(5 of 10)
Natural Mystique. The son of a diplomat, grandson of a former Minister of Finance and great-grandson of a former President, Belaunde went to school in Paris, got a master's degree in architecture from the University of Texas in 1935, then returned to Peru, where he designed private homes, started a magazine called El Arquitecto Peruano, and signed on as a government public-housing consultant. "I was interested in politics," he says, "but purely from the professional point of view." In 1945 he ran for the Chamber of Deputies, won a seat from Lima and quickly made a name for himself fighting for low-cost public housing.
Disgusted at the ever-expanding Lima slums and impatient for swifter reforms, Belaúnde finally decided to form his own political party a few months before the 1956 presidential elections. He named it Accion Popular, a catch phrase suggesting that the best help is selfhelp. No one would help the peasants unless they awoke from their coca-chewing lethargy and helped themselves—in the same cooperative, community spirit of their Inca forefathers. Working together, they could build roads and schools and hospitals —Belaúnde would see that they got the tools. "This was the philosophical idea," he says, "and the movement grew like a plant. We had created a natural mystique."
Ranging through the slums and into the hills, Belaúnde found himself attracting crowds in the thousands. "Following this winding road among the mountains," he cried, "I ask once more: Who made this road? And again, resounding in my ears like a triumphal march, I hear in these elegant words the history of all Peru's yesterdays, its present, the prophecy for its future: 'the people built it.' "
Army General Manuel Odria, then in power, scoffed at the upstart architect and declared Belaúnde's candidacy illegal for lack of enough petition signatures. Belaúnde called a protest demonstration in downtown Lima, raised high a Peruvian flag, and shouting "Adelante!", led a mob of 1,000 toward the President's palace. Waiting police hurled tear gas. His eyes streaming, Belaúnde delivered an ultimatum: "I will wait half an hour. If by then I have not been inscribed, we will march." Odria grudgingly let him run. In the voting, Belaúnde lost to Manuel Prado, an aristocrat who had made a deal with APRA: legality and an end to repression in return for APRA votes. Even so, Belaúnde was defeated by only 110,000 out of 1,260,000 votes—and kept right on campaigning.