I'm John Batchel. The New World Report with Professor Abenalis, U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.

We march to the sound of voting.

Takes us immediately to Peru, an interim president chosen, pending the final election in the summer of 2026 in July.

Professor, a very good day to you. Peru is a troubled country

for many years now, and I date the beginning of the crisis before the COVID pandemic,

but COVID hit it very hard. It had a number of presidents. The turnover was almost monthly.

It is now going through the same cycle of finding a president with two of them, one, two of them, detained for years now, for one of them, Castillo.

And the interim vice president, then becoming the interim president also jailed.

So we have great difficulties within the governing apparatus.

We also have a country that is intertwined with Chinese investment, a very large port,

a deep water port built entirely with the money and prestige of Costco,

a major company in China.

And as I last understood it, Costco controls the port, Peru does not.

All of that adds up to, is this a good day that the interim president is chosen?

And what does this mean for the July

vote? Good day to you, Evan. Good day to you, John. Well, as you point out, the election of

Peru's new interim president, Dr. Jose Maria Balkasar, he will be the eighth president that Peru

has had in eight years. And so, as you alluded to, that reflects a

combination of different problems. Part of it is endemic corruption, which is tainted a number of

different presidents in the past. And another part of it is the constitutional system, which

essentially allows the Peruvian Congress to either remove by censure or removed by impeachment, various different Peruvian

presidents. That's happened, again, multiple times. Without going through the entire recent history,

...