Hugo Pesce

Hugo Pesce Pescetto (17 June 1900 – 26 July 1969 ) was a Peruvian physician and left-wing activist, intellectual and philosopher.

Medical work

Pesce was born in Tarma, and studied medicine at the University of Genoa in Italy. In 1929, Pesce and Julio Portocarrero were unsuccessful in promoting Mariátegui's ideas in Buenos Aires at a convention of Latin American communists. Che Guevara recounts in The Motorcycle Diaries that he first read Marx in 1951 while working in Pesce's leprosarium. In the film adaptation, Pesce was played by . Pesce was also a writer and polemicist, and became Vice-President of the Peruvian Association of Writers and Artists.