Alan Garcia first became president of Peru in 1985. Within five years he had steered the South American country in the worst crisis in its history.
Then the man known as the ”Kennedy of South America” disappeared into the political sunset, never to return — or so it seemed.
But time is a wonderful healer and the 57-year-old Peruvian, who won a second presidential term on Sunday, insists he is no longer the leftist hothead of his youth but a capable statesman with a keen sense of what can be achieved in his country.
Voters obviously decided that 21 years later he must be a little wiser. The former president had 54,6% of the vote with 83,9% of ballots counted from Sunday’s poll.
The popular president-elect is by no means a gifted orator and has resigned himself to being chosen as the ”lesser of two evils”, as one commentator in Lima wrote.
By contrast with his opponent Ollanta Humala, a nationalist former member of the military, Garcia was a more palatable candidate for the middle and upper classes, whose preferred candidate, the conservative Lourdes Flores, failed to make the runoff vote.
Alan Gabriel Garcia Perez was born on May 23 1949 in Lima into a middle-class family. A lawyer and political scientist, he followed his father into politics.
As a young man he was an important figure in the party formed by social revolutionary Victor Raul Haya de la Torre in exile in Mexico in 1924 — the left-wing Partido Aprista Peruano (PAP). It was De la Torre who sent the budding politician to study at the Sorbonne university in Paris.
Garcia only met his father, a leading ”Aprista” who was imprisoned shortly before his birth, for the first time at the age of four.
When his father died 50 years later, Garcia was not permitted by his authoritarian successor Alberto Fujimori to return from exile for his funeral.
After a meteoric rise to the head of the state in 1985, the low point of his career came in 1992 when he escaped arrest on fraud charges only by fleeing Lima. Garcia claimed Fujimori wanted to have him assassinated.
Nine years later he returned from exile in France to contest the 2001 presidential election. With only one percent support at the outset of campaign, he was the laughing stock of the campaign but by its end, he trailed the victor Alejandro Toledo closely.
Garcia now has until 2011 to rehabilitate his battered reputation. – Sapa-DPA