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By Jose Lev Alvarez, Middle East Forum
Peru’s interim president, José María Balcázar, delivered a speech at the Lima Chamber of Commerce on April 28, 2026, that should have focused on Peru’s trade history.
Instead, the 83-year-old leftist lawmaker recycled Nazi-era conspiracy theories.
Jews, he declared, “controlled all the banks, all the commerce, and practiced usury” and had “pushed Germany into a war” because of it (only 0.3 percent of the German population in 1939 was Jewish).
Peru’s Jewish Association described them as outdated antisemitic theories echoing the propaganda used to justify the murder of six million Jews in Europe.
The Peruvian government’s response was a clarification that it regretted any “mistaken perception,” while reaffirming Peru’s past support for Israel’s creation.
This episode, however, is not a gaffe since this is not the first time a leftist Peruvian political figure has made such statements.
In 2022, former Prime Minister Anibal Torres praised and hailed Adolf Hitler’s economic reforms.
Rather than anomalies, such statements are symptoms of institutional collapse now opening the door for Iran’s expanding operations in the Andes.
Today, Peru’s Jewish community numbers roughly 1,900 people, down from a 1970s peak of over 5,000.
This small group has delivered outsized contributions to the nation’s economy and institutions.
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, son of a Jewish physician who fled Nazi Germany, served as president from 2016 to 2018.
Efraín Goldenberg, of Romanian Jewish descent, held the posts of prime minister from 1994 to 1995, foreign minister, and finance minister.
Jewish Peruvians built mining operations, ports, irrigation systems, and key financial institutions that still underpin the copper and silver export economy responsible for 60 percent of Peru’s total export revenue.
This record of achievements clashes with the antisemitic undercurrents that have persisted for decades.
In the 1930s, the fascist Revolutionary Union party incited attacks on Jewish businesses in Lima and imposed restrictive immigration rules demanding baptismal certificates and exorbitant deposits.
Nazi propaganda found receptive audiences. Those patterns never vanished. Conspiracy theories about supposed Jewish control of Peruvian institutions continue to circulate in political discourse.
The real threat today is how this domestic antisemitism now intersects with Iran’s geostrategic push into Latin America.
Prosecutors charged the cell with plotting the assassination of at least two Israelis in Lima.
Azizi received 18 months of preventive detention. It was the first documented arrest of a Qods Force operative on Peruvian soil.
The case fits a pattern. In 2014, Peruvian counterterrorism police detained Lebanese national Muhamad Ghaleb Hamdar in Lima.
Authorities accused him of scouting Jewish and Israeli targets and possessing materials linked to explosives used by Hezbollah.
Peruvian courts later acquitted him on technicalities, but the episode exposed active reconnaissance inside the country.
Iranian influence extends further. Peruvian National Police Colonel Max Anhuamán stated in October 2023 that political protests had been infiltrated by young Peruvians radicalized during training stints in Iran.
Indigenous activist Edwar Quiroga Vargas, who studied in Iran under the guidance of Mohsen Rabbani, the mastermind behind the 1994 Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina terrorist attack that killed 85 people, founded the Inkarri-Islam cultural center—the first Shi’i institution of its kind in Peru.
Public intelligence assessments have flagged the center as a vector for leftist revolutionary ideology amid mining unrest in Apurímac and Abancay.
These incidents carry geostrategic weight. Peru ranks as the world’s third-largest copper producer and targets 2.8 million metric tons of output in 2025.
The mining sector generates tens of billions in annual exports and supplies minerals essential for American defense systems, electric vehicles, semiconductors, and renewable energy technologies.
Peru also holds one of the largest undeveloped hard-rock lithium deposits at the Macusani plateau, with the Falchani project containing resources exceeding 4.7 million metric tons of lithium.
In parallel, China’s bilateral trade with Peru reached $51 billion in 2025, more than double the $23 billion in United States-Peru trade.
Beijing has poured tens of billions of dollars into Peruvian mining projects. Tehran rides those coattails while building its own covert networks.
The threat gains sharper focus when linked to Peru’s history of narco-terrorism.
Shining Path guerrillas trained alongside the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine cadres in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and South Yemen during the 1970s and 1980s.
Those exchanges of explosives expertise created operational knowledge that hybrid networks can now exploit.
Andean cocaine production exceeds 2,700 metric tons annually. Even a modest skim by Iranian proxies funnels tens of millions of dollars straight to Hezbollah and the Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Peru’s Pacific coastline, porous borders, and weak institutions make it an ideal rear base for asymmetric warfare against the United States, Israel, and the West.
Balcázar’s speech did not create this threat. It normalized the very narratives Tehran and Hezbollah use to recruit, radicalize, and justify their presence.
The government’s belated clarification and Peru’s ninth leadership change in a decade expose the same political blindness that has allowed Iranian operatives to function with impunity.
Peruvian authorities face a narrowing window. Intelligence cooperation with the United States and Israel must expand immediately to dismantle active cells and secure mining zones and borders.
Asset freezes and raids on front companies linked to the Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah must follow every credible lead.
Public repudiation of antisemitic conspiracy theories at the highest levels, paired with concrete protection of Jewish institutions, is non-negotiable.
Civic education that counters imported ideologies without scapegoating productive minorities is essential to long-term stability.
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Peru sits at the intersection of critical mineral geopolitics, ideological infiltration, and chronic institutional fragility. The president’s words were a symptom. The arrests in 2014 and 2024 were warnings.
If Lima continues to treat the Iranian network as anything less than the integrated threat the evidence shows it to be, the Andes will become the next theater in Tehran’s shadow war—just 2,200 miles from the southern border of the United States.
The numbers leave no room for denial: 1,900 Jews targeted by presidential rhetoric, Qods Force operatives and local accomplices arrested in a single plot, 2.8 million metric tons of copper, and 4.7 million metric tons of lithium at stake. Failure is no longer an option.
