In the midst of uncertainty over the open result of the runoff in Peruhe hook of Luis Galarreta, candidate for vice president of Keiko Fujimorifocused much of the attention and brought to the fore the life story of a leader whose career was marked from his birth by a limb malformation.
Galarreta was born in Lima on March 12, 1971 with a congenital condition. After a few months of life, and after medical recommendation, he underwent surgery in which both hands were amputated.
The leader said that this situation was linked to thalidomide use during pregnancy from his mother, a medication that decades ago was used to relieve nausea and that over time was associated with serious congenital malformations.
“When I was pregnant, my mother took a composition that affects the growth of fetuses. When I was about to be born, they told my parents that there could be a malformation and that the recommendation was to amputate a part. It must have been a very dangerous decision,” Galarreta recalled in an interview with the TV channel. YouTubee from the journalist Milagros Leiva.
Regarding that moment, he also highlighted the family impact that the medical decision implied. “My mother told me that It was a very difficult decisionbut my family is a group of people who have always entrusted themselves to God and who had a lot of faith in doctors from the beginning,” he added.
Over time, he went through an adaptation process that included prosthesis use and rehabilitation at the National Rehabilitation Institute of Callao, a stage that was key for his personal development during childhood and adolescence.
In different testimonies, Galarreta also referred to the support he received in his school environment. “I had 9-year-old friends who were in charge of helping me with everything. And many of them today tell me: ‘I learned solidarity thanks to you,'” he said on the Extraordinarios program.
Lawyer by training, His entry into politics occurred in the early 2000s.. He had his first candidacy for Congress in 2001, although without success. A year later he was elected councilor of the Municipality of Lima and in 2006 he managed to access a parliamentary seat, which he later revalidated in 2011.
They are career had a high point in 2017when he was elected president of Congress for the 2017-2018 period, becoming the first head of the Peruvian Parliament with a disability.
In his early years He was a member of the Popular Christian Party (PPC), but in 2015 he decided to leave for “strictly personal reasons” and joined Fuerza Popularthe space led by Keiko Fujimori, despite having been critical of Fujimorism in previous stages.
Since then, he consolidated his place within the party and held relevant roles, such as parliamentary spokesperson. In the He currently serves as general secretary of Fuerza Popular and as vice president of the Andean Parliament, a position for which he was elected in 2021. That same year joined Fujimori’s presidential formula as a candidate for the first vice presidency, in parallel with his candidacy for the Andean Parliament.
In this context, an eventual arrival to the government would make him the first vice president of Peru with a disability, an unprecedented precedent in the country’s political history.