While Peru’s Congress was debating last week whether to oust President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski over charges of corruption, rumors swept Lima that he had drawn up a Faustian bargain to remain in power. And so it came to pass. Three days after Mr. Kuczynski escaped impeachment thanks to supporters of Alberto Fujimori, the former dictator, he pardoned Mr. Fujimori, who was serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Democratically elected president in 1990, Mr. Fujimori led the country through a period of economic revival, but he was removed from office in a corruption scandal and convicted of human rights abuses carried out in his name by the military. Among the more notorious crimes: Nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University were kidnapped and murdered by a military death squad, and 15 people, including an 8-year-old, were killed in the Barrios Altos neighborhood of Lima for supposedly belonging to the Shining Path terrorist group.
Mr. Kuczynski’s move, described officially as a medical humanitarian gesture, has shaken Peru. With one apparently self-serving act, the president has polarized the country, broken an electoral promise, betrayed justice and enraged his own party. Daily demonstrations in Lima followed.
The legality of the pardon, widely perceived as a crude quid pro quo, is being challenged by jurists and human rights groups in Peru and elsewhere. Lawyers for the relatives of victims have announced they will appeal to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which had ordered Peru to try Mr. Fujimori for murders committed during his regime in the 1990s. The minister of the interior, the minister of culture, the human rights director of the Ministry of Justice and three congressmen from Mr. Kuczynski’s party have resigned.
The president may still be in the National Palace, but he has emerged battered from this dangerous “Game of Thrones, Inca Style” that played out in prime time throughout the holiday season before an audience that was both hypnotized and alarmed by the country’s slide into chaos.
The drama began on Dec. 21, when the majority opposition party, led by Mr. Fujimori’s daughter Keiko — a former presidential candidate who’s being investigated for money laundering — orchestrated a parliamentary coup set in motion by the Brazilian construction magnate Marcelo Odebrecht, whose company has bribed presidents, ministers and candidates throughout Latin America to win public contracts, greasing the wheels of an already corrupt región.
The charge against Mr. Kuczynski was that his consulting firm had signed contracts with the Odebrecht conglomerate linked to an overpriced project for the Interoceanic Highway when he was prime minister more than a decade ago. But the vote to overthrow him fell short when Mr. Fujimori’s son, Kenji, led a group of congressmen who abstained, reportedly on Alberto Fujimori’s orders.
Mr. Kuczynski is not alone in being embroiled in Mr. Odebrecht’s web. A former president, Alejandro Toledo, is being sought by Interpol over allegations that he received a $20 million bribe from Mr. Odebrecht. Another former president, Ollanta Humala, is already behind bars pending charges of corruption. Yet another, Alan García, who joined forces with Keiko Fujimori in an attempt to oust Mr. Kuczynski, is under investigation for corruption and money laundering.
By pardoning Mr. Fujimori to save his presidency, Mr. Kuczynski has inflicted great damage on democracy in Peru and in the region. He has abandoned the moral high ground that would have enabled him to lead the fight against the biggest graft scandal in the history of Latin America. And more important, he has rehabilitated a man who has yet to apologize to relatives of the victims murdered during his 10-year rule.
The sentence against Mr. Fujimori was a historic achievement for Peruvian justice. The venality of his release will only exacerbate the high level of impunity for human rights violations and weaken the rule of law at a time when a strong and independent judiciary is indispensable in the fight against widespread corruption in the region.
Mr. Fujimori still has supporters and a party built on his legacy that consistently wins a third of the electorate. He deserves some credit for smothering inflation and crushing two terrorist groups after Alan García’s disastrous first term from 1985 to 1990. But given the record of his regime, was it worth resuscitating a ghost from the past to save a wobbling ruler?
President Kuczynski has asked young Peruvians to move on and forget. But it was Mr. Fujimori’s infamous head of the secret services, Vladimiro Montesinos, who bribed politicians, bankers, entrepreneurs, judges, military officers and journalists, and videotaped the shady secret transactions, preserving a legacy of abuse of power behind closed doors. The existence of these ominous tapes is the best antidote to oblivion.
Peru needs to rebuild the foundations of a democratic society in the wake of the Odebrecht tsunami.
Sonia Goldenberg, a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, is a journalist and documentary filmmaker.