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Summary
Vásquez was head of the cabinet under Pedro Castillo, the president who tried to dissolve Congress by decree in December 2022, and she opposed his arrest.
In 2026 she backed Castillo's ally Roberto Sánchez in the runoff Keiko Fujimori won on June 7.
Her justification, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, does not hold: APEC is for presidents and ministers. President Keiko Fujimori's government did not plan to send her; the Communist government of China invited her.
Peru has seen this before. In 2023, six members of Congress spent twelve days in Shanghai paid by a Mexican telecom company that never explained why.
Nobody was sanctioned.
In December 2025, then interim President José Jerí was filmed in a hood entering a Chinese restaurant to meet a contractor tied to the "Chinese construction club." Congress removed Jerí in February 2026.
The stakes: more than 30,000 million dollars in Chinese investment, three-quarters of Peru's copper, 60 percent of the Chancay megaport and Lima's two electricity distributors.
The same strategy repeats across Latin America, from paid trips in Honduras and Argentina to the Chinese telecom company Huawei in Panama and Chinese fishing fleets off the Pacific coast.
Nobody flies you across the Pacific Ocean to Beijing for nothing.
A senator’s trip paid for by Beijing
On October 6, Peruvian senator Mirtha Vásquez announced that “in the coming days” she will fly to China with a delegation of legislators from several parties.
The invitation came from the Chinese Embassy in Lima, she said, so “the expenses will be covered by that diplomatic mission and no public funds will be used.”
She asked for unpaid leave, because the trip falls in the week senators are supposed to spend with the voters who elected them. Vásquez will instead be spending that week in China.
Her agenda, in her words: disaster management for El Niño, the fight against poverty, “strategic infrastructure,” economic cooperation, meetings with Chinese companies that operate in Peru, and the chance to raise “concerns about companies with questions.”
She added that the visit matters because China hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ summit in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19, 2026.
Politicians traveling at no cost to taxpayers is normally a virtue. Here the one paying is a foreign government, and Beijing courts Peru for a reason.
Nobody flies a senator across the Pacific without expecting something in return.
Who she is, and who invited her
Vásquez is a leftist. She served as head of the cabinet under Pedro Castillo, the president who tried to dissolve Congress by decree in December 2022 and was arrested the same day.
She supported Castillo, a Communist coup plotter, and opposed his arrest.
In 2026 she backed Roberto Sánchez, Castillo’s ally, in the presidential runoff that Keiko Fujimori won on June 7, a result that might have saved Peru’s democracy from a second coup attempt.
Today she is one of four senators of Ahora Nación, the left-wing party of Alfonso López Chau, and she faces a pending constitutional accusation that could bar her from public office for ten years. The accusation concerns her 2021 term as interim president of Congress.
She has never called herself a Communist, but her allies did the coup plotting, and she defended them.
In fairness, nothing in her record shows a vote for Chinese interests. As Castillo’s cabinet chief she negotiated with the communities blockading the Chinese-owned Las Bambas copper mine rather than clearing the road for the company.
But that is precisely how influence works: it is bought before the vote, not after.
One more fact is important. APEC is a summit of presidents and ministers. Senators do not attend.
President Keiko Fujimori’s government did not plan to send her to China; the Communist government of China invited her. The justification does not hold.
The 2023 precedent: twelve days, zero sanctions
In June 2023, six members of Congress flew to Shanghai for twelve days to attend a mobile-industry fair, with flights, hotel and meals paid by DPL Group, a Mexican telecom-policy company that works across the region.
DPL Group’s owner had met Peru’s then transport minister two months earlier. Why would a Mexican company spend that money on Peruvian lawmakers?
The company never explained, the minister said her meeting was about “teaching and research,” and one traveler said that “these companies do these kinds of events.”
However, nobody spends money without a reason.
Congress’s ethics code bans gifts, but the congressional Ethics Committee was chaired by Congresswoman Karol Paredes, one of the six travelers.
