Peru’s President Dina Boluarte used her appearance at the Davos Economic Forum last month to signal her regime’s unqualified subservience to the new administration headed by Donald Trump in Washington and to offer unfettered exploitation of the country’s natural resources to the big mining corporations and global finance capital.

Boluarte’s statements at Davos combined outright lies about her own regime, a degraded level of obsequiousness to US imperialism and unconcealed contempt for the Peruvian working class.

Boluarte claimed in her remarks that Peru is not only “a country entering a phase of calm governance, but also one that is experiencing economic growth.” She attributed this rosy scenario to her administration’s efforts: “Peru managed its economy responsibly, avoiding excessive debt and reckless internal public spending.”

These assertions prompted Luis Miguel Castilla, a US-trained Peruvian technocrat who served as minister of Economy and Finance from 2011 to 2014 during the last years of the mining export boom to China, to assert that the president is living “in an alternate world.”

Dina Boluarte is a hated figure in Peru, with an approval rating that has dipped to 3 percent, the lowest in the country’s history. Her government has managed to cling to power in the face of mass protests and unending corruption scandals only thanks to her subordination to the far-right faction that dominates the Peruvian Congress. She came to power as an unelected head of state on December 7, 2022 as a result of a parliamentary coup d’état and subsequent arrest of President Pedro Castillo, an operation backed by both the Peruvian Armed Forces and the CIA.

In one of her first acts as president, Boluarte gave shoot-to-kill orders to the military to suppress protests over Castillo’s overthrow and imprisonment. As a result, 50 people were assassinated, mostly young individuals of Quechua descent.

There is significant concern within Peruvian ruling circles that the president’s undisguised indifference to the serious issues facing Peruvian working people could jeopardize her mandate. The business daily Gestión carried a recent headline: “More companies seek to protect themselves from electoral risk and a presidential vacancy.” The article recounted Peruvian capitalists’ fears of “political instability, loss of profits, and disruption of their supply chains.”

Recently, a high-ranking military officer who had just been forced into retirement by the president accused Boluarte of political corruption and favoritism within the armed forces. He claimed that she was discharging generals who did not support her while promoting those who did, thereby creating a base within the military to offset her lack of popular support.

Social discontent in Peru culminated in four national strikes in 2024, led by public transport unions protesting a surge of murders committed by extortionist mafias. Enjoying overwhelming popular support, the protesters demanded the “resignation of Congress and Boluarte,” frequently labeling her “murderous Dina.”

In her remarks at Davos, Boluarte expressed hope for multilateral cooperation with other regional leaders. Castilla interpreted Boluarte’s approach as an attempt to place Peru on Trump’s “radar” as a reliable ally.

Her purpose is to be considered as supportive of Trump’s aims in Latin America as far-right politicians like former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s President Javier Milei, both of whom were invited to Trump’s inauguration. (Bolsonaro was banned from attending by Brazil’s Supreme Court.) Milei’s harsh cuts to social programs, which have plunged 55 percent of Argentines into poverty, have made him a model for the new Trump administration.

Boluarte’s attempt to win Trump’s favor led her to proclaim that “Latin America has always looked up to the United States as the elder brother,” a slavish remark that could only have caused most Peruvians to cringe.

She went out of her way at the Davos summit to demand that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro resign, and took a step further after returning to Lima, greeting the US-backed opposition candidate Edmundo González as Venezuela’s rightful president and bestowing upon him the “Orden del Sol del Perú.”

Boluarte begged Trump to visit Peru, or if not, to invite her to the White House so that she might “converse with him in order to weave [closer] ties between the United States and Peru.”

Trump has shown no reciprocal interest. US immigration authorities have reportedly rounded up some 500 Peruvian immigrants since the new administration took office. The first US military planes carrying dozens of Peruvian deportees arrived in Lima over the weekend. There are an estimated 300,000 undocumented Peruvian immigrants in the US, all of them targets for the ongoing police state crackdown.

As Pedro Castillo’s vice president, Dina Boluarte attended the Davos Economic Forum in 2022. In 2021, the pseudo-left magazine Jacobin characterized Pedro Castillo’s victory as a resurgence of the “pink tide,” supposedly posing an alternative to the neoliberal model imposed by US imperialism in Latin America following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

Castillo came to power representing Peru Libre, an ultra-nationalist party founded by the corrupt former governor of the Junín region, Vladimiro Cerrón, who mixed populist demagogy with Maoist rhetoric. Castillo’s vice presidential running-mate was Dina Boluarte.

At the 2022 Davos meeting, Boluarte, speaking on behalf of Castillo, condemned transnational mining companies for polluting rivers and pastures belonging to peasants, stating, “Let us measure this pollution because Peru is not an island where there is a Robinson Crusoe.”

However, during her speech at Davos this year, Boluarte openly welcomed the exploitation of natural resources by the mining corporations. She claimed that Peru “is the country offering the best expectations for foreign investments.”

While at Davos, Boluarte met with CEOs from the major mining companies Glencore, Anglo-American and Newmont, as well as with heads of major financial firms such as Blackrock and Arista, to promote increased investments in Peru. She specifically discussed mega-projects exceeding $2 billion related to water treatment in the Cajamarca region with Newmont.

This reversal is in line with Boluarte’s entire career since being catapulted into the presidency in 2022, demonstrating not merely her own corruption, but more significantly the perfidious role played by bourgeois populism and left nationalism—together with their pseudo-left apologists—throughout Latin America.

Boluarte wants to curry favor with the Trump administration in order to bolster her crisis-ridden regime with the support of US imperialism, the main counterrevolutionary force in the region.

At odds with Boluarte’s desire for close ties to the Trump administration is China’s growing economic influence, exemplified by the construction of the Chancay seaport mega-project, led by Chinese Company Cosco Shipping, with an initial investment of $1.3 billion. The Chinese government aims to position the port of Chancay as the primary departure point for raw materials from South America. To achieve this, it plans to build a bullet train that will connect Chancay to the mineral-rich southern regions of Peru and complete the interoceanic highway extending to São Paulo, Brazil.

This initiative runs counter to Trump’s aggressive stance toward Latin America, which includes provocative threats to retake the Panama Canal, bullying Panamanians for allowing Chinese companies to operate port facilities serving the canal, and suggesting a military invasion if the Panamanian government fails to close them down.