A former president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, will be extradited to Peru to face graft charges after surrendering to US authorities on Friday.
Toledo — who governed the country, a major producer of copper, between 2001 and 2006 — turned himself in to federal agents in California on Friday morning, a day after a federal judge in Washington denied his attempt to block the extradition, ending a years-long legal battle.
“I ask Peruvian justice not to kill me in jail,” Toledo said in an interview with the EFE news agency on Thursday, before he surrendered. “Let me fight with arguments.”
Toledo, 77, is expected to be transferred to Lima, Peru’s capital, in two to three days, Peru’s prosecutor Silvana Carrion told local media.
The former president is accused of taking at least $25mn in bribes from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht in exchange for facilitating public contracts. Prosecutors in Peru are seeking a 20-year sentence for Toledo, who has denied the charges.
If detained ahead of a trial in Peru, as prosectors have requested, he would be the country’s third former president behind bars.
Alberto Fujimori is serving sentences for embezzlement and human rights abuses committed during his authoritarian rule of the country between 1990 and 2000. Pedro Castillo, who was arrested last December after attempting to close congress and rule by decree, is under pre-trial detention in the same military facility on the outskirts of Lima.
Toledo is the fourth former president of Peru to be snared by the Odebrecht scandal, one of the largest corruption cases to have hit Latin America, with politicians implicated in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina, among others.
Two other former presidents of Peru, Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, are both facing charges of receiving bribes from the company, while Alan García — who governed the country from 2006 until 2011 — died after shooting himself in the head as police arrived to arrest him.
Toledo has been living in the US’s Bay Area since 2016. He was arrested at his home in Menlo Park, California, in July 2019 following a request from Peru for his extradition. Since then, he spent time in solitary confinement at the Santa Rita Jail, and was moved to house arrest in 2020. He was never charged in the US.
Toledo’s government received praise for overseeing quick economic growth and shepherding the country towards democracy following Fujimori’s authoritarian tenure. However, his upcoming extradition is a sign of Peru’s failure to fully transition to stable democracy, analysts warned. The country is racked with political instability, having had six presidents in the last five years.
“Peru needs a shock to revive confidence in its politics, politicians, and parties,” said Rodolfo Rojas, an analyst with Sequoia, a Lima-based political risk consultancy. “That will be a long process fraught, with uncertainty.”
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