Peruvian

Nov. 4 (UPI) — Indigenous communities in the Yurúa district, on the remote border between Peru and Brazil, have raised the alarm over the growing presence of members of Brazil’s Comando Vermelho criminal organization in their territory.

They say the group is exploiting what they describe as a “state vacuum” that leaves those living there unprotected against the advance of organized crime.

The armed Brazilian group has been crossing from Brazil into the Peruvian Amazon, taking part in drug-trafficking routes, illegal logging and other illicit activities that threaten the physical, cultural and territorial integrity of the Amazonian peoples, according to reports.

Those reports come from the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest, the Regional Organization AIDESEP Ucayali and the Association of Native Communities of the Yurúa-Sheshea District.

In the Yurúa and Breu river basins, residents have reported sightings of small planes landing on improvised airstrips in the early morning hours, establishment of unfamiliar camps inside Indigenous reserves and movement of boats carrying cargo without government oversight.

The situation has reinforced perceptions that Comando Vermelho and allied criminal networks are operating with relative impunity in the region.

After a large-scale operation at the end of October against organized crime in Rio de Janeiro, the Comando Vermelho’s main base of operations, alarms sounded over possible attempts by senior members of the criminal organization to seek refuge in neighboring countries.

Indigenous organizations are not only denouncing the problem but also demanding immediate and coordinated action from the Peruvian government, La República reported.

To that end, they have outlined five key areas for response: maintaining a permanent security presence, coordinating efforts between the Interior and Defense ministries, protecting Indigenous leaders, promoting alternative development for local communities and granting legal recognition to a “Transborder Indigenous Guard” to monitor the frontier with Brazil.

Former Interior Minister Rubén Vargas warned in an interview with Radio Exitosa that Comando Vermelho is conducting criminal operations in Peru, mainly along the Amazon River route, reinforcing community warnings in Yurúa and surrounding areas.

And the reach of this criminal network has expanded into the regions of Pasco and Huánuco, in the area known as Puerto Inca, a hub for drug trafficking and illegal mining.

“There are two businesses that interest Comando Vermelho: cocaine and illegal mining,” Vargas said.

Although press reports dating to 2019 have documented the activities of the criminal organization in Peru’s Amazon territories, many details about Comando Vermelho’s operations along the Peru-Brazil border remain unclear because of the region’s inaccessibility, lack of disaggregated official data and clandestine nature of the networks.

Martin Vizcarra will become the fifth Peruvian ex-president jailed in recent years amid period of political turbulence.

A judge in the South American nation of Peru has ordered the country’s ex-president, Martin Vizcarra, to be held in pre-trial detention over bribery allegations.

In a hearing on Wednesday, Judge Jorge Chavez ordered Vizcarra jailed for five months, saying he is a flight risk. He stands accused of accepting bribes during his tenure as governor of the Moquegua region 11 years ago.

Vizcarra is the fifth ex-president to be detained in Peru, which has been rocked by numerous scandals and political crises over the last several years. Peru has had six presidents since 2018.

For his part, Vizcarra has denied the charges against him, stating that they are a form of political persecution. He had planned to run for president again in 2026.

A judge had turned down a previous request to detain him in June, but the public ministry insisted that he was a flight risk and appealed the decision. His lawyers have said that he will seek to appeal his detention.

Three other ex-presidents, Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala and Pedro Castillo, are currently being held in a special facility built for former leaders of the country in a police base in the capital of Lima.

Vizcarra, who was investigated and removed from office by Congress in 2020, will likely join them there. Critics have accused Peru’s Congress of launching scurrilous impeachment efforts against political rivals, using vague charges such as “moral incapacity”.

The facility first housed former President Alberto Fujimori, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2009 for human rights abuses committed during his period of dictatorial rule. He was controversially pardoned in 2023, in defiance of an order from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and died of cancer the following year.

President Dina Boluarte, who came into office after former President Castillo was imprisoned after trying to dissolve Congress, signed a law earlier today offering amnesty to government security officials and aligned groups who committed rights abuses during the decades-long campaign against the Shining Path armed group.

Rights groups condemned the amnesty bill as a form of impunity for serious abuses.

