Manuel Carlos Prado y Ugarteche (21 April 1889 – 15 August 1967) was a Peruvian politician and banker who served twice as president of Peru.

Born into a prominent political family, he was the youngest son of General Mariano Ignacio Prado and his wife, María Magdalena Ugarteche Gutiérrez de Cossío.

His eldest brother Mariano Ignacio was a prominent banker who founded the so-called Prado Empire, the main economic group in Peru during the first half of 20th Century.

Joined to the Civil Party, he and his brothers Javier and Jorge supported the civil-military coup d'etat which overthrew President Guillermo Billinghurst in February 1914.

Early that year, Leguía had overthrew the Civilist President Pardo y Barreda and called an assembly to rewrite a Constitution convenient to him.

Against this official candidacy, José Quesada Larrea, a young lawyer, a native of Trujillo, Peru, who for his campaign acquired the newspaper La Prensa, from where he fought for electoral freedom, for the obvious purpose of the government to manipulate the results.

In the international order, Prado had two notable successes: The first was the victorious war against Ecuador and the subscription of the Rio de Janeiro Protocol guaranteed by the United States, Brazil, Chile and Argentina,which sought to settle the old boundary lawsuit that for more than a century had kept the attention of the Peruvian chancellery.

The second was the policy of continental solidarity and support for the United States and democracies faced by the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, during World War II.

This pro-Americanism brought with it some excesses, such as allowing the United States to set up an air base in Talara, northern Peru, and the mass internment of German and Japanese residents.

The Peruvian government, through Chancellor Solf de Muro, refused in 1944 the request to admit 200 Jewish children aged 4 to 10, who later were murdered at Auschwitz.

The Peruvian chancellery nullified the passports upon learning about this, closed the embassy in Geneva, and fired José María Barreto, ruining his political career.

The bill was later passed and the APRA's famed founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, returned from foreign exile.

In foreign policy, Prado – whose greatest pride was that as President in 1942 he made Peru the first of the South American nations to break off relations with the Axis Powers– was expected to side firmly with the U.S.

There is documentary evidence that shows that Prado's enthusiastic support of the deportation of Peruvians of Japanese descent to the United States during World War II was motivated by a desire to rid Peru of all of its Japanese-descended residents—a charge which some historians have argued amounted to a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The bill was later passed and the APRA's famed founder, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, returned from foreign exile.

This government developed in a climate of turmoil motivated by the economic crisis that presented itself with increasingly alarming characteristics; because of the turmoil that arose in the countryside in favor of the realization of land reform and a vigorous campaign of national scope for the recovery of the oil fields of La Brea and Pariñas that illegally continued to operate the American company International Petroleum Company.

The leadership of the opposition was assumed by the architect Belaunde, who organized a new mass party: People's Action,which was preparing for the next general election, where he would have prominence.

The mission was to put finance in order, balance the budget and stabilize the currency, which was achieved, not without first adopting anti-popular measures such as rising gasoline,cutting food subsidies and increasing the tax burden.

In those years the migrations of the mountains developed a lot and the slums around Lima increased, to the point of talking about the "belt of misery" that was beginning to surround the capital.

On a personal level, Prado managed in 1958 to get the Catholic Church to annul his marriage to Enriqueta Garland so he could marry the Limeña lady Clorinda Málaga, which caused little scandal among the conservative sector of Limegna society.

The Peruvian Armed Forces had been opposed to the Prado administration as it made reformist measures focused on civilian life, which resulted with the military receiving less support from the traditional elites and the Catholic Church.

It has been said that the real motive of this institutional coup of the Armed Forces was the anti-aprism still deeply rooted among the military, who did not want the APRA to rule, even in co-government.

He made a brief visit to his homeland as he commemorated the centenary of the Battle of Callao (2 May 1966), when he was paid a tribute for being the son of President Mariano Ignacio Prado, who drove to Peru during the last stage of the conflict with Spain in 1865–66.