Alberto Fujimori is free. Fourteen years after being sentenced to 25 years in prison – with an extradition included from Chile in 2007 – the man who governed Peru in the last decade of the last century left the Barbadillo prison in Lima this afternoon. He did it in the company of his children Keiko and Kenji, the most political of his clan, in the midst of a series of questions for contravening an order from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The scene is almost identical to December 2017, when he was pardoned on Christmas Eve. That time he was admitted to a clinic, where he remained for almost a hundred days, but he had to return to prison after the ruling was revoked.
Hours before his departure, the atmosphere in Barbadillo had begun. Eleven children in school sweatshirts came down from a hopper along with a group of women. They formed in front of the prison and showed a banner with the face of Alberto Fujimori and a word that is an affront to the victims of his regime: welcome. They are no more than twelve years old and when they were born Fujimori had already been behind bars for a handful of years, sentenced to 25 years for crimes against humanity. “Their parents are Fujimorists and they have given them permission,” a short-haired woman accompanying them responded curtly.
It is one in the afternoon, and the release of the former Peruvian-Japanese president who established a dictatorship in the nineties has entered the countdown. A hundred supporters have turned the exit from the Barbadillo prison into an orange rally. The face of the Peruvian-Japanese who established a dictatorship in the nineties is everywhere. On banners, flags, poles and even on some beer cans. “Who saved us from terror? “El Chino did it,” says a billboard posted on an adjacent wall that overlooks a mechanic.
Two speakers and a sound engineer have been stationed below. The rhythm of Chino, a technocumbia with which he attempted his re-election in the 2000s before his corruption scandals were uncovered, will be played countless times this morning. Only thirty police officers guard the door. And every time a car enters or leaves, people and the press rush to find out who it is.
“Brave Chinese, here are your people,” the mob says about the president who resigned by fax from Japan. The one who controls the megaphone is a short and solid lady named Nikita Ríos. “No one pays me. I am a grateful supporter. The country was bleeding and he pacified it,” she says. At some point in the afternoon Flor de los Milagros Contreras León, a member of La Resistencia, the shock force of Fujimorism, will take the floor to slander the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: “The best president of Peru is kidnapped for defending Peru . It’s all the fault of the miserable Court defending terrorists. But no more injustice. “Fujimori will be free.”
The day before, the president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court), Ricardo Pérez Manrique, required the Peruvian State to refrain from executing the release of Fujimori, 85 years old, as he had ordered in March 2022. However, bypassing a supranational justice body, the Constitutional Court (TC) ordered that habeas corpus be made effective and, with it, the humanitarian pardon granted six years ago by the economist of American descent Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. .
The TC’s ruling would have occurred irregularly. One of its members, Judge Manuel Monteagudo, denounced that the resolution was not on the agenda and was made behind his back. “A second order has been issued of which the rest of the magistrates have not been aware, that is, those of us who voted against. What has been processed, and this is an interesting and worrying procedural matter, is that it has been understood that the decision of what to do regarding the return corresponded solely and exclusively to those who were in favor of the first decision in purely procedural matters,” express.
At two in the afternoon, tempers began to heat up. “INPE (National Penitentiary Institute) do your job and free the Chinese. If you don’t, it means you have him captured. Do it or we will be the mockery of the caviars (well-to-do leftists).” But tensions decreased when they learned that Keiko Fujimori and her brother Kenji had left her house in San Borja heading to prison. It was the sign they were waiting for. Shortly after three in the afternoon, Fujimori’s most political children entered a lead truck, with Keiko at the wheel. His entry was at the pace of a procession amid a swarm of journalists and supporters. The moment was near.
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