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Pedro Sánchez (for it is he)

Linked here is an interview in today’s El Comercio with Peru’s Minister of Energy and Mines, Pedro Sánchez. It’s also and example of why I read El Comercio so much, because despite the fact the media channel is mind-numbingly sycophantic towards its government (and especially this time round as APRA will always return favours) it also gets to be the invited source when the gov’t wants to send out a message. Today we get the Twobreakfasts admin wanting to send one of those messages to those at Renco about Doe Run Peru (DRP) at La Oroya, currently totally shut down because no miner is stupid enough to send their concentrates there for smelting cos they know they won’t get paid. So today we get a minister interviewed by a Comercio dude.

The interview is very good in fact, and if you know how to read into what’s being said here what we have is Peru telling Ira Rennert “you either put up or you lose the deal, cos this goes no further.” If there’s one line that symbolizes this it’s the last Q&A (translated here):

El Comercio: However the mining company (i.e, DRP) says it’s impossible for it to get financing funds (to comply with its obligations).

Pedro Sánchez: Doe Run is a private company. It seems not to understand this because it’s asking all the world to help it out, but it won’t aloow itself to be helped.”

Now that might not sound too polemic to your ears, kindly lector of IKN, but from the soft-spoken and calm mouth of Pedro Sánchez (who, it has to said, is a pretty good minister in the Twobreakfasts gov’t…a rare thing indeed) is a very clear message…perhaps reading the whole interview will give you a better idea but you’ll need to be hispanically unchallenged for the whole caboodle. By the way, the report was smart enough to pick up on this last Q&A and use it as his headline, too.

So we’re now at the totally predictable endgame at DRP. Even the laggards in the higher ends of power have realized they’ve been played all this time by the despicable Rennert. I’ll be the one cheering if they do the courageous thing, namely expropriate DRP and make it a state run company.