Prominent Peruvian Jew Ephraim Goldenberg.

Martin Quispe Mayta, the 38-year-old founder of the Andean National Socialism Movement, is posing a threat to Peru’s Jewish community as he is attempting to gather enough signatures for his  group to be recognized as political party in Peru. Echoing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions centuries ago, the group openly advocates for a Jewish expulsion, according to the London Guardian.

With a population of 30 million people, approximately 3,000 Jews make up a miniscule percentage of the country’s citizens as their numbers continue to dwindle due to assimilation, intermarriage, and emigration to other countries in South America. The Peruvian Jewish community includes the country’s indigenous populations as well as those of European, Middle Eastern, and North African descent, most of whom immigrated to Peru during the nineteenth century.

In modern times, Jews in Peru have been well represented and have even been appointed to positions of power, included among them is finance minister and prime minister Efraim Goldenberg Schreiber, who served during the 1990s, Peru’s Jewish first lady Eliane Karp and second vice president David Waisman.

A rigidly class-based society, Peru’s political and economic leadership is controlled by the white minority while the indigenous Peruvians are considered to be the lowest socioeconomic caste. Quispe Mayta, who has Inca roots as the son of migrants from the Andes, blames the Jews for his family’s poverty “because the Jews controlled the world economy,” he said.

An admirer of Henry Ford’s antisemitic book “The International Jew” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” since his teens, Quispe Mayta has espoused a number of  far-fetched theories which he claims uncover the Jewish roots of a range of historical figures, including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Fidel Castro, Che Gueva, and even the leader of Peru’s Shining Path terrorist group, Abimael Guzman. But his most outrageous conspiracy theory of all is that Francisco Pizarro – the Spanish conquistador who ferociously conquered Peru, was Jewish.

“The Jew Pizarro and his band of genocidal Jews killed millions of native Peruvians in their mission to possess our gold,” he stated as fact.

The Jewish Association of Peru denounced and refuted Quispe Mayta’s “open expression of anti-Semitic racism” and had “appealed to authorities to take the necessary measures to halt the incitement to racial and religious hatred”.

This is not the first time Peru’s Jewish population has been under threat. According to a statement made in late 2005 by Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, the chief rabbi of Lima’s largest synagogue, anti-Semitism and attacks from Neo-Nazi groups were on the rise.