In a controversial decision, the Constitutional Court decided to restore to former president Alberto Fujimori the pardon given to him, for political reasons, by then president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, in 2017. On that occasion, his son, then congressman Kenji Fujimori, gathered votes to save PPK (as he was known) from a vacancy, provided that the then president granted his father a pardon.
After a year off, the Supreme Court overturned the pardon and Fujimori returned to Barbadillo Prison. Now, this new decision can set you free once again. At 83 years old and in poor health, the justification given is that he does not represent a danger to society and that he has the right to spend his last days at home.
There is an important issue to clarify there, however. The 25-year sentence he was serving and the pardon he received refer to very specific issues. These are the massacres of Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, where 25 civilians were executed by the Colina death squad, which operated under the command of the Executive power, and the kidnapping of Gustavo Gorriti and Samuel Dyer. Corruption offenses were also included in the penalty.
The point is that Peruvian law does not allow pardons to be generic to all acts in a person’s life. Therefore, processes that are not contained in the previous sentence and that are still open must continue.
In the case of Fujimori, we are talking about 9 processes, which are ongoing. It may be that the ex-mandatory does not survive the end of all of them or that he does not even have the health or time to serve new sentences, but it is important that he reports to the Justice what he knows. This will help in the compensation that the State owes, in addition to providing answers to families who are still looking for their missing.
Among the most important cases is that of Pativilca, a massacre also carried out by the Colina group in January 1992, in which six people were murdered. As in Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, the dead in Pativilca were labeled as members of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla at the time. The family members fought for years in court to prove that they were not members of the terrorist group, not least because there were children among them. In Pativilca, victims were kidnapped, tortured and shot to the head, some bodies disappeared.
After a lengthy process, the prosecution asked the former president for 25 years in prison for this massacre, but there is still a stage left in the process, which would include the necessary testimony from Fujimori.
Another case that remains open is that of forced sterilizations, in which more than 250,000 women, most of them living in humble, indigenous areas far from urban centers, were tricked and forcibly sterilized. The project had an official justification: to reduce poverty through family planning. The thousands of women who have already testified in the process, however, claim that they were never informed of the procedure and that they did not give their consent either.
This case had been stalled for years, but pressure from feminist movements caused it to be reopened in December 2021. According to the indictment, health authorities met sterilization targets set by Fujimori.
The other cases involve illegal arms sales to the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), embezzlement and money laundering and assassinations of opponents.
Impunity for Fujimori weighs even more in a country that is currently struggling to regain institutional and democratic stability. He is not on trial at the moment, but the destruction of political parties and all the tension that reigns in Peru today can also be attributed to Fujimori. His actions against parties, against Justice, against opponents and against democracy help to understand why the current scenario in the country is so corrupt and desolate.
