Chemical abundances in the Galactic bulge

The early history of star formation and chemical enrichment of our Galaxy is imprinted in the abundance patterns of the old stellar populations: the halo, bulge, and thick disk. Despite its importance, the Galactic bulge and its globular cluster system in particular, are still almost unexplored, the major problem being the high foreground extinction. The new generation of high resolution IR spectrographs opened new and unique perspectives to obtain detailed abundances in the bulge. Using the NIRSPEC spectrograph at Keck II, high resolution, echelle spectra in the range 1.5-1.8 mu m of bright giants in the Baade's window and in a sample of bulge globular clusters have been obtained. We present the results of our abundance analysis of several metals like Fe, C, O and other alpha-elements, by using full spectral synthesis techniques.