Alejandro Toledo
Alejandro Toledo was president of Peru from 2001 to 2006, the first of indigenous descent elected in the republic's history, the shoeshine boy from a village in the Andes at four thousand metres, one of sixteen children of whom seven died. He was taken up by Peace Corps volunteers in Chimbote, got to the University of San Francisco on a football scholarship and to Stanford for a doctorate in the economics of human resources. He worked for the World Bank and the UN, and in 2000 he led the March of the Four Suyos against Fujimori's third election, which with the Montesinos bribery tapes brought Fujimori down that November. He won the election of 2001 against Alan García in the run-off. He governed five years of growth at six per cent, the free-trade agreement with the United States negotiated and signed, the Camisea gas pipeline opened. The truth commission's report of 2003 on the seventy thousand dead of the war against Shining Path was received. His approval rating that fell to eight per cent in 2004, the lowest of any president in the region. It fell over his lies about an illegitimate daughter he had denied for years and about his signatures forged on the party's registration. He was born in Cabana in Ancash in 1946 and called el Cholo, the Andean, which he made his name in the campaigns, appearing with his Belgian wife Eliane Karp in an Inca headband at Machu Picchu for his inauguration. The Odebrecht scandal of 2016 found that the Brazilian builder had paid him twenty million dollars for the interoceanic highway to Brazil, through an Israeli friend's companies in Costa Rica. He was arrested in California in 2019, extradited in April 2023 after four years of fighting it. He was sentenced in Lima in October 2024 to twenty years and six months, the first of Peru's five living ex-presidents to be convicted in the affair. In 2025 he was sentenced to another thirteen for laundering, of which he is serving the longer, at seventy-nine, in the prison built for Fujimori.
- Lived: 1946 CE – ?
- Nationality: Peruvian
- Roles: president, economist, politician
