Earlier this month, China Southern Power Grid, state-owned in Beijing, announced the acquisition of nearly $3 billion in Peruvian power grid assets, giving China control of at least 70% of Peru’s electricity distribution market. The deal is notable, among other reasons, because it comes after months of violent protests that have rocked Peru since December, following the impeachment and arrest of socialist President Pedro Castillo. This is not an accident. Peru’s destabilization is opening the door to anti-American forces like China and Iran seeking a permanent foothold in the Western Hemisphere.
As the mass pro-Castillo protests of January and February dissipated, smaller waves of protests and roadblocks entered their fifth month in the southern region of Puno, close to the Peru-Bolivia border, a reminder that the country’s political crisis it is far from over.
At the height of the protests, 117 roads were blocked across the country. So far, at least 66 people have died, including a policeman burned alive and six soldiers drowned to death, with dozens of public buildings attacked. From December, when the coup attempt took place, until January, 859 police officers were reportedly injured and 43 police stations were looted or set on fire.
To assume that Peru’s crisis is playing out in a vacuum or ending with street protests is to ignore the lessons of other recent turmoil in the region.
In March 2020, for example, the National Defense University’s Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies [Centro Perry de Estudos de Defesa Hemisférica da Universidade de Defesa Nacional] released a report which showed the role of the “Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise” in inciting prolonged social unrest in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador – countries traditionally aligned with the US – since 2019.
The Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise is one of several terms used to refer to the threat network of the Latin American authoritarian left and its illicit global state and non-state allies. This can be clearly understood as a anti-american threat network.
The ‘Bolivarian’ threat network incited the 2019 riots in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador by using narco-terrorist armed groups and socialist “solidarity conferences” to train and deploy “shock troops” who participated in the riots. It also used individual facilitators to fund and coordinate riots and deployed disinformation accounts on social media.
This does not mean that these protests did not include legitimate grievances or peaceful protesters, but that the network co-opted them for its own ends.
The result? US-friendly governments in these countries were forced to make concessions to the protesters and spend scarce resources to deal with the unrest. The threat network also promoted anti-democratic and anti-American narratives and opened up new local spaces for organized crime and US adversaries to operate.
In subsequent elections, Chile and Colombia eliminated pro-US candidates and turned to far-left leaders. Chile’s last president was pressured to conduct a vote to overhaul the country’s decades-old constitution — a tense political battle that continues to this day.
In Ecuador, coordinated riots continued and pressures on the current centre-right government of President Guillermo Lasso are increasing.
As the threat network understands, such coordination is a form of warfare, elaborated by former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez as a form of “fourth-generation warfare”. This fourth-generation war, a form of asymmetric warfare, aims to counter US influence and bring countries into the socialist camp without the need to use conventional force. It is seen as an ongoing and deliberately prolonged struggle.
Peru’s turmoil is the most recent example of these efforts. According to the National Defense University report, Peru was publicly identified as a “next target” by the network in 2020.
The December arrest and impeachment of Castillo, a Marxist and threat network ally, after his failed coup attempt against Peru’s congress created the opening. Protesters backed by the network made unconstitutional demands, calling for the removal of Castillo’s vice president and successor, current president Dina Boluarte.
Like other protests, the one in Peru has been a mixed composition of pro-Castillo organized radical groups, other protesters dissatisfied with government corruption, and illicit actors. But indications that this was a coordinated effort are becoming clearer. Castillo’s allies would have made daily payments to mobilize protesters. The attempt to take five airports it also shows a sophisticated level of coordination.
Peruvian authorities discovered that terrorist elements in the protests included Sendero Luminoso, the historic Maoist terrorist group, and other armed groups, including the Ethnocaceristsa separatist group in southern Peru.
Edwar Quiroga, a well-known agent in the mining-rich Apurimac region of southern Peru, is known for turn on the Ethnocacerists to Iranian intelligence. Quiroga previously ran Inkarri Islam, a Shiite culture center in Apurimac that provides political and ideological training to young Peruvians. Castillo’s ally, Quiroga was arrested last August in southern Peru with 19,000 sticks of dynamite. Just four months later, protests in Peru began with an insurgency in Apurimac. Last week, Boluarte re-established relations with Iran — an unprecedented development in Peru.
Furthermore, Cuba’s ambassador to Peru, Carlos “El Gallo” Zamora, an agent of the Cuban regime’s nefarious G2 intelligence department, is known for decades recruiting agents to infiltrate and disturb the region’s democracies.
Furthermore, the former Bolivian president and main member of the threat network, Evo Morales, was banned from entering Peru for malign foreign interference. Peruvian authorities considered Bolivians to be the main foreigners involved in the country’s violent riots. Morales agents illegally crossed the Peru-Bolivia border over 27 times between 2021 and 2022.
Bolivia, a landlocked country where is china is active in lithium extraction, depends on Peru for global trade. Russia and Iran are actively involved in uranium mining in Bolivia. The prolonged disturbances near the porous Peru-Bolivia border help to benefit drug trafficking, as well as illicitly mined gold, lithium and other products — all of which can be used to fund the threat network’s political operations.
The confluence of illicit, ideological, and geopolitical interests behind Peru’s turmoil mirrors that of recent well-reported cases in neighboring democracies. It also means that the crisis does not end with the end of the protests. In a battle of narratives, protesters are now demanding that Peru hold early elections while falsely casting the political right as Boluarte’s co-governor.
All this unfolds as the US rapidly loses allies and partner governments in the region, while anti-US forces make permanent gains. Those who insist that China’s economic activity in Peru was negatively affected by the protests were proven wrong with last week’s sale of much of Peru’s power grid from the private Italian company ENEL to China. Turmoil may deter legitimate private investment from competing in the country, but China’s predatory state-owned enterprises should benefit.
The US must begin countering the asymmetric warfare of the “Bolvarian” threat network with an informational response and public diplomacy. Congress must pressure the White House to do so and must demand that the administration update it on illicit trafficking flows from Peru and the possible links of those flows to political activity. It should also urge Peru’s consumer protection agency, INDECOPI, to reject China’s recent monopoly purchase of electricity.
The last time another threat network ally ruled Peru, a Chinese state-owned company managed to guarantee access to a deep-water megaport that is key to Beijing’s naval ambitions in the Pacific, and the turkey has become another of China’s “comprehensive strategic partners”.
Mateo Haydar is research assistant for Latin America at The Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy.
©2023 The Daily Singal. Published with permission. original in english.
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