Chinchero — Lost in the Clouds of Poor Engineering, Bad Finance

By Nicholas Asheshov ✐

It seems President Kuczynski is to lay the First Stone of the new Chinchero Airport in Cusco this coming week. If so, it will be the third first stone for this sad project. Presidents Toledo and Garcia have preceded him. Some locals say Presidents Belaunde and Fujimori were others. We have to hope President PPK’s stone suffers the same fate. Chinchero is a disaster waiting to happen.

This week top regulatory officials in Lima resigned in protest at the illegal contracts for the financing for Chinchero. But crooked finance contracts are the least of of what has always been a rotten project.

The Cusco city fathers say they need a new airport. This is incorrect. Their object is to grab the valuable building land of the present airport. But even if Cusco needs a new airport, Chinchero is easily the worst of the alternatives. The Pampa de Anta, nearby, is incomparably better. Anta is dramatically lower in height and is already runway flat.

Chinchero is outside Cusco at an oxygen-less 500ms higher, on the road to Machu Picchu.

It started off, as these projects do, with funny money. Four years ago the Cusco Regional Government, run then by ‘Humala associate Jorge Coco’ Acurio, paid $70 million for a 330-hectare string of potato fields on the rolling, cold, cloudy massif of Chinchero.

The lucky owners of the fields were the 426 members of a couple of Chinchero’s comunidades. They received $230,000 for each hectare, making them by far the most expensive potato fields in the world. You can buy a hectare of potato field in Idaho, the world’s biggest potato region, for $5,000 per hectare. In expensive southern England, in Devon and Somerset for instance, the same potato field might cost GBP 10,000, one-twentieth of the Acurio Chinchero price.

The Chinchero potato fields are good for potatoes, beans, a couple of sheep and a burro. They make a lousy airport. Difficult in fact to find a worse location. The average height of this ancient farmland is 3,700 m.a.s.l. The only commercial airport in the world that is higher is El Alto, at 4,000 m.a.s.l., the airport for La Paz. El Alto can be used only for local one-hour , max 90-minute hops down to Cochabamba and Tarija and Santa Cruz. Arica is a ski-jump away, Lima a hop up the coast. But that’s it. El Alto never will be commercial because planes cannot take off at these altitudes with a full load of fuel and passengers. You can have either a full tank and just a few tourists or lots of tourists and a few gallons of fuel, enough to get down the hill. In the case of Chinchero, that means Lima. As Newton said, apples fall down for free. Bolivia’s international airport is at Santa Cruz at 400 m.a.s.l. Passengers to and from La Paz to Rio, Buenos Aires, Miami and even Lima go via Santa Cruz. Check the timetables.

It will be the same for Chinchero. The bureaucrats and politicians in Cusco and in Lima, at ProInversion and the Ministry of Transport, have taken to calling it the ‘International’ Cusco airport. This is a lie propagated by the under-funded concessionaire, Kunturwasi. Flights between Chinchero, if this idiot, foggy project goes ahead, will continue to go via Lima, as they do today and till the next century. With one difference. The tickets will cost $300 more than they do today.

Fog, hailstorms, normal in high mountains, add to the Chinchero danger. The glaciers and snowfields of the Cordillera Urubamba, at 6,000 m.a.s.l., loom over Chinchero. They are just a few miles to the north of the Chinchero potato fields. Picturesque, dramatic. Dangerous.

Technological advances in aviation are focused on electronics and nano materials. But Newtonian physics will not change, whatever the Cusqueño powerbrokers seem to think.

It could not get worse? Yes, it does.

The Chinchero massif is a limestone base. For engineers, this means sinkholes. For instance, the Inca terraces at Moray close to Chinchero at the same height, are sinkholes. The Chinchero lakes of Piuray and Huaypo reflect the same geology. Engineering studies reflect no deep drilling to assess this risk. A 200-ton airliner will one day land at Chinchero and open a massive instant hole. Not good.

Cusco road, sewage and electricity services are already pathetic. There’s talk, but no plans exist for new transport between Chinchero and Cuzco, nor Urubamba. Power cuts are almost daily in Urubamba, the province in which poor Chinchero is located, thanks to state-owned Electro Sur Este.

What to do with the 7 million tourists a year promised by President Kuczynski? Machu Picchu is already at a standing-room-only 5,000, sometimes 7,000 visitors a day. A study commissioned by the government says the max daily entry cannot pass 5,400/day. Call it 2 million per year.

Cuzco thinks, says, it needs a new airport. The present one, Velasco Astete is at 3,250 m.a.s.l., 500ms lower than Chinchero, which is a big difference at these delicate heights. Velasco Astete, run and owned by Corpac, the government airport authority, consists of 240 hectares of good flat land which could easily and cheaply have its runways extended and expanded, with new terminals and, above all, new electronics. The A219 and A320 used by Latam and Avianca can fly in on self-drive computers as they do routinely, of course, in Europe and North America where the weather, though for sure not the height, is much worse than Cusco ever is.

But the Cusco shakers, the chambers of commerce and the local politicos have other plans for Velasco Astete’s 240 hectares of land, which is only a few minutes from downtown. As building land it is worth already today $1,000/m2, $2,000/m2 before the end of the decade. Use your own fingers to work out how much this free gift of land will be worth to the imperial city’s top dogs.

In theory, the central government (all Peruvians) is owner of the land, and indeed this is how it should be. But, no, the Cusqueños have already bought it. Under a quiet agreement with former President Humala, the $70mn it paid the Chinchero comuneros is being handed over to the central government in exchange for the 240 Corpac hectares of Velasco Astete. Acurio was later thrown out of the regional president job by the Cusco Supreme Court for one of several instances of corruption. Acurio is one of the Humala-Heredia team being investigated by state prosecutors for corruption linked to the jailed Mr. Belaunde Lossio for thousands of millions of dollars in state construction contracts.

So Chinchero is shrouded in big money corruption, and should be stopped, investigated on these grounds alone. This apart from its technical stupidity, a characteristic of corrupt projects.

There is a good way for the Cuqueños to have their cake and eat it too. They can do the sensible thing and build a new airport on the Pampa de Anta, closer than Chinchero to their downtown and flat as a tortilla. It needs a few million bucks worth of drainage but none of the expensive earthmoving of Chinchero. Its approaches are no more dangerous than Cusco itself, better actually.

What height is Anta? Same as Velasco Astete, 3,225.

What is the Region Cusco to do with its world-record expensive potato fields, burro grazing at Chinchero? Forget it. The money has long gone on pick-up trucks and on a forest of dreadful cinderblock highrises.

Chinchero is a traditional Andean village with a fine cultural tradition in textiles, with superb views of the cordilleras reaching over to Machu Picchu. Leave it as it is. No airport means tourists will retain as fine a view as any in the Andes. The bells of the charming colonial church will continue to float out over the Inca ruins, the primary schools and the workshops of the internationally recognized weavers.

Nick Asheshov was editor of the Andean Air Mail & Peruvian Times during the 1970s and 1980s, and of The South Pacific Mail, Santiago during the 1990s. He was Latin America Editor of Institutional Investor, New York over the same period. He lives in Urubamba, where he writes a blog and where he has been prominent in the hotel and railway business.

This article appeared in the Peruvian Times on January 26, 2017

The Berlin Wall 1989, Peru Elections 2016

Nov23

By Nicholas Asheshov

Deutsche Bank, DB, Germany’s flagship financial institution, has announced that for the past quarter it has lost $7 billion and for the first time in half a century it will not pay the dividend on which tens of thousands of German families rely. A big part of the loss is to pay fines by European and United States courts and regulators for dishonesty in London, New York and in Germany itself. The dishonesty consisted in part in selling clients valueless bonds and paper, and in rigging interest and currency exchange rates.

The latest losses follow years of criminal activities, as described by New York, London, and Berlin prosecutors, by DB among a dozen French, English, Swiss and U.S. global banks caught rigging markets. The money, the funny money, goes to directors and managers, not to shareholders much less to the tax collector. The DB announcement came a few days after Volkswagen admitted to fixing the exhaust emissions of its diesel vehicles. VW faces $20bn worth of criminal charges and trading losses. The head of VW, a 68-year-old engineer, said it was nothing to do with him. He has been replaced, taking $70mn in retirement benefits.

Lufthansa allowed earlier this year one of its planes to be deliberately crashed, killing 200 passengers.

VW, Deutsche Bank, and Lufthansa have represented German, European, world dependability and engineering and social responsibility. Ambitious capitalism toned down by worker and government involvement, a contrast to Anglo-American a ultranza combative corporations, ruthless but often as we see today, more open. Japan, so successful for a few decades after the War, is tight and closed and its famously turgid economy seems to reflect this.

