$15 million gift from Carlos Peralta and family creates a new lung unit at hospital, where his own life was saved

Carlos Peralta knows what it feels like to run out of breath. He also knows what it feels like to run out of time. The Mexican industrialist, chairman and chief executive of Grupo IUSA, was diagnosed with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that slowly scars the lungs until breathing and taking in oxygen become a daily struggle.

A double-lung transplant was his only real option. He could have gone anywhere in the world for care.

He went to Miami.

Recently, Jackson Health Foundation announced that Peralta and his family donated $15 million to Jackson Health System as a thank-you.

In recognition of the gift, the hospital’s specialized pulmonary facility now carries the family’s name: the Carlos Peralta and Family Lung Unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

The money will expand the unit’s lung intensive care capacity, help route emergency patients more smoothly, add advanced medical technology, grow specialized clinical research, and improve care for people facing end-stage lung disease, the condition that nearly took his life.

“We didn’t have time to waver,” Peralta said. “My condition was worsening every day, and I knew my time was limited. Finding Dr. Pipkin and the extraordinary team at Jackson Health System saved my life. I am forever grateful to the Miami Transplant Institute and the team that gave me a second chance at life. My family and I made this gift so that future patients facing severe lung disease can receive the same world-class care and hope that I received.”

He credits the Miami Transplant Institute, a joint program of Jackson Health System and UHealth, the University of Miami Health System. It ranks first in Florida and in the top 10 nationally for transplant volume, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.

Peralta chose it for its surgical skill and because donor lungs often become available quickly there, which matters enormously for patients whose condition worsens by the week.

Dr. Mauricio Pipkin, the institute’s surgical director of lung transplant, led his operation.

“We care for the sickest of the sick,” Pipkin said.

“In many cases, these are patients who have been turned away elsewhere because they require advanced life support and come straight from the ICU. As complex as Carlos Peralta’s case was, our team was confident we could give him a second chance. Seeing him thrive today and choosing to pay that gift forward is the highest compliment our team could receive.”

The renamed unit is designed around patients like him. It brings pulmonary medicine, thoracic surgery, and critical care together as one team on a single floor.

It adds more ICU capacity and has its own interventional radiology and catheterization suites, so very fragile patients don’t have to be moved around the hospital.

David Zambrana, president and chief executive of Jackson Health System, said the gift was about the people behind the numbers. “Behind every transplant is a person with more life to live, a family hoping to make more memories with their loved one, and a future that looks brighter and less uncertain,” he said.

“The Carlos Peralta and Family Lung Unit will ensure that thousands more families experience that same hope.” Flavia Llizo, chief executive of Jackson Health Foundation, said the gift “will leave an indelible mark on healthcare in South Florida.”

Peralta and his wife, Mariana, were there for the announcement, alongside hospital and foundation leaders and the surgeon who operated on him.

For Peralta, 74, the gift continues a family tradition of combining business and civic duty that goes back more than 80 years.

His father, Alejo Peralta y Díaz Ceballos, was an engineer from Puebla who founded Industrias Unidas, S.A., or IUSA, in 1939. In 1956, President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines asked him to lead Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute.

There he laid the groundwork for the Zacatenco campus and founded XE-IPN Canal 11, a television station devoted to education and culture. In 1962, he opened an industrial complex at Pastejé, in the State of Mexico, a deliberate effort to bring factories and jobs to the countryside.

The son started at the bottom.

Carlos Peralta joined the company in 1968 as an apprentice in the machine shop. He worked his way through production and administration, becoming executive vice president in 1984 and chairman in 1997, the year his father died. Along the way, he took Grupo IUSA into wireless phones by founding Iusacell in 1989, years before most Mexicans had a mobile phone, and the family sold out of the business in 2001.

Today the group makes more than 6,000 products for the electricity, water, and gas industries, including electric meters, cables, transformers, and solar panels.

It sells in more than 30 countries and employs about 10,000 people.

His sons, Juan Carlos and Pablo, are the third generation in the business.

Peralta’s giving began in the same communities his father tried to lift up. At Pastejé, he supported three day-care centers for workers’ children and a school that offers free education from kindergarten through 12th grade.

The school focuses on technical training and job preparation and has worked to open doors for Indigenous families in the region, including the Mazahua. In 1997 he founded the Fundación Alejo Peralta y Díaz Ceballos in his father’s memory, and he still serves as its president. Its first job came almost immediately.

After Hurricane Paulina hit Mexico’s Pacific coast that October, the foundation worked with the governments of Oaxaca and Guerrero to obtain 1,100 homes for displaced families. Three years later, after storms in Puebla’s Sierra Norte, it gave another 500.

It has since helped with recovery after hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods and runs programs for low-income older adults and for children with cancer, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes.

Health and education have been a steady thread.

In 2002, Peralta gave the Mexican Red Cross 32 ambulances, one for each Mexican state. He also funds the Carlos Peralta Chair in Public Health at Universidad Anáhuac.

The foundation’s technology program, Enseñando para una vida mejor, began in 2008 and had trained more than 4,000 young people from farming and working families in rural parts of the State of Mexico by 2016.

In 2020, he received the Shimon Peres Award for his contributions to education in Mexico.

Most of that giving stayed close to home, in the towns around his family’s factories and in the parts of Mexico where his father first built the company.

The Miami gift is different, both in its size and in where it goes. Peralta is giving to the hospital that saved him and to the patients who will come after him.

Many will arrive the way he did, struggling to breathe and running out of time.

With this gift, the Peralta family hopes more of them will get the same second chance.