Peru’s new president has moved closer to Washington by joining a coalition to use military force against drug cartels. But she won’t turn her back on Beijing.

Fujimori’s balancing act

When US secretary of state Marco Rubio visited Lima last week to welcome Peru into the Shield of the Americas, he stressed that the initiative did not represent a threat to the country’s sovereignty. It was designed instead, he said, to deploy military force against the drug cartels that were the real threat to state sovereignty across Latin America.

“It is a shield against these transnational criminal groups that, in many cases, have more money and better military equipment than the state. That is unacceptable, and the only way to defeat it is to confront it forcefully,” he said.

“We’re not going to do anything that our partners don’t ask us to do.”

Peru became the 19th Latin American state to sign up to the Shield of the Americas, which Donald Trump launched last March, after the election of its right-wing president Keiko Fujimori. Colombia also joined after its shift to the right in elections this year, leaving Brazil and Mexico the only holdouts apart from Venezuela and Cuba.

The initiative has no permanent institutions and does not include a mutual defence pact and its sole operational instrument, the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, is run from US Southern Command in Florida. Announcing her decision to join, Fujimori said it did not change Peru’s constitutional requirement that inviting foreign troops to deploy on its territory must be approved by the national parliament.

“Of course, we will uphold this rule. Peru’s sovereignty is intact. We will recover order, tranquillity and peace for all of the Peruvian people,” she said.

Fujimori, who is the daughter of the late dictator Alberto Fujimori, won a narrow victory in this year’s presidential election following a protracted count. She campaigned on a promise to tackle crime by putting the military on the streets, building new high-security prisons and putting a soldier or police officer on every public bus.

The Shield of the Americas is one expression of Trump’s decision to make the western hemisphere the top US foreign policy priority and of his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which successive administrations in Washington used to justify invasions, occupations and political interference in Latin America. Trump’s corollary says the US will protect its access to “key terrain throughout the region” and “deny adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities in our Hemisphere”.

The second part is a reference to China, which has become an increasingly important economic actor throughout Latin America in recent decades with major infrastructure projects across the region. Among the most important is the Chancay megaport outside Lima, in which Cosco Shipping Ports, a Chinese state-owned company, holds a 60 per cent stake.

A Peruvian court ruled last February that a government regulator should only be allowed limited oversight over the port’s operations. In an opinion piece for the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio ahead of his visit last week, Rubio took a swipe China’s involvement in the port.

“Projects backed by the Chinese Communist Party bypass Peru’s legal frameworks and pose risks to transparency and data security,” he wrote.

China is Peru’s biggest trading partner, buying about 38 per cent of its exports, and the latest AmericasBarometer poll found that Peruvians trust China more than the US by a margin of 51 per cent to 39 per cent, reflecting the trend across the region.

The Chinese embassy responded to Rubio in a fusillade of social media posts, declaring that “the western hemisphere is nobody’s backyard” and reminding Peruvians that they can visit China for up to 30 days without a visa.

“China opens its doors and welcomes the Peruvian people with open arms,” it wrote.

“So why do Peruvians, when applying for a visa to a certain country, have to undergo rigorous checks and even face threats that the visas of their entire family will be cancelled?”

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