Julio Guzman is the director of international programs and clinical professor at the School of Public Policy. He has over twenty years of experience at the intersection of politics, democracy, and trade and development in Latin America. Recently, his research and advocacy work focused on the effects of China’s influence in the region’s economy, democracy and the rule of law. He has briefed the U.S. Congress House of Representatives and the U.S State Department on China-Latin American relations and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity.
Guzman is founder president of the centrist political party Partido Morado (Purple Party) in Peru, an organization he founded from scratch and became its two-time Presidential candidate, nearly elected in 2016. He steered the victory of the political party in two consecutive parliamentary elections, passing legislation to enforce women’s rights, maximize women’s political participation, protect LGTBQ+ rights and enhance working conditions for agricultural laborers. Previously, he served in government as secretary general of the Office of the Prime Minister –appointed president of the Cabinet of Vice Ministers– and vice minister of micro and small enterprises, leading national strategic reforms in science and technology, open and e-government and trade-related industrial policy.
In 2014, Guzman joined Deloitte Peru as partner to forge the public sector consulting division, where he championed the research evaluation strategy to back the state acquisition of the first Peruvian satellite. From 2001 to 2011, as trade economist at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C., Guzman led the Bank’s agenda on trade and poverty, in charge of the Computable General Equilibrium Model Program to evaluate the pro-poor effects of Free Trade Agreements and as advisor of Latin American countries for the design and implementation of fair-trade policy.
Guzman holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Maryland, a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in economics at the Universidad Católica del Perú. He is a Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellow at Yale University (2018), Draper Hills Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University (2019), and Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (2022). He is currently Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Senior Fellow at the international non-profit Results for Development and member of the Free Enterprise and Democracy Network (FEDN) at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). He taught at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.
Throughout his career, Guzman has published in several venues, from a 2016 Peru’s best seller “Our Own Path to Development: Investing in People”, to Foreign Affairs and TIME magazines. He has been interviewed in CNN, Foreign Policy, Reuters, Aljazeera, The Economist, Bloomberg and many other international media.