Manuel Prado Ugarteche
Manuel Prado was president of Peru from 1939 to 1945 and from 1956 to 1962, the banker whose father had been president in the war with Chile and whose brother had died in it, the Lima oligarchy's own man. He was elected twice with the army's blessing and, the second time, with APRA's votes. That was the arrangement the country called the convivencia and which the army ended by carrying him out of the palace ten days before his term expired. The first term was the war. There was the border war with Ecuador of July 1941, in which the army took the Ecuadorian province of El Oro in a fortnight and the Rio protocol of January 1942 gave Peru the Amazon territory it had claimed, which Ecuador renounced in 1960 and fought over again in 1981 and 1995. There were the declaration for the Allies in 1942 and of war on Germany in 1945, and the Japanese Peruvians deported to American camps at Washington's request, eighteen hundred of them. There was the growth that the American war purchases of cotton, rubber and minerals brought, and the election of 1945 that he let APRA contest, which its candidate Bustamante won. The second term followed the eight years of Odría's dictatorship. He won the election of 1956 with APRA's support, bought with the promise to legalise the party, which he did. He governed six years of the mining boom. There were the Toquepala copper mine opened by the Americans in 1960, and the fishmeal industry that made the country the world's first fishing nation. There were the exchange liberalisation under Beltrán, and the land invasions in the sierra that a Trotskyist led in the valleys of Cuzco and that the army put down. There was the election of June 1962, in which Haya de la Torre came first by a fraction with less than the third the constitution required. The army, which had said it would not have Haya, annulled the count and took the palace on 18 July. It put the president on a plane to Paris. He was born in Lima. He was a mathematician and an engineer before he was a banker, ran the Banco Popular and the central bank. He lived his last years in Paris, where he had married for the second time in 1958 in a ceremony the Church did not recognise and the country talked about more than his policies. He died there in August 1967, at seventy-eight, the last president of the families that had governed the country since the guano.
- Lived: 1889 CE – 1967 CE
- Nationality: Peruvian
- Roles: president, banker, politician
