Alfredo Vera Arrata

Alfredo Vera Arrata (Guayaquil, 1935) was the Minister of Interior of Ecuador from January 2011 to June 2011.

Born to the politician and lawyer Alfredo Vera Vera and his wife, Baltita Arrata Macías, Alfredo Vera Arrata was born in Guayaquil as the second of four children. During his childhood he contagioned poliomyelitis and as a consequence of his illness he was unable to do sports and was forced to wear special shoes. Nevertheless, he grew up as any other child in the neighborhood. Although middle class, he comes from a prominent intellectual family. His sister is the former ballet dancer and Ecuadorian prima ballerina Noralma Vera Arrata and his uncle the writer Pedro Jorge Vera.

Alfredo Vera attended in his home city to the then prestigious High School Colegio Nacional Aguirre Abad. Subsequently he studied architecture in the University of Guayaquil and got the degree of architect with a major in urban planning in 1970.

For 15 years Vera Arrata worked as architecture professor at the University of Guayaquil. At the same time, he worked as an urban planner at the consulting firm CONSUR.

Since 1976 he works at the Guayasamin Foundation as a leading executive due to his family ties to Oswaldo Guayasamín (Vera Arrata is married to his daughter Saskia). He brought forward the materialisation of the La Capilla del Hombre ("The Chapel of Man") and furthermore, the development of painture in Ecuador.

Already as a student, and partially due to his family upbringing, Alfredo Vera had a big interest for politics and even got to be vice president of the National Students Association (FEUE) in Guayaquil. In addition, he was also a leader of the Movimiento Unión Revolucionaria de Juventudes Ecuatorianas, a leftwing revolucionary student association. He paid this with liberty and exile: In 1963 he left Ecuador and went to other Latin Américan countries, among them Chile and Cuba. The dictatorial regime imprisoned him for a year after returning illegally to Ecuador.

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