Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was born in the Miraflores District of Lima to parents who fled from Germany after the Nazis came to power. Kuczynski worked in the United States before entering Peruvian politics.^[3] He held positions at both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund before being designated the general manager of Peru's Central Reserve Bank. He later served as Minister of Energy and Mines in the early 1980s under President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, and as Minister of Economy and Finance and Prime Minister under President Alejandro Toledo in the 2000s.^[4] Kuczynski was a presidential candidate in the 2011 presidential election, placing third. His opponents Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori went on to the 5 June 2011 runoff election, in which Humala was elected.^[5] Kuczynski went on to stand in the 2016 election, where he narrowly defeated Fujimori in the second round.^[6] He was sworn in as president on 28 July 2016.^[7][8]


On 15 December 2017, the Congress of Peru, which was controlled by the opposition Popular Force, initiated impeachment proceedings against Kuczynski, after he was accused of lying about receiving payments from the scandal-hit Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht in the mid-2000s.^[9] However, on 21 December 2017, the Peruvian Congress lacked the majority of votes needed to impeach Kuczynski.^[10] After further scandals and facing a second impeachment vote, Kuczynski resigned from the presidency on 21 March 2018 following the release of videos showing alleged acts of vote buying, presenting his resignation to the Council of Ministers.^[11][12] He was succeeded as president by his First Vice President Martín Vizcarra. On 28 April 2019, Kuczynski was placed under house arrest while under investigation for allegedly taking bribes from Odebrecht.^[13]

Early life and education[edit]

Kuczynski was born in Miraflores, Lima, Peru, as the first son of Madeleine (née Godard) and Maxime Hans Kuczyński, one of the earliest public health leaders in Peru.^[14][15][16] He is a cousin of the French film director and critic Jean-Luc Godard.^[17]


His parents fled Germany in 1933 to escape from Nazism. His father, born in Berlin, then capital city of the German Empire, was a German Jew of distant Polish origin, and his mother was Protestant, of Swiss-French descent.^[18] Entering Peru in 1936, Maxime Kuczyński sent his son to be educated first in Lima at Markham College, and then in Lancashire in England at Rossall School, where he was a pupil in the Maltese Cross House between 1953 and 1956. He won a foundation scholarship to study at Exeter College, Oxford, and graduated with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics in 1960. Later, he received the John Parker Compton fellowship to study public affairs at Princeton University in the United States, where he received a master's degree in 1961. He began his career at the World Bank in 1961 as a regional economist for six countries in Central America, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.^[19]


In 1967, Kuczynski returned to Peru to work at the country's central bank during the presidency of Fernando Belaúnde. Kuczynski went into exile in the United States in 1969 due to political persecution after Belaunde's government fell to the military dictatorship of General Juan Velasco Alvarado in a coup d'état. The newly installed government accused Kuczynski of funnelling about $18 million (equivalent to $115 million in 2016) to Nelson Rockefeller’s International Petroleum Company. He joined the World Bank as the chief economist managing the northern countries of Latin America, moving on to become Chief of Policy Planning.^[20]


From 1973 to 1975, he was a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co.,^[21] an international investment bank headquartered in New York City. In 1975, he returned to Washington, D.C. to become Chief Economist of the International Finance Corporation, the private finance arm of the World Bank. Subsequently, he was appointed President of Halco Mining in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a mining consortium with operations in West Africa.^[22]


From 1983 to 1992, he was co-chairman of First Boston in New York City, an international investment bank. In 1992, he founded, with six other partners, the Latin American Enterprise Fund (LAEF) in Miami, Florida, a private equity firm that focused on investments in Mexico, Central and South America. The institutional investors in LAEF included more than 15 of the world's largest university endowments, foundations, and pension funds. In 1983, he helped found the Inter-American Dialogue and remained a member until 1997.^[23]

Family and personal life[edit]

His father, Maxime Hans Kuczynski, was born in Berlin,^[18] then part of the German Empire. He was a bacteriologist who served in the German Army during World War I on the Balkan front. He was a renowned pathologist and tropical disease specialist, in particular expert on Verruga peruana or Carrion's disease. He trained at the Universities of Rostock and Berlin, where he was professor of pathology.^[53] His father was an officer in the German Army on the Eastern and Turkish fronts in the First World War, and he traveled widely in Russia, China, West Africa, and Brazil. Maxime Hans Kuczynski left Germany in 1933 due to his persecution for his Jewish roots, and he was invited to Peru in 1936 by President Óscar R. Benavides to set up the public health service in the interior of the country. Maxime Hans Kuczynski reformed the San Pablo leprosarium on the Amazon at the Brazilian frontier, set up a public health colony on the Perene river, and was later professor of tropical medicine at National University of San Marcos in Lima.^[54][55]


Kuczynski has been married twice, first to Jane Dudley Casey, the daughter of Joseph E. Casey, a former member of the United States House of Representatives for the 3rd district of Massachusetts. Their children are businesswoman Carolina Madeleine Kuczynski, the New York Times journalist Alex Kuczynski,^[26] and John-Michael Kuczynski. Kuczynski and Casey divorced in 1995.


Kuczynski's second wife is Nancy Lange, an American and the First Lady of Peru until Kuczynski's resignation in 2018.^[56] The couple, who married in 1996, have one daughter, Suzanne Kuczynski Lange, a biology graduate.^[56][57][58]


Kuczynski's younger brother, Miguel Jorge Kuczynski Godard, is a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Kuczynski's brother-in-law Harold Varmus was a Nobel Laureate for Medicine for cancer research in 1989.^[33]


Kuczynski is a first cousin of French film director Jean-Luc Godard by his mother, Madeleine Godard, who was the aunt of the film director.^[33]


He held U.S. citizenship until November 2015; he renounced it to be able to run for Peru's presidency.^[33]


Kuczynski is a polyglot. Aside from his native Spanish, Kuczynski also speaks English and French fluently, and is proficient in German.