It seems to be a similar story, perhaps, in the EU. VW, DB and Lufthansa have represented, created, today’s version of the European tradition.
Next door, in Switzerland, the Swiss president of FIFA, Herr Blatter, is being investigated by U.S. and Swiss law enforcement agencies as the head of a criminal organization, with its HQ in Zurich, running the world’s biggest, bar none, recreation business.

Long-respected Swiss banks like UBS, Union des Banques Suisses, and Credit Suisse are in court, like Deutsche Bank, for rigging the markets and running money-laundering and tax rackets. They also face charges of rigging precious metals and money markets.

Credit Suisse is raising $6bn in new capital to make up losses, as also is DB itself. Today’s shareholders are being watered down. They are losing part of their investment as well as their dividends. It is difficult to put together half a dozen names that have better represented the most reliable, responsible face of 21st Century capitalism.

Everyone also knows that the European banks, led by DB and the International Monetary Fund, have lent Greece $460bn and that every last euro of this has disappeared into new accounts at the same banks. European taxpayers will pay the losses via the Brussels printing presses. To put this in context, the total loans to Latin America in the 1980s banking crisis was under $200bn loaned to 15 countries with a population of 600mn. They paid it back, give or take.

The population of Greece is 10mn. Every Greek man, woman, and child should be sitting on $40,000. But many of them are hungry or worse, out of work, facing a daily invasion of thousands of war refugees from the Middle East.

It was just 25 and a bit years ago that Communism and the Berlin Wall collapsed. The capitalist West had won a 70-year confrontation. Good had vanquished Bad. Christian values had emerged as the dominant, indeed the only, world scheme. If it was not Christian, it was a first cousin, Liberal Democracy, the rule of law.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Peru was a failing nation, as is today, for instance, Venezuela. The government was collapsing, terrucos and cocaine cartels seemed to be taking over. Peruvians had to carry their money in shopping bags, wheelbarrows even.

A quarter of a century later, Peru is a liberal democracy with a solid financial system. It meets its international obligations. It has a lively line in corruption. But its best efforts are a modest, tropical shadow of the German and Swiss corporations, which have set out to cheat their customers and stakeholders.

The failed nation of 1989 has had elections every five years, since 1980 with a whoops to bring in the new millennium. In six months there will be another election. And another again, it’s reasonable to expect, in 2021.

This is not to say that Peru does not have a long way to go. Nor that the Germans and the Swiss are not thoroughly good people, world leaders in all sorts of valuable ways.

Many Peruvians would understandably harumph! at the “rule of law” clause that necessarily goes with liberal democracy. But just this week the Constitutional Tribunal with an occasionally fuzzy record, cracked down decisively on an attempt by Nadine Heredia, President Humala’s wife, to slide past due process with openly inappropriate legal maneuvers. Instead of skirting the issue the Tribunal quickly, decisively, cleanly blew the whistle on the lively Sra. Humala and stopped her efforts to avoid investigation by the courts into her colorful financial history.

It may be that the Tribunal will have done her a favor and that her financial doings may be less than meets the eye. But the point is that Peru has shown that when push comes to shove, as it certainly did in this case, the system has proven to be not only better than expected by most, but getting better than it used to be.

First published in the Peruvian Times, October 23, 2015

World Bank, IMF Meeting Opens Window for Peru’s Next Step Up

Nov23

By Nicholas Asheshov

The World Bank/IMF meeting in Lima this coming week is the biggest, most prestigious get-together of the year for bankers and finance people. Anyone who is anyone from anywhere will be here, has to be here, and it is a great thing, for Peru. It puts the country firmly, perhaps a little unexpectedly, on the list of world centers, up there with Rio and Mexico City.

Peru’s finances and politics will take little of the attention of the ten or twelve thousand financiers and camp followers. But the reputation of Peru’s cuisine will fill the restaurants in Miraflores and San Isidro from midday to after midnight. Many of the visitors will want to take in Cusco and Machu Picchu. Good news as it reflects, as with the restaurants, the arrival of first-rate hotel and airline service, a true hospitality industry that did not exist even a decade ago.

The priority of the ministers, the central bankers and their aides will be to get a fix on what is happening to the world economy. They will be looking with increasing concern for guidance, ideas about what to do, once they get home. Not since the Lehman explosion in 2008 have government finance people in the emerging countries had to face the certainty of falling prices, falling production, falling employment and falling income.

Worldwide, only a small handful of countries — starting with India and the United States— is growing. Not much but at least moving forward. Europe and Japan are stagnant, with no immediate prospects of growth as are usually reliable heavyweights like Canada, Australia, and the Scandinavians. This group includes as respectable tail-enders Peru and Chile, Mexico and Colombia, Singapore and Indonesia with, as it may be, Iran about to join in.

The rest, led by Brazil, China, Russia, Turkey, and South Africa, not to mention the Middle East and Africa, are in recession or in open disaster.

Looking for ideas

The delegations from 150-odd countries members of the IMF and/or the World Bank will be hoping to bump into someone, perhaps from the international investment and commercial banks, who can give them ideas about how best to keep afloat for, it has become clear, at least the rest of the decade.

This used to be the job of the IMF and of the World Bank. Not so long ago the World Bank was the main inspiration for public works and infrastructure for Latin America and elsewhere. It was a full-service institution, much more than a bank, providing moral backing as well as technical expertise, funds and guarantees.

The IMF, a similar building of conference halls and honeycombs of offices across M St in downtown DC, provided emergency funds and financial backbone for governments in problems. This included big names like the United Kingdom, not just third world backsliders. It may be that many of the World Bank projects did not work as advertised. Certainly the IMF’s austerity demands often produced pain with little immediate gain. Europe, including Greece today, are inheritors of this tradition. But the notion that orderly public finances and statistics are a good idea and not just an imperialist plot has become standard issue to the enormous benefit of countries round the world, starting with Peru and in this often-bolshie neighborhood, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico. It also included during the 1990s and the early years of this century, Brazil as star pupil.

Brazil — the 800-pound gorilla

But this year Brazil has become an 800-pound gorilla. At this Lima meeting it is not China that has already joined the other elephants like Japan and Europe, but Brazil that will be a feature of concerned conversation.

A couple of years ago Brazil had become the world’s seventh biggest economy, a few pounds ahead even of the United Kingdom, a century ago the world’s greatest. Until earlier this year it seemed to the financial markets as though Brazil could treat the commodities slump like a road-repair diversion. It could have been thus. Instead, “We got hit by a turtle,” a disgusted Sao Paulo executive told the Wall St Journal this week. Brazil is turning into an international mega-problem. It is not just that Brazil’s public finances are in tatters. . . Infrastructure like roads and water supply is in deep disarray, with crime rising. National and regional politics, traditionally complex, are disintegrating with the opposition as weak as the government itself.

These days this is not just another colorful third world sad story but one that could detonate a run on the international credit markets This week here in Lima the single biggest topic of discussion will be how to prevent or at least postpone a Brazil debt default.

Not so long ago it was the IMF that could put out the fire. But today the credit markets are huge and unstable. The money that has gone, virtually uncontrolled to companies in Brazil, China, Turkey, and South Africa went often into ventures that do not work, often mines and hydrocarbons facilities which themselves have created today’s low prices. It is no accident that the copper price has moved below its 200-month moving average, setting the tone, too, for the other industrial commodities.

At the beginning of the week, the bonds and other debt issued by Glencore Mining dropped along with its share price by 30%. Glencore, with a long association with Peru through Xstrata and Marc Rich, developer of the massive Antamina and Las Bambas copper mines here, saw its market value at $16bn, down from $80bn earllier in the year, and its debt at just under $50bn — huge numbers and huge dislocation.

Other mining and hydrocarbons companies, including BHP Billiton and Anglo American, are developing the same kind of dislocation between the productive value of their assets and their ability to service the debt paper bought with enthusiasm not long ago by investment and retirement funds in Europe and the United States. Top of the list are Petrobras and Vale do Rio Doce. Petrobras debt today is, at $470bn, 10 times greater than Glencore, one of the world’s biggest.

Wall St analysts say they have always assumed that the Petrobras debt is backed by the government, but famously Brazil’s sovereign debt has itself been marked down by the rating agencies to junk. By coincidence, the foreign debt of Greece is within a dollar or two of Petrobras’ obligations. In the case of Greece, of course, every widow’s mite is going to be picked up by the German taxpayer.

$60 trillion in debt issued worldwide since 2009

These are just straws in the IMF and World Bank’s headwinds this week though, there’s plenty more of the same. For instance the IMF itself has published a report saying that $18 trillion — i.e. $18,000,000 billion, give or take— in bonds and similar have been issued by companies in China, Brazil, Turkey, up from $4 trillion in 2004, and warns that a lot of this is held by US mutual funds. This in turn is part of the $60 trillion in debt that has been issued worldwide as of 2009, over and above whatever it had been before that.

