Comments about "Toledo: a man and his vision"
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Fascinating story - Toledo is intelligent and worldly. Now I can understand why he would be chosen as a Commencement speaker. His life story is quite remarkable and his accomplishments are truly noteworthy. I would definitely be interested in hearing his insight...back in the good old days when Stanford actually took Commencement seriously.
Responding to Arthur?, you might want to save yourself the trouble of digging out Toledo's commencement speech. Pretty much everybody I talked with after his speech agreed that it was abysmally bad. Having seen the commencement speakers in 00 (Kofi Annan), 02 (Condoleezza Rice, now that was a lazy choice by Hennessy), 03 (Toledo), 04 (Sandra Day O'Connor), 05 (Steve Jobs), and one from 06 (Vartan Gregorian), I have to say that his was the most disappointing by far. He sort of fumbled his way through his life story for what seemed like an hour and then spent a couple minutes trying to connect it to the students (to paraphrase, go fight poverty in third world countries). Unfortunately, the couple minutes he did spend came off sounding like "come to Peru and help me". So sadly, it ended up being a boring speech without much relevance to the graduates.
Toledo has created a lot of wealth for himself but very little wealth for Peru - Toledo is a "champagne socialist" - just a pencil pusher! Fujimory created wealth for Peru. Peruvian children eat from wealth but children can not eat from pompous democratic principles.
Toledo does not mention population control - it is insane to think that you can reduce poverty without birth control!
If Toledo wouldn't have self-assessed salaries for himself and for his wife, he wouldn't have gained the lowest popularity rating in Peru and of any other Latin American president; then he would not have needed to flee Peru the way he did and he could now be working from his home with the Peruvians on those wonderful ideas to alleviate poverty.
Instead he came into a "sabbatical" to Stanford, as the article puts it, to "think about [it]," to write his books, and--like Fujimori--to think about how to get back in power again. Frankly, Toledo's ideas for alleviating poverty sound very naive and incomplete, and I think I'd rather ask him how he would improve the quality of football soccer in Peru, on this he may have a clue.

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