There are few countries in the world where Coca-Cola isn’t the most popular soft drink. But in Peru, that position is held by Inca Kola – an almost 100-year-old beverage deeply embedded in the national identity.

The yellow soda – meant to evoke the grandeur of the ancient Inca Empire and its reverence for gold – was the creation of Joseph Robinson Lindley. The British immigrant had set out from the coal mining town of Doncaster, England, for Peru in 1910 and soon after set up a drinks factory in a working-class district of the capital, Lima.

He started producing small-batch carbonated fruit drinks and gradually expanded. When Inca Kola was created in 1935, with its secret recipe of 13 herbs and aromatics, it was just a year ahead of Coca-Cola’s arrival in the country. Recognising the threat posed by the soft drink giant, which had launched in the US in 1886 and made inroads across Latin America, Lindley invested in the budding television advertising industry to promote Inca Kola.

Advertisement campaigns featuring Inca Kola bottles with their vaguely Indigenous motifs and slogans like “the flavour that unites us” appealed to Peru’s multiethnic society – and to its Inca roots.

It fostered a sense of national pride, explains Andres Macara-Chvili, a marketing professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “Inca Kola was one of the first brands in Peru that connected with a sense of Peruanidad, or what it means to be Peruvian. It spoke to Peruvians about what we are – diverse,” he says.

But it wasn’t only the drink’s appeal to Peruvian identity or its unique flavour (described by some as tasting like bubblegum, by others as being similar to chamomile tea) that enhanced brand awareness. Amid the turmoil of a world war, Inca Kola would also come to prominence for another reason.

Finding opportunity in a wartime boycott

At the tail end of the 1890s, Japan had sent roughly 18,000 contract labourers to Peru. Most went to the country’s budding coastal sugar and cotton plantations. Upon arriving, they found themselves subjected to low wages, exploitative work schedules, and unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions, which led to deadly outbreaks of dysentery and typhus. Unable to afford passage back to Japan after they’d completed their four-year contracts, many of the Japanese labourers remained in Peru – moving to urban centres where they opened businesses, notably bodegas, or small grocery stores.

Denied access to loans from Peruvian banks, as their community grew in number and economic standing, they established their own savings and credit cooperatives.

“Among their community, money began to circulate, and with it they raised the capital to open small businesses,” explains Alejandro Valdez Tamashiro, a researcher of Japanese migration to Peru.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese community emerged as a formidable merchant class. But with that came animosity.

By the mid-1930s, anti-Japanese sentiment had begun to fester. Nationalist politicians and xenophobic media accused the community of running a monopoly on the Peruvian economy, and, in the build-up to World War II, of espionage.

By the start of that war in 1939, Peru was home to the second-largest Japanese community in Latin America. The following year, one incident of racially motivated attacks and lootings against the community resulted in at least 10 deaths, six million dollars in damage and loss of property for more than 600 Japanese families.

Since its release, Inca Kola had been widely sold in the mainly Japanese-owned bodegas.

With the outbreak of war, its competitor, Coca-Cola, received a huge boost internationally. The US firm, which for years had used political connections to expand overseas, became a de facto envoy of US foreign policy, burnishing its image as a symbol of democracy and freedom.

The soda giant obtained lucrative military contracts guaranteeing that 95 percent of soft drinks stocked on US military bases were Coca-Cola products, essentially placing Coke at the centre of the US war effort. Coke featured in wartime posters while war photographers captured soldiers drinking from the glass bottles.

Back in Peru, in the wake of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Coca-Cola halted distribution of its soda to Peru’s Japanese merchants, whose bodegas were by now one of the main suppliers of the US carbonated drink.

Recognising a brass tacks opportunity to boost sales, the Lindley family – already outselling a fledgling Coca-Cola domestically – doubled down as the main soft drink supplier to the spurned community. With Japanese-owned bodegas forming a sizeable distribution network across Lima, Inca Kola quickly stepped in to fill the shelf space left empty by Coca-Cola’s exit.

The wartime shift gave Inca Kola an even stronger foothold in the market and laid the groundwork for a lasting sense of loyalty between the Japanese-Peruvian community and the Inca Kola brand.