This is the context of the IMF/World Bank meeting here this week. If economies around the world were growing as they did from 2009, then lenders and investors could as usual suspend their disbelief. But the IMF itself has said that it will be lowering, again, its growth forecasts for the coming few years so the lack of connection between reality and the credit markets has become even clearer, China or no China.

For sure the tip-top bankers and economists, investors and traders here are aware, convinced in fact, that it is them and not the elected politicians who are in charge What sets the annual IMF/WB meeting apart is that there is more to it than just international bureaucrats, paper-pushing government officials and the blank-eyed economists and lawyers who run central banks. The juice, and the big money, for this meeting comes from the investment and commercial bankers from Wall St., London, Frankfurt, Toronto, Tokyo, Sao Paulo who come to meet each other as well as government officials. The meetings take place at dozens of cocktail parties, buffet breakfasts and lunches and, naturally, cups of coffee and drinks at the bar. Lima’s main banks, the Credito, Interbank, the BBVA Continental, and Scotiabank are putting on big shows.

Two out of every three years the WB/IMF meeting is held in Washington itself where there is a well-oiled hospitality industry. Traffic is a known quantity. The hotels are geared to big-name conferences. It is easy to get things done. Phones and taxicabs work. Then one in every three years the meeting is held away from home. It might be somewhere well-organized like Berlin. Or Bankok or Lima with dreadful traffic and security worries. Lima is more of an adventure but that adds spice.

There will be real interest for the participants in the Prospects for Peru as an up-and-coming junior BRIC. The collapse of Brazil, joining Argentina and Venezuela, means that Peru, Chile and Colombia will have a chance to shine, to provide, along with Mexico, the main positive focus in Latin America, a valuable door-opener for the coming decade.

First published in the Peruvian Times on October 2, 2015

Sell, Collect your Money, or Go to Jail

Jan9

Lofty principles, sacred promises, the public interest, the Constitution, and democracy itself are at stake in a heavyweight bout between El Comercio and La Republica. The dispute is about which of them should control Correo and Ojo, two of Peru’s biggest and best newspapers.

By Nicholas Asheshov

(From Caretas)

The fight is, of course, about money and power. Today in Peru, unusually, circulation is much bigger and more valuable than ever before. Peru is in the run up to a wide-open presidential election in 2016 and this is one of the first big skirmishes of the campaign.

Amazingly, in the electronic age, Peru is a fast-growing, feisty newspaper market. Millions of unlettered 20th century families have morphed into 21st century householders and straphangers. The straw shacks of two and three decades ago are today brick and cement and not just in Lima but in Arequipa, Ica, Chimbote, Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Piura.

While The Washington Post has had to be rescued by an electronic biz kid who probably doesn’t touch a newspaper from one week to the next, El Trome – El Comercio‘s zappy down-market tabloid – has tripled its circulation in just five years to 650,000. It is read by the new commuters, including the chauffeurs and maids of the people who read and advertise in the Establishment’s El Comercio. El Trome is read by one in three newspaper buyers in Peru. This is over three times more than the numbers who read the company’s flagship El Comercio (94,000) together with its less turgid stable mate Peru21 (87,000).

In Peru, each copy has a readership of perhaps four or five. The Internet has a still-low penetration of around 25%.

There are, or rather were, three Big Newspaper groups in Lima. These are, or again were: El Comercio, the tough, rich Establishment leader; La Republica, the left wing group; and the Agois-Banchero group’s middle-of-the-road Epensa, featuring Correo and Ojo. Today, Epensa is just a nameplate.

In July, La Republica’s financial backer, Salomon Lehrner, had quietly arranged to buy out the Agois’ 93-year-old major Epensa shareholder, with 54%, for $17.2M, a bargain. In August El Comercio muscled in at the last minute with $18M, including an $800,000 pourboire for Apoyo, its bankers. Still, a giveaway. They got the deal.

Overnight, El Comercio’s share of Peru’s newspaper market went from around 50% to 80%, more than that of Beijing’s The People’s Daily.

Here, in this case, notwithstanding the adage to the contrary, otorongo no come otorongo, as things stand, El Comercio – more, an anaconda than a quick-footed mountain lion – has swallowed, in a single cheap gulp its only competitors, market leaders Correo and Ojo, both of them livelier and more market-friendly than its own products.

This is not good for the newspaper business in Lima. It is, in fact, a disaster. It gives the Comercio group four out of every five newspapers, and the deal would have been unhesitatingly thrown out of Anti-Trust court anywhere in Europe or North America. Anywhere, indeed, this side of Iran. Even Pravda Granma never had 80% of the market.

Correo’s market is A and B, Ojo’s is C and D. Correo and Ojo have been growing, fast. Ojo, a feisty tabloid has doubled its circulation lately to 300,000 Correo is, at 155,00 and growing, easily the market leader in the A and B level, triple that of La Republica, (45,000), the left wing tabloid.

Leaving aside for a moment the unfortunate readers, advertisers today have a choice of ONE. As Henry Ford liked to say: you can have any colour you like so long as it’s black.

Journalists who don’t see eye to eye with the numerous Miro Quesada family, El Comercio‘s patriarchal owners, will be out of luck and a job. Politicians who don’t get the nod from the Miro Quesadas will be in the same boat, offshore and heading west.

The Miro Quesadas say they will not interfere in the journalistic side of Correo and Ojo. As we used to say in Fleet Street, “pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” Rupert ‘The Dirty Digger’ Murdoch, my old employer, said the same when, in London, he bought The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The News of the World and, in New York, The Wall Street Journal, among a hundred others elsewhere. Today his people, courted and employed by every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, are being sent to jail in London for behaviour disgraceful even by Fleet Street’s flexible standards.

The Miro Quesadas are the cholo version of the Murdoch tradition, memorably cartooned as Lord Copper of The Daily Beast in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Scoop.

For decades the Miro Quesadas carried on a deadly vendetta against the big up-the-workers AAPRA party and have enthusiastically backed every golpe militar within living memory. They helped oust President Belaunde’s democratic government in 1968. Velasco’s military whipped round and nationalised El Comercio as well as the other dailies.

Belaunde, a gentleman, returned El Comercio to the Miro Quesadas the day that he returned- to the Government Palace in 1980.

Today’s El Comercio, with its bland, deviously cryptic front pages, is a well-established formula in Latin America, like the Edwards family’s El Mercurio in Santiago and their equivalents in Buenos Aires and Ciudad de Mexico. A rich, sad bunch of Little Murdochs. The Miro Quesada newspapers do a poor job of reflecting the realities of Peru, one of the world’s most varied, fast-moving, and fascinating countries.

La Republica’s journalistic tradition is a little better, but not much. It was, for instance, anti-Fujimori i.e. anti-political gangsterism. But it has been quiet about the vote-rigging, phony finances, and corruption associated with Presidents Toledo and Humala, its political friends. Salomon Lehrner, a La Republica financial angel, has been a backer of Toledo and Humala and has built up a colourfully disreputable financial reputation, outlined more than once in Correo, over the past few decades.

However, La Republica, an attractively laid out full-service tabloid, is at least livelier than El Comercio. Circulation figures show, however, that it is a poor representative of the 50% of voters who regularly place their confidence in populism, which is what’s left, as it were, of the Socialism of the long-gone 20th century. It is, in the A & B range, outsold three-to-one by middle-of-the-road Correo. It was Correo, for instance, that broke the US$50M Toledo scandal: this features a bankrupt Israeli-Peru financier Josef Maiman, with whom Lehrner has worked closely in the past. Lehrner helped finance Humala’s campaigns in 2006 and 2011 and was Humala’s prime minister for the government’s first months.

Curiously, El Comercio and La Republica are partners in the market-leading TV Channel 4, El Comercio with 70%. This has been returning annual profits of between $15 and $20M, important to La Republica’s cash flow.

Gustavo Mohme, La Republica’s publisher, is a well-established construction figure. El Comercio is associated with Grana y Montero, Peru’s top construction company, quoted since 2013 on the NYSE.

La Republica is understandably upset about losing the Epensa deal. which Lehrner had engineered through a backstreet notary in the no-go Lima district of Puente Piedra. But La Republica’s directors would never have kept their left-wing fingers off middle-of-the-road Correo and Ojo. People with a political agenda, left, right and centre are boring and newspaper readers everywhere, of course, know it.

El Comercio will surely be told by even the most susceptible magistrates. that their protestations of good faith are meaningless, even if they claim that they are nice-guy reformed characters.

The magistrates will, we can hope, crossing our fingers, tell them that they have to sell their new prize, but will tell La Republica that they cannot be the buyers.

