Game of Thrones, Inca Style

[Judi Lynn]

By SONIA GOLDENBERG DEC. 28, 2017



LIMA, Peru — While Peru’s Congress was debating last week whether to oust President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski over charges of corruption, rumors swept Lima that he had drawn up a Faustian bargain to remain in power. And so it came to pass. Three days after Mr. Kuczynski escaped impeachment thanks to supporters of Alberto Fujimori, the former dictator, he pardoned Mr. Fujimori, who was serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Democratically elected president in 1990, Mr. Fujimori led the country through a period of economic revival, but he was removed from office in a corruption scandal and convicted of human rights abuses carried out in his name by the military. Among the more notorious crimes: Nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University were kidnapped and murdered by a military death squad, and 15 people, including an 8-year-old, were killed in the Barrios Altos neighborhood of Lima for supposedly belonging to the Shining Path terrorist group.

Mr. Kuczynski’s move, described officially as a medical humanitarian gesture, has shaken Peru. With one apparently self-serving act, the president has polarized the country, broken an electoral promise, betrayed justice and enraged his own party. Daily demonstrations in Lima followed.

The legality of the pardon, widely perceived as a crude quid pro quo, is being challenged by jurists and human rights groups in Peru and elsewhere. Lawyers for the relatives of victims have announced they will appeal to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which had ordered Peru to try Mr. Fujimori for murders committed during his regime in the 1990s. The minister of the interior, the minister of culture, the human rights director of the Ministry of Justice and three congressmen from Mr. Kuczynski’s party have resigned.

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/opinion/peru-kuczynski-fujimori-pardon-odebrecht.html