Peru is perhaps the only country in the world in which more than five former presidents have been or are immersed in criminal proceedings for various crimes. The cases of Francisco Morales Bermúdez (sentenced to life imprisonment and deceased in July 2022), Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski are well known. There are serious questions and investigations into Martin Vizcarra’s administration as regional president of Moquegua, as well as a public prosecutor’s investigation into the current president, Pedro Castillo Terrones, who is protected by the legal figure of “presidential immunity”.
With the suicide of Alan García Pérez – who shot himself in the head on 17 April 2019 when the prosecutor’s office was preparing to raid his home and take him into custody – the criminal proceedings against him were extinguished.
Likewise, as a result of the Lava Jato scandal, it is known that the construction company Odebrecht was dedicated to paying bribes (kickbacks) to national, regional and municipal government officials to obtain the good pro of works such as the Interoceanic route, among others. In addition, according to statements made by Jorge Barata (former representative of the company in Peru), Odebrecht allegedly financed the election campaigns of Alejandro Toledo, Alan García, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Keiko Fujimori, Lourdes Flores Nano and Susana Villarán. The investigation into this process continues.
The rate of corruption of officials in Peru is very high. According to a Judicial Power report published by the newspaper La República, in 2018 there were “a total of 27,200 officials prosecuted for corruption at the national level. Of this figure, 6,731 correspond to Lima and 20,289 are distributed in the regions” (https://tinyurl.com/5ean5c8u).
Corruption is reflected in the economy and in the decline in the quality of life. The Ombudsman’s Office, in a report entitled “Radiography of corruption in Peru” (2017), revealed that 12 billion soles, or around 3.6 billion dollars, are lost annually due to acts of corruption. The document specifies that this is equivalent to losing 10 million dollars a day and points out that “the price of corruption amounts to 10% of the national budget per year”.
In one of my previous essays on corruption in the Peruvian state, I stated the following: “In Peru, the state has become the branch office behind which criminal organisations operate, using different criminal methods and using corruption as a methodology, with the sole purpose of appropriating the spoils of the national budget. The statistics are overwhelming: thirteen regional governors have been prosecuted for corruption offences, most of them under preventive arrest. Likewise, more than twenty mayors and former provincial and district mayors are facing judicial proceedings or have been sentenced for corruption offences during their terms in office”.
Recently, the public prosecutor specialising in corruption offences, Amado Enco, revealed that at the national level there are 2,289 regional governors and mayors under investigation for corruption cases. And four former presidents of the Republic (one of them in prison) are questioned for alleged crimes.
MORALES BERMÚDEZ CASE
In January 2017, former Peruvian president Francisco Morales Bermúdez (a Peruvian army general who succeeded dictator Juan Velasco Alvarado in the 1970s) was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Rome (Italy) for his participation in the “Condor Plan”, having been found responsible, along with other defendants, for the deaths of some twenty Italian-Latin Americans. Two former Peruvian military personnel were also sentenced.
This plan – directed by the military governments of Chile and Argentina – was organised in this region of the Americas to kill some twenty Italian-Latin Americans, accused of being subversives who were supposedly seeking to remove it from power the aforementioned dictatorships of Pinochet and Videla.
It should be noted that the “Condor Plan” was an operation devised by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to wipe out political opposition between 1970 and 1980. It was executed mainly in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile.
In the article “Four keys to understanding the sentence against Francisco Morales Bermúdez” by Cristina Blanco, academic and research coordinator of the IDEHPUCP (https://tinyurl.com/2s95j9ms), she points out that, in order to understand this sentence, “one must resort to the assumptions that enable internal jurisdiction in the face of serious human rights violations in impunity”.