Hostility towards the community intensified during the war. Throughout the early 1940s, a deeply US-allied Peruvian government hosted a US military base along its coast, broke off diplomatic relations with Japan, shuttered Japanese institutions and initiated a government deportation programme against Japanese Peruvians.

Despite this, today more than 300,000 Peruvians claim Japanese ancestry, and the community’s imprint can be seen in many sectors, including in the country’s Asian-Peruvian fusion eateries, where Inca Kola is a mainstay on menus.

Taking on a giant – and then joining forces

Inca Kola would go on to narrowly outcompete Coca-Cola for decades. But by the late 1990s, the company was mired in debt after a decades-long effort to contain its main rival.

Following heavy losses, in 1999, the Lindleys sold a 50 percent stake of their company to Coca-Cola for an estimated $200m.

“You were the soft drink that went toe-to-toe with this giant international corporation, and then you sold out. At the time, it was unforgivable,” reflects Macara-Chvili. “Today, those feelings are not so intense. It’s in the past.”

Still, Coca-Cola, in recognising the soft drink’s regional value, allowed the Lindley Corporation to maintain domestic ownership of the brand and to retain bottling and distribution rights within Peru, where Inca Kola continues to connect with local identity. Unable to beat the brand outright, Coca-Cola sought a deal that allowed it to corner a market without displacing a local favourite.

Sitting outside a grocery store with two friends in Lima’s historic centre, Josel Luis Huamani, a 35-year-old tattoo artist, pours a large glass bottle of the golden soda into three cups.

“We’re just so accustomed to the flavour. We’ve been drinking it our whole lives,” he says.

“It’s tradition, just like the Inca,” declares 45-year-old food vendor Maria Sanchez over a late lunch of beef tripe stew at a lunch counter not far from Lima’s main square.

Dining with family and friends in the highland jungle region of Chanchamayo, Tsinaki Samaniego, 24, a member of the Ashaninka Indigenous group, sips the soft drink with her meal and says, “It’s like an old friend.”

This article is part of ‘Ordinary items, extraordinary stories’, a series about the surprising stories behind well-known items.

Read more from the series:

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June 19 (UPI) — Peru’s congressional oversight committee has approved a report that recommends removal of President Dina Boluarte, alleging she abandoned her post in 2023 to undergo cosmetic surgeries without notifying Congress or formally delegating her duties.

The committee approved the report after weeks of investigation that included checking medical records, reviewing the presidential schedule and hearing testimony.

According to the report, there is a “high degree of certainty” that Boluarte underwent surgery for cosmetic and functional reasons between June 28 and July 4, 2023.

The panel concluded her absence jeopardized the continuity of presidential leadership, real-time decision-making, national emergency response and the overall direction of state policy.

“The country cannot accept a president stepping away from her duties to undergo personal surgeries without officially recording her absence, as required by Article 115 of the Peruvian Constitution,” said Congressman Juan Burgos, chairman of the congressional oversight committee.

The investigation initially focused on Boluarte’s undisclosed use of luxury watches and other assets. During the probe, documents emerged showing medical expenses tied to cosmetic procedures, prompting the committee to broaden its inquiry — later known as the “surgery case.”

In a national address in December 2024, Boluarte acknowledged undergoing surgery but denied it was cosmetic.

“Yes, I underwent a surgical procedure. It was not cosmetic — it was necessary for my health, essential for respiratory function. … It did not impair my ability to carry out my duties as president,” she said.

However, Dr. Mario Cabani, the surgeon who performed the procedures, told the committee that Boluarte underwent multiple cosmetic and functional facial surgeries.

The report now heads to the full Congress, which must decide whether to admit it for debate and eventually hold a vote on the motion to remove Boluarte from office. The measure requires 87 votes out of 130 to pass.

So far, major opposition blocs support the effort, but lawmakers from Boluarte’s ruling coalition and the Fujimorist bloc have withheld support and did not endorse the report in committee.

If admitted, it would be the sixth attempt to remove Boluarte since she took office in December 2022. Three motions were filed in 2023 and two in 2024. None secured the votes needed to oust her.