Yungar, a remote town in the Peruvian Andes, has been receiving worldwide attention in the past couple of weeks, because of the efforts of a man named Lenin to stop one of the candidates, named Hitler, from running in the upcoming municipal elections.

Hitler Alba Sánchez, also known as ‘Hitler of the Andes’ or ‘The Good Hitler’, has already served as mayor of Yungar between 2011 and 2014, and he is now trying out for a second term. However, his candidacy was challenged by a local man called Lenin Vladimir Rodríguez Valverde, who claimed that Hitler wasn’t eligible because of his previous term as mayor. The attempt to sabotage The Good Hitler’s election ultimately failed, but the bizarre coincidence of these two men’s names has become an international news topic.

Alba Sánchez claims that he doesn’t know Lenin or his motives for attacking his campaign, but he suspects that he is affiliated with opposition parties. He’s not too worried about it though, as he is convinced that people remember the good he did during his first term and will turn out to vote for him on October 7.

“The Good Hitler returns to these elections with the support of friends and sympathizers,” the 37-year-old candidate told RPP. “We have always done good and people know us.”

We’ll have to wait a few more days to see if Hitler once again becomes mayor of Yungar, but in the meantime, people have been curious to know how and why his parents named him after one of the most hated figures in human history.

Alba Sánchez claims that foreign names were very popular in Peru during the 1980s, and his father, who didn’t know anything about Adolf Hitler, herd the name one time and liked it because it sounded foreign. He was never a Nazi sympathizer or an admirer of the German dictator, and Alba Sánchez himself condemned the actions and ideology of his namesake, adding that the name is the only thing they have in common.

 

Asked if he ever considered changing his name, the Hitler of the Andes told Peruvian reporters that he had did want to do that at some point, but he had already entered politics, and all his friends and supporters knew him by his first name, so changing it just wasn’t practical.

The mayoral candidate admitted that his name sometimes caused awkward moments, even within his family. For example, one time, they were watching a documentary on the Holocaust and his young daughter started arguing with the narrator, saying “my dad is not evil”. Her mother ended up changing the channel to avoid causing her more heartache.