President Humala has weighed in on the TV, saying that the purchase of Epensa by El Comercio, “an octopus,” is in every way wrong and that he is drafting a press law. Lehrner and others have chimed in but this would, as we all know, make things worse. The answer is to tidy up Peru’s well-intentioned but confused anti-trust legislation. All that’s needed is to copy the European Union legislation, already in Spanish, under which corporate fusions must be routinely cleared by the regulators, in this case Indecopi, which often works quite well.

FIN

Nicholas Asheshov, Editor for many years of the Peruvian Times and The Andean Report, worked on Fleet Street for Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and for the Financial Times, and Institutional Investor. He lives in Urubamba and in 2010 broke Orient Express’s Peru Rail Machu Picchu monopoly.

Published in Spanish by Caretas on Jan. 9, 2014

Here Comes the Window Tax

Feb8

By Nicholas Asheshov

I have a suggestion for Mr. Castilla, the young finance minister, which will help him iron out what he calls disruptions in the economic agenda. It happens to us all.
My idea is that he create a new tax which will have the merit of aggravating, but not much, the better-off, and pleasing socialists, making it an out-of-the-gate winner.
My proposal is for a tax on windows. If, like some of my neighbours here in Urubamba, your house has just a few small ones or, high in the Cordillera, no windows at all, you pay nothing. If your house in the jungle is all palm-thatch roof, it’s the same. No tax.
For Peru today, the window tax is “Brilliant!” says Richard Webb, the country’s top economist.
“A window tax would be a thousand times easier to collect than the present property tax. No complex calculations.”
Every householder will simply fill in a form on their iPad stating the number of windows in their houses and apartments and make a bank transfer accordingly.
The tax people will of course make spot checks and anyone whose math is found faulty will pay a suitable fine.
This proposal, which I am sure will be taken up immediately by the literate members of the Congress, came to me from Mansfield Park, one of Jane Austen’s six wonderful novels of country life in England two centuries ago: Jane started to write Mansfield Park in 1812 and it was published in London two years later. They did not even put her name on the cover, just “By the author of Pride & Prejudice and of Sense & Sensibility.”
Jane’s reference to the window tax comes as she is describing the visit of a family to the immense country palazzo of a neighbour where there were so many rooms that their only function, she suggests in her sharp-tongued way, is that they are there to pay the window tax.
All English people, like myself, are familiar not only with Jane’s stories but also with the window tax of the 18th and 19th centuries, partly because its results can still be seen in old towns and old houses out in the country. Some of these still have large window-spaces blocked in with bricks in order to reduce the owner’s tax liability.
My 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the tax was widely disliked as an attack on “light and air” but was acknowledged to be progressive, meaning that it hit the rich but not the poor.
If your house had more than eight windows you had to pay double the rate, to whit, four shillings per window instead of just two shillings.
No Pane, No Gain
H.M. Treasury’s website calculation of what two shillings would be in today’s sad sterling is just over GBP11. That’s $17 per small-house window, call it S/.50, or S/.100 per window for a house or apartment with more than eight windows.
Let’s say there are five million urban houses in Peru with six windows apiece, the window tax would bring in $500mn at practically zero cost in collecting.
There would have to be some clear definitions. For instance, my own house here in Urubamba has 14 windows, plus six in the playroom and guest suite on the other side of the garden. But two of them on the verandah are absolutely immense, making up a full 20 yards long looking onto the river, the woodland and the snow peaks of the Cordillera Urubamba. If I had to pay, say S/.300 a year just for those, I’d think, at S/.1 per day not including Sundays, that I was getting a good deal, cheap at the price.
I also have some glass-and-wood French windows, which I would maintain are really doors but I bet the tax people would say “Windows!”
The tax, the encyclopedia says, was also levied in parts of France and Germany. In England it was ended in 1851, maybe because in those days it was not so easy for the Inland Revenue to collect from crusty landowners with bulldogs and shotguns.
“The window tax,” Richard Webb says, “will open the door, ha ha, to the more equitable and more aggressive tax system that Peru urgently needs.”
Minister Castilla can give his new window tax a literary tong by calling it “the Jane tax.”

Ends
———-
Notes:
Richard, Director of the country’s leading think tank, the Instituto de Peru, at the Universidad San Martin de Porras, adds the stunning calculation that the value of urban real estate in Peru has in the past decade increased five-fold. His comments:
Urban property is undoubtedly the biggest, least taxed, yet easiest to tax, and most justifiably taxable form of wealth in Peru. Justifiably because there is zero disincentive on productive activity, and because it is highly progressive and by any standards democratic.
Here’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Let’s say there are three categories of urban – district capitals, medium cities, and Lima.
For the districts we have a figure for the last 10 years, using my telephone survey of 200 of the smallest and poorest district capitals. If the average size of those homes is 100 square meters, the square meter has risen in value from US$11 to US$43 between 2001 and 2010.
For medium towns we can guess that the square meter value is about double the distrito value, therefore rising from US$22 to US$86.
For Lima, a house in the grass-roots Huascar area, in San Juan de Lurigancho, today sells for about US$200/m2, up from US$51 10 years ago.
Excluding rural homes, the urban population is roughly 30% Lima, 20% medium cities, 20% distritos.
So, multiplying the values by the homes (average family is 4.5 persons and two-thirds live in owner-occupied homes), we estimate that total home value has risen from US$8 billion to US$38 billion between 2001 and 2010. Back in 1960, it could not have been much more than US$1 billion.
If the window tax is the equivalent of an annual 1.2% tax on house value, I arrive at almost exactly your estimate of US$500 million annual revenue. And all on wealth that no one produced: it is pure rent generated by the fact that it is more practical, productive and socially pleasant to live nearer other people than scattered all over the mountainside.
I also asked Richard, about the values of agricultural land, nothing to do with windows.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Our survey included a question on “el precio de una hectarea agricola en su distrito.” I’ll check, but off the top of my head the preliminary figures, when the survey had reached 100 districts, changed only slightly when we extended it to 200.
“The figures are: average price per hectare in 2001 – 6,847 soles, in 2006 – 9,425 soles, in 2011 – 15,578 soles. All this in constant 2011 prices. That’s 8.6% growth in value per year over the decade. Over the last five years it is 10.6% growth p.a.”

Published in Spanish in Caretas, week of February 10 2012

Polling Day

Jan6

By Nicholas Asheshov

With polling day on October 3 the campaigns for regional and municipal elections are heating up and this is not just a spectator sport in Peru. Hundreds of people in every district, thousands in every province are running for office and to judge by Urubamba, Cuzco and Lima, which I follow with attention, the democracy-count runs the gamut from vicious to ferocious.

Half-a-dozen candidates have been murdered, one would-be alcalde in the backwoods of Huanuco is in jail for organizing a who-can-drink-most competition with wood-alcohol at which the three winners died, and the alcaldesa of Santa Anita, a Lima district which includes a main foodstuffs wholesale market, escaped when her car was fire-bombed.

There are even aviation connections. In Lima the front-runners are Lourdes Flores, on my Right, and Alex Kourie, in the misty Middle. Lourdes, a 50-something lawyer, has run for President of the Republic two or three times and had always seemed to me to be jolly, too talkative but nice. Few, including me, now think this because the TV and newspapers have forced her to own up to working for years for a fellow called Cataño whose name is really something else but he changed after being nabbed years ago with 100 kilos of cocaine. Lourdes has for some time been Chairman of Peruvian Airlines, owned by Mr. Cataño, at $10,000 a month plus exes.

Lourdes also does not chat freely about another client and friend, Jose Luis Sanchez, the Spanish spinner who collected $3mn from Fujimori’s master-fixer Vladimiro Montesinos, now doing life in a Callao prison, during the 2000 general elections. Sanchez was in charge of the dirty tricks section.

Lourdes has also been legal advisor to the people, many of them from Pakistan, who import tens of thousands of second-hand cars, trucks and buses from SE Asia to come and gasp their last smoky, fumy breath on Lima’s clogged streets. Many of them, to add injury to insult, started off as right-hand drives from Japan, Hong Kong and the conversion to left-handers is often poorly done meaning dreadful crashes and buses going over Andean precipices. It’s all illegal, but Lourdes has shown the importers how to get local magistrates to slap amparos, laissez-passez orders thus circumventing the laws. Mr. Cataño, though not from Pakistan, is also a leading importer of pre-owned vehicles and the drugs police are pressing him for details on his finances.

Alex Kourie, mayor of Callao, has had problems with a tiny one-mile section of the only road to Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport where he was charging a $1 toll; for years it was easily the most profitable venture in town, making infinitely better margins than LAN, COPA and TACA combined.

An unfancied outsider, Susana Villaran, has come up fast on the loopy Left. Susana, one of those expensively-brought-up caviar socialists, as they’re known in Lima, has a collection of convicted terrorists on her aldermanic lists and spat furiously at my friend Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the banker and former PM, when he mildly commented that foreign investors were “keeping an eye on”–some such– her swift rise in the polls.

The present mayor of Lima, Luis Castañeda, a close associate of Lourdes, is running for President in next year’s elections, but has been dogged by connections with a $20mn scam involving garbage collection and some Brazilians.

For us in the provinces this is all entry-level shenanigans. At the moment the mayor of Cuzco is the third since the elections four years ago. The first two achieved the impossible by getting caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. The way that crooked alcaldes actually get caught, though rarely, is what is politely known as nepotism; no one can resist having their cousins, children, domestic servants and mum and dad on the payroll. Actually, none of the voters objects -they’d do the same; noblesse oblige. But they only get accused of it when there are more serious matters that can’t so easily be proven.

Here in Urubamba we keep up with the metro crowd. Our alcalde, Benizio Rios, one of the vaguely-lefty NGO people who infest Peruvian and Bolivian provincial life, has just been booted out of the town hall for nepotism. Items like sewage infecting the municipal playground, gross potholes in the streets are not criminal offences. But you’ll be glad to hear that because of a judicial technicality, which may have nothing to do with Benizio being friendly with the appropriate magistrates, he is running for our alcaldia again. His slogan is “Honradez y Experiencia.”

Benizio has the backing of the well-heeled Hugo Chavez —come in, Caracas--party, whose symbol is a simple “O” for Ollanta Humala, an ex-army commandante and wanna-be Chavez whose wife has problems explaining where all her money comes from. On top of that Benizio has the support of the Machu Picchu bus drivers, to whom he awarded a 30-year monopoly, worth $10mn+ a year for 20 creaky buses between the train station and the ruins. This is totally, believe me, illegal but Machu Picchu is a no-rules zone, off-limits even for SUNAT, Peru’s tough IRS.

There are 13 candidates for Urubamba mayor and it’s not only Caracas and the bus people but the government budget that makes it worthwhile. Eduardo Guevara, a three-time mayor here, and a good friend, tells me that in his day it was a million or two. Now it’s $20mn. Eduardo, who’s running again, was round for a coffee the other day together with a candidate for mayor of one of our districts, a Catholic priest, an excellent young chap who we’ll call Arturo. As we were talking, I found that a lady had come in and was physically attacking Padre Arturo, spitting, hitting, swearing. It was a comadre of mine, a schoolteacher and it turned out that Arturo was the father of her one-year-old baby, a frequent visitor but we’d never been told and, of course, never asked about daddy. But there I was, like one of those referees in a wrestling match on the telly, trying to separate the contenders. Naturally, my comadre’s family is running one of her many brothers, also a good egg, for the alcaldia of the district against Padre Arturo. Try as one may it’s not easy to stay out of local politics and now you see what I mean about it being not just a spectator sport.

Letter from Urubamba, Sept 30, 2010

The Niños and the financial roller-coaster

Dec22

By Nicholas Asheshov

Ferocious blizzards in the United States, a warm North Pole, biblical floods in Queensland and drought in northern China are being blamed on La Niña but here in Urubamba in the permanent eye, one supposes, of the Niño+Niña complex, the weather could not be more charming.

The shock pre-Niña rains a year ago which cut away big slices of the railway to Machu Picchu, have been followed this year by the traditional monsoon mixture of warm sunshine and refreshing rainfall. It’s sparkling, green and friendly, our favourite time of the year. We sense some of the mystery of the carefully-sculpted Cloud Kingdom of the Incas where dramatically chiseled rock walls controlled the rivers, the fields and the ciudadelas.

The first El Niño that gave Peru a headline role in the world’s climate drama occurred four decades ago in 1972. Newspapers worldwide published little maps showing Peru with arrows going in all directions. My sister Anna, an international skier, complained that Peru’s desert rainstorms were ruining the snow in the Swiss Alps – globalization avant le mot.

That Niño had been preceded in Peru by a famously remorseless anchoveta hunt by the brash new Peru fishing fleet led by the engaging, brilliant Lucho Banchero. Every single anchoveta from the beach breaks to the whale belt 100 miles offshore was netted. Boats would capsize and sink with too much fish. The catch was 12 million tons, one in every five fish caught worldwide that year.

The Apus struck back instantly and implacably. The dense horizon-to-horizon clouds of seabirds, the world’s greatest, have never returned. In Lima we watched thousands of starving pelicans fight for their last scraps outside the Surquillo market. The price of fishmeal, corn, wheat, sugar, cotton and soya skyrocketed on the New York and Chicago markets.

Serendipitously perhaps, OPEC doubled and tripled the price of oil to $15 the barrel. I myself moved the market. I reported to McGraw-Hill’s commodities wire on the strength of a good-humoured tip from the U.S. Embassy, then literally a stone’s throw away on Av Washington, that Arabs had come to Lima to buy copper. I practically had them mounting their camels in flowing robes at the door of the Hotel Bolivar before riding down La Colmena. The Chicago Board of Trade copper price jumped from 60 to 70 cents the pound but I was too young and poor to take advantage. In any case I had just come from Fleet St where you learn on Day One never to believe your own story.

Thus the first post-WWII price crisis. Nixon had de-pegged the dollar from gold. The oil people had no idea what to do with their billions –before that a million or two was real money– and gave it to Citibank who lent it to obscure states that even Brazilians hadn’t heard of, to Peronist bag-men and soldiers in Buenos Aires and to the Banco Popular in Peru.

Six hyper-crises later here we are again. Hundred-degree heat scorched the wheat crop last year in Russia and the Ukraine, The same economists who six months ago were gasping deflation are now fighting inflation by, of all things, reducing taxes.

So even here in Urubamba we all know that bumbling bankers, confused bureaucrats and a cascade of Niños and Niñas have packaged themselves into a global roller-coaster, though I bet that in the Andes we’re safer than anywhere else.

Here in any case is where we stand, broad-brush, in the southern Sierra.

Four decades of figures from Senamhi, the weather bureau, show an average increase of between two and three degrees centigrade -the figures themselves are precise but it depends on the location. This is a lot. The glaciers from the Vilcabamba south to the Cordillera Real above La Paz and Lake Titicaca have all but disappeared. All you’re looking at now is a dusting of snow. The remains of old airplanes that crashed into the ice fields 30 and more years ago are being uncovered, frozen bodies of young pilots recovered and buried by their families.

A few hundred miles to the east the Brazilians continue mowing down the Amazon and Sertao, unthinkable even as recently as the 1972 widescreen Niño.

Average rainfall here has lessened, too, though the overall figures aren’t startling. But the rain now tends to come in sharp bursts, meaning there’s a lot less for farmers.

“We’re having to undo the work of decades where European NGOs brought in big, expensive cows and thirsty crops like alfalfa to feed them. Now there’s not enough water,” a Ministry of the Environment official in Cuzco tells me.

“We’re bringing back llamas and alpacas, smaller fields. We’re going back to how it used to be.”

As you might imagine, the Incas had it all clear. Their huge high-altitude polylepis –queuña— forests, now largely cut down for firewood, conserved water. Their great flights of terrace complexes made best use of it.

If I, like many of my friends, were running for President –Election Day is April 10– my Government Plan would be just four words and here they are:

Back to the Incas. FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Feb. 17, 2011

A lesson in patience – The hand that rocks the cradle

Dec22

By Nicholas Asheshov

The municipal cuna-jardin in Urubamba is housed in part of the collapsing remains of a long-ago government hotel in the middle of the crowded wholesale market.

The two-year-olds play in what must have been a well-windowed sitting room. But the rest are gloomy little rooms lit by a neon strip or a hole knocked out of the roof.

The rest of this ruin is used as offices for the town gobernacion.

Cribs beside a makeshift kitchen allow two- and three-year-olds to flop down for a siesta. Down below an ankle-deep pool of water from broken 50-year old pipes is close by two dim rooms full of quietly cheerful four- and five year olds.

“We’ve had the Defensa Civil here any amount of times,” Eliana Garcia, the school’s Directora tells me on a visit this past week. “Their reports declare yet again that it’s dangerous.”

But there is an immediate heart-warming contrast between the clapped-out building and the competent bustle of the handful of teachers and 120 kids. You have to suppose that one of the lessons the children, from lactantes of three months to lively boys and girls of four and five, learn is how to make do and get on with each other.

I know this place well. A decade ago my wife and I brought our own expensive three-year-old daughter, Tany, here every day. It was the only place for toddlers in town but, much more, it was the kindness she was shown by the overworked and underpaid teachers like Eliana and by Yasmina Concha, made up for the dismal facilities. Yasmina went on to become Tany’s madrina and an old family chum.

