INTERVIEWS:
El Presidente, Regular Guy

By Tyler Bridges

Formerly president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo is rediscovering everyday life at Stanford. By Tyler Bridges.

Just then, someone spotted him and asked: “What are you doing? Aren’t you the president of Peru? Where’s your bodyguard?”

“I used to be the president of Peru,” replied Alejandro Toledo, whose five-year term ended in July.

Some 42 years after first coming to the Bay Area, Toledo has returned with his wife and daughter to spend at least a year at Stanford University, where he has been named a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is learning again how to use a computer, writing two books, lecturing worldwide, and recharging his political batteries with an eye toward running for president again in 2011.

Gone are the bodyguards, the chauffeurs, the bulletproof Mercedes-Benz, the presidential jet, the hounding reporters, the frenzied supporters, the merciless critics, the white-jacketed servants, the generals waiting at his beck and call, and the meetings with presidents Bush, Chávez, da Silva, and others.

Alejandro Toledo by Taylor Jones for the Hoover Digest.

Toledo drives a used SUV that he bought, cooks for his family, pushes a shopping cart at the local Safeway, has a Blockbuster card, carries his own luggage at the airport, and plays soccer on public fields in Palo Alto. When strangers recognize him, he tells them with a smile that he is actually Alejandro Toledo’s twin brother.

“I love the freedom that I have now,” Toledo said.

Toledo’s low-key manner doesn’t surprise Bay Area friends who knew him before.

“He’s treated as an ex-president wherever else he goes,” said Martin Carnoy, a professor at Stanford’s School of Education. “But at Stanford, he’s just one of the guys. He’s an incredibly unpretentious guy.”

Toledo came to the Bay Area in 1965 as a penniless 19-year-old student who had never left Peru or even flown on an airplane. He tripped on the first escalator he tried out, at Los Angeles International Airport.

He grew up on a dusty patch of land in a stinking slum, one of 16 children, only nine of whom survived childhood. Two Peace Corps volunteers helped him win a partial scholarship to study at the University of San Francisco.

Gone are the bodyguards, the chauffeurs, the bulletproof Mercedes, the presidential jet, the hounding reporters, the frenzied supporters, the merciless critics, the white-jacketed servants, the generals at his beck and call.

Toledo learned English, worked the midnight shift at a Van Ness Avenue gas station, and played soccer on the USF junior-varsity squad under coach Steve Negoesco while earning his bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration. He drove a 1959 Triumph convertible with faulty brakes that he named Mellow Yellow and borrowed a roommate’s sport coat for dates.

In 1970, Carnoy accepted him into the graduate-studies program at the School of Education.

“He had the ambition of someone who has come from the bottom and clawed his way up, who has the ambition to go way beyond where anyone expected him to go,” Carnoy said.

Toledo went on to earn two master’s degrees and a doctorate at Stanford. He met his future wife, Eliane Karp, a French-Belgian graduate student, at a campus party.

And along the way, he secretly nourished the outlandish dream of becoming president of Peru.

After working for the World Bank and teaching at Harvard, Toledo returned to Peru. He wound up leading the opposition to President Alberto Fujimori, who bought off pliable opponents and used his secret police to intimidate and silence dissenters.

When Fujimori unexpectedly resigned in 2000, elections were called. Toledo won.

He stumbled badly in his first year. His $18,000 monthly salary, the largest in Latin America, infuriated Peruvians. So did well-publicized late-night jaunts to posh restaurants, his frequent tardiness, and his reluctance to acknowledge a child born out of wedlock while he was separated from Karp.

For the next three years, Toledo’s approval rating languished around 10 percent. When he went out in public he had to take care to avoid being showered with eggs and rotten vegetables, and he fought off efforts to force him from office.

In time, Peru’s economy boomed under his free-market and free-trade policies and the poverty rate began to fall. Last year, during his final six months in office, while he remained unpopular, his approval rating rose to 34 percent, according to one poll.

Watching Toledo, now 61, in Palo Alto makes it hard to imagine that he led a California-sized country of 27 million people.

