Peru's President-elect Alejandro Toledo will be inaugurated , a year after enduring smear campaigns in a battle against the autocratic regime of ex-President Alberto Fujimori.
Toledo, an economist who overcame poverty to earn a doctorate from Stanford University, said his top priority will be to improve the plight of Peru's poor. He says his preparation for the job started when he was 8, shining shoes in the streets of the northern coast city of Chimbote.
"It was at that age that I earned my first doctorate in economy," he told reporters Friday.
Toledo, 55, became Peru's first freely elected president of Indian descent last month in a close runoff election against former President Alan Garcia.
To secure victory, Toledo promised 2 million new jobs over the next five years, lower taxes to encourage business investment, and 100 percent raises for underpaid teachers, police and health workers.
Fulfilling those goals will be a challenge. He faces pent-up demands for employment in a nation where 50 percent of the people live in poverty and only one in two in the labor force has steady work.
Toledo has never held political office.
He made an unsuccessful presidential run in 1995 and withdrew from a presidential runoff against Fujimori in May, accusing the ex-president of planning to rig the results in a fraud-riddled election.
Fujimori fled in November to Japan, his parents' homeland, where he was granted citizenship as corruption scandals involving his ex-intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, ended his 10-year rule.
Toledo is scheduled to take the presidential sash from provisional President Valentin Paniagua in Peru's Congress. More than a dozen dignitaries plan to attend the ceremony, including 11 Latin American presidents, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.
Many Peruvians, wary after years of Fujimori's demagoguery, were alarmed during this year's campaign when Toledo capitalized on his Indian features and poor background to present himself to Peru's poor in almost Messianic terms.
He beckoned to supporters at rallies with outstretched arms while aides chanted over loudspeakers, "Pachacutec! Pachacutec!" the name of a 15th-century Inca emperor.
"I admire Pachacutec for his capacity to integrate, unite and construct in difficult times," Toledo told radio station Radioprogramas on Friday.
But Toledo has pledged to respect the checks and balances of democracy, while fulfilling the dual promise of a balanced budget and job creation over the next five years.
He has enlisted the help of skilled technocrats to help steer Peru's economy out of its three-year slump, in part by lowering taxes to encourage consumer spending and business investment.
His finance minister is Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former investment banker in the United States with important ties to international investors. Toledo chose as his prime minister Roberto Danino, an expert in international corporate transactions who has worked for years in Washington.
Toledo was born in an isolated village in Peru's central Andes, the eighth of 16 children, seven of whom died in infancy. His family moved to Chimbote in search of a better life when he was 6.
He had to convince his father that allowing him to attend high school was not a waste of time.
Toledo won a scholarship to attend the University of San Francisco with the help of Joel and Nancy Meister, two American Peace Corps volunteers who arrived in Chimbote in 1964.
He went on to earn a master's degree in economics and a doctorate in education from Stanford University.
"Even then he had a lot of charisma and people recognized that he was special," Joel Meister, 60, told The Associated Press. "He was very intelligent and very much concerned about social conditions in Peru."
The Meisters returned to Peru from Tucson, Arizona, to attend Toledo's swearing in.
"I can't imagine anybody who is in a better position to deal with the tremendous challenge," said Meister, now a professor of public health at the University of Arizona. "He's somebody who has very strong roots in poverty in Peru and he's also very well connected to the international financial community |
