Celso Pastor de la Torre

Celso Pastor de la Torre was a lawyer, political organizer, and art collector. Born in Lima in 1914, he graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University and helped Fernando Belaúnde Terry establish Acción Popular, serving as the party’s first secretary-general. He represented Peru in Washington during both Belaúnde presidencies and also represented the country at the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank. ¹

During his first Washington posting, the dispute over the International Petroleum Company complicated Peru’s access to American assistance. A February 1966 memorandum by Under Secretary Thomas Mann records three occasions on which Pastor assured him that a settlement was approaching; Mann linked those assurances to American loan authorizations in 1964. The same memorandum describes Peruvian complaints that Washington was using aid to influence domestic policy. ²

Pastor also used his diplomatic career to display a collection of colonial Andean paintings, many from the Cusco school. Works accompanied him abroad and were exhibited in Spain, the United States, and Peru. After his death in 2009, the collection remained a subject of exhibition and scholarship: a 2017 show at the Peruvian–North American Cultural Institute in Miraflores brought together works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the curatorship of Luis Eduardo Wuffarden. ¹