Chile Returns Fujimori to Peru to Face Charges
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: September 23, 2007
LIMA, Peru, Sept. 22 — Peruvian police detained a former president, Alberto K. Fujimori, in Santiago, Chile, Saturday and flew him here, opening the way for him to be tried on human rights and corruption charges.
The detention followed a ruling on Friday by the Supreme Court of Chile that he could be extradited.
Mr. Fujimori’s arrival at a military air base here already has much of this country pondering what lies ahead for the man who ruled Peru from 1990 to 2000 with a blend of authoritarianism and showmanship. Initially he is to be jailed in a modest police station cell — a striking contrast with the rented mansion in which he lived in Chile.
Perú 21, a Lima newspaper, summed up the former president’s odyssey over the last several years as he tried to return to power with the headline “Harakiri,” referring to Japanese ritual suicide.
It was that quest for a second chance at power that led him in 2005 to leave comfortable exile in Japan, where his parents were born and where he received asylum in 2000 as his government was collapsing amid corruption scandals.
He headed to Chile, hoping he could continue on to Peru, but instead was detained. Later, the Chilean Supreme Court began deliberations on an extradition request by Peruvian prosecutors.
Mr. Fujimori’s saga is filled with other such twists and turns. The current president, Alan García, spent much of the 1990s in exile, wanted by Mr. Fujimori’s government on corruption charges related to his economically disastrous first term in the late 1980s.
“There is a kind of exquisite irony in the role reversal of this cat and mouse game,” said Gustavo Gorriti, a respected journalist here who was detained in 1992 in the basement of Mr. Fujimori’s military intelligence service. His case was among those that moved the five-judge panel in Chile to grant extradition.
“I don’t get any pleasure from Fujimori’s plight,” said Mr. Gorriti, “but justice has to be done to keep such adventurers from emerging.”
Not everyone here agrees. While most Peruvians approve of his extradition, Mr. Fujimori, 69, still commands a power base, with political operatives throughout the country and more than a dozen members of Congress.
Mr. Fujimori’s continued popularity is based, in part, on his having largely crushed the Shining Path guerrilla movement. The struggle with the Maoist-inspired movement was responsible for many of the 70,000 deaths over two decades as the government fought with insurgents.
More than 500 supporters who thought he would land at the international airport here gathered there Saturday to welcome him back to Peru, waving banners reading “We love you, chino” (a nod to his Asian descent), while dancing to a mariachi band and eating ice cream.
“Fujimorismo will be reinvigorated through this ice-breaking event,” said Carlos Raffo, a pro-Fujimori congressman, referring to the political movement inspired by the former president. “Having Fujimori on Peruvian soil again will return him to the hearts of the people.”
Some of the human rights charges against him are based on reports of his support for the Colina Group, a secretive squad of military intelligence officers who carried out extrajudicial killings in the early 1990s, a time of intense violence during the war.
Some followers of Mr. Fujimori, who denies all charges against him, see his actions in the context of stabilization efforts, preferring to ignore how he may have profited from a web of graft, embezzlement and intimidation managed by Vladimiro Montesinos, his former spymaster.
“Fujimori defeated terrorism,” said Ernesto Castillo, 52, a factory worker who went to the airport to show support for the extradited president. “Thanks to him we live in peace.”