LIMA, Oct 4, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – A Peruvian court on Wednesday annulled ex-
president Alberto Fujimori’s pardon for crimes against humanity and ordered
the 80-year-old’s immediate arrest, officials said.
The South American country’s justice department said in a statement that
the Supreme Court had “issued the arrest and detention orders against former
president Fujimori so that he may be re-integrated into the prison
establishment.”
He was pardoned last December on humanitarian grounds, but critics said
the move was in exchange for Fujimori’s son helping then-president Pedro
Pablo Kuczynski avoid impeachment.
Fujimori was 12 years into a 25-year jail sentence handed down for
ordering two massacres by death squads between 1991 and 1992.
“This decision is inhuman, it’s unjust,” said his daughter Keiko, leader
of the main opposition Popular Force party and seen by many as the heir to
Fujimori’s political dynasty.
“Today is the saddest day of our lives, it’s painful,” a tearful Keiko
told reporters, adding that she had yet to speak to her father since the
court decision.
One of Fujimori’s lawyers, Miguel Perez, said on Chile’s RPP radio the
decision was subject to appeal.
The pardon, issued by Kuczynski before he was himself brought down by a
corruption scandal, triggered a wave of protests by human rights
organizations and by victims of Fujimori’s crackdown.
Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent, has been living in Lima but has
been hospitalized four times since his release last December.
After his arrest Wednesday, he was admitted to a clinic for tests after
experiencing a drop in blood pressure and an accelerated heart beat, his
doctor, Alejandro Aguinaga, told reporters.
– Health problems –
Victims of Fujimori’s crackdown had petitioned the Inter-American Court to
demand a judicial review of the process that led to the pardon.
Carlos Rivera, a lawyer for the victims, said the decision to annul the
pardon was justified.
“Kuczynski’s pardon to Alberto Fujimori has no legal value and therefore
he has to return to prison for irregularities in the process,” he said.
Kuczynski had justified the pardon on humanitarian grounds, given
Fujimori’s well-documented ill-health. But the scandal-tainted president had
only days earlier survived an impeachment vote thanks to the abstention of a
group of lawmakers led by Fujimori’s son Kenji.
This lead critics to say the pardon was obviously a quid-pro-quo, the
price Kuczynski paid for what proved to be a temporary political survival.
“International standards in the humanitarian pardon were not met,” Rivera
said.
Alejandro Aguinaga, Fujimori’s doctor, expressed shock at the news. “We
see that in Peru nothing is respected. The pardon of president Fujimori was a
constitutional action,” Aguinaga told Radio RPP.
Fujimori has had a number of operations as part of a long-running battle
with tongue cancer. His most recent hospitalization was in August, for an
irregular heartbeat.
– Family feud –
He has been working on a memoir about his decade in power (1990-2000), a
period marked by corruption but also by a fight against guerrillas and
terrorism.
“I have reached 80 bearing the marks of the years, with all the shocks of
political life, the enormous satisfactions and the profound regrets,” he
wrote in a message to AFP around his birthday in July.
“In the few years I have left,” Fujimori explained in his handwritten
text, “I will dedicate myself to three objectives: bringing my family
together, improving my health to the extent possible, and striking a serene
and balanced equilibrium in my life.”
However, Fujimori has been unable to reconcile his daughter Keiko, 43,
with her younger brother Kenji, who leads a rival faction of her party, to
end a political schism which could see the two face off in the 2021
presidential elections.
The charge of crimes against humanity stemmed in part from the killings or
disappearances of scores of civilians — allegedly by a shadowy squad of
military officers — during Peru’s bloody struggle against Maoist rebels.
The ex-ruler is revered and despised in equal measure in Peru. Admirers
laud him for dragging the country’s economy into the modern era and defeating
the Shining Path guerrilla movement.