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Page 54cessor, the Austrian Kurt Waldheim,
Pérez de Cuéllar disliked the diplomatic
parties, press conferences and social
whirl that were an integral part of being
the world’s most senior diplomat. He
preferred the company of his books, his
music and his poetry. A reserved and
private man, the Peruvian once
disclosed that he would really like to
have been a concert pianist, “but in my
country that was only for girls”. As a
diplomat, however, it helped that he
played scales on a narrow range of
emotional notes.
Javier Felipe Ricardo Pérez de Cuél-
lar was born in Lima, the Peruvian capi-
tal, in 1920. His father, Ricardo, was a
businessman and amateur pianist; his
mother was Rosa de la Guerra Cevallos.
He attended private Catholic schools,
learnt French from his governess and
studied law at the Catholic University
in Lima, supporting himself by working
as a part-time clerk at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. After graduating he
joined the diplomatic corps because, he
joked, it would enable him to see the
world “at someone else’s expense”.
His first posting was to Paris, where he
met and married Yvette Roberts. They
had two children, Francisco and Agueda
Cristina, before divorcing in 1975. That
year he married Marcela Temple Semi-
nario, a fellow Peruvian who had five
children from her first marriage.
Whenever possible he would slip
away from his 38th-floor office in theUN headquarters to have lunch with
her. “He has his books, his music, his
garden and this makes him relax. Since
we are always surrounded by people,
such times are rare,” said Marcela, who
died in 2013. Pérez de Cuéllar, who
devoured literature in three languages,
once confessed to a reporter: “When I
can, I read everything but United
Nations documents.”
From Paris he went to London as a
member of Peru’s delegation to the in-
augural session of the UN general as-
sembly in 1946. That was followed by
postings to Bolivia, Brazil and Switzer-
land, the latter as ambassador, before
returning to Lima as secretary-general
of the foreign ministry where he helped
to normalise Peru’s relations with the
Soviet Union. Subsequently he became
his country’s first ambassador to Mos-
cow, an experience that would prove
invaluable at the UN.
In 1971 Pérez de Cuéllar became
Peru’s permanent representative to the
UN in New York. Four years later Wald-
heim appointed him special represent-
ative in Cyprus, where UN troops were
guarding a buffer zone between the
Turkish north and Greek south. He did
not resolve a dispute that still rumbles
on today, but he did persuade the two
sides to talk. Rejoining the Peruvian
foreign service in 1977 he served as am-
bassador to Venezuela before returning
to the UN as an under-secretary-ge-
neral in 1979 and succeeding Waldheim
two years later.
Pérez de Cuéllar firmly rejected sug-
gestions that he should serve a third
term as secretary-general. He left the
UN in good standing at the end of 1991
and returned to Peru, where in 1995,
aged 75, he ran for president as the head
of a broad coalition opposed to Alberto
Fujimori, the authoritarian incumbent
who was seeking a second term. He
came a distant second with only 22 per
cent of the vote after a campaign that
The New York Times described as
having “all the excitement of a 300-
page UN report on South American
shipping regulations”.
Five years later he enjoyed a measure
of vindication when Fujimori was dis-
missed as president following a corrup-
tion scandal. Valentín Paniagua, an op-
position politician, took over as care-
taker president and appointed the solid,
reassuring figure of Pérez de Cuéllar as
his prime minister for that period, after
which the veteran diplomat finally re-
tired from public life.
Although during his first term at the
UN Pérez de Cuéllar could claim no
spectacular accomplishments, no great
diplomatic breakthroughs, no conflicts
resolved, it provided a solid foundation
for a more successful second term.
Even his critics conceded that, thanks
to that early stamp collection and his
interest in communication that it
represented, he had held the UN
together, earning the respect of its
divergent factions through his hard
work and impartiality. “What I have to
preserve most of all is my usefulness,”
he once said. “If I started taking sides I
would lose my credibility.”Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, UN secretary-
general, 1982-1991, was born on
January 19, 1920. He died in his sleep
on March 4, 2020, aged 100why I should preside over the collapse
of the organisation,” he declared. “If I
don’t have assurances of support for my
next mandate, I don’t know why I
should stay.”