Tany, today a citified MP3 teenager, goes back to her first alma mater as an ayudante when she’s home for the holidays.

Like us and perhaps even more so, today’s mothers and fathers are for sure grateful for somewhere to dump their kids during the morning. The mothers, Eliana and Yasmina tell me, all have jobs, some in the market or in stores, some in offices. A handful are single-mother student teachers.

They leave bottles of powdered and, sometimes, genuine, mother’s milk. The toddlers bring along lunchboxes.

Eliana, a quietly-spoken get-on-with-it 40-something who has been in charge here for years, talks knowledgeably about the ministry curriculum which requires ‘stimulus’ for three-month-old babies and, for instance, counting up to at least 12 for the four- and five-year-olds. “They all get at least to 10,” Luzmarina, one of the teachers, says.

Most kindergarten and primary teachers I’ve talked to find the official curriculum itself quite good with its new efforts to go beyond old-style rote-learning to think-learning.

But still everyone agrees that public education is awful, as bad as it gets in the civilized world.

In a study, ¿Para Quién Trabajan? Médicos y Maestros del Sector Público del Perú, published by the Instituto del Peru a few months ago, Richard Webb and Sofia Valencia declare that “Providers, bureaucrats, politicians and union leaders have accommodated to a status quo of low wages, lax discipline, falling entry standards and inadequate levels of effort.”

The study adds that this is “irreversible” unless something “exogenous” turns up.

The patience needed by Eliana Garcia to cope with dozens of other people’s infants in a dungeon is nothing to what she requires to cope with officialdom.

Eliana takes me a few blocks up the main street to where the new cuna-jardin is being built on an 850m2 site. Half a dozen workmen are moving around. It looks as though it’s perhaps 20% done. “They keep on delivering the wrong materials and taking them away again,” Eliana says.

The foundation stone was laid, with speeches, a year ago, Eliana tells me.

In municipal budget discussions “the new coliseo always wins,” Eliana says.

The walls for the new cuna-jardin show a dull ministry-mandated building with windows starting at maybe 1.70m above what’s budgeted to be a bare cement floor. Not even a tall visitor can see over them to the snow peaks of the cordillera.

“Maybe the ministry thinks that the children shouldn’t be distracted,” Eliana says.

Eliana tells me enthusiastically, with the Maestro de Obras standing by: “Up there’s the second floor, for the Administration.”

But the maestro immediately says, “There’s no second floor. My contract is just for a one-story building.”

Eliana begins to protest -“I’ve got an Acta!” –but quickly stops..

“I’ll go and talk to the architecto en el municipio.”

“You do that,” the maestro says.

FIN

Published in Caretas Magazine the week of Nov. 22, 2008

It’s The Serranos That Count

Dec22

By Nicholas Asheshov

I’m expecting that the census the other day will show an upsurge in the rural population. We out here in the campo may even be getting back to the population levels of the Inca Empire.

There’s been only a modest increase over the past couple of decades. But anyone traveling round the southern sierra and in the montaña east of Cusco will see bigger villages, more roads and above all more school-children.

Every valley in the massive Cuzco core of The Empire is heavily-populated. The forest is being cut back aggressively.

By contrast all over rural England and elsewhere in Europe they have been shutting primary schools. But here in Urubamba and in the great hinterland beyond the Valley, primary schooling is a big focus. For nearly two decades the government has been opening primary schools and kindergartens for three-to-fives, even crèches called here wawa wasi.

A while back I was in Occabamba, one of Cuzco’s hidden, exciting cacao-coca-coffee valleys. Spectacled bear, deer and eagles are close by but you also see truckloads of school kids going to and fro at around eight any weekday morning and after one in the afternoon. Five of every 10 people is under 16.

Richard Webb, with his Cuanto? organization, the only people in town for numbers, tells me that the figures show that only 7.6 million Peruvians are classified as “rural.” But he suspects that often “tiny little hamlets are included as urban, meaning that the rural population is in reality higher. Whatever, around three out of every 10 Peruvians live out in the country.

The amazing thing is that the rural population of Peru is still lower than it was under the Incas even though the total population of Peru is three times greater. Of course everyone in Inca times lived en el campo apart from a few tens of thousands in Cusco, Chan Chan, Huanuco Viejo and Pachacamac.

The low point over the past six or seven thousand years came in 1620, with only 600,000. These would all fit today into Miraflores and San Isidro with room left over.

The Conquest produced one of the great population disasters of history. It was worse even than the Black Death of the 14^th century where half of Europe was wiped out.

In Peru, out of every 20 people, only one survived.

Vital censuses were carried out by Viceroy Toledo in 1570, in Huanuco and in Yucay, just up the road from Urubamba. These were followed up in 1603 and 1620.

On the basis of the 1570 head-counts, carried out less than 40 years after the Spaniards had arrived in Cajamarca and just as Tupac Amaru was being executed in the Plaza de Armas de Cusco, Toledo estimated that the population of pre-Conquest Peru at eight and a half million.

This was a pretty good shot. according to the best work done on Inca population, David Noble Cook’s “Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru 1520-1620”.

Cook looked, for instance, at how many people would live off a hectare of tilled land –seven, according to a 1960s study– and came up with 6.5mn people living on the Coast in 1520, which was when Atahualpa and Huascar were getting ready to destroy each other, a decade before Pizarro landed in Tumbes.

Using statistical regressions based on Darfur-like disasters he calculated how many people had died from disease and warfare, and came up with a total population for Inca Peru of 9.4mn; the 0.4 there is William Devevan’s calculation of the population of the montaña. There’s a good case, he also says, for numbers of around 14mn.

So within less than a century the population had dropped by around 95% to 600,000, almost all of whom were sierra Indians. The native population of the Coast had dropped to zero. No one was left.

Ever since, Peru has been massively underpopulated, the classic land without people, and people without land. By the early 20^th century, 100 years ago, the population of Peru had inched up to just over three million, according to my 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. By 1940 Peru had just over seven million. In 1961 it was 10.4mn, more or less as it had been before the Conquest.

The sierra saved a small genetic something of Inca and pre-Inca Peru. The sturdy Quechua tradition, with its Quispes, Mamanis, Usquamaitas, Corimañas, Orqohuarancas and Yupanquis is all that remains of the Incas, the Lords of Sipan, the Dukes of Chavin, the Earls of Huari and the Kings of Tiahuanuco.

Much more interesting than counting how many people spend their lives in unproductive cities would be some DNA studies of the ancient families of my neighbours here in the Sierra to tie them to the glories of seven millennia of one of the great success stories of civilization. We can be sure, in any case, that the per capita GDP of the Inca Empire was substantially higher than it’s ever likely to be under today’s slash-and-burn efforts. ENDS

Published in Caretas Magazine Oct 28 2007

OP-ED – The 2011 Election: Facing a leap back to the bad old days

Dec21

By Nicholas Asheshov

Special to the Peruvian Times

With the short end of a week before voting on Sunday, April 10, the first round of Peru’s presidential elections has lurched into a curtain-raiser to a bitter run-off featuring a stark choice between business-as-usual+plus and Chavez-style grab-it statism.

The polls say that Ollanta Humala, representing the specter of a depressing dive into Venezuelan-style shambles is way out ahead against a trio led by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a pragmatic free-marketeer promising a pueblo-friendly lift-off for an already-humming economy.

Under Humala, a far-left rabidly anti-Chilean, airports, ports and telecom, energy, probably banks, newspapers and TV would be nationalized, according to his written manifesto. LAN, the dominant force in local aviation, would certainly be hobbled if not sent packing. The same fate might await some of the big foreign investments in energy, mining and retailing. The half-forgotten sound of international agreements and contracts, not to mention constitutions, being torn up, is back on the air.

Brazilian companies, led by big construction and energy like Odebrecht, Vale do Rio Doce and Petrobras would, on the other hand, be favored. Humala, like all Peruvians, likes Lula but, more to the point, his PDB party is providing electioneers and finance for the Humala campaign. Brazilian companies are already trying to pepper the Andes with huge hydro-electric schemes with the power pylons heading for Sao Paulo.

Venezuela and Cuba are the models, “with appropriate local adjustments,” Humala says.

The media in Lima produce and discuss endlessly, as well they might, a flood of polls that after a ho-hum start at the turn of the year, today put Humala, a former army comandante and mutineer to boot, at close to 30 percent with Kuczynski, PPK, a former Wall St banker, and two others, Keiko Fujimori and Alejandro Toledo, bunched together at between 18 percent and 20 percent.

The elections will see 14 million over-18s of a 30-million population vote for which of two candidates get into the final run-off in early June. They are also voting on Sunday for a 120-seat Congress, whose membership will be roughly in line with the percentages obtained by the five leading candidates.

