How America bought Peru's air force over its president's head
When Peru's Air Force quietly inked a contract with Lockheed Martin at Las Palmas Air Base on April 20, the country's interim president, José María Balcázar, was simultaneously telling the national press that no such agreement existed.
Balcázar, 83, had publicly refused to authorise the purchase days earlier, arguing that a transitional government lacking any democratic mandate had no business committing the state to a decade-long, multibillion-dollar obligation. His position was constitutionally coherent. It was also entirely inconvenient for Washington and Peru's senior military command.
Defence Minister Carlos Díaz overrode the president, authorised the Air Force commander to proceed, and Colonel Carlo Rey Benavente, head of the FAP's Technical Supply Service, signed the contract in a closed ceremony with Lockheed Martin representatives. The Ministry of Economy subsequently transferred the first payment instalment of $462mn. The supreme commander of Peru's armed forces had been circumvented by his own cabinet.
To understand why the United States cared enough about this procurement to deploy diplomatic hardball, one must begin not with the aircraft but with a huge port built and operated by Beijing.
Chancay, completed in November 2024 at a cost of $1.3bn and located 80 kilometres north of Lima, is 60% owned by COSCO Shipping, the Chinese state-owned shipping giant. With a capacity of 1mn containers per year, it is already the most strategically significant port on South America's Pacific coast. The White House's concern about its potential dual-use military capacity was already well-documented; in January, Peru's First Constitutional Court sharpened that concern dramatically by upholding an amparo action filed by COSCO Shipping that ordered Ositrán, Peru's national transport infrastructure regulator, to refrain from exercising supervisory, regulatory, inspection, and sanctioning powers over the terminal. The US State Department publicly expressed alarm that Peru may be unable to oversee its own port. Peru has announced an appeal, but the legal process will take time.
Washington's countermoves were swift. Also in January, the United States approved a $1.5bn plan to modernise Peru's naval base at Callao, widely read as a direct strategic counterweight to Chinese infrastructure, with up to 20 US experts expected to be stationed in Peru for up to a decade. President Donald Trump upgraded Peru's alignment that same month by designating it a Major Non-NATO Ally.
Against that backdrop, the F-16 procurement carried a strategic premium for Washington well beyond replacing Peru's ageing Mirage 2000s and MiG-29s — though that operational justification is real, with the fleet facing near-total grounding by 2027. F-16 operators are structurally bound to US-controlled maintenance chains, software update cycles, and weapons certifications under the Arms Export Control Act. Buying the aircraft is, therefore, a long-term geopolitical commitment. Former Foreign Minister Hugo de Zela articulated the underlying formula with unusual candour: strategic alliance with the United States, economic alliance with China.
The deal's origins were murky long before the constitutional crisis erupted. Under former interim president José Jerí, who held office between October 2025 and February 2026, the procurement was classified as a military secret and the formal competition de facto abandoned. That competition had included France's Dassault (Rafale F4) and Sweden's Saab (Gripen E/F) alongside Lockheed Martin's offering. Peru's own Technical-Operational Evaluation Committee had ranked the Rafale first, the Gripen second, and the F-16 third. The Jerí administration disregarded those rankings and moved to sole-source negotiations with Lockheed Martin, citing "geopolitical and strategic reasons" in a February Air Force resolution. Dassault and Saab were never formally notified of their elimination.
The role of US Ambassador Bernie Navarro was, by any diplomatic standard, unusually direct. He presented his credentials to Jerí on February 3 and, within days, posted a photograph of the two men sharing hamburgers at his residence, a conspicuously informal image widely read as Washington's endorsement of Jerí's political survival at a moment when the president faced congressional censure motions.
Navarro also secured a dramatic revision of Lockheed Martin's original offer, which had covered only 12 aircraft at $3.42bn. The revised package doubled the quantity to 24 for a marginal increase to $3.5bn, a concession without obvious precedent: Lockheed Martin had quoted Colombia $4.2bn for an equivalent 24-aircraft package the same year. The deal structured the 24 F-16 Block 70s across two tranches of 12. The first — ten single-seat F-16Cs and two twin-seat F-16Ds — was contracted at $1.54bn, with a further $460mn for ground support, logistics, simulators, training, and an initial weapons package.
The scheduled signing ceremony on April 17 collapsed when Balcázar announced on radio that he would not authorise the purchase. His refusal was grounded in a principle that would resonate in any constitutional democracy, as a caretaker government with no electoral mandate should not bind its successors to decade-long obligations of this scale.