“It should be recalled that the prosecutorial investigations in Italy began with the complaint of a relative of a disappeared detainee against the Uruguayan ex-sailor Jorge Néstor Troccoli, who fled to Italy some time before to avoid prosecution in his country. Uruguay requested Troccoli’s extradition, which was denied, and demanded that Italy apply the aut dedere aut judicare principle, whereby if a country refuses to extradite, it must try the extraditable person for the crimes he or she is accused of. The complaint against Troccoli was followed by several others in the following years and, after the prosecutor’s accusation, the criminal trial was initiated against 27 accused nationals from Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Uruguay; to the detriment of 43 victims, among them 23 Italian-Latin Americans and 20 Uruguayans”, he comments.
He adds that “although, as a general principle, courts have jurisdiction over crimes committed within their territory, there are certain jurisdictional links for the state to exercise jurisdiction over acts that occurred outside its territory, a situation known as extraterritorial jurisdiction. One of the most common jurisdictional links, established by Italian law, is that of the nationality of the victims, which is applied in this case. But it is also possible – as would be the case for non-Italian victims – for a criminal court to hear acts committed outside its territory, and with foreign defendants and victims, when these are serious international crimes that would otherwise remain unpunished. This is the principle of universal jurisdiction whereby, even if the traditional connecting factors are not present (place of the acts, nationality of victims or accused), national courts can prosecute a person suspected of having committed an international crime anywhere in the world if they understand that they are an attack on the international community as a whole”.
ALBERTO FUJIMORI CASE
Former president Alberto Fujimori is currently serving a 25-year sentence for having been considered the perpetrator of aggravated homicide with malice aforethought, grievous bodily harm and aggravated kidnapping in the cases of the La Cantuta and Barrios Altos massacres, and the kidnapping of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and businessman Samuel Dyer Ampudia. The sentence was handed down in 2009.
For his supporters, the sentences are excessive because they consider that Fujimori fought a frontal war against terrorism in order to pacify the country from the violence started by Shining Path and MRTA. They argue that in this frontal war there were consequences and even excesses on the part of elements of the armed forces, which is why they disagree.
Since his extradition from Chile in 2007, Fujimori’s trial record has had several episodes. At the end of 2000, Alberto Fujimori travelled from Peru to Brunei for the annual APEC summit. From there he went to Japan, from where he resigned the presidency of Peru by fax. He remained in Japan until 2005, and with his dual nationality, he was able to evade charges of corruption, embezzlement and crimes against humanity (https://tinyurl.com/3j2azxpz).
On 6 November 2005, Alberto Fujimori travelled to Chile, where he was arrested the following day by the Chilean authorities and since then, on 11 November of that year, an extradition process against him began.
On 21 September 2007, the Supreme Court of Chile approved the request of the Peruvian judiciary to extradite him. After his arrival in our country, he faced several trials against him and ended up being convicted for the above-mentioned crimes.
A decade afterwards, on 24 December 2017, former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski granted Fujimori a humanitarian pardon on the grounds that “an official medical board has evaluated the inmate and determined that Mr. Fujimori suffers from a progressive, degenerative and incurable illness and that the prison conditions pose a serious risk to his life, health and integrity”.
Within hours of the announcement of the pardon, the defence of the relatives of the victims of the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta cases filed an appeal to revoke the pardon.
On 3 May 2016, the Peruvian Constitutional Court rejected the nullity of Alberto Fujimori’s conviction, which is why it was determined that his 25-year sentence imposed for responsibility in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres would continue, under the controversial theory of “media perpetrator”.
On October 3, 2018, after months of hearings, the Supreme Court of Preparatory Investigation declared the pardon granted to former president Alberto Fujimori inapplicable and ordered his immediate location and capture.
Despite all the accusations and convictions against him, many Peruvians in urban and rural areas are in favour of a humanitarian pardon, considering that he was a president who stabilised the economy and defeated terrorism with a frontal strategy that ended with the capture, trial and conviction of the main terrorist leaders.
This is only part of the panorama of accusations, investigations, trials and convictions against former presidents. The cases of Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski will be analysed in a future article.
