Background
Jorge del Prado was born in Arequipa on 15 August 1910.
Jorge del Prado was born in Arequipa on 15 August 1910.
When his father, a senator, died, Jorge, then 17 years old, had to interrupt his high school education and go to work.
He became associated with the journal Amauta and José Carlos Mariategui’s Socialist Party. When the Socialist Party was transformed into the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), del Prado joined it. He rose in the party’s ranks and the administration of Commander Luis M. Sanchez Cerro jailed him for six months in 1930.
Subsequently, he suffered several other periods of incarceration, as well as exile in Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile. From 1933 on he continued his underground work until the Peruvian Communist Party began its support of the banker Manuel Prado, the official presidential candidate of the dictator Oscar R. Benavides. Under Prado (1939-1945), the PCP enjoyed government protection. The first Congress of the PCP met freely in 1942 and elected Prado its national secretary of organization, a position he held until President Manuel A. Odria outlawed the Aprista, Communist, and Trotskyist parties in 1948. Then, after three years of underground activities, del Prado was exiled to Bolivia and Brazil.
Del Prado returned to Peru in 1956, when Manuel Prado was again elected president. He was elected secretary general of the PCP in 1961.
Del Prado was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1978 and to the Senate in 1980 and 1985. In 1980 he ran for the first vice presidency of the republic on the ticket of the Unidad de Izquierda, a conglomerate of leftist groups.
When the PCP split into the pro-Moscow and pro-Peking branches, Jorge del Prado continued as Secretary General of the former organization. He attended all the congresses of the Communist Party of the USSR after 1959 as well as congresses of the Communist parties of Chile, Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.
