El Congreso de Perú ha aprobado, con 63 votos a favor y 34 en contra, declarar persona non grata a la presidenta de México, Claudia Sheinbaum. El país sudamericano agudiza de esta manera el rompimiento de relaciones que adoptó de manera unilateral el lunes. El conflicto se deriva de la decisión de las autoridades mexicanas de otorgar el asilo en su embajada en Lima a Betssy Chávez, la ex primera ministra de Pedro Castillo. El Gobierno mexicano defendió la protección asegurando que Chávez es una perseguida política y subrayando que el asilo no puede ser considerado un gesto inamistoso entre naciones, de acuerdo a la Organización de Naciones Unidas (ONU).

México ha rechazado la medida adoptada por el Legislativo peruano. “Está motivada por planteamientos falsos”, aseguró la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) mediante un comunicado. “México no ha intervenido de modo alguno en los asuntos internos del Perú, fiel a sus principios normativos de política exterior y a su sólida tradición diplomática”, añade el documento, que insiste en que el asilo de Chávez fue decidido únicamente en “estricto apego al derecho internacional”.

El conflicto entre ambas naciones viene de tiempo atrás. La Comisión de Relaciones Exteriores del Congreso peruano propuso en septiembre pasado declarar a Sheinbaum persona non grata por no rechazar la intentona golpista de Castillo y por haber abogado por la excarcelación de quien fue mandatario entre 2021 y 2022. Por aquellos días, además, la presidenta mexicana recibió en Palacio Nacional a Guido Croxatto, el abogado de Castillo. La iniciativa legislativo no prosperó entonces, pues no contó con los votos necesarios para llegar al pleno. Hoy sí lo consiguió gracias al clima de tensión que han alcanzado ambas naciones.

Durante la sesión de este jueves, Ernesto Bustamante, el vicepresidente de la Comisión de Relaciones Exteriores, descalificó a Sheinbaum, acusándola de tener una estrecha relación con el narcotráfico. “Nosotros no podemos permitir que una persona así, que está en la cama con el narcotráfico y que distrae a su pueblo de los verdaderos problemas a los que se debería acometer, se meta en problemas peruanos. A nosotros solamente nos corresponde decidir qué hacer con Betssy Chávez o con algún otro congresista que quiera asilarse en alguna embajada”, atacó Bustamante.

Los problemas entre México y Perú se avivaron este lunes, cuando el Estado mexicano concedió el asilo a Chávez, acusada en su país por ser una de las autoras del quiebre democrático. La política estuvo en prisión preventiva hasta hace algunas semanas y se ausentó en las más recientes audiencias que se llevan en su contra por el delito de conspiración. Su defensa argumentó que Chávez tenía problemas de salud, pero de manera sorpresiva se dirigió a la embajada mexicana. Desde entonces se encuentra en la casona en el distrito de San Isidro a la espera de que el Estado peruano le entregue el salvoconducto para viajar a México, el cual podría llegar en las próximas horas.

Bustamante, parlamentario de Fuerza Popular, la agrupación política liderada por los herederos de Alberto Fujimori, señaló en otro momento del debate parlamentario que la postura de México “ha traspasado los límites del respeto mutuo y la soberanía” desde el mandato de Andrés Manuel López Obrador. El legislador subrayó el fuerte “sesgo ideológico” del expresidente mexicano, quien desconoció la investidura de Dina Boluarte y se negó a entregarle la presidencia pro-tempore de la Alianza del Pacífico. En el caso de Sheinbaum, Bustamante subrayó que ha “defendido reiteradamente a (Pedro) Castillo como si realmente fuera el actual legítimo presidente del Perú”.

Algunos congresistas como Ruth Luque, del Bloque Democrático Popular, han criticado la medida en contra de Sheinbaum y han defendido la decisión del Estado mexicano de asilar a Betssy Chávez. “Prefieren destinarle tiempo para seguir desgastando la relación política con un país que puede otorgarle asilo en el marco del derecho internacional, pero no se quiere abordar el uso de una cámara del Congreso para un acto de proselitismo político”, dijo en referencia a un mitin donde Keiko Fujimori anunció su candidatura a las elecciones generales de 2026, y se utilizó recursos del Estado para cubrir el evento.

