Galarreta: Fujimori's VP pick overcomes childhood amputation to lead Peru's congress

Luis Galarreta stood beside Keiko Fujimori on Sunday as she made her first public remarks after the polls closed, and within hours the internet had seized on a detail: the prosthetic hook on his right hand. The 55-year-old parliamentarian, now her running mate for Peru's presidency, became the subject of social media debate—not for his politics, but for the visible evidence of a life that began with a choice his parents had to make before he was born.

Galarreta was born in Lima on March 12, 1971, with a congenital malformation of his upper limbs. His mother had taken a medication during pregnancy that affected fetal development, and when doctors discovered the problem, they recommended amputation. It was, by his own account years later, a decision that must have seemed impossible. His family was religious, faithful to God and to the physicians who would perform the surgery. At three months old, both his arms were amputated. He has lived the fifty-five years since with prosthetic hooks, a fact he has discussed openly in interviews, describing his history as "very rich" and saying he would change nothing about it.

What makes Galarreta's presence on Fujimori's ticket noteworthy, however, is not his disability but the sharp reversal in his political convictions. He now serves as vice president of the Andean Parliament and previously held the presidency of Peru's Congress—positions of genuine power. Yet his path to Fuerza Popular, Fujimori's party, was paved with public criticism of both the woman and the movement he now represents.

Galarreta's political career began in 2001, when he ran for Congress under the banner of Renovación Nacional without success. He was elected as a municipal councilor in Lima a year later and entered Parliament in 2006, where he was reelected in 2011. For years he was affiliated with the Christian Popular Party, a center-right faction with its own identity and history. Then, in May 2015, he left that party, citing "strictly personal reasons," and joined Fuerza Popular—the political vehicle of fujimorism.

But the record shows something more complicated than a simple party switch. In 2010, during municipal elections, Galarreta warned that if Álex Kouri, a former regional governor, became mayor of Lima, it would represent "the first step toward the return of the mafia, which is also represented by the candidate Keiko Fujimori." A year later, as a newly elected congressman, he appeared on the program Prensa Libre and called the Fujimori regime of the 1990s a "disastrous experience" in terms of institutional governance, human rights, and corruption.

Yet by 2017, when he was elected president of Congress, his language had transformed entirely. Fujimori, he declared, was "gathering the best of the 90s." When pressed on his earlier criticisms, he suggested that critics wanted Fujimori to "flagellate herself," to renounce and curse her father's era. "It was a government much better than Toledo's and other governments," he said, "but it had errors and crimes." The implication was clear: accept the past as a mixed legacy and move forward.

What changed between 2011 and 2017 remains his own explanation. He moved from the margins of Peruvian politics to its center, from opposition to alignment, from moral clarity about the Fujimori years to a more forgiving assessment. Now, as the vice-presidential candidate of the woman he once called a representative of organized crime, Galarreta embodies a larger story about Peru's political volatility—how quickly allegiances shift, how thoroughly convictions can be reframed, and how a man who overcame profound physical limitation early in life has navigated the more ambiguous terrain of political compromise.