She did not recuse herself.
Asked about the trip, she could not remember her hotel or what she ate.
Another traveler, Congressman Ilich López, said: “They gave me knowledge. If I have to go to jail for receiving it, here I am.” He never went to jail.
Nobody was sanctioned.
Chifagate: the president in a hood
In December 2025, then interim President José Jerí was filmed entering a chifa, a Chinese-Peruvian restaurant in Lima’s San Borja district, wearing a hood. He went there to meet Zhihua Yang, a Chinese contractor with government contracts worth millions.
Yang had been named as a key figure in the “Chinese construction club,” a group of Chinese companies accused of colluding to win public works.
A second meeting took place in a shop in Lima’s Chinatown that the authorities had shut down. The Government Palace said Jerí went to buy candy.
On February 17, 2026, Congress removed Jerí, 75 votes to 24, after 130 days in office.
In Lima almost nobody wears a hood. Presidents have people who buy their candy for them. A president lost his office over a dinner with a Chinese businessman, and eight months later a senator accepts the Chinese state’s plane ticket.
What is at stake
Chinese investment in Peru reportedly exceeds 30,000 million dollars, by the Chinese embassy’s own count, against about 6,700 million from the United States.
About three-quarters of Peru’s copper exports go to China. COSCO, a Chinese state company, owns 60 percent of the Chancay megaport north of Lima, and Lima’s two electricity distributors, Luz del Sur and Pluz, belong to Chinese state groups, China Three Gorges and China Southern Power Grid.
On September 8, 2026, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a column in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio questioning the Chinese investments behind Chancay. Within hours, China’s embassy in Lima answered that the hemisphere “is nobody’s backyard.”
Two days later, President Keiko Fujimori brought Peru into the “Shield of the Americas,” U.S. President Donald Trump’s regional security alliance.
That is President Fujimori’s dilemma, and most of Latin America’s: security cooperation with Washington, but sales of minerals, beef, pork and grain to Beijing.
How Beijing courts a country
The same strategy repeats across the region.
Paid trips for legislators: Peru in 2023; Honduras, where 26 deputies flew to China in September 2025 at the expense of the Communist government of China while their own Congress was paralyzed; and Argentina, where libertarian deputies traveled in January 2026 on “an official invitation of the People’s Republic of China.”
Embassies that silence critics: in May 2026, as Chomcho reported, three Chinese diplomats pressured the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires into cancelling a book on Beijing’s propaganda.
Telecom networks: the Chinese telecom company Huawei in Panama. U.S. Ambassador to Panama Kevin Cabrera called Huawei’s equipment “not trustworthy.”
Ports: Chancay, and the Panama Canal port terminals that Panama is taking back from a Hong Kong company.
Contractors: the “construction club.”
And the fishing fleets. Hundreds of Chinese vessels fish along the edge of the 200-mile exclusive economic zones of Ecuador, Peru and Chile, on the far side of the Pacific from their home ports, some 10,000 miles away, taking the squid that Latin American fishermen depend on.
International waters exist for transit and free navigation, not for emptying a poor country’s sea.
If China needs food, the United States and the South American trade bloc Mercosur will gladly sell China beef and pork.
One war, many battlefields
Washington and Beijing now compete capital by capital, and Peru is one battlefield. It is the test case because its economy depends on China and its security now depends on the United States.
Latin Americans watch how Beijing bullies its small neighbors in Asia, and they do not trust it; they just need their minerals and their harvests sold.
A senator paid by Peruvians to represent Peru should not be Beijing’s guest.
The Senate should require public disclosure of every foreign-funded trip and a written report on what was promised in return, and President Keiko Fujimori’s government should screen Chinese investment, as the “Shield of the Americas” declaration suggests.
“He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house; but he that hateth gifts shall live” (Proverbs 15:27, KJV). Peru has had its house troubled enough.
Nobody flies you across the Pacific Ocean to Beijing for nothing.
