Hernando de Soto

Hernando de Soto is the President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy headquartered in Lima, Peru, a think tank considered by The Economist as one of the two most important think tanks in the world. Time Magazine has chosen him as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century. Forbes has chosen him as one of 15 innovators "who will reinvent your future." Entwicklung and Zusammenarbeit described him as one of the most important development theoreticians of the last millennium. 

Forbes, Time and The Economist have chosen him on separate occasions as one of the leading innovators in the world. More than 20,000 readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy ranked him as one of the world's top 13 public intellectuals. He has served as President of the Executive Committee of the Copper Exporting Countries Organization, as CEO of Universal Engineering Corporation (one of Europe's largest consulting engineering firms), as a principal of the Swiss Bank Corporation Consultant Group, and also as a governor of Peru's Central Reserve Bank. 

Mr. de Soto has published several articles and papers on economic policy. He is the author of The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism, and his seminal work, The Mystery of Capital. De Soto has published two books about economic development: The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World in 1986 in Spanish (with a new edition in 2002 titled The Other Path, The Economic Answer to Terrorism) and 2000, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (ISBN 978-0465016150). Both books have been international bestsellers, translated into some 30 languages.

The original Spanish-language title of The Other Path is El Otro Sendero, an allusion to de Soto's alternative proposals for development in Peru, countering the attempts of the "Shining Path" ("Sendero Luminoso") to win the support of Peru's poor. Based on five years worth of ILD research into the causes of massive informality and legal exclusion in Peru, the book was also a direct intellectual challenge to the Shining Path, offering to the poor of Peru not the violent overthrow of the system but "the other path" out of poverty, through legal reform. In response, the Senderistas added de Soto to their assassination list. In July 1992, the terrorists sent a second car bomb into ILD headquarters in Lima, killing 3 and wounding 19.

In addition, he has written, with Francis Cheneval, Swiss Human Rights Book Volume 1: Realizing Property Rights, published in 2006 – a collection of papers presented at an international symposium in Switzerland in 2006 on the urgency of property rights in impoverished countries for small business owners, women, and other vulnerable groups, such as the poor and political refugees. The book includes a paper on the ILD's work in Tanzania delivered by Hernando de Soto.[162]