Background
Luis Bedoya Reyes was born in Chucuito, Peru on 20 February 1919.
Luis Bedoya Reyes was born in Chucuito, Peru on 20 February 1919.
He received his primary and secondary education in his native city and in Lima. His doctorate in letters and his professional title of attorney at law (1942) were awarded by the National University of San Marcos.
Before he practiced law, he taught at several high schools and at the military school Leoncio Prado. After graduating from San Marcos, he taught history at the Catholic University of Lima. In 1944 he helped to found Jornada, a political newspaper that supported the successful presidential candidacy of José Luís Bustamante y Rivera. Four years later he became President Bustamante’s press secretary, just before he was ousted from power.
In 1956, after helping to establish the Christian Democratic Party of Pern, Bedoya served as its first secretary general and supported the Acción Popular presidential candidacy of Femando Belaúnde Terry. As his party again supported the presidential candidacy of Belaúnde in 1963, Bedoya served as minister of justice from 1963 to 1964 and was assisted by President Belaúnde to get elected mayor of Lima in 1964 for a three-year term. From 1967 he resigned from the Christian Democratic Party and founded the Christian Popular Party, under whose banner he was reelected mayor of Lima. In 1978 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly with the second highest number of preferential votes, after Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, candidate of the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP).
Bedoya was his party’s presidential candidate in the general elections of 1980, coming in third behind Belaúnde of Acción Popular and Armando Villanueva of the Aprista Party. In the 1985 election, Bedoya’s party joined forces with Andrés Townsend Ezcurra’s Movimiento de Bases Hayistas to form Convergencia Democrática, with Bedoya as its presidential candidate. Again he placed third, after Alan García Pérez of the PAP and Alfonso Barrantes Lingan of Izquierda Unida.