The former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo arrived in Lima on Sunday after his extradition from the United States, the latest in a string of ex-leaders to face corruption charges in the country.
Images showed Toledo, 77, wearing a green jacket and red jumper, being escorted by Peruvian police and US Marshals down the stairway from a commercial flight at Lima’s international airport.
Toledo, president of Peru between 2001 and 2006, surrendered himself at a courthouse in San Jose, California, on Friday for extradition after a judge dismissed his last appeal.
The extradition has caused a stir in Peru, amid outrage and disappointment that yet another ex-president has fallen from grace. Toledo is accused of receiving millions of dollars in bribes from the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, the giant company at the centre of Latin America’s biggest corruption scandal.
He is one of four former Peruvian presidents sucked into the graft network. Former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was forced resign over corruption allegations in 2018, is also being investigated for alleged money laundering. Alan Garcia, who followed Toledo as president between 2006 and 2011, killed himself when police came to arrest him at his home in 2019.
Toledo is accused of taking about $35m in bribes from Odebrecht to win a public works contracts to build a highway connecting Peru and Brazil. The Brazilian firm has admitted to paying $800m to officials throughout the region in exchange for lucrative public works contracts.
Peru formally requested Toledo’s extradition in 2018 and he was arrested in the US the following year before being released on bail in 2020. He denies the charges of collusion and money laundering and insists he will not receive a fair trial in Peru. Prosecutors have requested a 20-year prison sentence.
His lawyer in the US, David Bowker, said the former president was “profoundly saddened and disappointed” by the decision to deny his bid to block the extradition, and called the investigation a “political prosecution”.
His lawyer in Peru, Roberto Su, said on Sunday that his client was in poor health and his “rights had not been respected”.
Toledo – widely credited as the leader who restored democracy to Peru after the decade-long regime of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori – will probably share the Barbadillo prison on a Lima police base with the 84-year-old ex-strongman, who was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years for corruption and human rights abuses.
Another fellow prisoner could be ex-president Pedro Castillo, who was ousted in December and charged with rebellion after attempting to dissolve congress and rule by decree, sparking widespread political violence and plunging the country into crisis.
An economist with a doctorate from Stanford University in the US, Toledo is the second former Peruvian president to be extradited, a status he shares with Fujimori who was extradited from Chile in 2007.
“Peru has most of its presidents of the last two decades accused of corruption, which sends a devastating message,” said Jo Marie Burt, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America.
“The Toledo case [is a] big disappointment for Peru and for all of Latin America. It discourages the fight for democracy. You can’t fight for democracy and be corrupt,” she added.
