Julio Guzmán


Julio Armando Guzmán Cáceres is a Peruvian economist, politician, and leader of the Purple Party. He was formerly the leader of the All for Peru political party, running for president for the party in Peru's 2016 elections, but was disqualified.

Biography

Julio Armando Guzman Caceres was born on July 31, 1970, in Lima. He is the second youngest of 12 children. His father, an architect by profession, came to Lima from the rural province of Anta in the Cusco Region. His mother is from Celendin in the Cajamarca Region.
Guzman attended Colegio Sagrados Corazones Recoleta high school in Lima.
Guzman joined the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where he studied economics and started a career teaching mathematics. Then he studied for a Master's in Public Policy at Georgetown University and continued graduate studies at the University of Oxford before completing his PhD in Public Policy from the University of Maryland.

Professional and political life

He has been an adjunct professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and the nearby campus of the University of Maryland.
Guzmán worked for 10 years at the Inter-American Development Bank as an economist in integration and trade. He left to work as a deputy minister in Peru's Ministry of Labor in the government of Ollanta Humala. In 2012, he was appointed secretary general of Peru's Cabinet under Prime Minister Juan Jiménez Mayor. Guzmán resigned from the government in February 2013.
Later he worked as a representative of the international firm Deloitte in Peru.

2016 election campaign

Guzman announced he was running for president of Peru in July 2015. He rose in the polls throughout the final months of 2015 until registering 5% of the vote in January. By February he had risen to 20% of the vote, second to leading candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto Fujimori. In March the National Elections Jury barred him from the election after it found irregularities in the party's internal processes.

2021 election campaign

In 2016, Guzman separated from All for Peru and founded the Purple Party. Guzman registered the party in Peru seeking to participate in the 2021 presidential elections. Following allegations surrounding Peruvian officials being involved in the Odebrecht scandal, Guzman stated that the "Odebrecht case is the meteor that will extinguish the dinosaurs" of Peru's political realm.

Personal life

In 2003, Guzmán married Ximena Caceres del Busto, with whom he had two daughters. They divorced in 2009.
In 2011, he married American citizen Michelle Ertischek, with whom he has two daughters.