Alejandro Toledo

Alejandro Toledo (born March 28, 1946, Cabana, Peru) is a Peruvian economist who served as president of Peru (2001–06). He was the country’s first democratically elected president of indigenous ancestry. He is known fondly by his supporters as “El Cholo” (“The Indian”).

Toledo was the son of impoverished Quechuan farmers and grew up shining shoes on the northern coast in the city of Chimbote. An academic scholarship took him to study in the United States at the University of San Francisco, where he earned a B.S. in 1970. After earning two master’s degrees, in economics of human resources (1971) and economics (1972) from Stanford University, he worked in international economics at the United Nations (1976–78, 1989) and the World Bank (1979–81). He returned to Peru in 1981 and became the social policy adviser to Labour Minister Alfonso Grados. While earning a Ph.D. (1993) in economics of human resources at Stanford, Toledo was a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Institute for International Development. In 1998 he became director of international affairs at the Graduate School of Business Administration (Escuela de Administración de Negocios para Graduados; ESAN) in Lima.

Toledo’s first run for the presidency under the centrist Perú Posible (Peru Possible) party in the 1995 elections garnered him only 3 percent of the vote, and Alberto Fujimori took the office. Toledo led the same party in the 2000 presidential race. This time, the smear tactics used by the Fujimori camp against the other candidates unwittingly paved the way for Toledo. Toledo withdrew from the runoff in protest and launched a series of popular demonstrations against Fujimori’s victory. After a bribery scandal toppled Fujimori’s government, Toledo led the pack of new candidates for the April 2001 elections and won 36.5 percent of the vote in the first round.

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Toledo’s image had been marred somewhat by allegations of infidelity, immoral behaviour, and cocaine use in the late 1990s. He also had a falling out with his campaign adviser Álvaro Vargas Llosa (son of the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who lost the 1990 presidential race to Fujimori), who began to advocate blank ballots to protest the candidacies of both Toledo and former president Alan García Pérez. On the positive side, Toledo was aided by his daughter and his wife, the anthropologist Eliane Karp, who gave campaign speeches in the Quechuan language. In the second round of voting, on June 3, 2001, Toledo took 53.1 percent of the vote. (Fewer than 3 percent of the ballots were blank.) He was sworn in as president on July 28. In his inaugural speech, Toledo promised to create new jobs, partly by increasing tourism, and to fight corruption, narcotics trafficking, and human rights abuses—in short, “to be the president of all Peruvians and of all races.”

During his term the Peruvian economy grew and inflation nearly disappeared, but unemployment decreased only slightly. His chief supporters, mainly those of Quechuan ancestry, blamed him for not doing enough to create more jobs. His support dwindled even more after his administration was tainted by scandal, and he was criticized for spending too lavishly and for awarding himself the highest salary of any Latin American leader at the time. When he refused to recognize a teenage daughter born out of wedlock, there were calls for his ouster. He stayed in office, however, and during his last six months he managed to stimulate the economy through free trade policies. Constitutionally barred from seeking another term, Toledo stepped down on July 28, 2006.

After leaving the presidency, Toledo accepted a faculty position at ESAN teaching finance, accounting, and economics. From 2006 to 2008 he was on leave as a visiting fellow at Stanford University. He also founded the Lima-based think tank Global Center for Development and Democracy, which addresses issues of democracy, economic growth, and social inclusion.

In 2013 Toledo became the target of investigations into the source of his family’s wealth, though suspicions that it was ill-gotten remained unproved several years later. In 2016 Toledo ran for president again but fared badly. Not only did he finish eighth in the crowded field, but Perú Posible failed to reach the 5 percent threshold necessary for it to remain an official political party. Matters turned from bad to worse for Toledo in February 2017, when his arrest was ordered after he was implicated in an influence-peddling scandal that grew out of an investigation related to Brazil’s Petrobras scandal. It was alleged that during his tenure as president Toledo had received some $20 million in bribes from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht in exchange for granting a billion-dollar-plus contract to build a highway between Brazil and Peru. Toledo fled Peru and settled in California. In 2018 Peru filed an extradition request, and the following year he was arrested by U.S. law-enforcement officers. Though he was initially jailed while he fought extradition, in 2020 Toledo was released on bail because of the COVID-19 pandemic and placed under house arrest.

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