The US response was immediate and undisguised. Ambassador Navarro took to social media the same day, warning that anyone who "negotiates in bad faith with the United States and undermines American interests" should expect Washington to deploy "all available tools" in response. Peruvian media reported this included implicit threats to revoke visas from officials involved in blocking the purchase, signalling a level of public pressure that would be remarkable directed at any ally, let alone a government in the midst of a democratic transition.
Two sources with direct knowledge told La República that electoral calculations sharpened the urgency. With leftist candidate Roberto Sánchez having overtaken far-right rival Rafael López Aliaga in the vote count five days earlier, the military feared a Sánchez presidency might freeze or revisit the purchase. Sánchez was not categorically opposed to fleet modernisation but had questioned the timing, which for Washington and the FAP brass amounted to the same thing. "It was now or never," one military official said.
On April 20, Díaz authorised the Air Force commander to proceed. Balcázar, constitutionally supreme commander of the armed forces, was informed after the fact.
When De Zela and Díaz resigned publicly last week, accusing Balcázar of lying to the nation about the contract's status, the crisis shifted from a procurement dispute to a question of who actually governs Peru. Premier Luis Arroyo, who had backed the purchase throughout, remained in post in open defiance of the president. Balcázar subsequently offered the remarkable defence that, having not participated in the negotiations, he could not be accused of lying about them.
The episode exposes a structural problem no single administration can fix. Peru has had eight presidents in a decade. Balcázar, governing for barely two months before this crisis broke, had no electoral mandate and limited institutional leverage.
What the episode ultimately reveals is where Washington has concluded Peru's real centre of gravity lies – and it is not with whoever occupies the presidency, a position still contested after the disputed April 12 election. The US Ambassador met the premier at the Palace of Government without the president present. Public threats were issued. Commercial lobbying was conducted openly on behalf of an American defence contractor. None of it was directed at the head of state, because none of it needed to be. The presidency was, in effect, treated as an obstacle to be routed around rather than a counterpart to be persuaded. In a country cycling through governments at the rate Peru has, that calculation may even be rational. That it is also a quiet verdict on the state of Peruvian democracy is a conclusion the Trump administration appears entirely comfortable leaving unspoken.
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When Peru's Air Force quietly inked a contract with Lockheed Martin at Las Palmas Air Base on April 20, the country's interim president, José María Balcázar, was simultaneously telling the national press that no such agreement existed.
Balcázar, 83, had publicly refused to authorise the purchase days earlier, arguing that a transitional government lacking any democratic mandate had no business committing the state to a decade-long, multibillion-dollar obligation. His position was constitutionally coherent. It was also entirely inconvenient for Washington and Peru's senior military command.
Defence Minister Carlos Díaz overrode the president, authorised the Air Force commander to proceed, and Colonel Carlo Rey Benavente, head of the FAP's Technical Supply Service, signed the contract in a closed ceremony with Lockheed Martin representatives. The Ministry of Economy subsequently transferred the first payment instalment of $462mn. The supreme commander of Peru's armed forces had been circumvented by his own cabinet.
To understand why the United States cared enough about this procurement to deploy diplomatic hardball, one must begin not with the aircraft but with a huge port built and operated by Beijing.
Chancay, completed in November 2024 at a cost of $1.3bn and located 80 kilometres north of Lima, is 60% owned by COSCO Shipping, the Chinese state-owned shipping giant. With a capacity of 1mn containers per year, it is already the most strategically significant port on South America's Pacific coast. The White House's concern about its potential dual-use military capacity was already well-documented; in January, Peru's First Constitutional Court sharpened that concern dramatically by upholding an amparo action filed by COSCO Shipping that ordered Ositrán, Peru's national transport infrastructure regulator, to refrain from exercising supervisory, regulatory, inspection, and sanctioning powers over the terminal. The US State Department publicly expressed alarm that Peru may be unable to oversee its own port. Peru has announced an appeal, but the legal process will take time.
Washington's countermoves were swift. Also in January, the United States approved a $1.5bn plan to modernise Peru's naval base at Callao, widely read as a direct strategic counterweight to Chinese infrastructure, with up to 20 US experts expected to be stationed in Peru for up to a decade. President Donald Trump upgraded Peru's alignment that same month by designating it a Major Non-NATO Ally.
