The new President of Peru, Francisco Sagasti, is a naturalized Costa Rican because he was married to a Costa Rican woman.Sagasti was married for more than 11 years to the former liberationist deputy Silvia Charpentier, who is also director of the Central Bank, as recorded in the Civil Registry.As a result of this link, the new Peruvian president is the father of 25-year-old Amanda SagastiCharpentier.
Who is Francisco Sagasti?
The former World Bank official comes to the Presidency of Peru with the enormous challenge of managing a country shaken by a political crisis and a devastating Pandemic that has caused a severe recession.
Elected this Monday as the new president of Congress by his colleagues, he will assumed as President of Peru this Tuesday afternoon in a solemn session.At 76, Sagasti is a debutant in the political arena and in parliament, of which he has been a member since March 2020 as one of the nine legislators of the Morado party.
“Don QuijoteSagasti is the new president of Peru ! Now to fight against corruption and the political crisis !”, leftist congresswoman Rocío Silva Santisteban tweeted to greet the election of the new president of Congress and her country.
His gray beard contributes to his resemblance to Don Quixote, although the challenges of ruling Peru loom gigantic compared to the windmills faced by the famous character of Cervantes.
Sagasti’s election
Sagasti’s moderation emerged as a letter of consensus among the congressional factions.His name allowed unlocking the crisis that began a week ago when thatsame forum dismissed Martín Vizcarra and lit the fuse of massive protests that left two people dead and a hundred injured.
As leader of his Party`s congressional delegation, he supported the reasons why the party rejected Vizcarra’s removal.In Congress, he held the presidency of the Science, Innovation and Technology Commission.
Brief Biography of the new Peruvian President
He began in party politics in 2016 with the creation of the Purple Party, of which he is a co-founder.Trained as an industrial engineer at the National University of Engineering in Lima, he received his doctorate in social sciences at the United States from the Pennsylvania State University.
He worked at the World Bank as an advisor and head of the Strategic Planning Division in the late 1980s. Teaching at the Universidad delPacífico and at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In Spain he taught at the Madrid Business Institute and in the United States at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Grandson of war hero
Born in Lima on October 10, 1944, Sagasti is the grandson of Francisco SagastiSaldaña, who was part of the Peruvian army that defeated Chilean forces at the Battle of Tarapacá in November 1879. He later fought in other battles of the war.
His maternal family is of Austrian origin that settled in Chile.Sagasti was one of 700 hostages of the MRTA terrorist command that stormed the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima in December 1996 (until April 1997).
Music is one of his biggest hobbies: he plays piano, guitar, composes songs and loves classical music. In addition to exercising and eating well, he is “applying Johann Strauss’s recipe: he has a waltz called Wine, women and song… the way to stay young is what I would translate as: ‘wine, friends and songs,” he explained in a February 2017 interview with journalist Tamara Wong Fuster.
Married three times (one of them to the Costa Rican) and father of seven children, the new Peruvian president assures that he has already fulfilled the “mandatory marital service” for 37 years.
