Alan Garcia

Topics: Peruvian Aprista Party members, Peruvian Constituent Congressmen, Peruvian democracy activists, Peruvian Deputies, Peruvian lawyers, Peruvian opposition leaders, Peruvian politicians, Peruvian presidential candidates, Peruvian Roman Catholics, Peruvian Senators, Peruvian socialists, Presidents of Peru

Alan Gabriel Ludwig Garcia Perez is the current President of Peru, having won the 2006 elections on June 4, 2006 in a run-off against Union for Peru candidate Ollanta Humala. He is the leader of the Peruvian Aprista Party and the only APRA party member ever to have served as President of Peru. He served a first term as President from 1985 to 1990. His first term was marked by a severe economic crisis, social unrest and violence. He ran unsuccessfully for the Presidency in 2001, losing in a run-off to Alejandro Toledo.

Garcia was born in Lima into a middle-class family with close ties to the already established APRA party. His father, Carlos Garcia Ronceros, was the secretary of APRA during the government of Manuel A. Odria, which had declared the party illegal. Given his political militancy, his father was later arrested and imprisoned, leaving him alienated from his family and not meeting his son Alan until five years later.

Garcia studied at the Colegio Nacional Jose Maria Eguren in Barranco, a district of Lima. He went on to university studies at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica and later earned his law degree at the National University of San Marcos in 1971. Afterwards, he moved to Europe, attending the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, where he studied and completed his thesis on constitutional law, earning himself a doctorate in political science. In 1973, he went on to the University of Paris, where he obtained a degree in sociology. Garcia lived several years in Paris but, in 1978, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, the elder leader of the APRA party (who would die one year later), urged him to return to political life in Peru, after the Bermudez administration presided over the return to civilian government and allowed the reorganization of other political parties.