Peru’s interim president, José Jerí, has denied lying to the country and claimed he was the victim of a plot to discredit him amid a growing political scandal over his secretive meetings with Chinese businessmen.
Jerí, 39, who took office in October after his predecessor Dina Boluarte was forced out, told a congressional oversight committee on Wednesday that he had been the target of a smear campaign designed to destabilise the country ahead of elections in April.
“It could be understood to be a trap,” he told the committee after he was summoned to explain two meetings which were made outside office hours and were not publicly disclosed as part of his official agenda.
Public prosecutors have launched an investigation into the meetings at a Chinese restaurant, or chifa, and a shuttered shop in Lima’s Chinatown.
The scandal – dubbed “Chifagate” – comes as the United States and China jostle for influence in Latin America, where the Asian giant is the main trading partner for most countries, including Peru, and a major source of foreign direct investment.
Peru’s chronically corrupt and unstable politics has seen a rapid turnover of seven presidents since 2018 in a revolving door of dismissals and resignations.
Opposition lawmakers have said they will present a motion to impeach Jerí, though his popularity, at about 44% according to polls this month, is significantly higher than his predecessor Boluarte, whose approval rating continually slumped into the single figures.
“I will not resign, because that would imply that I had done something wrong, which is not the case,” Jerí told lawmakers.
The scandal broke with the emergence of videos of the meetings, showing the president, wearing a top with a hood pulled over his head in one and in dark glasses and gesturing wildly while making a telephone call in the other.
Both meetings were with a well-connected Chinese businessman, Yang Zhihua, whom Jerí refers to as “Johnny” and who has resided in Peru for decades. Yang has built a small business empire including shops, restaurants and a concession for a hydroelectric project.
Prosecutors say another Chinese citizen, Ji Wu Xiaodong, who was present at the first meeting in the restaurant, is accused of belonging to an illegal timber-trafficking network known as Los Hostiles de la Amazonia and had been placed under house arrest for two years.
Official records show Ji Wu, an accredited Spanish translator who had worked with Lima’s Chinese embassy, made several visits to the presidential palace in the last few months, accompanied by Yang.
In a national television interview on Tuesday, Jerí said Ji Wu had served the food at the restaurant but they did not talk because he spoke little Spanish.
The interim president had previously issued a public apology after the meeting at the Chinese restaurant emerged, which appeared to have been shakily filmed on a smartphone. He said the visit was to coordinate the anniversary celebration of the day of Peruvian-Chinese friendship. He apologised for “giving rise to suspicions and doubts about my behaviour” by the way he was dressed.
But hours after Jerí’s apology, another video emerged showing the second meeting with Yang, at his store in Chinatown, which had been forced to close by Lima’s municipal government for selling unauthorised products.
The scandal is likely to raise eyebrows in Washington, where the Trump administration has raged at growing Chinese investment in Latin America.
The Chinese firm Cosco Shipping Ports built a fully automated deepwater port in Chancay, 50 miles (80km) north of Lima, which has been operating since November 2024 and offers an express trade route to China.
This month, in an apparent move to challenge China’s dominance, the US state department approved the potential sale to Peru of $1.5bn in equipment and services to help the country relocate its main naval base in Lima’s port of Callao, to allow the seaport’s expansion.
In a statement, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency said the “proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy objectives of the United States by helping to improve the security of an important partner that promotes political stability, peace and economic progress in South America”.
