Peru theatrically broke off relations with Iran on September 1. The official reasons filled two pages: repression, press freedom, nuclear inspectors denied access, and a shipping lane disrupted since March. None of it holds up against the numbers. Trade between Lima and Tehran came to a meagre $1.3mn last year, a rounding error made up of veterinary vaccines and achiote dye going one way, diagnostic reagents and dried fruit coming back. Peru had nothing to lose here, as this was never a foreign policy decision about Iran to begin with. It was a loyalty test, and Lima passed it in style.

The clue sits inside the foreign ministry itself. Carlos Espá, the man who signed the rupture, spent 15 years running press and cultural outreach at the US Embassy in Lima, from 2008 to 2023, before newly inaugurated President Keiko Fujimori made him her chancellor in July. He studied politics in Washington on a Fulbright scholarship, ran for president himself this year under a party he founded from nothing, and folded straight into her cabinet when he lost. When Espá talks about defending democracy against Tehran, Peruvians can be forgiven for hearing an echo of the building he used to work in.

According to Epicentro, international relations scholar Farid Kahhat put the contradiction bluntly: Iran's record on human rights was certainly not a secret, yet it never previously interrupted relations, no more than it interrupts Peru's dealings with China, an equally authoritarian and far larger trading partner. Óscar Vidarte of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú went further, arguing in an interview with La República that Lima has abandoned decades of a foreign policy built on balancing rival powers in favour of open alignment with Washington.

A gift wrapped for Trump

Espá used his own swearing-in to confirm Peru would join the Shield of the Americas, the hemispheric coalition of like-minded nations Donald Trump launched at a Miami summit in March. Washington itself has been explicit that the initiative is as much about squeezing out Chinese influence in the region as it is about organised crime. Fujimori had already signalled her enthusiasm months earlier, telling an interviewer in July that Peru wanted "to strengthen this relationship with the United States", reportedly after discussing membership with Trump's circle during a visit to Mar-a-Lago before she had even won. Breaking with Iran cost Lima nothing economically and bought goodwill with the one power now reshaping the hemisphere's politics under the "Donroe Doctrine."

The consultants who came with her

The people around Fujimori tell the same story from a different angle. Her adviser Carlos Díaz-Rosillo, a Cuban-American academic who runs the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International University, invited her to speak at the centre before the election and has been described, in reporting cited by Peruvian outlet La República, as a senior international security adviser inside Trump's Defense Department.

Argentine consultant Damián Valenzuela also worked on the campaign and is a known associate of Díaz-Rosillo. More combustible is the presence of Fernando Cerimedo, the Argentine digital strategist behind the campaigns of Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, and Bolivia's Rodrigo Paz. Cerimedo (now detained in Bolivia on an attempted murder charge involving his former partner) was part of the campaign as well. La República established that Cerimedo flew into Lima on July 27 and stayed through Fujimori's inauguration the next day, sharing breakfast at a Miraflores hotel with a member of her Fuerza Popular campaign team. Fujimori denies any personal or professional relationship, telling reporters in Piura she may have greeted him somewhere but has never communicated with him.

Whatever the truth of that specific denial, a US-centred network of right-wing operators, consultants and think-tank patrons now threads visibly through Lima, Buenos Aires, Brasília, Caracas, Asunción and La Paz, and Fujimori's government sits inside it.

The Israel double standard

Peru's break with Tehran ostensibly stemmed from human rights and nuclear transparency concerns. Its parallel courtship of Israel involves neither. What it does involve is hardware. Peru's state defence manufacturer FAME signed a six-year technology-transfer agreement with Elbit Systems, one of Tel Aviv's largest arms companies, and is buying nine additional PULS rocket-launcher units between 2026 and 2029. Since taking office, Fujimori's government has also pursued Israeli cooperation on facial recognition, predictive policing software and cyberdefence, the same surveillance architecture Fuerza Popular campaigned on to fight extortion gangs. Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar both called Fujimori before her inauguration to discuss exactly this kind of cooperation, and Israel's ambassador attended the ceremony in person.

Set that against the rupture with the Islamic Republic, and the double standard becomes hard to miss. Peru's government cited repression, discrimination against women and persecution of dissidents as grounds to sever ties with Tehran. It has raised none of these concerns about what many, in light of the atrocities of Gaza, view as a genocidal government. Lima is not merely tolerating that record. It is arming itself and modelling its domestic surveillance state on the country accused of it.

The China problem nobody in Lima wants to solve

None of this changes where Peru's commercial interests actually lie. China is by far the country's largest trading partner. In 2025, the Asian superpower accounted for around 35% of Peru's total goods trade, while the country's exports to China were roughly $33bn and imports from China roughly $18bn, putting bilateral goods trade at around $50bn. Peru also completed its domestic procedures for an updated free trade protocol with Beijing in July 2026, with the agreement designed to deepen trade and investment ties.

This dependence became more visible in 2026. In the first half of the year, Peru exported $20.85bn in goods to China, an increase of 38.7% year on year, while China remained the country's largest export market. Chinese state shipping group Cosco also holds a 60% stake in the Chancay megaport, the flagship project Lima markets as a gateway between South America and Asia.

Fujimori is scrambling to separate two things that may prove increasingly difficult to disentangle: Peru's geopolitical alignment and its economic dependence. Lima can deepen its security relationship with Washington and Israel, participate in US-backed regional initiatives and sever barely relevant ties with Iran while continuing to rely on China for exports, infrastructure and investment.

For now, that strategy carries little immediate economic cost. But geopolitical alignments tend to acquire economic consequences. Whether Peru can move decisively into Washington's camp without putting its roughly $50bn annual goods-trade relationship with Beijing under strain is the real question Fujimori has yet to answer.