to impose, in the next presidential elections of 2026, a candidate inclined to the intentions of removing Peru from its alliance with China.

The Ecuadorian ‘Model’

This time, this “failed state” strategy is reinforced by the success recently obtained by similar means in Ecuador. There, in 2021, around the same time that China’s COSCO began construction of the port of Chancay in Peru, a wave of violence was unleashed, which included the assassination of several candidates in the 2023 elections, and which brought to power Daniel Noboa, a president born and educated in the United States, whose government has been a willing puppet of the interests of U.S. hawks and neoconservatives. The first thing President Noboa did was to call in U.S. troops and intelligence services supposedly to stop the violence in his country, signing a five-year “cooperation” agreement in January 2024 with Gen. Richardson permitting deployment of U.S. military and naval personnel on Ecuadorian soil, with immunity from legal punishment if they should break any national laws.

In his campaign for a second term, Noboa vowed that he would change the Ecuadorian Constitution to allow the installation of foreign military bases on Ecuadorian territory once again. After winning a contested victory in the May 2025 run-off elections, Noboa is moving on his electoral promises, which included the reopening of the U.S. military base in Manta, which had been shut down by President Rafael Correa in 2009. Manta was a strategic military base, from which the U.S. spied on practically the entire Pacific and part of the South American jungle.

But reopening Manta (which still awaits a decision by the Constitutional Court and a national referendum approving amending the Constitution to allow foreign military bases on national territory) is not the final step in this strategy of using insufferable drug cartel violence to establish permanent U.S. military bases on the South American continent again. There is now talk of opening three new military bases in Ecuador on the border with Peru. All this, of course, under the pretext of the war on drug trafficking.

In the midst of this destabilizing policy, it is no coincidence that the United States has immediately invited President Dina Boluarte to visit Washington and meet with President Donald Trump to discuss U.S. proposals for economic and security cooperation, an invitation extended when Vice President J.D. Vance crossed paths with President Boluarte in Rome for the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV’s reign. The announcement has been accompanied by a wave of press rumors, about the possibility that the United States would be the one to build the bi-oceanic train. This is clearly an act of distraction, since it is almost unthinkable that the U.S., in the midst of its current financial crisis, would carry out such a laudable intention—not to mention that the United States has not built any railroads worth that name in decades on its own territory!

Preparing a Pincer Movement from the South

The threats against the Peru-China alliance are not coming only from the north. Our southern neighbor, Chile, is also being subjected to the same excruciating Anglo-American pressure and terrorism to get it to cut its deep economic relations with China and the Belt and Road Initiative—and stop it from potentially joining the BRICS group of nations, to the horror of the financial elites.

In a long April 30 press conference in Santiago, the ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Chile, Niu Qingbao, protested the enormous pressures which the United States is bringing to bear on Chile to cancel its joint scientific and economic projects with China. The Chinese ambassador referenced the Chilean Foreign Ministry’s suspension of the contract between the government of the People’s Republic of China and the Universidad Católica Privada del Norte for construction of the Ventarrones Astronomical Observatory in Antofagasta, with its advanced space telescope. The “suspension” was clearly imposed under U.S. pressure. The U.S. absurdly attacked the project, with the claim that it could be used for military purposes by China—the same false argument the United States makes against the Chancay Port. The ambassador protested against this decision by the [President Gabriel] Boric government, asserting that the Chilean government has all the research capabilities to dismiss the American arguments.

The Chinese ambassador protested even more harshly an arson attack which had occurred just days before (on April 21) against the Rucalhue hydroelectric power plant, which Chinese companies are building in Santa Barbara, in Chile’s Biobío region. The paramilitary commando unit which carried out the attack caused significant damage. The ambassador called the attack an act of terrorism, protested the lack of adequate police protection for the site, and warned that the incident raised Chinese companies’ doubts about Chile’s ability to provide adequate protection for their projects in Chile. He asked for compensation for the damages inflicted on their property and equipment. It must be understood that in diplomatic language to ask for “compensation” is a level very close to a “diplomatic protest.”

The government responded immediately, promising that it would provide permanent police protection from now on. Niu said he was satisfied with the government’s response and was confident of their future cooperation. The government’s rapid response shows the importance the government gives to Chinese projects and safeguarding the bilateral relationship, he noted.

At the same time, Anglo-American interests have been trying to stir up anger and resentment against Peru’s Chancay Port inside Chile, for allegedly hurting Chilean shipping interests through unfair economic “competition.” In reality, the port is designed to increase Asian–South American commercial shipping for all the nations of the region, Chile included. When the increased regional trade and economic activity which the Chancay–transcontinental train project will generate kicks in, all aspects of Chile’s economy can grow by an order of magnitude—as for all other nations in the region.

Beware the British Hand!

Close attention must be paid to Great Britain’s steps to strengthen its position in Chile, particularly its Armed Forces. Historically, Britain famously used its economic and military control over Chile in the Nineteenth Century to deploy it as its proxy in the 1879-1884 scorched-earth War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia, which set back South American development for decades, leaving behind tensions between these neighbors which imperial interests manipulate to their advantage.

On April 28, the Chilean Navy and the Royal Navy of Great Britain signed a “historic agreement” in which they agreed to further intensify relations between the two navies. A curious agreement, when for many analysts, the Chilean Navy is virtually an appendix of the Royal Navy. For example: Chilean cadets have to spend at least two years in the Royal Navy matrix in order to graduate.

Those bilateral agreements of April, however, not only include a project for joint naval construction in Chilean shipyards, which is being promoted as having the capability to reshape regional shipping. Most ominously, they also include permission for the entry of British ships into Chilean naval bases.

This sharply increased British deployment in the South American Pacific, seeking to make Chile once again “the instrument of British imperialism,” must be taken as a serious threat to the entire region’s interests—those of the Chilean nation emphatically included. The United States defines the commercial Chancay Port as an unacceptable military threat to their strategic interests, asserting (publicly and often) that in the global war against China which American military planners somehow assume to be inevitable, the Chinese navy could use Chancay as their base.

South America’s battle to join forces to secure the mutual development of every nation, against Great Britain and the imperialist current still dominating United States policy toward South America, promises to be hard fought in the months ahead.

---

[fn_1] Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger went so far as to call for population reduction for many LDC (less developed countries), arguing that increasing populations would cause nations to wish to keep resources for their own benefit, rather than exporting them. [back to text for fn_1]