Bajo el lema de “¡El Perú se respeta!”, la cuenta oficial del Congreso ha informado en sus redes sociales la declaración de persona non grata de la presidenta de México. No es la primera gobernante con la que Perú tiene fricciones en el último tiempo. En el 2023, durante el mandato de Dina Boluarte, se declaró persona non grata a Gustavo Petro y precisamente a Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Ambos mostraron una oposición férrea contra Boluarte.

Su sucesor José Jerí, quien tiene menos de un mes en el cargo después de haber asumido por ser el presidente del Congreso, continúa en la misma ruta. “Nosotros tampoco estábamos de acuerdo cuando ella se expresaba respecto a asuntos internos de nuestro país, y creo que hemos mantenido la cordialidad hasta donde se pudo”, declaró hace poco sobre la posición de Sheinbaum. Sobre el salvoconducto que precisa Betssy Chávez para viajar a México, Jerí ha sido esquivo. “Es un tema que estamos analizando. Existe la necesidad de hacer los estudios jurídicos correspondientes para proceder a una respuesta”. No obstante, se comenta que el Estado peruano lo otorgará en las próximas horas.

Alongside the legions, the miliaria marked the power of the Roman Empire. Placed every mille passus or Roman mile (1,478.5 meters), these cylindrical or rectangular stone markers punctuated the Roman roads, much as kilometer posts do on highways today.

A large group of researchers has turned to the latest technology to delve into historical and archaeological records in order to reconstruct the road map from 2,000 years ago. What they discovered is that it was far more extensive — almost twice as large as previously believed. They also found that very little of its original layout remains. The results of their work, published in Scientific Data, have been compiled and made publicly available on Itiner-e, a digital atlas of the roads that began or ended in Rome.

“When you walk along a sunken path worn down by time and travelers, people still say, ‘this used to be a Roman road,’ but the Romans built them to last,” says Pau de Soto, of the Archaeology Research Group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and lead author of this impressive study. “Another misconception we wanted to dispel is that they were paved with stone slabs, like the Via Appia. In fact, they were built in successive layers of gravel, each finer than the last, with the top layer made of compacted fine gravel. That was best for horses, which at the time still didn’t wear horseshoes,” adds the archaeologist.

Like modern roads, they were raised above the surrounding terrain and given a slight slope to drain water. “The first modern roads were built following the Roman model,” the archaeologist notes.

Pau de Soto and some 20 researchers used modern GIS (Geographic Information System) techniques to unearth the layout of the Roman roads. “GIS is the foundation of modern archaeological research,” says the UAB researcher.

They combined historical texts such as the Itinerarium Antonini and the Tabula Peutingeriana — the closest thing to a road map from antiquity — with studies on archaeological sites and books on Roman history. “But we also used 19th- and 20th-century topographic maps, postwar aerial photographs taken by the Americans, and satellite images; GIS allows you to combine data from all these sources and project it onto the terrain,” De Soto adds.

The result of combining so many sources is that, around the year 150 CE — when the Roman Empire was at the height of its expansion, spanning about four million square kilometers (1.5 million square miles) — the network comprised 299,171 kilometers (about 186,000 miles) of roads. This figure adds more than 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) to the 188,555 kilometers (117,000 miles) counted in earlier studies and is equivalent to circling the planet seven times. In Spain alone, the length of Roman roads exceeded 40,000 kilometers (24,850 miles) — twice what had been estimated. At that time there was no radial distribution centered on Madrid, as with modern highways, but from cities like Augusta Emerita (Mérida), the capital of Roman Lusitania, several major routes branched out.

The authors of the new study estimate that one-third of the roads connected the main urban centers, while the remaining two-thirds were secondary routes linking settlements on a local or regional scale. However, they found that there is certainty for only 2.7% of the total mileage. “That’s what still survives or has been excavated in archaeological work,” De Soto explains.

For the vast majority of Roman roads — nearly 90% — there are only traces suggesting where they must have been: “In landscape archaeology we call them fossilized axes, which might be a Roman bridge, remnants of a road at a city’s outskirts, or the discovery of a miliarium,” says De Soto.

