Peru’s New FM Criticised the President Before Being Sworn In

A Peruvian president who was publicly contradicted by his own cabinet has just handed the foreign ministry to a diplomat who, on national television that morning, had aligned with the cabinet against him. The choice is not a recovery. It is a concession.

The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that Peru’s new foreign minister Carlos Pareja Ríos was sworn in by interim president José María Balcázar at the Palace of Government in Lima on the evening of April 23. The ceremony took place without press access. It closes, on paper, the most visible institutional rupture inside Balcázar’s cabinet since he took office in February.

Pareja, 75, replaces Hugo de Zela, who resigned on April 22 after publicly accusing Balcázar of lying to the country about the status of the US$3.5 billion F-16 contract with Lockheed Martin. Amadeo Flores was sworn in at the same ceremony as the new defence minister, replacing Carlos Díaz Dañino, who resigned alongside De Zela.

Why Peru’s new foreign minister had criticised the president that morning

On the morning of April 23, hours before his appointment was announced, Pareja appeared on Canal N and went directly at the president. “The president rejects the signature that he himself had approved. That breaks a sequence of negotiation that has been developed step by step,” he said on air.

He went further. Pareja warned that if the F-16 acquisition had collapsed, Peru could have entered a “delicate situation” with Washington. He said the country needed a foreign minister with genuine international experience capable of restoring communication with the US government.

“The first thing to do is to reestablish communication and explain Peru’s position,” Pareja said. By the end of the day, he was the person tasked with doing it.

The political reading is unambiguous. Balcázar did not choose a loyalist who would defend his postponement position. He chose a former ambassador to Washington who had publicly described that position as a rupture with US interests.

The cabinet that overruled him on the F-16 contract now has its senior foreign-policy seat filled by a diplomat who had already told the country, on camera, that the cabinet was right.

Who Carlos Pareja is and why his record matters

Pareja entered the Peruvian diplomatic service in 1976 and retired in 2018 after more than four decades in the Foreign Ministry. His record is almost entirely operational rather than political.

In the 1980s he served as political counsellor at the Peruvian embassy in Washington. In the 1990s he ran the Ministry’s South American Affairs directorate and worked on territorial and sovereignty matters during the Peru-Ecuador peace negotiations. He was promoted to ambassador in 1999 and sent to Madrid.

His most recent ambassadorial posting was Washington between 2016 and 2018 — a tour that spanned the last months of the Obama administration and the first year and a half of the first Trump administration. He knows the personnel, the procedural expectations, and the political temperament that now sits across the table from him in Bernie Navarro’s embassy in Lima.

Pareja also served as Peru’s envoy to Switzerland, Chile, and Spain. Before his retirement, he held the position of director general of Protocol and Ceremonial of the State at the Foreign Ministry. He is, in profile, exactly the category of appointment that would have been made under a functional presidential-ministerial relationship — which is what makes the circumstances of his appointment so telling.

What the reshuffle means for Peru’s relationship with Washington

The Lockheed Martin contract signed on April 20 and paid against on April 23 means the US$3.5 billion F-16 programme is now operationally intact. Ambassador Bernie Navarro confirmed on local radio that first aircraft deliveries are scheduled for 2029. The immediate crisis is therefore a question of damage-control rather than reversal.

Pareja’s appointment gives Balcázar a foreign minister that Washington already knows. That reduces the risk that the ongoing phase-two contract for the remaining 12 F-16 aircraft — not yet formally signed — gets caught in political retaliation from either side.

The fact that Pareja was explicitly publicly critical of Balcázar’s postponement position before being appointed is, in this context, the point. A loyalist foreign minister would have been read in Washington as confirmation that the palace and the cabinet remained at odds. A Pareja appointment allows the US side to treat the April 17-23 episode as a closed chapter rather than a standing divergence.

For the opposition and for Peruvian Congress, the appointment has the opposite signal. As the Rio Times analysis of Peru’s institutional instability documented, cabinet reshuffles of this scale during interim presidencies have historically preceded impeachment proceedings rather than stabilised them. Balcázar is now the eighth Peruvian president in a decade, and the one whose cabinet publicly defied him on a US$3.5 billion transaction.

What to watch after Peru’s new foreign minister takes office

Three things matter immediately. The first is whether Pareja obtains a congressional vote of confidence. Under Peruvian constitutional practice, a new cabinet must present itself to Congress within 30 days, and the body’s position on the F-16 dispute was effectively pro-cabinet against the president.

The second is the June 2026 runoff election. Pareja is a caretaker appointment in a caretaker government that has roughly three months to operate before the July 28 handover. His mandate is almost entirely about preventing external-relations damage rather than building long-term policy.

The third is Balcázar himself. An interim president who appoints a critic as his senior foreign-policy minister has signalled, implicitly, that he has accepted the limits of his own authority.

That may preserve his tenure through July. It may also accelerate impeachment proceedings already gathering force in Congress.

For investors and chancelleries, the Pareja appointment is not a policy shift. It is a signal that the Peruvian state has, for the moment, reorganised itself around the cabinet’s reading of the national interest rather than the presidency’s. Whether that holds until July is now the central question in Lima — bigger than any one aircraft contract, and bigger than the June runoff itself.

Related coverage: Peru’s cabinet signed off on the F-16 over the president’s head • How Balcázar stopped the F-16 signing on April 17 • Peru’s presidents keep falling, its economy doesn’t