Both the Congress and the President are elected for a five-year 2011-16 term starting July 28, Independence Day. Voting is obligatory.

With Humala, the only left-winger, a sure thing to get into the run-off, Sunday’s race is for the single remaining slot to run against him in June.

Luis Castañeda A fifth contender, Luis Castañeda, a colorless, murky former Lima mayor, is down from 30 percent support in January to below 11 percent. So the focus is on Toledo, Keiko and PPK. The hope of, one supposes, two-thirds of the electorate is that one of these will in June pull together the non-left votes to beat Humala into, they hope, oblivion.

The four contenders have emerged after more than three months of campaigning as clear-cut TV characters.

Humala Ollanta Humala, an army mutineer accused of human rights violations, was described on TV by Hugo Chavez in Caracas this past week as “a good lad, a good soldier.” Caracas has provided much of Humala’s campaign funds according to well-established paper trails through, for instance, NGOs fronted by his wife, Nadine. He has, naturally, got the Lima and provincial middle class frightened, terrified in fact, that Peru — which has been emerging over the past couple of decades into a coming-along economy with poverty rates finally ticking down — will slough back into the lost decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

Keiko Fujimori The polls say, as they have for the past three months, that Keiko, a self-confident 35-year-old daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, currently doing life in a Lima jail for human rights violations, has a solid 20 percent of the vote.

She, in effect, is the one that Toledo or PPK must beat on Sunday. She is also going to be the easiest to beat for Humala, as even though she would be joined, reluctantly by PPK and Toledo, she is not yet a convincing presidential figure.

Alejandro Toledo, 65, president 2001-6, only a few weeks ago looked a shoo-in to the final round with close on 30 percent in the polls. He bills himself as a toughie Andean Indian ex-shoe-shine boy with a Stanford PhD. Sounds ideal, but his record in office was as a vacillating, hard-drinking womanizer with approval ratings of 8 percent, marking him at the time the least popular elected leader in Latin America. Today he is still lively but a pompous bore on the TV, and this has hauled him back down despite a campaign that is well-financed by a foggy consortium.

Joining these leaders during the past few weeks is Kuczynski, PPK, an Oxford-educated Wall St banker and former Central Bank executive, finance and prime minister, one of whose daughters is a fashion-plate Park Ave socialite and former New York Times staffer.

Kuczynski, 72, is an accomplished flautist with a grand piano in his Lima town house and another at his mountainside country estate on which for relaxation he plays Bach fugues and Mozart sonatas.

Pedro Pablo KuczynskiKuczynski in 2001-2 sorted out the high inflation, low-income mess as the first finance minister in Toledo’s otherwise vacuous government, and has financed his own campaign – he sold a south-Lima beach house and cashed in some stock. But until a month ago it was looking, at three or four percent in the polls, like just a quixotic swan-song. Columnists were thanking him for, at least, pepping up a desultory melee. At that time, too, Humala was also a back-of-the-pack also-ran at 10-12 percent.

But in February they both took off. PPK drove a “PPKamion” and distributed PPKuy dolls — cute fluffy guinea pigs — to attract a wider audience for his well-thought-out program and hands-on experience to get Peru’s lagging education, health, jobs, pensions and infrastructure adjusted upwards to a pushy 7-8 percent growth economy.

Suddenly PPK shot up to 10 percent, then 14 percent. Now he’s up in the 17-18 percent league with one poll putting him second behind Humala.

Humala, starting as a cloudy has-been, has more than doubled his early-days polling. But unlike PPK he is no dark horse. In 2006, he came within a few points of becoming president of Peru, wearing a red T-shirt and openly fawning on Chavez, then as now the only important re-creation of Latin America’s bad old 1970s and 1980s of muddled stagflation and bully-boy caudillos.

For this election Humala has put on a coat and tie. He refuses to answer questions about his published Chavez-like program. the familiar, dreaded paraphernalia of up-the-workers cant. His brother Ulysses has created a stir by going public with a description of him as a little-Hitler dictator.

Another brother, Antauro, a cashiered army major, has been in jail the last six years for leading a paramilitary gang in an attack, which Antauro says Ollanta planned, on a provincial police station that killed four unarmed policemen.

In the 1990s, Ollanta led an army mutiny against Fujimori in the mountains of the far south.

His rabid anti-Chilean position connects with a thick top-to-bottom atavistic seam in Peru’s often-moody psyche. This appeals especially to Peru’s grouse-patch millions, and not just out in the sticks: Humala is as strong in Lima as PPK.

A wider xenophobia, typical of elections everywhere, has slimed its way selectively through the campaign. Now that he might win, Kuczynski has been attacked ferociously by Toledo and Humala for having a U.S. passport, acquired in 1999 — Kuczynski’s wife Nancy is from Wisconsin — with, therefore, clear conflict-of-interest issues. PPK replied, variously, that Toledo might have thought of this when he made PPK his Premier in 2005 and that he was relinquishing his U.S. passport anyway. In a TV debate on Sunday, Toledo, who lives in Palo Alto, Calif., and whose acid-tongued wife, Eliane, is a Belgian Zionist, referred to PPK as “Mister Kuczynski” as if they’d never spent hundreds of high-powered hours together running the country.

PPK was born in Lima in 1938, his parents refugees from Hitler. His mother was a cousin of Jean-Luc Godard, the French cineaste and his father Max was a Berlin-born medic who founded a hospital for lepers in Iquitos and, in effect, eradicated leprosy from Peru. He was also active in the high country of Cusco and Puno as a doctor. PPK has photos of Dr Max and himself as a kid in the backwoods of Peru in the 1940s. Max even spent the best part of a year in a Lima jail as a political prisoner under the dictator General Odria, in 1948. Max sent Pedro Pablo to Rosall, a tough boarding school in northern England, from where he won a scholarship at the age of 17 to Exeter College, Oxford A few days ago PPK, campaigning in San Cosme, a desperate Lima slum, ran into an old man, a former leper rescued more than half a century ago by Max. It was, as can be imagined, an emotional moment.

PPK, never a shrinking violet, has developed a relaxed-but-quicksilver, folksy-but-serious TV and campaign-stump style. To his followers he is way and ahead the best potential president that Peru could want. He fits in today, too, to a current that has seen Ricardo Martinelli in Panama and Sebastian Piñera in Chile, both tip-top business figures, leading lick-things-into-shape governments.

But Humala, too, represents a well-established presence: Chavez in Caracas, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador, Ortega in Nicaragua, even the Kirchners in Argentina.

ENDS, as usual, we know not where.

Published April 5, 2011, by the Peruvian Times

Nick Asheshov is a Director of The Machu Picchu Train Co., Urubamba.
A veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur, he was editor of the Peruvian Times from 1969 to 1990.
This report was prepared specially for the Peruvian Times.

Op-Ed: Observations on the Election Results

Dec21

“The coming years will for sure compound this as the voting tsunami lines the pockets of a few, but salts the wells of families all over Peru.”

By Nicholas Asheshov

Here are some immediate technical observations on the knife-edge victory of Ollanta Humala.

Keiko Fujimori’s people fatally misjudged the final two or three weeks of an inordinately long campaign. The polls show well enough that if the election had been in mid-May, Keiko would have been first past the post. Keiko’s kitchen cabinet, led by Jaime Yoshiyama, a first-class minister in her fathers first administration (1990-92), were so self-confident that they refused to broaden out and form a coalition. They thought they could go it alone.As President Garcia told associates: “They’re close, much too close,” — son muy cerrados. Once Keiko had got into the second slot of a two-person contest, she should immediately have formed a governing coalition pulling together the all-over the-shop center-right, led by PPK. In the first-round campaign Keiko had said repeatedly that she would form alliances once into Round Two. She did not do so, and lost the election because of it.

No question but that the heavy-metal support of Mario Vargas Llosa and other big names, including Toledo, persuaded the hundreds of thousands of doubters that Ollanta Humala is, after all a decent middle-of-the-road fellow who just wants a better deal for the poor.Over the past two or three weeks the TV and leading newspapers have published accusations and prima facie evidence that Humala should be investigated for witness-tampering on his own human-rights violations, gross breaches of the electoral finance regulations, foreign financing (Venezuela) of his campaign, tax-dodging, and a handful of other breaches of the law – according to the media.Whether or not these are reasonable cases, or just last-minute electoral campaigning by the anti-Humala people, we will now never know. Whatever, these doubts, as presented in the media, made little or no difference. What seemed often like a broadside campaign against Humala had either no impact, or not enough to make a difference.

The polls, led by CPI, Datum, Ipsos-Apoyo, seem to have done their best. But in an electorate that includes stone-age Indians and families on the Forbes list, the polls in fact could only reflect what people were thinking and could not predict accurately beyond a few days. In the middle of last week, for instance, both Datum and Apoyo had Keiko just ahead, but by Saturday Apoyo was sending its expensive banking clients clear and accurate predictions of a clear Humala victory. But this was after the markets had closed for the week.

