The Devil’s Advocate

On my last post I was explaining my thesis on how I think you could classify the different opinions we Peruvians have about Fujimori, according to our own personal backgrounds. Some people were nice enough to leave their comments and, reading them, you can recognize the different opinions most of us have about him:

• Some of us really hate him, think that he was the worst president we had ever seen, are sure that the criminis lessa humanidad (crimes against humanity) which he has been charged are true, and think that he should die in jail
• Some others praise him, think that he was the best president Peru has ever had, and think that he should be allowed to take the presidency again
• Finally, some few of us think that, while he did much good for our country, he should be judged to clarify if he had (or not) penal responsibility on those crimes: were they true, he should be incarcerated, in any other case, he should be allowed to run for presidency as he wishes

Charges against Fujimori

I won’t repeat myself, and you can find a list of some of the good things done by Fujimori’s Government in my previous post and, of course, in his personal page as well. Let me list now some of the crimes he has been charged with:

• Abandonment of Office: he faxed his resignation from Tokyo to the Peruvian Congress
• Homicide: he is accused of responsibility in the extrajudicial execution in 1991 of fifteen people at a fund-raising party in a poor tenement in Lima's Barrios Altos district, and the “disappearance” in 1992 of nine students and a professor from La Cantuta University. Both crimes were directly executed by the Grupo Colina, a death squad purportedly run by Vladimiro Montesinos
• Embezzlement: he is accused of embezzling state funds to help finance his re-election

You can read more at the Fujimori Extraditable web page, and at the US Department of State Country Reports of Human Rights Practice.

There are many other things that are said about him (like “when he flown to Japan, his luggage was full of stolen money” or “he stole a thousand million dollars that is hidden in encrypted Swiss bank accounts”), but none of them is credible (and therefore the Government has not pressed charges under any of those descriptions), so we won’t refer to those here.

I’m not a lawyer (and have no legal experience whatsoever), but I do know that we need to differentiate political responsibility from penal responsibility. Fujimori was the Head of State and, of course, is politically responsible for everything that happened during his presidency: both the good and the bad things. So, in this respect, he is of course accountable for the occurrence of all the crimes mentioned. The bad news is that political responsibility doesn’t send anybody to jail. So, courts are trying to find proof that he has also penal responsibility. Unfortunately they haven’t been lucky so far, and all of the charges presented (at least, on the extradition papers sent to Japan) seem to exhibit probative deficiencies.

Weak charges, poor documentation

El Comercio, Peruvian main newspaper, and from which it cannot be said that is favoring Fujimori, published an interesting article last Sunday exploring the problems on the accusations: “Cuadernillo presentado al Japón exhibía deficiencias probatorias”. There’s no English version of that note, but you can read a rough translation here. Ricardo Uceda, author of that article, comments that while the main and most important charges against Fujimori are those related to the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta cases, there is no enough proof that he ordered both crimes. Ricardo Mac Lean, a renowned lawyer, expressed in an internal memo to the Foreign Affairs Ministry (the one that is in charge of the extradition process) that “he feels embarrassed that we’re sending to Japan a 700-page document with no substantial proof”. Government’s external legal advisor, White & Case, stated also that the document had no good probative value.

On the embezzlement case, the Kroll Report failed to find any of the illicit bank accounts in which it was said that Fujimori hid the stolen money.

Some of the other cases, on the other side, are robust enough, but they would mean a maximum of 3-4 years in jail, sentence that, according to Peruvian law, can be suspended.

Please, take note that I’m not saying that Fujimori is innocent. I just want to state the fact that there are no conclusive proofs (as his detractors claim) that he’s responsible of any of the crimes against humanity attributed to him.

Why did he go to Chile?

While I don’t know for sure, I have some theories about why he decided to abandon his comfortable Japanese auto-exile, to fly to the land of Peruvian southern neighbor, Chile.

First of all, I’m pretty sure that he knows that the charges against him (contained on the extradition papers) were weak. Had they had any concrete proof of any of the attributed crimes, his best shot would have been to stay in Japan, for they don’t extradite Japanese citizens (he has the citizenship for he never renounced to it). He left Japan because he’s sure that no fair trial can find penal responsibility on him.

Second, he wants to be president again (to clean up his image, according to him), and he’s been in campaign over the last months. He promised to his followers that he would return to Peru before the elections and, with this trip, he can say that “he’s delivering his promises, for he’s now closer to Peru”.

Third, he knows about the recent problems between Peru and Chile and wants to make a profit from them. He thought that he would not be incarcerated (at least not in such a short time span) and that he would be able to continue his political campaign. Being in prison until a Chilean judge decides if he’s extraditable was probably one of the analyzed scenarios, but he may have decided that the probability of this (being incarcerated) was low.

Fourth, if the extradition judge decides that there’s no enough proof for an extradition, he would claim that “a fair trial has found him innocent”, and would therefore use this as a tool on his defense in Peru.

Fifth, if Chile finally decides to extradite him to Peru, he can claim that he’s a Japanese citizen and would ask to be sent back to Japan.

I don’t know what he’s thinking, of course, but this seems as the most plausible scenario to me.

What do you think?