To say Peru is going through political turmoil would be an understatement. Its finance minister stepped down in June, hard on the heels of president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. The first was the result of public outcry over fuel tax hikes, and the second of links to construction conglomerate Odebrecht, currently at the centre of Latin America’s largest corruption scandal.
Nevertheless, new finance minister Carlos Oliva can see the positive side. “We did have a political crisis, but it got resolved within the letter of the constitution,” he says. “President Kuczynski left, the vice-president [Martin Vizcarra] took over. This is something that wouldn’t have happened 30 years ago. Thirty years ago we had coups d’état, military [intervention]; we had different problems.”
