Saturday, July 25, 2009
Miami Herald: Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori has faced three convictions for abusing his power as president and authorizing military death squads more than a decade ago and, now, for embezzling $15 million in government funds to pay his spy chief.
No matter.
Fujimori expects all to be forgiven — if his daughter Keiko Fujimori wins the presidential election in 2011. She has promised to pardon his crimes. If so, the septuagenarian won’t face 25 years in prison.
The former president claims it’s a political vendetta. He admitted paying off intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos, but insisted he should not be held criminally responsible because he later repaid the money with funds found at the headquarters of Montesinos’ agency. He walked out of a Lima court Monday vowing to nullify this latest conviction, saying he only paid Montesinos to avoid a military coup.
“The true judgment for me is that of the people, who have long absolved me in their heart,” Fujimori said.
Folly
Maybe they have, but democracy shouldn’t be about one man. That’s the old caudillo folly that keeps polluting Latin America’s best democratic efforts.
Whether it’s the dangerous hijinks of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez ... or the military thuggery of deposing Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya after that president sought to illegally change his country’s constitution ... democracy is only as good as the institutions that protect it.
Fujimori took on the radical Shining Path and initially set Peru on a better economic course, but along the way he became his own worst enemy — ignoring constitutional strictures and acting like a dictatorial monarch.