Background
Andrés Townsend was born on 23 March 1915 in Chiclayo.
Andrés Townsend was born on 23 March 1915 in Chiclayo.
He finished high school at the Colegio Nacional de Guadalupe. He received a doctorate in law at the University of La Plata.
He joined the Federación Aprista Juvenil (FAJ) in 1934. The following year he was deported to Argentina. From 1945 to 1948 he was editor of La Tribuna, the Aprista daily. In 1948 he was again exiled.
He lectured in Panama, taught history at the National University of San Carlos in Guatemala and worked at the United Nations until his return to Peru in 1956. During the second Manuel Prado administration (1956-1962), Townsend was on three occasions on the Peruvian Delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. He was elected as an Aprista to the Chamber of Deputies in 1963 and was its president when the constitutional regime was deposed by the armed forces in October 1968. While a deputy, he was elected secretary general of the Latin American Parliament. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1978 and to a five-year term in the Senate in 1980. He was a candidate for the first vice presidency on the Aprista ticket in 1980, and in 1985 on the ticket of Convergencia Democrática, an electoral alliance of Luis Bedoya Reyes’ Partido Popular Christiano and the Movimiento dc Bases Hayistas, a party established by Andrés Townsend after he left the Aprista Party in 1982. He was reelected senator for a five-year term in 1985.