Óscar Luis Castañeda Lossio is a Peruvian politician who was Mayor of Lima, the capital city of Peru, from 2003 to 2010. He became Mayor of Lima again in 2015, after being elected for a third nonconsecutive term with 51% of the popular vote, for a term that lasted until December 2018. He ran for President of Peru in 2000, prior to his mayoral campaign, and in 2011, coming in fifth place with 9% of the vote. He is under investigation in 2019 for alleged corruption in the context of a broad anti-corruption campaign following revelations in the Lava Jato scandal in Brazil. In particular, he is suspected of having favoured a Brazilian multinational civil engineering corporation in exchange for bribes while serving as mayor of Lima.
Life and politics
Castañeda, who was born in Chiclayo and lived in the Casa Castañeda, is the son of Carlos Castañeda Iparraguirre and Ida Lossio. His father is remembered as one of the most important mayors of Chiclayo. As a child he used to inspect with his father the works in progress at the city. From his marriage with Rosario Pardo, he has two sons: Luis Castañeda Pardo and Darío Castañeda Pardo. He was studied law at the Catholic University of Peru and he earned a master's degree at the Centro de Altos Estudios Militares del Perú. In Sweden and Mexico he got a Professional Diploma in Management. In 1981, he started as a member of Popular Action party, working with many of the former mayors of Lima such as Alfonso Barrantes Lingán. Between 1990-1996, during Fujimori's government, he was the President of the NationalInstitute of Public HealthIPPS, now known as ESSALUD. He had also a controversial participacion in La Caja del Pescador, an entity that works in benefit of the fishermen. In 2000, he ran as a candidate of his own party National Solidarity Party, in the presidential elections, but failed to make it to the run-off elections. In 2002, he participated in the elections for mayor with the National Unity Party, defeating Mayor Alberto Andrade. Castañeda started out as a very popular mayor, with a popularity index close to 79%. He won re-election as the city's mayor in November 2006 with 48% of the vote. In 2011, SN decided to run for the presidency. Nevertheless, and unsuccessfully, they only managed to gather around 9.5% of the votes. On March 15, 2013 audio recordings leaked to the press were broadcast over national television revealing that Luis Castañeda Lossio was indeed in charge of the campaign to recall Lima's first female Mayor, Susana Villaran. Before the leaks Castañeda Lossio had publicly denied his involvement in the recall process. In 2014, he ran for Mayor of Lima, winning the election by a landslide on October 5, over rival and incumbent Susana Villarán in third place, and surprisingly, 18% for APRA candidate Enrique Cornejo. He assumed office on January 1, 2015 and stepped down on December 31, 2018. While mayor of Lima, Castañeda attracted criticism for various policies that were seen as retrogressive attempts to erase the legacy of his predecessor. These included erasing murals commissioned by Villarán, undoing reforms she had made to Lima's public transit system, barring the public from city council meetings, and cancelling plans to remake the banks and neighborhoods along the Rimac River in downtown Lima into a new park, the so-called Rio Verde Project. Following the cancellation of the Rio Verde project, one of the neighborhoods that would have been transformed was, instead, devastated by a fire in November 2016, which forced out hundreds of Shipibo-Konibo community members. As of January 2020, Castañeda remains the subject of investigations into wider allegations of corruption linked to the Brazilian construction firms Odebrecht and Grupo OAS.
