Promising to fight to improve the lot of the nation's poor and to root out corruption, Alejandro Toledo was sworn in Saturday, becoming Peru's first elected president of Indian descent and returning the country to democracy after 10 years of autocratic rule by Alberto Fujimori.
In the war against poverty, "I'll dedicate all my efforts," he said. "From this objective, no one will move me."
Toledo, 55, has his work cut out for him. More than half of the country's 26 million people live in poverty -- 4.5 million of them below the line of extreme poverty, he said.
One in four children younger than 5 is chronically malnourished, and the infant mortality rate is five times that of Peru's neighbors, he said.
"In a world ever more globalized and competitive, Peruvians find themselves marginalized inside their own country," he said.
Toledo said he would set up programs to build housing for the poor, to improve the unemployment rate by investing in small businesses, to more than double the resources allocated for educating the poor, to make access to health care available to all Peruvians, to care for the young and the old and the indigenous peoples of the country.
Toledo said he would get the resources to help the poor by increasing tourism, rooting out corruption and reallocating money from other projects. He proposed to the presidents of other South American countries who were in attendance "an immediate freeze on the buying of offensive weapons in the region" as a way of saving money so that it could be redirected toward the poor.
"If all the countries of the subcontinent were to declare their pacifist will, there would be no sense in developing and spending money on arms that we've promised not to use," said Toledo.
In addition to presidents of other Latin American countries, the dignitaries at Saturday's swearing-in included U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.
Describing himself as "a rebel with a cause against centralism," Toledo announced the creation of a national commission of decentralization, and set November 2, 2002 for local elections.
Eight months after Fujimori left the country in disgrace, his term of office cut short by corruption scandals involving his top security officer, Toledo promised to investigate claims of human rights abuses and to be "implacable in fighting against corruption."
To a standing ovation, he also announced he was restructuring the armed forces and the police with the participation of their respective leaders.
"The armed forces and the police should be subordinated to the authority elected by the popular sovereignty," Toledo said.
Before the ceremonies began, Toledo traveled to a Lima shantytown where he had campaigned and helped serve breakfast to poor children, handing out milk cartons and sandwiches.
The former shoeshine boy is a political neophyte. He lost a presidential bid in 1995 and pulled out of a presidential runoff against Fujimori in May 2000, after accusing him of election fraud.
Last year at this time, Fujimori was sworn into office amid fraud accusations and street protests in which six people died and many others were wounded.
In November, Fujimori traveled to Japan, where his parents were born, after his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, became embroiled in corruption scandals. Japan has granted Fujimori citizenship.
Toledo won a scholarship to attend the University of San Francisco and went on to earn a master's degree in economics there and a doctorate in education from Stanford, though he has said many times he has a Ph.D. in poverty. |
