Andean Group - July 2009 (ISSN 1741-4466)

Former president Alberto Fujimori (1991 to 2000) went on trial for embezzlement in July, accused of paying US$15m to his security chief Vladimiro Montesinos. In the space of two weeks he was convicted and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, the third conviction he has received. Fujimori had admitted paying Montesinos out of state coffers but insisted that he repaid the money before fleeing Peru for Japan in 2000, although he did not clarify from where this money came. Fujimori clearly hoped that by admitting his guilt he would speed up the trial and avoid inflicting irremediable damage to his legacy and the presidential ambitions of his daughter Keiko.

“I express my partial and relative conformity with the charges [...] I only acknowledge the facts, I don't accept the criminal responsibility, the punishment or the civil reparations," Fujimori told the court in Lima. In April Fujimori became the first former, elected head of state in the region to be tried and convicted in his own country for serious human rights violations. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for murder, aggravated assault and kidnappings, mostly carried out by members of Colina, a death squad in the army intelligence service (SIE).

“Pinochet effect"
The motivation behind Fujimori's decision to plead guilty in the latest case against him was to avoid the fate of Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose image was damaged far more by the discovery that he embezzled millions of dollars in the Riggs bank scandal than by his responsibility for human rights crimes. He feared that a protracted trial would bring to light the full extent of the kleptocracy over which he presided and damage Keiko's prospects in the 2011 presidential elections. Keiko claimed after April's trial that she would pardon her father if she were to win, although international law and past rulings by Peru's constitutional tribunal prohibit pardons or amnesties in cases of crimes against humanity. 

• Montesinos
  Alberto Fujimori claims that the payment he made to Vladimiro Montesinos was not illegal because he had later reimbursed the state. Judge César San Martí­n was unimpressed. “This was not a political sentence," he said in concluding the trial on 20 July. “The decision today was based purely on the facts." Peru's anti-corruption prosecutor estimates that some US$2bn was plundered from state coffers during Fujimori's decade-long stint in power.