Hernando de Soto is currently President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) headquartered in Lima, Peru. 

Mr. de Soto was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1941 and did his post-graduate work at the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva. Mr. de Soto was President Alberto Fujimori's Personal Representative and Principal Advisor until he resigned two months before the President's coup d'état. Between 1988 and 1995, he and the ILD were responsible for some 400 initiatives, laws and regulations that modernized Peru's economic system. In particular, they designed and ran Peru's property system which has given titles to more than 1,200,000 families and brought into the law some 380,00 firms which previously operated in the black market, allowing Peru's poor to acquire more than $9 billion in net benefits.