Yet stay he did, with the Cold War
thaw helping to ensure that his second
term was more productive and success-
ful than his first: Mikhail Gorbachev
rose to power in the Soviet Union,
bringing glasnost and perestroika;
President Reagan’s second term in the
US was mellower than his first; and in
1987 Pérez de Cuéllar put the UN back
on the map by persuading the securitycouncil to adopt a mandatory resolu-
tion that enabled him to negotiate an
end to the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. His
special representative then orchestrat-
ed the negotiations that led to the
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Pérez de Cuéllar, a seasoned practition-
er of patient, behind-the-scenes diplo-
macy, was in his element. He demon-
strated these skills again in 1991 when,
by negotiating with Syria and Iran, he
helped to secure the release of John
McCarthy and Terry Waite, British
hostages held in Beirut.
Unlike his more flamboyant prede-‘When I can, I read
everything but United
Nations documents’
Obituaries
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar
Peruvian diplomat, pianist and philatelist who was a reluctant secretary-general of the UN at the time of the Falklands conflict
FOX PHOTOS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID HUME KENNERLY/GETTY IMAGESPérez de Cuéllar with Margaret Thatcher in 1986. Left, with Ronald Reagan, 1982Javier Pérez de Cuéllar became a life-
long philatelist after inheriting a stamp
collection from his father, who died
when he was four. That may be what
kindled his interest in the wider world.
“I remember receiving European
stamps, stamps from the African coun-
tries and French territories... the
stamps for Churchill, for de Gaulle, for
John Kennedy,” he said. “Stamps are a
form of communication and culture.
They carry a message of their own and
lead to world understanding.”
As a reluctant secretary-general of
the United Nations from 1982 to 1991
Pérez de Cuéllar needed all the under-
standing he could muster, not least
when, three months after he took
office, Argentina invaded the Falkland
Islands. After Alexander Haig, the US
secretary of state, tried and failed to
avert British military action, Pérez de
Cuéllar embarked on three weeks of
intensive diplomacy.
He also failed, but emerged with
some credit and the respect of both
sides. “Despite my great sympathy for
Argentina, I had to be on the side that
was the law,” he later said. “Argentina,
unfortunately, invaded the Falkland
Islands, which in the United Nations
charter is prohibited.”
Matters did not improve. Later in
1982 Israeli troops brushed aside a
7,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in
Lebanon; the UN failed to halt the
Iran-Iraq war; a
special session of
the general
assembly on
disarmament
ended in fiasco;
member states
routinely ignored
security council
resolutions; in-
tense superpower
rivalry precluded
any East-West co-
operation; and an
influx of new Third
World countries
exacerbated the
divide between
developed and undeveloped nations.
Meanwhile, the Reagan administration
preferred to bypass an organisation
that it regarded as anti-American, and
withheld financial support. So did
Russia and China, bringing the UN
close to bankruptcy.
In a report in late 1982 Pérez de Cuél-
lar referred to “an alarming succession
of international crises” in which the
UN had been unable to play an effective
role. Determined to “shake the house”,
as he put it, he continued: “We are
perilously near to a new international
anarchy. I believe we are at present em-
barked on an exceedingly dangerous
course, one symptom of which is the
crisis in the multinational approach to
international affairs and the concomi-
tant erosion of the authority and status
of world and regional intergovernmen-
tal institutions.”
Some questioned whether Pérez de
Cuéllar, with his self-effacing personal-
ity and old-world gentility, was tough
enough for the job, but he worked hard
to keep lines of communication open,
to maintain his position as an honest
broker and to remind member states of
the UN’s value as a global mediator. In
one interview he
described himself as “a kind of pope of
my religion”. Pointing to a bound copy
of the UN charter, which prohibits the
use of force to settle disputes, he added:
“That book is my religion.”
Although Pérez de Cuéllar was tall,
distinguished-looking and fluent in
Spanish, French and English, he was
never knowingly charismatic and had
not sought or campaigned for the job of
secretary-general. He had emerged in
1981 as the compromise candidate, the
only one acceptable to all five perman-
ent members of the security council
after 16 rounds of fruitless voting. Nor
did he want a second term. Frustrated
by the Cold War divisions that had
paralysed the security council and by
the UN’s deepening financial crisis, and
having recently undergone a quadruple
heart bypass, he wanted to step down in
1986; but in the absence of any other
plausible candidate the permanent
members all pressed him to remain.
He used an interview with The New
York Times to make clear that he would
only do so if they provided moral and
material support to the UN, and
averted the worst financial crisis in its
41-year history. “I don’t see any reasonevelopednatione interview he
d