Toledo came to the Bay Area in 1965 as a penniless 19-year-old student who had never left Peru or even flown on an airplane. The first time he tried to ride an escalator, at the Los Angeles airport, he tripped.

The first time he showed up to play in a regular pickup soccer game at Stanford last year, however, “all the Peruvians recognized him,” said Tulio Mendoza, an IBM manager from Peru. “When we told the other players, they didn’t believe that an ex-president would play with us. They thought we were joking.”

Toledo joins the other players afterward at the Oasis in Menlo Park, where they talk soccer over pizza and beer.

After dinner, Toledo likes to visit the Dutch Goose, a peanuts-on-the-floor joint in Menlo Park, to shoot pool.

“He doesn’t demand anything,” said Hector Varela, a bartender. “He’s just a sweet, nice guy.”

Toledo said that after getting more than 100 death threats from Fujimori’s henchmen and living in a fishbowl in Peru, first as a candidate then as president, he is reveling in his independence.

“Once again I’m a common citizen,” Toledo said. “I don’t have to be afraid for my safety. I’m enjoying the time to think and reflect. I look younger. In 10 years, I hadn’t gone to a movie. I have seen 12 movies already. My family can’t believe it.”

The biggest adjustment for Toledo has been dealing with high Bay Area prices and doing such mundane tasks as getting a driver’s license and opening a bank account.

He visited eight car dealers before he found a used Toyota SUV at an acceptable price in Fremont. He couldn’t open a bank account until Stanford provided a letter saying he was on its payroll.

Learning how to use a computer again was another challenge.

“When I was at Harvard [as a professor in the early 1990s], I was on the frontier of using the computer of that time,” Toledo said. “But after I got into politics and became president, I became computer illiterate.”

Carnoy said that after he helped Toledo buy a computer at the Stanford Bookstore, “He’d call me up and say he’d learned how to use Word and the Internet. He was so proud he learned how to use e-mail.”

Stanford’s current administration got its first exposure to Toledo when he was the 2003 commencement speaker. He spoke about how much he owed to education and to people who believed in him, told the graduates that they must not take their good fortune for granted, and urged them to learn about the world and help other people.

“I am the president of Peru, but at the end of the day, don’t tell anyone, I am still a rebellious Peruvian Indian fighting for the cause of the poor,” he said. “The war against poverty needs to be won. Otherwise, the beautiful vision of a world populated by truly free human beings will continue to be no more than just a dream.”

When he made it known in 2006 that he would like to return to Stanford, the provost’s office and the Hoover Institution arranged it. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, an independent think tank on the Stanford campus, appointed him a distinguished scholar in residence and offered him an office in a secluded setting.

“When a national leader like Toledo steps down,” Stanford Provost John Etchemendy wrote in an e-mail, “it is essential that he have a chance to ‘decompress’: to reflect on his experiences and perhaps record those reflections; to think about the future and perhaps retool for new endeavors; and to share what he has learned with students and colleagues.”

Toledo is updating his autobiography and writing a book on antipoverty strategies, although he has been criticized in Peru for not having done enough to reduce the ranks of the poor.

“At the end of the day, don’t tell anyone, I am still a rebellious Peruvian Indian fighting for the cause of the poor.”

Karp, a onetime specialist in rural aid who is fluent in seven languages, is teaching a class called Indigenous People and Social Inclusion in Latin America. Their daughter, Chantal, is doing research for a professor and applying to Stanford and other universities to gain admission to a doctoral program.

Now widely traveled, Toledo was invited by former president Jimmy Carter to act as an election observer in Nicaragua last year and has invitations to give speeches in Europe, in Asia, and at other American universities. But Toledo said his real pleasure these days is being in the Bay Area.

John Rick, a Stanford anthropology professor who works in Peru every year, said Toledo invariably gets special treatment at restaurants, although he doesn’t seek it.

“Latins in any business or restaurant know who he is,” Rick said. “He gets the best seat in the house, and the food is always perfect. People are amazed to meet him, almost reverent.”

Available from the Hoover Press is Political Institutions and Economic Growth in Latin America: Essays in Policy, History, and Political Economy, edited by Stephen Haber. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.