Alejandro Toledo was the first elected president of Peru after the escape and resignation by fax from Japan of the autocrat Alberto Fujimori. It was 2001 and this liberal economist born into poverty and with a brilliant academic resume seemed like the right person to revive the country after the fujimorista mess.
Two decades later, Toledo is preparing to return to Peru in handcuffs after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave his extradition the green light on Tuesday to face corruption charges against him.
Despite the fact that the ex-president’s lawyers filed an appeal this Wednesday with the Northern District Court of California to suspend the extradition, the Peruvian justice expects Toledo to take just a few “days” to return to Peru. “At the moment we do not have an established term, that will be the product of agreements and meetings that are taken on how to carry out (the extradition) in the coming days,” the head of the Office of Extraditions of the Public Ministry told Canal N, Alfredo Rebaza. “The important thing is that the decision has been made,” he added.
The authorization from the US government was the last step for the extradition after it was approved last September by the US justice, after a long process that began with the escape of Toledo, imitating his predecessor Fujimori.
At the beginning of 2017, after the outbreak in Peru of the corruption scandal of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, the former president was accused of collecting 20 million dollars from this company – fully involved in the looting of Petrobras in Brazil – in exchange for the concession of a road. Toledo disappeared, was declared a fugitive and appeared in California, where in the 1970s he had studied at the Universities of San Francisco and Stanford thanks to scholarships.
After the formal request for extradition from the Peruvian justice, in 2019 he was arrested and imprisoned for eight months until, the following year, he was granted house arrest after paying bail.
Now Peru assures, through the State Attorney General’s Office, that the US Department of Justice planned to present a petition this Wednesday to revoke that bond that allowed the former president to leave the Californian Maguire prison in 2020.
“If the Court decides the request to revoke the bond, Mr. Toledo can be arrested and placed at the disposal of the U.S. Marshals, which is the United States police service, and through this body the execution of delivery to the State is made. Peruvian; we estimate that this will take days,” attorney Silvana Carrión told radio station RPP, who was convinced that the appeal of the former president’s lawyers will be rejected “because the latest requests from Toledo’s defense have been denied.” .
Washington’s decision to extradite Toledo comes amid the political and institutional crisis that Peru is experiencing after the impeachment and arrest of leftist president Pedro Castillo, and the subsequent protests that have already left fifty dead.
