Born in the Huarochirí[1] district outside Lima to Francisco Igartua and Herminia Rovira, he went to school in Callao, and studied at the Franciscan seminary in Santiago de Chile for a year.
In 1952, the Odría dictatorship exiled him to Panama,[1] but he made a surprise return to Lima, and took refuge at the former home of El Comercio, where, after lengthy conversations, he managed to get his expulsion overturned.
When Belaúnde was deposed and General Juan Velasco Alvarado came to power, Oiga supported the reform process, with the exception of calling for elections for a Constitutional Assembly, and for the defense of the freedom of the press.
With the start of the second Belaúnde government in 1980, Oiga entered its fifth stage by transforming into a weekly analytical journal with a wider coverage, again in the Time magazine format, including familiar and amenable topics, and maintaining a coherent and, in the words of the director "quixotic," democratic position.
On November 16, 1995, he transferred the rights to the Oiga name to the company Publicaciones de Revistas S.A. in order to pay off his tax debts and the pensions of his 70 workers.
In 1998, at Igartua's behest, a work group was created with the intention of reviving Oiga, and this finally took place on February 14, 2008, when the brand was definitively registered with the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and Intellectual Property of Peru.