Manuel Prado y Ugarteche

Manuel Prado y Ugarteche 1961

Manuel Prado y Ugarteche (born April 21, 1889 in Lima , Peru , † August 15, 1967 in Paris , France ), engineer, banker and politician, was Peruvian President twice, from 1939 to 1945 and from 1956 to 1962.

Life

Manuel Prado was born in Lima in 1889 to an aristocratic family. His father was the former Peruvian President Mariano Ignacio Prado , his brother the philosopher Javier Prado y Ugarteche . In 1918 he married Enriqueta Garland; the marriage produced a son and a daughter.

From 1915 to 1919 Prado was a professor at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. He was elected to the Peruvian Congress in 1919 and founded the Partido de la Unión Parlamentaria . Because of his opposition to the dictatorship of Augusto Bernardino Leguía , he had to go into exile in Paris from 1921 to 1932. After his return he was from 1934 president of the Banco Central de Reserva del Perú , the Peruvian central bank.

First presidency

In 1939 Prado was elected President of Peru at the head of the Coalición Conservadora with 78% of the vote, succeeding Oscar R. Benavides . He sided with the Western Allies in World War II (although it was not until 1945 that he officially declared war on the Axis powers). In a brief armed conflict, his country occupied more than 200,000 km² of disputed Amazonian territory between Peru and Ecuador . The border with the neighboring country was confirmed in the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942.

Domestically, he allowed APRA again. The term of office ended as planned in 1945 and Prado went again, this time voluntarily, to Paris for a few years.

Second presidency

In 1955 he returned to Peru to prepare for his candidacy in the 1956 presidential election. He won this as the top candidate of a movement supported by the APRA (again declared illegal) with 45% of the votes ahead of Fernando Belaúnde Terry . He took over the presidency a second time.

In his economic policy, Prado vacillated between liberal experiments to abolish subsidies on fuel and food (which led to strikes and riots), restricting the withdrawal of capital abroad and introducing measures to nationalize the oil industry.

In 1958 he managed to get the Catholic Church to annul his marriage to Enriqueta Garland and he married Clorinda Málaga . In 1961, Prado was the first foreign head of state to visit Japan after World War II .

The election of the successor in 1962, in which APRA founder Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre received just under the most votes according to the official result (although it fell short of the minimum of a third of the votes stipulated in the constitution), was overshadowed by allegations of fraud. Ten days before the planned end of Prado's term of office, the military took power with Ricardo Pérez Godoy at the helm. Prado went into exile again in Paris, where he died five years later.

Manuel Prado Ugarteche also published various scientific works on calculus and hydrostatics.

Awards (selection)

• 1956: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• 1957: Special level of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1960: Grand Cross of the Order of St. Jacob of the Sword

Web links

Commons : Manuel Prado y Ugarteche  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Various speeches at the Peruvian Congress (Spanish)
• Short biography (Spanish)