MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Peruvian leader pledges to pardon ex-president Fujimori if she wins April's general election

”After what we've been through I'm in favor of pardoning my father (Alberto Fujimori) and I prefer to say so openly”, Keiko Fujimori said in an interview

Peru's opposition leader Keiko Fujimori has said that she would pardon her jailed father, former president Alberto Fujimori, if she wins April's general election. The 82-year-old Fujimori is serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity and corruption.

Even if not elected, his 45-year-old daughter, who is herself being investigated for corruption and spent more than a year in pre-trial detention, said she would ask the winning candidate to pardon her father.

“After what we've been through I'm in favor of pardoning my father and I prefer to say so openly, just as I said it openly when I was against it and defended a legal way out,” Fujimori said in an interview with the Cuarto Poder television program.

Previous attempts to have him freed on legal or compassionate grounds have failed, but Fujimori said she felt her sick father had “been through enough.”

Alberto Fujimori is serving time after being found guilty of ordering two massacres by death squads in 1991 and 1992 while president (1990-2000).

He was sentenced in February 2007 and although another disgraced former president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, pardoned him in December 2017, that was overturned by a court 10 months later.

His daughter has had her own legal problems and is accused of accepting US$1.2 million in illicit party funding from scandal-tainted Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht -- which has since been renamed Novonor -- for her unsuccessful 2011 presidential election campaign. She was also unsuccessful in 2016.

She has spent a total of 16 months in pre-trial detention but has twice been released by courts.

The wide-ranging Odebrecht corruption scandal involved the paying of hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to win public works contracts in a dozen countries. The company has admitted to paying at least US$ 29 million to bribe Peruvian officials, including four former presidents.

Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Kuczynski and the late Alan Garcia have been implicated in the scandal.

With information from AFP