- ContributedHumberto Urteaga Dulanto, Peruvian Ambassador to Jamaica.
Laura Tanna, Contributor
PERU, a South American country with a population of approximately 25 million, is represented in Jamaica by Humberto Urteaga Dulanto, the ambassador to Jamaica since November 1999.
Peru celebrates its National Day today so Ambassador Urteaga agreed to share some information on his country and his background there.
The Peruvian population is of Amerindian, Spanish and African heritage. Today, the percentage of Indians is 35, the Mestizos or mixed race is 45 , and white approximately 10 per cent, in his estimation.
There are some Asiatics, perhaps 250,000 Japanese, and 1.5 million Chinese.
According to Ambassador Urteaga: "The blacks in Peru came from the Caribbean. They were almost 25 per cent in the 18th century. Now they are not more than 2 per cent or 3 per cent, not because they have been persecuted. Inter-marriage is spreading away the blood and what is a fact is that Peru is going to be a totally Mestizo country in 100 years or so."
He was particularly eager for Jamaicans to know that 94-year-old Elena Brown Medina, a Peruvian of Jamaican ancestry, was featured in an article in El Lima Comercio last January because of her life's work in teaching English and educating "problem children".
The interviewer, Patricia Castro Obando, noted that Mrs. Brown's father, James Brown, was a black Jamaican working for the railroad and her mother, Maura Rosa Medina, was a blue-eyed Peruvian.
The interviewer surmised that Mrs. Brown's dedication to her students may have derived from the experience in 1915 of being refused entry to a prestigious Lima school solely because of her colour.
She even taught from her home in Callao after the devastating earthquake of 1940, so that her students would not lose an academic year.
COSMOPOLITAN OUTLOOK
Callao is very cosmopolitan, not only because it is Peru's largest port, but because it was the headquarters of the British Corporation, active in Peru from 1883 to 1970, according to Ambassador Urteaga.
He noted that "The British have the tendency to bring to Peru English-speaking people to work for them. In Northern Peru, where there were oil fields, as long as British Petroleum owned that possession, they brought a lot of Barbadians and Jamaicans. So, I have met Peruvians of Caribbean descent, who, although grown up, were still very fluent in English. Mrs. Brown distinguished herself in helping people, so we are talking not only of a teacher of many generations of Peruvians; we are talking about a civic leader very well known in her city. She makes all Peruvians very proud and Jamaicans will be very proud to see that in a remote Latin American country, the Jamaican presence has been very good and very active!"
When asked just how remote Peru is from Jamaica, Urteaga replied that when he was first posted to Jamaica (1971 to 1974) "British Overseas Airway Corporation (BOAC) used to go to Lima, passing through Kingston, as did Lufthansa, the German airline. I remember making the flight in four hours exactly. Today, it takes 11 hours to fly to Miami, stop there and make a five-hour flight from Miami."
A career diplomat, Ambassador Urteaga treasures his first Jamaican posting as Second Secretary.
"It was very exciting because I witnessed the transition between the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration to Michael Manley's People's National Party (PNP) in 1972. I became the Head of Mission and Charge d'Affaires. My Government did not name another ambassador for the next three years so I remained my own boss. Both our countries were in the Non-Aligned Movement. The head of Peru, General Juan Valasco, initiated a lot of social reforms, enforcing land reform and many revolutionary changes in my country. I was friendly with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Jamaica, Dudley Thompson. He allowed me to be directly in touch with him and to discuss many issues with him, because I was head of my mission and he was a very good friend of my country. So professionally, I learned a lot in Jamaica that helped me afterwards. And, during my tour of duty here, I had two sons born in Kingston. They were with my first wife. I met her before leaving for my first post in San Francisco."
That was where their eldest son, Emanuel or Manny, was born before Urteaga's posting to Quito, Ecuador, and then Jamaica. Their fourth son, Andres, was born in Lima after their return to Peru from Jamaica.
PERSONAL YEARS
Urteaga himself was born on September 7, 1940 in the small town of Lambayeque, 700 miles north of Lima in the middle of a desert, well-known as a sugar cane province.
His father, an army officer, had been garrisoned there but within a few months the family moved to Lima where they remained. His mother, a Spanish-Peruvian lady came from Pisco.
Her father, a cotton planter, was heavily in debt and lost his estate during the 1930s economic crash.
Urteaga recalls: "Seven generations Spanish, my mother kept the old Spanish customs: religiosity and strong sense of family. She passed away six months ago at age 90. My father passed away in 1979 when he was 81. I have one brother and one sister and was educated at Christian Brothers School and at the Catholic University, in Lima. I majored in international law, then joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."
After Jamaica, he worked in Peru in the planning division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the political division of the American Department.
He was subsequently posted to Washington D.C. from 1976 to 1980, spent a year and a half in Venezuela, then back to Peru.
His next foreign posting was again to San Francisco, as Consul General, where he stayed for almost seven years. Peru's financial problems kept him there longer than normal.
TERRORISM
"Those were very difficult years," he recalls. "That was the worst time of the terrorism. Almost no tourists went to Peru. All the places were empty. It was very difficult years with a lot of fear."
Urteaga is speaking of the days when the Maoist Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path] movement waged guerrilla warfare in an attempt to gain power in Peru.
"It was quite a long period," he notes. "It started to become worse from 1986 till 1992, so we had like six or seven years [of violence]."
Between the country's economic crisis and the terrorism, President Alberto Fujimori swept to power in 1990 with his "Peru 2000" movement, defeating incumbent Alan Garcia, the populist lawyer whose policies left Peru bankrupt, with inflation over 7,000 per cent.
To deal with terrorism, people allowed Fujimori a higher level of autocratic behaviour than might normally have been tolerated.
According to Ambassador Urteaga: "He closed Congress in 1992. He wanted to have full control of all the institutions of the Peruvian government."
Those whom he did not consider loyal or who were opposed to this were dismissed, of whom 117 were diplomats, including Urteaga who found himself, a career diplomat, back in Lima, suddenly forced to work in the private sector for the first time.
He became a life insurance agent until, he says: "I was called back to active service through a judiciary decision. It took four years, I think. It was difficult."
Continues next week: Hostage of the Tupac Amaru (Part 2)
