No such charges were filed, he said, and the rumors were played up by his opponents in a continuing effort to discredit him. When asked if he’ll run for president again in 2011, as some have speculated, he says it would be premature to weigh in. “I’ll tell you this much,” he said later in the interview. “I’m not finished yet.” “One thing I’m proud of is that whatever small contribution I made was done within a framework of absolute respect to democratic principles,” he said. “And, damn, it has been so hard.” He said sometimes that the free press got on his nerves, but he never cracked down. He said that he worked largely within the constraints of democracy in a developing country during a time of turmoil has made him popular among many American scholars. Alejandro Toledo grew up in Chimbote and was befriended by Peace Corps Volunteers who helped him study in the United States. Later he was a language instructor in Brockort's Peace Corps/College Degree Program. Elected President of Peru in 2000, Toledo invited the Peace Corps to return to Peru after a 27 year absence. He is presently a visiting Fellow at Stanford University.
Toledo contacts Fresno Bee to complain that an Associated Press story inaccurately reported he was returning to Peru to face fraud charges
Toledo: a man and his vision
Former Peruvian president reflects on his past and looks toward the future in exclusive interview
April 30, 2007
By James Hohmann
Caption: Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo received the New York Democracy Forum's Presidential Medal this month, displayed here at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. James Hohmann
High in the foothills, far removed from the bustling core of campus, sits the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The low-profile institution, up a narrow and curvy road that is blocked by a gate at night, is the closest thing Stanford has to a monastery for its intellectuals.
This is where former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo does his thinking. In a small, austere studio with windows overlooking purple wildflowers, the retired head of state ponders what’s next. His unlikely rise from penniless villager to Stanford Ph.D. (1993) to president made headlines and prompted the University to select him as its commencement speaker in 2003.
Since his five-year term ended last July, the 62 year old has been making up for lost time with his wife and daughter, traveling the world to converse with allies and thinking about what comes next.
In his first interview granted since stepping down as president, given exclusively to The Daily over two sessions last week, Toledo reflected on his legacy and articulated a comprehensive plan to battle poverty.
“Government day-to-day is very absorbing,” he said. “It’s been such a soft landing that it is incredible. I’m glad that I now have the time and space to process and digest my thoughts.”
He has just come back from 18 days on the road when he sat down for 90 minutes on Friday. The bags under his eyes attested to his intense travel regimen and five years as chief executive of a country with almost 30 million people.
While most his age would look to retirement, Toledo talks energetically about dedicating his life to the “war” against poverty and for democracy, two concepts which he inextricably links when he talks about his view of the world and of Latin America.
“When I’m involved in this fight as an Indian soldier, I don’t feel too tired,” he said. “It is the cause I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of my life to. What the hell.”
When a national leader like Toledo steps down, Provost John Etchemendy Ph.D. ‘82 said in an email to The Daily, “it is essential that he have a chance to ‘decompress.’”
Etchemendy said the University was honored to have Toledo, the only former head of state with an appointment, “to reflect on his experiences and perhaps record those reflections; to think about the future and perhaps retool for new endeavors; and to share what he has learned with students and colleagues.”
At one point during his presidency, polls showed that Toledo’s approval rating hovered around 10 percent. Toledo said that after he peacefully turned over power to his successor last year, his popularity in the country dramatically increased.
“I’m not a good judge of my own administration,” he said. “Let history judge the results of what I did.”
But while the former leader has his vocal critics at home, including successor Alan Garcia, Toledo has been heavily praised by scholars in the Ivory Tower.
Toledo recently accepted an offer from Political Science Prof. Larry Diamond to be a distinguished scholar next year at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which is part of the University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).
Diamond, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and coordinator of the democracy program at FSI, said that Toledo is genuine, authentic and a truly historical figure.
“He came through a very turbulent period in Peruvian politics,” Diamond said. “He’s not just a figure of the past. He’s very determined to have an impact on the future.”
Toledo wore a collared blue shirt with two buttons undone and a pair of Armani Exchange blue jeans. His black hair is graying a bit, but he’s still the firebrand he was on the stump when he gets started about something he wants to talk about.
He said that loyalists to rival Alberto Fujimori worked overtime to fight the man who led the coalition that brought down the Peruvian government.
“Fujimori never forgot what I did,” Toledo said. “They made my life impossible.”
Toledo first contacted The Daily to complain that an Associated Press story, which had been printed in this newspaper, inaccurately reported he was returning to Peru to face fraud charges. No such charges were filed, he said, and the rumors were played up by his opponents in a continuing effort to discredit him.
Toledo, the first indigenous man elected president of Peru in the modern era, said he inherited a country with fragile democratic institutions in the depths of recession.
“For people, it was difficult to swallow that the person in the palace is not one of them,” he said. “There were some doses of racism and skepticism. It wasn’t easy, but I stuck to it. I respect the press, but I never changed my direction because of fabricated news. In the end, I thank God that it paid off.”
