The counting is agonisingly slow. As dawn broke over Lima, the coffee cups of traders in London’s futures pits were already drained. Peru’s presidential run-off between leftist Pedro Castillo and right-wing Keiko Fujimori is too close to call, and the City is holding its breath. But for those who depend on the copper flowing from the Andes to power electric cars and smartphones, the tension is more than a spectator sport. It is the human cost of a fractured society.
On the dusty streets of Juliaca, a highland city that swells with miners and their families, I met a woman called Rosa. She sells empanadas from a rusted cart. Her husband works at the nearby Antapaccay mine, majority-owned by British-Australian giant Glencore. “If Castillo wins, he says he will nationalise,” she whispers, glancing over her shoulder. “Then what? We have no land, no other work.” For Rosa, this election is not about ideology. It is about survival.
And yet, in the prosperous suburbs of San Isidro in Lima, wealthy Peruvians fret over a different future. Castillo has promised to rewrite the constitution, to redistribute wealth. To them, he is a spectre of Venezuelan-style collapse. “We will leave. We have passports,” a banker tells me from behind his desk, a silver Cross pen tapping impatiently. “The British firms will follow us.”
The cultural shift here is palpable. Peru has boomed on the back of commodities, but the spoils have not trickled down. The pandemic exposed the brittle scaffolding of a society where the elite live in gated communities and the poor die in queues for oxygen. Now, two visions of nationhood compete at the ballot box. One is based on extraction and foreign investment. The other on indigenismo and state control.
British mining interests are a microcosm of this tension. They brought jobs, roads, hospitals. But they also brought inequality and environmental scars. In the highlands, communities block roads, demanding a greater share of profits. In London, shareholders demand returns. The election result will tilt the balance of power.
As I write, the electoral commission has paused the count. Both sides claim fraud. The streets are quiet, but the air is thick with mistrust. In a café in Miraflores, a young activist tells me: “No matter who wins, half the country will feel robbed.” That is the real story. Not the price of copper or the FTSE 100, but the fracture in the soul of a nation. And the British pension funds that underwrite that fracture will watch nervously as the sun sets over the Andes.
