QCOSTARICA – This Monday, amid a political crisis, Francisco Sagasti Hochhausler was elected as the new president of Peru, being the third to hold the position in just one week.
Sagasti, who was born in the Peruvian capital in 1944, is also a naturalized Costa Rican.
According to the Registro Civil – Costa Rica Civil Registry – the new Peruvian president maintains his Tica nationality and was even registered as a voter, in 2019, in San Rafael de Escazú.
But nationality is not the only thing that ties Francisco Sagasti to Costa Rica, because his daughter Amanda Sagasti, was born in Costa Rica.
Amanda, 25, is the result of the marriage that the newly appointed president of Peru had with the Costa Rican Silvia Charpentier, a former legislator of the Partido Liberacion Nacional(PNL) and current director of the Board of Directors of the Central Bank of Costa Rica (BCCR).
Charpentier, who is an economist, married Sagasti in 1993 according to the marriage registry in the Civil Registry. serving as a legislator during the second government of Óscar Arias Sánchez (2006 – 2010), but her post in 2008.
In 2005, the Registry noted the separation of the former legislator and the current Peruvian president.
During the time they were a couple, they experienced one of the events that most marked Sagasti’s past: in 1996, he was kidnapped at the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima, Peru, spending 48 hours in captivity.
Sagasti was held hostage, together with diplomats and ambassadors, between December 17 and 19 by guerrillas from the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).
After his release, the Peruvian weekly Caretas published his experience in captivity.
According to the archives of La Nación, on December 24, days after being released, Sagasti arrived in Costa Rica.
Sagasti is currently 76 years old. As the new head of Congress before the resignation of Manuel Merino, he had to automatically and immediately assume the leadership of the State, under the Peruvian constitution.
The new president will be inaugurated Tuesday afternoon.
The move is expected to ease tension on the streets after the impeachment of Vizcarra last Monday unleashed nationwide protests and what analysts have called Peru’s worst political crisis in more than a decade.
Former interim president, Manuel Merino, stepped down on Sunday after mounting calls for his resignation culminated in nationwide fury over the killing of two protesters on Saturday in a heavy-handed police clampdown on demonstrations.
Peru continues to fight one of the world’s deadliest outbreaks of Covid-19, and one of its worst recessions.
Exactly 20 years ago, on November 16, 2000, Valentín Paniagua was elected as a caretaker president after the fall of Alberto Fujimori, who governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, and was jailed in 2009 for authorizing death squads, overseeing rampant corruption and vote-rigging.