The most disconcerting part of this scrappy match continues to be the complete dis-articulation of the center-right, as represented by PPK, Toledo and Castañeda. In November PPK went privately to Toledo to try to forge a deal under which PPK and Toledo would together contest the election. Toledo would hear none of it, and that was that. Toledo, a low-achiever president, proved to be a hopeless campaigner, despite heavy financing and his once-30% imploded on voting day to 15%-odd.PPK was clearly, of all the candidates, the one most capable of running a country in the 21st century. He was unable, however, to raise the cash needed for a hard-run campaign against a well-financed field. Both Keiko and Humala had plenty of cash but PPK, known personally of course to every banker and leading businessman in the country, had to finance his effort out of his own pocket.The kind of money involved might have been $3 million, perhaps $5 million. More than a hundred times that was wiped off the value of quoted shares in five minutes on Monday, and much more in other values. The coming years will for sure compound this as, the voting tsunami lines the pockets of a few, but salts the wells of families all over Peru.

Today’s Economic backdrop:

Prices on the Lima stock market collapsed at the open Monday in response to the preliminary results of the voting on Sunday and, following down-the-limit procedures, was closed for a couple of hours. When it reopened the indexes were down around 12%. Peru-related shares on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE instantly reflected the negative view of the business community by sinking strongly and by midday Banco de Credito/Credicorp, BAP, shares were down 14% to 87, while the Peru Investment Fund, EPU was down 12% at 38.50.
Earlier this year BAP had been at 120 and EPU at 50, so both have lost around one-quarter of their value so far this year.
Peru stocks continued to fall in afternoon trading on the NYSE. BAP was nearly 20% down on the day at 82. This meant a loss to shareholders just on Monday of well over $2,000 million, two billion, dollars.

EPU, the Peruvian investment fund, at 37.50, had lost a face value of around $500mn for the day.

Total face-value looses on publicly-traded shares were in excess of $6,000 million, six billion dollars.

Published June 6, 2011 by Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES

Business is betting that Keiko will be first past the post in a photo-finish

Dec21

By Nicholas Asheshov

If the secret polls are right, and the stock market, which shot sharply up seven points on Thursday, clearly thinks they are, Keiko Fujimori will squeak past Ollanta Humala to win the run-off election on Sunday June 5 and become president as of July 28, 2011 through 2016.

As Keiko-backers see things, there was a nasty moment, polls-wise, over last week-end and at the beginning of the week when Datum’s three-point lead for Keiko, announced Sunday, slid to just a sliver and headed south.

Two or three weeks ago the tight-knit Keiko squad had been confident of a safe though perhaps not solid victory. But reacting with a touch of panic, a word used by one of her advisors, to the week-end slouch in the polls, Keiko rallied the troops, and on Thursday morning the TV programs showed Keiko wheeling out Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Hernando de Soto, Mercedes Araoz, Maximo San Roman, Luis Castañeda and others –the solid, as they themselves see it, capable Center-Right. Perhaps a bit of a muddled middle, but that is a characteristic of the hard-core center everywhere.

On Thursday evening PPK was the key-note speaker, apart from Keiko herself. He had got 18+% of the votes in the first round on April 10, behind Keiko’s 23.5% and Thursday’s collection of anti-Humala worthies turned this into a pro-Keiko governing alliance.

Humala, a dangerous far-left fascist-montesinista, as Gustavo Gorriti and Alvaro Vargas Llosa among others, called him in the last election, is of course also seeking the votes of the same people of which there are surely now few. The polls, the TV shows and the newspapers show a country passionately divided down the middle into anti-Humalas and anti-Keikos.

The one-half of the country that will vote for Keiko on Sunday see Humala as a re-run of the blundering statists of the 1970s, here and elsewhere, and their re-runs in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina today.

The Lima intellectuals, the Caviars, led noisily today by the died-in-the-wool Thatcherite Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who treated Humala as an untouchable in 2006 and, in fact, till just a few weeks ago, today bill him as the last rampart of democracy against a reprise of the bad old ’90s when bullying kleptocrats, with Alberto Fujimori as president, cut a vicious swathe through Lima. Keiko has become today’s untouchable.

Keiko and her people say they will be the first to steer clear of any new version of closed-door corruption. They say that Keiko, 36, is first of all an unusually, perhaps unexpectedly capable, decisive administrator with five years as a congresswoman on her CV. Certainly her campaign stump style has been as polished and silver-tongued as anyone’s.

Quite sharp, too: she told Humala on the TV to go and talk it over with her dad in jail if he wanted to complain about the old days. She easily trounced the gloomily confused zoot-suited “Comandante” Humala in a last-ditch TV face-to-face on Sunday evening, and this was reflected in the poll figures used by the bankers and stock-brokers who came back to the market in mid-week.

Money talks as clearly here as elsewhere and what the market is saying is that it expects from a Fujimori government all the good things and more that it got from Alberto Fujimori 1990-95 in the way of pro-business, pro-growth legislation and non-bloated administration.

This may not have been such a many-splendored thing but it was so much better than the economic nonsense of the previous 30 years that it stands out as Peru’s first 15 minutes of flame.

Other effects are flowering a decade and more later. Indices of poverty have come down sharply for millions of campesinos, according to studies being produced regularly by Richard Webb’s Instituto del Peru.

It was Fujimori I who introduced privatization, more sensible tax codes and up-graded public works –roads, electrification, schools. The follow-up Toledo (2001-6) and Garcia (2006-11) administrations have bumbled through along these same lines, backed by record copper, gold, silver and other metals prices. This has come together with an international you-can’t-go-wrong easy money financial market.

This international bounty is a far cry from Fujimori 2 (1995-2001) and, of course, from Garcia I (1985-90). And it will certainly too, be a distance from the shortening of commodity prices, the increase in inflation, the fall of the dollar that many bankers and businessmen are expecting for fasten-your-belts 2012+.

This is not the time, the Keiko people say, to be fooling around with state-run experiments that have never worked outside Northern Europe. This is not just a question of political culture. The Scandinavian model needs a tradition of administrators and, with it, a ton of real money.

This would not be the case with the motley crew of up-the-workers political drifters who have wandered into the Humala camp. Been there, done that.

This is what Keiko Inc has been trying to get across these past few months without, a la peruana, actually saying so. The code for this is: We Must Abolish Poverty. Keiko says, Grow out of poverty. Humala says, Take it, Redistribute.

The juxtapositions of prominent names on both sides shimmered through the social pyramid as mobs sacked downtown Puno, including an army barracks, customs warehouses and the tax office. “Humalists in Terror Infierno” said one headline. It was so bad that it looked as though Puno, with 800,000 voters, would not vote on Sunday. But things have calmed down for the moment because most of these votes are for Humala.

On a machete-edge call like Sunday’s, those votes will all count.

It has been an undistinguished campaign, these past several weeks. Humala has focused on the inglorious past, and Keiko on a don’t-rock-the-canoe future. There has been no talk, excepting earlier from PPK, of Peru in a world where Peruvians are young, unlike the Chinese and Europeans, nor of nano-technology, genetics and climate change, of viral pandemics and the fall-out from Moslem arcs-of-instabilit.

Neither of the candidates has made any promise to reform the judicial system root-and-branch and both have solid reasons for reticence even though all the voters understand that this is a top priority. Humala has been financed illegally and almost openly by millions of dollars in suitcases from Col. Chavez in Caracas, and he is facing witness-tampering and torture court cases, and he has a brother doing a 25-year stretch for political murders which Ollanta himself instigated, according to electronic taps, now public. Meanwhile Keiko has a father also doing 25 years for human rights violations, with scores of fin-de-siecle generals and ministers also behind bars.

Looking a month or three into the future one of Peru’s top business figures warns of big problems in the Congress for whoever is president, and indeed some new congressmen have already been migrating from the party for which they were elected –for instance Yehude Simon, a former PM, has switched from PPK to Humala.

But it is the overall quality of the new membership that has the business leader worried. He says: “Compared with the incoming 2011-16) Congress, we will look back on the present (2005-2011) Congress as if it had been the classic Greek agora of Socrates and Plato.”

Published June 3, 2011 by Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES

Nicholas Asheshov

Country Notes from Urubamba, Peru

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OP-ED – The 2011 Election: Facing a leap back to the bad old days

Op-Ed: Observations on the Election Results

“The coming years will for sure compound this as the voting tsunami lines the pockets of a few, but salts the wells of families all over Peru.”

Published June 6, 2011 by Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES

Business is betting that Keiko will be first past the post in a photo-finish