At 3:20 am on July 18, 1962, ten days before President Manuel Prado Ugarteche was to complete his six year term, an armored column under Colonel Gonzalo Briceno Zevallos stormed the Government Palace in Lima and detained the president. The armed forces, led by the chief of the Joint Command General Ricardo Perez Godoy, acted after the June 10 elections in which Victor Raul Haya de la Torre of the long vetoed APRA party won a narrow plurality short of the constitutional one third, throwing the choice to Congress; the military alleged fraud and demanded annulment, and when the electoral authorities refused, staged what is described as the first institutional coup in Peruvian history. A four-man junta of the service chiefs annulled the elections, dissolved Congress, and promised new elections for 1963.
Prado was held aboard the BAP Callao until his term's end on July 28 and left for Paris on August 1. The Kennedy administration suspended relations and aid but normalized within weeks after the junta committed to elections, which Fernando Belaunde won in 1963.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Target identified in Coup Atlas research: President Manuel Prado Ugarteche, detained aboard the BAP Callao off San Lorenzo Island until the end of his term on July 28, 1962; he was not physically harmed and settled in Paris on August 1.
RESEARCHED NAME
Key figures
Ricardo Perez Godoy (general, chief of the Joint Command, junta head)
Manuel Prado Ugarteche (deposed president)
Nicolas Lindley (army general, junta member who replaced Perez Godoy in March 1963)
Gonzalo Briceno Zevallos (colonel who led the palace assault)
Victor Raul Haya de la Torre (APRA leader whose election plurality triggered the veto)
Sources
The coup was promoted by Joint Command chief General Ricardo Perez Godoy against the outgoing government of Manuel Prado over alleged electoral irregularities; a junta annulled the elections and called new ones for 1963, while the deposed president was taken to the Callao naval arsenal and held aboard the BAP Callao until the end of his term on July 28, leaving for Paris on August 1.
Haya de la Torre of the Aprista party won the June 10, 1962 presidential vote with 33 percent, below the constitutional one third requirement, and the military, opposed to Haya and alleging fraud, annulled the results after the July 18 coup led by Ricardo Perez Godoy.
SOURCE REVIEWEDWikipedia, 1962 Peruvian general electionopen source ↗
Contemporary reporting recorded that at 3:20 am Prado was thrown out of office ten days short of completing his term by a junta of four service chiefs; nine Latin American countries suspended or broke relations, and the United States suspended relations, stopped 81 million dollars in Alliance for Progress aid, and cut off military aid, with President Kennedy calling the coup a serious setback.
SOURCE REVIEWEDTIME, Peru: The Military Take Over (contemporary archive report)open source ↗
The military junta annulled the elections, dissolved the Congress, and suspended the constitution on July 18, 1962; the US lifted diplomatic sanctions on August 17, 1962 and military sanctions in October 1962, and Perez Godoy was himself overthrown as junta head on March 3, 1963, replaced by General Lindley.
SOURCE REVIEWEDUniversity of Central Arkansas, Dynamic Analysis of Dispute Management project, Peru (1912-present)open source ↗
Editorial Note
The target of the coup was less Prado, at the end of his term, than the succession: the armed forces annulled an election APRA had won and vetoed Haya de la Torre. Contemporaries explicitly compared it to the Argentine coup of March 1962, four months earlier, enriched in this batch. Arc link: the junta's internal March 3, 1963 replacement of Perez Godoy by Lindley is a separate event; elections in June 1963 brought Belaunde to power.
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Manuel Prado Ugarteche, detained aboard the BAP Callao off San Lorenzo Island until the end of his term on July 28, 1962; he was not physically harmed and settled in Paris on August 1..
Baseline coding: Incumbent executive removed from power. Recorded leader fate: deposed; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset, v2.2.2
Peyton, Buddy, Joseph Bajjalieh, Michael Martin, and Andrea Gerald. 2026. Cline Center Coup d’État Project Dataset. Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. V.2.2.2. February 17. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. doi: 10.13012/B2IDB-9651987_V10
“Washington Suspends Ties With Lima After Its Coup; U.S. BREAKS TIES WITH PERUVIANS,” July 19, 1962
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →