Watches and watchdogs in Peru
Recently a source told Marco Sifuentes, a journalist from Peru, that on two occasions when he met with Dina Boluarte, the country’s president, she wore a different Rolex. Boluarte has spoken of hailing from a modest background, and didn’t seem likely to have earned enough money in her various government jobs to afford such luxury wristwear. (Rolex prices typically start well into the thousands of dollars.) So Sifuentes asked Ernesto Cabral—a colleague at La Encerrona, a podcast and digital news show that he founded in 2020—to investigate further. Senior officials in Peru “still have Flickr accounts,” Sifuentes told me with a laugh, referring to an image-hosting website founded in 2004. “I knew that because, when I have to produce thumbnails for YouTube, I need high-resolution images.” Cabral went through ten thousand such images of Boluarte—as well as consulting with experts and reviewing documents—and identified fourteen separate watches that appeared on her wrist dating back to her inauguration as a government minister in 2021, including three expensive Rolexes that only appeared after she became president, late in 2022.
As “Rolexgate” blew up into a big story, Boluarte initially didn’t say much.
the scandal has become a huge political liability for Boluarte. Prosecutors initiated a corruption investigation—in the course of which law enforcement officers raided her home and battered down the door—that has since posed questions about her ownership of luxury jewelry and her financial transactions; mainstream outlets have picked up on the story, and Boluarte’s approval rating, already low, now stands in the single digits. None of this sounds especially surprising for a country that recently cycled through six presidents in as many years, where many politicians have been dogged by allegations of corruption.
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