José Jerí ceased to be the interim president of Peru this Tuesday after a brief four-month mandate, unable to withstand the suspicions and doubts generated by his behavior as head of state, due to holding semi-clandestine meetings with Chinese businessmen and being accused of irregularities in the hiring of officials who had previously been received at the Government Palace.
This 39-year-old lawyer, trained in Somos Perú, a right-wing party specializing in the municipal sphere, was censured by the Congress itself that had placed him in the presidential seat, and became the seventh ruler to fall amid a deep-rooted political crisis that has been ongoing for nearly a decade.
Jerí rose to the head of state on October 10 of last year as president of the Congress, at the time his predecessor, Dina Boluarte (2022-2025), was removed, who in turn had replaced the imprisoned leftist president Pedro Castillo (2021-2022), from whom she was vice president.
He had entered Congress in 2021 to replace the disqualified former president Martín Vizcarra (2018-2022) with only 11,600 votes.
In just a few months, he went from being an unknown and ordinary congressman to presiding over parliamentary commissions, then the Legislature, and from there to the presidential chair.
Rape Allegation
His arrival at the head of the state was marked from the outset by a rape allegation allegedly occurred at the end of 2024, which was archived by the interim Attorney General, Tomás Gálvez, due to lack of biological evidence, although another defendant in the same case had testified that Jerí could have allegedly used objects or other means to commit the rape.
As a result of this case, a judge ordered him to undergo therapy to treat a psychosexual pathology, and during his first days, his old tweets went viral, in which he showed a predilection for 'sex' and 'women', while on his Instagram account he followed hundreds of profiles of women who create erotic content.
In his parliamentary work, he was also accused of illicit enrichment, for allegedly having received money to advance bills in the Congress Budget Commission, which he came to preside.
Bukele Style
As president, he sought to resemble Nayib Bukele in El Salvador or Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, with a reform of the penitentiary system and interventions in the prisons where inmates were exhibited in submissive situations to the security forces, in addition to the state of emergency to combat criminal gangs.
This led him to have a popularity of over 50% during the first few weeks, but everything changed at the beginning of this year when it became known that, already as president, he had held a series of semi-clandestine meetings with Chinese businessmen, some of them state contractors and even from his own presidential office.
Among them stands out Zhihua 'Johnny' Yang, at whose chifa – a Peruvian-Chinese restaurant – he went on the night of December 26th hooded to avoid being recognized, and whose Chinese products store he visited on January 6th, hours after it had been closed by municipal authorities.
Then came the cases of a series of government officials who were hired right after having met with the president at the Government Palace, one of them after having spent the entire night of Halloween there and leaving the presidential headquarters the next morning.
This led the parties in Congress to seek to distance themselves from Jerí at a time when most of them are seeking good results in the general elections called for next April 12th, after the country has had seven presidents in the last ten years.
