Manuel Prado Ugarteche


Manuel Carlos Prado y Ugarteche was a banker who served twice as President of Peru. Son of former president Mariano Ignacio Prado, he was born in Lima and served as the nation's 50th and 54th President. His brother, Leoncio Prado Gutiérrez, was a military hero who died in 1883, six years before Manuel Prado was born.
As a young army officer, Prado was a key player in the coup that overthrew President Guillermo Billinghurst in 1914. He became president of the Central Reserve Bank in 1934 and served until 1939.
Manuel Prado, a conservative patriarch of a wealthy and powerful family, reached the presidency of Peru with the help of the left-wing Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana party. Prado announced that "one of the first acts of my government will be to declare a general political amnesty and put an end to the proscription of political parties."
During Prado's second presidency, the only significant proscribed party was the APRA, which was thrown out of power and outlawed in 1948 by President Manuel Odría. Prado announced that he would submit to the newly elected Congress a bill to legalize APRA once again. The bill was later passed and the APRA's famed founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, returned from foreign exile.
In foreign policy, Prado – whose greatest pride was that as President in 1942 he made Peru the first of the South American nations to break off relations with the Axis Powers– was expected to side firmly with the U.S. There is documentary evidence that shows that Prado's enthusiastic support of the deportation of Peruvians of Japanese descent to the United States during World War II was motivated by a desire to rid Peru of all of its Japanese-descended residents—a charge which some historians have argued amounted to a campaign of ethnic cleansing.