Secret recordings of Peruvian presidents are nothing new. Nor are corruption accusations leading to impeachments. Over the past decade, Peru has had seven presidents, none of whom has managed to hang on for longer than three years. One resigned within a week.
The country’s current president, José Jerí, 39, who presided over the impeachment of his predecessor and who was then installed in her place last October, could join that list.
In a leaked video released this month, CCTV footage from Dec. 26 shows Mr. Jerí being dropped off by a car belonging to the president’s office and then attempting to cover his face with the hood of his sweatshirt as he entered Xin Yan Restaurant, which is owned by Yang Zhihua, a Chinese businessman who has come under government scrutiny.
Another video leaked a week later shows Mr. Jerí in one of the numerous corner stores that Mr. Yang owns in the capital, Lima. He can be seen shouting into his phone in front of Mr. Yang. Local media had reported that Mr. Yang’s store had been ordered shut down for violating a municipal ordinance. Three days later, the ordinance was struck down by a federal regulatory body.
According to Peruvian law, Mr. Jerí, who has acknowledged the authenticity of the videos, is legally required to log all his official activities and did not disclose his visits to the restaurant and the store.
Under withering questioning from federal lawmakers this week, Mr. Jerí has been defiant.
He said he had known Mr. Yang, who he calls “Johnny,” before he became president. As for the visits, he enjoys Chinese food and happened to pass the store and thought to buy some candy and paintings. (But, he added, “Johnny wouldn’t let me pay because he was being kind to me.”)
And the shouting? It was a call from his press secretary about an unrelated matter that had upset him. He refused to share his phone’s call history with lawmakers and journalists.
“These are normal actions that people, regardless of their position, carry out, but they have been distorted for purposes that the investigations will surely reveal,” he said in Congress on Thursday.
Mr. Jerí’s defense has been met with deep skepticism.
At least 20 lawmakers have signed onto motions that, if passed, would result in Mr. Jerí’s impeachment, a number that kept rising on Thursday. Of the 130 members of the lower house, 66 must vote for impeachment for a president to be removed. And on Tuesday, Peru’s prosecutors’ office said it had opened a graft investigation into his meetings with Mr. Yang.
Mr. Yang has more than a dozen companies in Peru, including a construction firm that has won several contracts from the police, a hydroelectric company that was granted a state concession to build a dam, and a ceramics factory that, according to a national trade association, was built without proper permits.
The New York Times obtained a confidential report on Thursday about Chinese companies accused of corruption in Peru that was drafted by a congressional committee last year.
In it, Mr. Yang was identified as a junior partner in a more than $50 million highway project led by a local subsidiary of China Railway Engineering Corporation that became the subject of an arbitration dispute. The report accuses Mr. Yang’s construction company of conspiring to defraud the Peruvian state by using the economic leverage of large, Chinese state-owned companies to secure contracts for projects that were later abandoned.
Mr. Jerí’s office did not respond to a request for an interview and Mr. Yang could not be reached for comment.
Willax, a conservative cable channel, broadcast a third video of Mr. Jerí with Mr. Yang. It appears to have been recorded by a person wearing a hidden camera, and offers a glimpse of a separate moment at Mr. Yang’s store during Mr. Jerí’s visit there on Jan. 6. It shows members of Mr. Jerí’s team collecting bags of goods from people who appear to be the store’s employees. Someone off-camera says, “This is for the comandante.”
Peru’s Congress is currently on summer break, complicating efforts to summon an extraordinary plenary session to impeach Mr. Jerí, though lawmakers from across the political spectrum have expressed support for doing so.
Peru already has presidential elections scheduled for April. Part of Mr. Jerí’s defense has been to accuse his political opponents of releasing the videos to “alter the electoral process.” Before the scandal broke, Mr. Jerí enjoyed a relatively high approval rating of 51 percent in the latest polling.
Many Peruvians have responded to the mushrooming scandal with jadedness.
“Our politicians are all corrupt and they sell themselves to the highest bidder,” said Jacinta Martínez, 45, a landscaper in Lima. “Today it’s the Chinese who are buying them, tomorrow it will be Peruvians or Venezuelans or Americans.”
Peru’s relationship with China has grown increasingly close. More than a decade has passed since China became Peru’s biggest trading partner, and in 2024, Chinese companies completed construction of an enormous port north of Lima — part of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. China is the main buyer of Peru’s largest export, copper. Chinese companies are heavily involved in Peruvian infrastructure and telecommunications, and Peruvians can visit China visa-free as tourists.
The United States has sought to counter Chinese influence in Peru, in large part through forging a closer military partnership. Mr. Jerí has tried to thread the needle by welcoming both Chinese and American investment.
During Mr. Jerí’s brief time in office, President Trump notified Congress that he intended to make Peru a “Major Non-NATO Ally,” a designation that Colombia, Brazil and Argentina also share, and the State Department said Peru had asked to purchase $1.5 billion worth of U.S. equipment and services to support construction of a new naval base near Lima.
In December, the U.S. Senate approved Mr. Trump’s nomination of Bernie Navarro, a self-described America First champion who has vowed to “root out” growing Chinese influence, as the new ambassador to Peru.
Some of Mr. Jerí’s political allies have said that they believe the geopolitical jockeying between the United States and China precipitated the scandal embroiling the president. In an interview with a Peruvian newspaper this week, Prime Minister Ernesto Alvarez said the videos may have been leaked to the media to damage Mr. Jerí for seeking stronger ties with Washington.
“It could be China because they’re very upset about the” naval base,” he said, “and because we’ve stated transparently that Peru should be an ally of the United States.”
The Chinese and American embassies in Lima did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Mr. Navarro, the incoming U.S. ambassador.
Earlier this week, Cuarto Poder, the same outlet that published the video of Mr. Jerí in Mr. Yang’s shop, reported that another Chinese businessman, Ji Wu Xiaodong, who is under investigation for his role in a criminal organization involved in illegal logging, had visited the presidential palace three times since Mr. Jerí took office. Mr. Ji Wu had been ordered held under house arrest.
Mr. Jerí told lawmakers that Mr. Ji Wu was a friend of Mr. Yang’s and said he did not know Mr. Ji Wu well and that he barely spoke Spanish. Mr. Ji Wu is accredited by Peru’s foreign ministry as an official Chinese-Spanish translator.
According to Peru’s energy regulator, Osinergmin, Mr. Yang’s hydroelectric company, Hidroeléctrica America, has made no progress on building the $24.4 million, 20 megawatt dam as of the end of last year. It is due for completion in March. The company could lose a $244,000 deposit it if does not fulfill the contract.
In his testimony before lawmakers this week, Mr. Jerí mentioned two additional, unregistered meetings with Mr. Yang — two more December meals at Mr. Yang’s Xin Yan Restaurant.
Videos of those meetings have yet to emerge, but on a late night TV show on Wednesday, Beto Ortiz, a journalist for Willax claimed that he knew of 19 more videos of Mr. Jerí meeting with Mr. Yang, and teased details from the ones he’d seen.
For his part Mr. Jerí said he is eager to have any videos of him made public.
“Hopefully they’ll start airing them,” Mr. Jerí said at a news conference on Thursday afternoon, “so we can verify and get many more clues about who’s behind them and what the links are between them.”
Max Bearak is a reporter for The Times based in Bogotá, Colombia.
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