Eliane Karp (born 1955), a French-born anthropologist and economist, is the wife of the current president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, whom with she has a daughter, Chantal.
Karp was born in Paris to Jewish parents; her father was born in Poland and her mother in Belgium. As a teen, she was a member of the left-wing Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair and lived briefly on a kibbutz in Israel. Karp earned her [B.A.] in anthropology at the Hebrew University. She subsequently traveled to the United States to do her Master's and Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford University, with a minor in Finance and "Economy of Development". At Stanford, she met and married Toledo. Karp first came to Peru in the late 1970s to study Indian communities while working on her PhD.
She worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and also at Bank Leumi in Tel Aviv, Israel. At the World Bank she specialized in loans for economic aid programs for undeveloped countries. In Peru, before becoming first lady, she worked at USAID.
For a number of years, Toledo and Karp lived apart, although without divorcing. Some people say that she was paid US$ 1 million to return to Peru and help her husband in his presidential campaign.
Karp is said to be fluent in seven languages: French, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Flemish, Portuguese and Quechua, a native Peruvian language. Before her husband was elected President, she gave several campaign speeches in Quechua, which helped her husband's election campaign. At one rally in the Andean city of Huaraz, Karp declared that the "apus" (mountain gods of Peru's ancient Indian cultures) had spoken and that Toledo's election would break a "curse of 500 years" of oppression.
Karp accompanied Toledo into office with ambitious plans to address social inequality and the needs of Peru's poor. When she became Peru's first lady, she promised to shake up the capital's elite and avoid the socialite duties customary to presidential wives. She insulted the Lima elite, calling them "snobs". Toledo later appointed her head of a commission to address multicultural issues, but her work has been hampered by the very low approval ratings of her husband's administration. She was severely criticized when it was revealed she had a consultancy position with Wiese Sudameris Bank for which she was paid $10,000 a month. She was forced to resign from the position on August 15, 2002.
In a speech given on February 21, 2005 at George Washington University, Karp defended the coca policy of her husband's administration. She pointed out its long traditional use in indigenous culture and explained that coca can never be completely eradicated because of high prices for the leaf paid by drug traffickers.
While Karp became a U.S. citizen at one point, she took Peruvian nationality in 2002.
Karp likes to dress in of bold-colored suits with earrings and oversized necklaces bearing pre-Columbian motifs.
