Peru's Minister of Energy and Mines, Ángelo Alfaro Lombardi has resigned following a public accusation of sexual assault by a woman who alleges she was abused by him when she was 16 years old, an incident she says resulted in a pregnancy. 

The resignation, confirmed by the Presidency on March 22, came despite the government having reaffirmed Alfaro's position just days earlier, exposing the fragility of political accountability mechanisms under the administration of interim President José María Balcázar.

The accuser, Jennifer Canani Panduro, gave testimony to Willax TV in which she described being drugged and rendered unconscious at a social gathering in Pucallpa in 2000, before waking in Alfaro's bed with no memory of the intervening period. She was, at the time, a fifth-year secondary school student. Alfaro, then 47, was serving in a senior managerial role at Electro Ucayali, the regional electricity company. 

Canani stated that when she and her mother attempted to file a formal police complaint at the Coronel Portillo station in Pucallpa, officers declined to register the case — a pattern common in Peruvian police stations, particularly 25 years ago. Alfaro subsequently acknowledged paternity of the child, now 25 and resident in Australia.

Alfaro's public response was contradictory and, by any measure, politically damaging. In an initial written statement, he denied the allegations entirely, attributed them to financial motivations on the part of his former partner, and announced his intention to file a counter-complaint for defamation and blackmail. He claimed to hold chat-message evidence in which Canani allegedly acknowledged receiving monetary compensation and a rental property in exchange for making the accusations. 

Yet in a subsequent television interview on Cuarto Poder, conducted after his resignation, Alfaro shifted ground markedly — conceding that a relationship had in fact occurred and characterising it as consensual. "My only sin has been falling in love," he said, adding that the relationship had proceeded with her family's knowledge. The rhetorical pivot from categorical denial to romantic justification did little to arrest the reputational collapse.

Penal lawyers consulted by El Comercio were unequivocal that the allegations carry sufficient legal weight to compel a prosecutorial investigation. Carlos Caro, a criminal law specialist, noted that the existence of a child born from the encounter constitutes an evidential element — not conclusive in itself, but legally significant. He identified multiple applicable provisions of the Peruvian Penal Code: Article 170 (rape through violence or intimidation), Article 171 (rendering the victim incapacitated through intoxication), and Article 172 (exploiting pre-existing incapacitation). 

Luis Gutiérrez Oliva, another criminal law practitioner, emphasised that the child's existence confirms sexual intercourse occurred; the prosecutorial question is whether consent — impossible in any meaningful legal sense given the victim's age and alleged state — was present. 

Both specialists cautioned that the 26-year time elapsed since the alleged offence, flagged by the Supreme Court in Recurso de Nulidad 429-2020 as a credibility consideration, represents a significant procedural obstacle, making corroborating witness testimony and psychological evaluations particularly critical.

Balcázar's initial handling of the matter drew sharp criticism. After Canani's interview aired, the president publicly defended Alfaro, stating he would only remove him upon a "firm sentence" — an extraordinary threshold that appeared to conflate criminal conviction with the political and ethical standards expected of cabinet ministers. 

Balcázar's own record on the subject is independently damaging. During a 2023 congressional debate on legislation to prohibit child marriage, the then-legislator stated that "sexual relations at an early age benefit the psychological future of women" and argued that "in the Civil Code, from 14 years upwards there is no impediment." 

When challenged on those remarks following his assumption of the presidency, Balcázar declined to retract them, instead accusing critics of distortion — describing those who raised the issue as "perverse people who have never been able to demonstrate the contrary" — before adding, with evident self-satisfaction, that he was "a minimally cultured man" with "a firm personality." The remarks, unrebuked and unretracted, cast his decision to shield Alfaro pending a criminal conviction in a rather more deliberate light.

The resignation does not resolve Alfaro's ministerial legacy on its own terms. His tenure at the Ministry of Energy and Mines coincided with a severe disruption to natural gas supply from the Camisea field, caused by a rupture in the Transportadora de Gas del Perú (TGP) pipeline. The crisis laid bare Peru's structural dependence on a single gas corridor, triggering a forced transition to costlier diesel and petrol alternatives across industrial, electricity generation, and transport sectors, with attendant inflationary pressure. 

Alfaro's management was broadly characterised as competent within the constraints of emergency response — prioritising critical sector allocation and coordinating with energy regulators — but his tenure produced no discernible framework for long-term infrastructure redundancy, diversification of the energy matrix, or resolution of Petroperú's chronic financial instability. The energy crisis endures, but the minister does not.