Less than two months into her presidency, Peru's Keiko Fujimori spent this week doing two things simultaneously on U.S. soil: courting foreign investors with a fiscal pitch anchored in $100 billion in reserves, and pledging before the United Nations to pursue criminal networks all the way from the triggerman to the financial structure that funds him.
For the roughly 750,000 Peruvians living in the United States — and the families back home who depend on the money they wire — that two-track message defines the presidency they either pinned their hopes on or feared from the start.
The Investment Case Fujimori Took to Wall Street
On the afternoon of September 24, Fujimori stepped onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and delivered what amounted to a one-page term sheet for investing in Peru. Her pitch rested on three pillars: international reserves surpassing $100 billion, a fiscal deficit target of 1.8% — among the tightest in Latin America — and an inflation rate below every regional peer. She capped the remarks with the phrase "Perú es ya. Perú is here," a slogan calibrated as much for social media feeds as for fund managers.
The numbers hold up to scrutiny. Peru's Central Reserve Bank has reported sustained growth in external reserves, and Peru's nominal GDP is projected to reach approximately $380 billion this year. That macroeconomic track record has drawn steady foreign direct investment for decades — a continuity Fujimori is explicitly framing as her inheritance from the market architecture her father established in the 1990s.
She also acknowledged the asterisk. During her remarks at the NYSE, Fujimori conceded that Peru is navigating "some criminal problems" — framing organized crime not as a deterrent to capital but as a challenge the state is strong enough to overcome. Whether global investors read that as earned confidence or as an unquantified risk factor may determine how much of the pitch translates into actual capital flows.
What the Security Rhetoric Means for Peruvians in the U.S.
Two days before the NYSE appearance, Fujimori took a podium her father never reached — the United Nations General Assembly — and framed her security agenda in starker terms. She declared Peru engaged in an outright "war" against criminal organizations and pushed international bodies to classify them as terrorist groups, arguing that extortion, contract killings, narco-trafficking, illegal mining and human smuggling share the operational structure — and should share the legal designation — of insurgent movements.
That speech landed inside a week that exposed the contradiction baked into the framing. Journalist and Áncash gubernatorial candidate Susy Aponte Polo was shot dead on September 19 in the highland city of Caraz, nine days after she publicly accused a senior national police general of ordering an attack against her. The general was quietly reassigned the day after the killing — a decree citing only "service needs" — while prosecutors reclassified the case from a feminicide inquiry to a suspected contract killing. No authority has linked the general to the attack. Fujimori made no mention of the Aponte Polo case during her UN speech.
For the Peruvian-American community — concentrated in New Jersey, Florida, California and New York, with sizable nodes in Paterson, Miami, Los Angeles and Queens — the anti-crime rhetoric carries competing meanings. Crime-driven emigration has been accelerating: in 2022 and the first half of 2023 alone, more than 800,000 Peruvians exited the country without returning, per Americas Quarterly data, with many eventually attempting the U.S. border route. If Fujimori's crackdown genuinely improves street-level safety, the incentive to leave could weaken — slowing, in turn, the diaspora growth that fuels remittance volumes.
Remittances: The Stakes for Families on Both Sides
Those flows are not a rounding error. Peru's Central Reserve Bank recorded $1.428 billion in remittances received during the fourth quarter of 2025 — a quarterly high — and confirmed that the United States is the leading country of origin for those transfers. For working-class Peruvian families in Lima, Trujillo and the Andean south, that income stream underwrites housing, school fees and medical costs — exactly the budget lines most exposed to crime-related disruption.
Peruvian entrepreneurs and small-business owners in the U.S. who are weighing whether to deepen commercial ties back home face a specific version of the same calculation. Stable macro fundamentals — the case Fujimori presented on the NYSE floor — matter less if extortion networks or supply-chain gaps tied to illegal mining cancel out the gains. The question the diaspora is quietly asking is whether meaningful security progress can arrive fast enough to make the investment pitch real on the ground.
Peru Joins the Shield of the Americas — and What It Signals
The security pivot has a regional dimension. On September 10, during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Fujimori announced that Peru would join the Shield of the Americas — a U.S.-led coalition formed in March 2026 that pools intelligence and coordinates law enforcement operations against transnational drug networks. The bloc now counts more than 15 member states. At the UNGA session on September 22, she reinforced that commitment alongside Chilean President José Antonio Kast, both calling for greater cross-border security cooperation — though Chile joined the coalition only as an observer.
A Rapid Fall in Approval, a Presidency Still Taking Shape
Fujimori has been in office for 60 days. She won June's runoff by fewer than 50,000 votes out of more than 18 million cast — one of the narrowest margins in Peruvian electoral history — inheriting a country that has cycled through eight different presidents in a single decade. The early approval slide, while steep, reflects both El Niño anxieties and the gap between sweeping security promises and visible results on Peruvian streets.
The Datum Internacional survey published September 17 found her approval at 42% — down 18 percentage points from the 60% recorded in August — while disapproval climbed to 44%, putting those who reject her management two points ahead of those who endorse it. The poll was conducted September 11–15 among 1,204 respondents nationwide.
Her international sprint this week — the Shield of the Americas commitment, a bilateral exchange with UN Secretary-General António Guterres, UNODC Executive Director Monica Juma, and the NYSE closing bell — is structurally a message aimed at two audiences at once: foreign capital markets that need assurance Peru is open and stable, and a domestic electorate watching to see whether the "war on crime" she proclaimed in New York actually reaches the neighborhoods that sent her to power. For the Peruvian diaspora in the United States, those two messages are inseparable — and neither can fully succeed without the other.
