Alejandro Toledo

Alejandro Toledo Manrique (born 28 March 1946) is the current president of Peru. He was elected in 2001, after leading the opposition against the dictatorial and deeply corrupt Alberto Fujimori, president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. Toledo is married to the Belgian anthropologist Eliane Karp.

Table of contents

1 Early years 2 Professional Career 3 Political Career 4 The Toledo presidency

Early years

Toledo was one of sixteen children of a family of Indian campesinos in the small town of Cabana, province of Pallasca, department of Ancash. He grew up in Chimbote, city on the Peruvian northern coast. His father was a bricklayer and his mother was a fishmonger. As a child, he worked as a shoeshine boy.

Toledo studied at the local state school G.U.E. San Pedro. At age 16, with the guidance of members of the Peace Corps, Toledo enrolled at the San Francisco State University on a one-year scholarship. He completed his Bachelor's degree in economics by obtaining a partial soccer scholarship and working part-time pumping gas. Later on, he completed his Ph.D in economics and human resources at Stanford University.

Professional Career

During the past 20 years, Toledo has worked as a consultant for various international organizations, including the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCDE). He has also been a regular professor at ESAN, Peru's leading Business School. From 1991 to 1994, he was an affiliated researcher in the field of international development at the Harvard Institute for International Development. Toledo was also guest professor at the University of Waseda and the Japan Foundation in Tokyo.

Among Toledo's publications are works on economic growth and on structural reforms. However, his latest book, Las Cartas sobre la Mesa, describes his political career which led him to found the party Peru Possible.

Political Career

Toledo entered politics as an independent candidate for the presidency in 1995, election in which Alberto Fujimori was re-elected. He founded the Peru Possible party in 1999 and again declared himself a candidate, for the 2000 elections. Despite a constitutional prohibition to a third term, Fujimori ran again in 2000, defeating Toledo, amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud. Toledo petitioned to have the election annuled, but in November, 2000, amid growing allegations of fraude and corruption within his administration, Fujimori fled to Japan, where he claimed Japanese citizenship.

After the fall of Fujimori, the president of the Peruvian Congress, Valentin Paniagua, became interim president and called for new elections on May 29, 2001. Toledo won after a close run-off election with former president Alan García. His margin of victory was slim (52.5% vs 47.5%) considering Garcia's abysmal track record as a left-wing populist president from 1985 to 1990. Toledo's inauguration was July 28, 2001.

The Toledo presidency

Since coming to power, the Toledo administration has been plagued by ongoing civil unrest and civic discontent, due primarily to the continuing stagnation of the Peruvian economy, which the current government's staunchly free-market, neoliberal economic policies have failed to assuage. In his electoral campaigns, Toledo promised "a break with the past", in particular with the deeply corrupt "cronyism" and patronage of the Fujimori regime. But many of the rank and file of Peru Possible joined the party with the hope of a job, and to stifle discontent within the ranks Toledo has been forced to open civil-service positions to party members, an obvious step backward.

In June, 2002, the southern city of Arequipa was paralyzed for a week by strikes and riots in protest of the privatization of two regional electricity generating plants, the largest civil unrest in Peru for fifty years. The government had underestimate local resistance and was forced in the end to rescind the privatizations. The affair sent a clear message to the Toledo administration that its economic policies are highly unpopular; Peru remains mired in recession, with more than fifty percent of the population living in poverty, fifteen percent in extreme poverty.