Against that backdrop, the F-16 procurement carried a strategic premium for Washington well beyond replacing Peru's ageing Mirage 2000s and MiG-29s — though that operational justification is real, with the fleet facing near-total grounding by 2027. F-16 operators are structurally bound to US-controlled maintenance chains, software update cycles, and weapons certifications under the Arms Export Control Act. Buying the aircraft is, therefore, a long-term geopolitical commitment. Former Foreign Minister Hugo de Zela articulated the underlying formula with unusual candour: strategic alliance with the United States, economic alliance with China.
The deal's origins were murky long before the constitutional crisis erupted. Under former interim president José Jerí, who held office between October 2025 and February 2026, the procurement was classified as a military secret and the formal competition de facto abandoned. That competition had included France's Dassault (Rafale F4) and Sweden's Saab (Gripen E/F) alongside Lockheed Martin's offering. Peru's own Technical-Operational Evaluation Committee had ranked the Rafale first, the Gripen second, and the F-16 third. The Jerí administration disregarded those rankings and moved to sole-source negotiations with Lockheed Martin, citing "geopolitical and strategic reasons" in a February Air Force resolution. Dassault and Saab were never formally notified of their elimination.
The role of US Ambassador Bernie Navarro was, by any diplomatic standard, unusually direct. He presented his credentials to Jerí on February 3 and, within days, posted a photograph of the two men sharing hamburgers at his residence, a conspicuously informal image widely read as Washington's endorsement of Jerí's political survival at a moment when the president faced congressional censure motions.
Navarro also secured a dramatic revision of Lockheed Martin's original offer, which had covered only 12 aircraft at $3.42bn. The revised package doubled the quantity to 24 for a marginal increase to $3.5bn, a concession without obvious precedent: Lockheed Martin had quoted Colombia $4.2bn for an equivalent 24-aircraft package the same year. The deal structured the 24 F-16 Block 70s across two tranches of 12. The first — ten single-seat F-16Cs and two twin-seat F-16Ds — was contracted at $1.54bn, with a further $460mn for ground support, logistics, simulators, training, and an initial weapons package.
The scheduled signing ceremony on April 17 collapsed when Balcázar announced on radio that he would not authorise the purchase. His refusal was grounded in a principle that would resonate in any constitutional democracy, as a caretaker government with no electoral mandate should not bind its successors to decade-long obligations of this scale.
The US response was immediate and undisguised. Ambassador Navarro took to social media the same day, warning that anyone who "negotiates in bad faith with the United States and undermines American interests" should expect Washington to deploy "all available tools" in response. Peruvian media reported this included implicit threats to revoke visas from officials involved in blocking the purchase, signalling a level of public pressure that would be remarkable directed at any ally, let alone a government in the midst of a democratic transition.
Two sources with direct knowledge told La República that electoral calculations sharpened the urgency. With leftist candidate Roberto Sánchez having overtaken far-right rival Rafael López Aliaga in the vote count five days earlier, the military feared a Sánchez presidency might freeze or revisit the purchase. Sánchez was not categorically opposed to fleet modernisation but had questioned the timing, which for Washington and the FAP brass amounted to the same thing. "It was now or never," one military official said.
On April 20, Díaz authorised the Air Force commander to proceed. Balcázar, constitutionally supreme commander of the armed forces, was informed after the fact.
When De Zela and Díaz resigned publicly last week, accusing Balcázar of lying to the nation about the contract's status, the crisis shifted from a procurement dispute to a question of who actually governs Peru. Premier Luis Arroyo, who had backed the purchase throughout, remained in post in open defiance of the president. Balcázar subsequently offered the remarkable defence that, having not participated in the negotiations, he could not be accused of lying about them.
The episode exposes a structural problem no single administration can fix. Peru has had eight presidents in a decade. Balcázar, governing for barely two months before this crisis broke, had no electoral mandate and limited institutional leverage.
What the episode ultimately reveals is where Washington has concluded Peru's real centre of gravity lies – and it is not with whoever occupies the presidency, a position still contested after the disputed April 12 election. The US Ambassador met the premier at the Palace of Government without the president present. Public threats were issued. Commercial lobbying was conducted openly on behalf of an American defence contractor. None of it was directed at the head of state, because none of it needed to be. The presidency was, in effect, treated as an obstacle to be routed around rather than a counterpart to be persuaded. In a country cycling through governments at the rate Peru has, that calculation may even be rational. That it is also a quiet verdict on the state of Peruvian democracy is a conclusion the Trump administration appears entirely comfortable leaving unspoken.
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