Empresa Peruana de Servicios Editoriales (Editora Perú)

The Empresa Peruana de Servicios Editoriales, known as Editora Perú, is Peru’s state-owned publishing enterprise. It runs the country’s official media of record: the official daily newspaper El Peruano, which publishes the state’s legal norms and official bulletin alongside news and commentary, and the state news agency Andina. It also operates Servicios Editoriales y Gráficos (Segraf), a state printing operation.

Editora Perú began operations on 12 February 1976. El Peruano is far older, founded by Simón Bolívar on 22 October 1825; it is widely described as the oldest newspaper still in circulation in the Americas, and its nineteenth-century editions (1826 to 1868) are inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register for Latin America and the Caribbean. Andina was created in 1981. The company therefore combines a near two-century-old official gazette with a more modern news agency under a single state enterprise.

Media assets

Publishing: El Peruano

News agency: Andina

Ownership and governance

Editora Perú began operations in 1976 under Decreto Ley N.º 21420, which brought several state newspaper operations, including El Peruano, under one enterprise. In 1981, by Decreto Legislativo N.º 181, it was reconstituted as a state-owned company under private law, organised as a joint-stock company (sociedad anónima) with the name Empresa Peruana de Servicios Editoriales S.A.

The decisive ownership fact is that the Peruvian State is Editora Perú’s sole shareholder. Ownership is held entirely, 100%, by the Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento de la Actividad Empresarial del Estado (FONAFE), the state holding fund attached to the Ministry of Economy and Finance that owns and directs Peru’s state enterprises. The company is governed under Law N.º 27170 and Legislative Decree N.º 1031, subject to FONAFE’s directives and to oversight by the Contraloría General de la República. Its board is appointed through the FONAFE state-enterprise structure, and the board in turn appoints and may remove the general manager who runs the company. As of July 2026, the board was chaired by Hugo David Aguirre Castañeda, with Félix Alberto Paz Quiroz serving as acting general manager and director of journalistic media.

Because ownership, board appointment, and management all run through the state, Editora Perú has no ownership or governance buffer between it and the government of the day. That is the structural basis for its State-Controlled classification.

Source of funding and budget

Editora Perú is formally a commercial state enterprise and books most of its income as sales of goods and services rather than direct budget transfers. Its 2024 annual report shows sales of goods and services of about PEN 88.2m, up from PEN 78.8m in 2022. That revenue is heavily state-linked: public-sector clients accounted for 76% of total billing in 2024, and official publications were the company’s most significant source of income. Its financial dependence is therefore not mainly a subsidy relationship but a legally structured service relationship with the state, in which other public institutions pay to publish laws, regulations, and official notices in El Peruano, a step legally required for those norms to take effect.

That obligation is reinforced by Law N.º 31577 of 2022, which sets deadlines for publishing legislation in El Peruano and prohibits Editora Perú from omitting, refusing, or delaying the publication of official norms. The company’s income is thus tied to its official-gazette function and to state spending rather than to an independent commercial market.

Editorial independence

Editora Perú’s outlets have shown a consistent pattern of favourable coverage of the government of the day. Content analyses conducted for this report in 2021, 2022, and 2024 found that Andina emphasised the president’s achievements while directing criticism largely at opposition parties and former presidents. Andina has published investigative work in the past, including on the Odebrecht corruption scandal that implicated several former presidents and a former presidential candidate, but that scrutiny was applied unevenly across administrations. Managers have described Andina’s role primarily as a channel for distributing official announcements, including an arrangement to carry official judicial content, rather than as a platform for adversarial reporting.

El Peruano has shown similar tendencies, giving favourable space to the sitting government and less room to dissenting voices. The alignment has shifted with each change of administration, tracking the government in power rather than any fixed editorial line, from the Vizcarra period through Pedro Castillo, Dina Boluarte, and the governments that followed. Editora Perú operates under a Code of Ethics that formally commits it to neutrality, impartiality, and pluralism, but the same code requires it to maintain permanent communication channels with state authorities and to accommodate official information requests from the government. No domestic statute or independent mechanism has been identified that would guarantee or verify the editorial independence of its outlets.

AI and digital policy

Editora Perú has pursued digital modernisation of El Peruano and Andina, including digital editions, the electronic official gazette, and AI-supported content workflows. Its 2024 annual report says the company began using artificial intelligence in content dissemination, trained staff in AI tools, and used AI during its APEC coverage to expand distribution in Chinese and Quechua. State Media Monitor found no dedicated editorial AI-governance policy specific to Editora Perú. Peru does have a general AI framework, Law N.º 31814 of 2023 and its implementing regulation approved by Decreto Supremo N.º 115-2025-PCM in September 2025, with phased implementation, but this is a national framework rather than an editorial-independence safeguard specific to the state media.

Classification rationale

Editora Perú is classified State-Controlled because it is wholly owned by the Peruvian State through FONAFE, its board and management are appointed through the state-enterprise structure, and it has no binding editorial firewall or independent oversight mechanism. Its outlets, the official gazette El Peruano and the news agency Andina, consistently favour the government of the day, and its own Code of Ethics obliges it to keep permanent channels open to state authorities. It is an institutional publisher of the state, not an autonomous public-service outlet.

The classification does not turn on which government is in power. It has held across successive administrations, including Pedro Castillo, Dina Boluarte, and the interim governments of José Jerí and José María Balcázar that followed Boluarte’s removal in October 2025 and Jerí’s removal in February 2026. Following the 2026 general elections, Keiko Fujimori of Fuerza Popular was proclaimed winner of the June presidential runoff and is due to take office on 28 July 2026.

July 2026