Everything indicates that a road must have linked those elements. What GIS does is model the most plausible route between them, taking into account the terrain’s topography — such as a mountain pass or a river crossing. Another 7% of the map’s total is purely hypothetical: if two Roman cities lie close to each other and both have road remains at their exits, it’s reasonable to assume they were once connected by a road.

“The Roman roads—and the transport network as a whole—were absolutely crucial to maintaining the Roman Empire,” says historian Adam Pažout of Aarhus University in Denmark, a coauthor of the study. “The Romans devised an intricate transportation system made up of inns, roadside stations, and relay points for couriers and public officials traveling across Italy and the provinces,” he recalls.

For Pažout, “the roads formed a framework that allowed Roman power to be projected — whether through the army, the law, or administration — and that held the Empire together.”

According to the authors, their work will allow for a better understanding of Rome’s history. Along these roads, millions of people traveled, new ideas and beliefs spread, and Roman legions and merchants moved between the far-flung corners of the three continents that made up the Empire. But these routes — whose immense reach is only now being fully revealed — also helped spread diseases and plagues such as the Antonine smallpox or measles epidemic, and the Justinianic bubonic plague, both of which weakened the Empire. They may even have served as the pathways for successive barbarian invasions.

What remains of the Roman roads, though not many miles in physical length, still forms part of Europe’s framework. As archaeologist Pau de Soto reminds us: “Europe’s urban fabric is a legacy of Rome. Most European cities already existed in Roman times — and were already connected to one another.”

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Zohran Mamdani — a 34-year-old with a degree in African Studies, born in Kampala, the capital of Uganda — will be the next mayor of New York City. He will do so after winning more than 50% of the vote, a remarkable feat. And the list of historic firsts he represents for New York’s mayoralty is long: he will be the first Muslim, the first socialist, and the youngest person to hold the office in more than a century. Yet, despite these firsts, Mamdani also embodies a certain continuity with a lesser-discussed feature of the Democratic Party in recent years: like Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, Mamdani is the child of socialist immigrants.

The socialism of these parents was forged during the revolutionary decades of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s, Obama’s father held a senior position in Kenya’s Ministry of Economics, serving as a self-critical socialist within the economic project led by the charismatic hero of independent Kenya, Tom Mboya. Around the same time, amid the civil rights movement in the United States, Harris’s parents met at a rally of the Afro-American Association. Both went on to earn doctorates: her mother in endocrinology — channeling her political fervor into advancing breast cancer research — and her father in economics, studying to what extent the anti-colonial politics of his native Jamaica could be applied to his adopted country, the United States.

As for Buttigieg’s father, he became the leading philologist of Antonio Gramsci’s work. Even in 2018, when I met him for the first and last time, his constellation of references for understanding contemporary politics was still rooted in the Italy of Pier Paolo Pasolini, autonomism, and the Fiat factory protests.

Mamdani’s parents share a similar political trajectory. His father, a Ugandan like him, arrived in the United States in 1963 on a scholarship for students from East Africa. As a student, he took part in north–south trips organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He later channeled that activism into an academic career focused on the analysis of colonialism, postcolonialism, and minority groups in Africa.

His mother, born in India, developed her political awareness in the street theater of Delhi. Upon arriving in the United States as a student, she also became a filmmaker, directing films that subtly challenged Hollywood prejudices: screenplays shot in foreign working-class neighborhoods, romantic comedies set against historical political backdrops, and casts without white actors.

Unlike other Democrats with socialist parents, Mamdani has not tried to distance himself from his parents’ legacy. Every move he makes on the political chessboard alludes to family politics. His activism against the siege of Gaza — whose importance to his political career has been compared to the role that opposition to the Iraq War played in Obama’s — is directly tied to his father’s anti-colonial critique. His proposals for free childcare, rent freezes, and municipally owned supermarkets echo the many domestic tensions over money that appear in Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and other films by his mother.

To his detractors, all this might sound like the plot of a Houellebecq novel: a charismatic young Muslim politician, a Trojan horse deceiving well-meaning voters, a society unwittingly sliding into decline. But in reality, what it signals is an attempt to build a new coalition that brings together the young, immigrants, workers, debtors, Muslims, students, tenants, and parents — a rainbow coalition that leaves no one behind. Except the billionaires.

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