Last November, he went to Nicaragua with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to supervise its presidential election. Earlier this month, he sent a letter to leaders worldwide calling on them to address human rights abuses in Myanmar (Burma). Two weeks ago, the New York Democracy Forum awarded Toledo with their Presidential Medal for his support of democracy.
On May 24, he will receive the Presidential Award from the Bay Area Youth Fund, an institution that promotes the first child of a poor family to attend higher education. He’s opened up a center to support democracy and development, with offices in Spain and Lima, Peru’s capital.
He has even sold movie rights to his story.
When asked if he’ll run for president again in 2011, as some have speculated, he says it would be premature to weigh in.
“I’ll tell you this much,” he said later in the interview. “I’m not finished yet.”
“One thing I’m proud of is that whatever small contribution I made was done within a framework of absolute respect to democratic principles,” he said. “And, damn, it has been so hard.”
He said sometimes that the free press got on his nerves, but he never cracked down. He said that he worked largely within the constraints of democracy in a developing country during a time of turmoil has made him popular among many American scholars.
“I consider him a dedicated democrat,” said FSI senior fellow and Political Science Prof. Michael McFaul in an email to The Daily, “but also someone who is trying to understand the very complex relationship between democracy and development.”
Toledo, a self-described disciple of democracy, said that his beloved form of government needs to deliver results for the people in the developing world. He said he worries as Hugo Chavez, the leader of Venezuela, riles up anti-American and anti-democratic sentiment in Latin America.
“The Chavezes of Latin America are capitalizing on the fertile land for the emergence of populism,” he said. “That land is fertile as a result of our inability in the last 100 years to reduce poverty and put something concrete to the meaning of democracy.”
Papers — some in Spanish, others in English — were spread out on the desk of Toledo’s cloistered office, where he is writing two books. The first is an update on a book he wrote more than a decade ago about his life story. The second will detail his plan for fighting poverty. They are expected to be released toward the end of 2008.
His wife, Eliane Karp, is lecturing in the anthropological sciences department at the University. Their daughter will enter the economics department’s Ph.D. program in the fall, with an emphasis on the economics of the environment.
Toledo said that he is trying to do academic research with “deliberate policy implications for the fight against poverty.” The war, he suggests, can be waged on four fronts.
First, he said government must be willing to provide direct assistance to the absolute poorest on the condition that pregnant women get prenatal care and take their children to be vaccinated.
During his presidency, Toledo said he instituted a program when he was president that gave direct welfare to the poorest women because they are thriftier than their spouses and less prone to throw it away on alcohol. But his policy team had to audible when the men started taking the money from the women.
“We gave them whistles,” Toledo quipped. “Then all the women came out and beat the hell out of the guy.”
Second, he believes, investors and government should support small business and family enterprise with micro-credit.
“Those poor people in the High Andes,” he said, “have shown that they repay faster and better than the big multinationals.”
One minute, he is sitting calmly in the library of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The next, he jumps out of his chair and paces excitedly in circles around the small table. His smile brims, voice raises and arms wave. He talks so fast that his words, but not ideas, start to jumble over one another.
The third action he offers is long-term investment in nutrition and health for small children.
“A mother who is malnourished,” he said, “will produce a malnourished child.”
The final ingredient in his recipe for battling poverty is a long-term investment in education infrastructure, but this, he said, requires the longest-term thinking.
“It takes 18 or 19 years to see the results of that investment,” he said, noting that the gains of reforms he put in place while president will not be felt for decades. “I made decisions not for the next election but for the next generation.”
Toledo was seen as a disappointment in some quarters when he left office because even though the economy grew at 6.5 percent during his final year in the presidency, most Peruvians continued to subsist on less than $2 a day. After Toledo set his own salary at $216,000 (he later lowered it under public pressure), he was derided as an elite.
Diamond complimented Toledo for his commitment to democracy.
“He’s left of center but very conscious of how you need to work through the market mechanisms,” he said.
Toledo was born in Cabana, a small Andean Indian village 12,000 feet above sea level. When he went to study at the University of San Francisco in the late 1960s on a soccer scholarship, he was the only one of 16 children in his family to attend college.
After struggling to learn English as an undergraduate, he won admission to the University’s School of Education and picked up a master’s degree while on the Farm (1972).
Later, he consulted for the World Bank and lectured on economics. After serving as an economics minister and managing an institute on economic development, he threw his hat into the race for president.
Critics considered his bid fanciful; few thought he could win. He was challenging Fujimori, an autocrat who drew ire from the international community for human rights abuses.
This rags-to-riches success story, Toledo said, is “a statistical error.”
“By an accident, I am free,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I am free because I can choose. Millions of people are not free because they are sentenced to live in poverty. I want to do the best I can to free my people.”
Toledo’s sees democracy being undermined without reduction in poverty.
“Freedom and democracy is not just going to vote on Election Day,” he said. “You cannot have democracy if you have a lot of noise in the streets and in your stomach.”
