“Please let me heal or die at home,” Alejandro Toledo told a Peruvian court the week before it decided his fate. It was not enough. On Monday, October 21, 2024, judges in Lima sentenced the 78-year-old former president to 20 years and six months in prison for taking bribes from the Brazilian builder Odebrecht.
The National Superior Court of Specialized Criminal Justice accepted the term prosecutors had asked for. Toledo, who governed Peru from 2001 to 2006, sat through the hearing. AP reported that he often smirked, and sometimes laughed, when the judge mentioned the multimillion-dollar sums at the heart of the case or stumbled over transcripts. He leaned over repeatedly to talk to his lawyer.
The highway and the money
Prosecutors said Toledo took $35 million from Odebrecht in return for letting the company win the contract for a 650-kilometer road. The road links Peru’s southern coast with the Brazilian border region. According to DW, its price swelled from $850 million to $2.1 billion. AP gave different figures for the section in question: an initial estimate of $507 million, against $1.25 billion that Peru ended up paying.
Judge Inés Rojas read out testimony from Jorge Barata, a former Odebrecht executive in Peru. Barata had told prosecutors that Toledo phoned him up to three times after leaving office to demand payment. Toledo lowered his eyes and looked at his hands while she read the expletive-laden account.
Rojas said the victims were Peruvians who “trusted” him as their president. He was “in charge of managing public finances,” she said, and instead “defrauded the state.” Prosecutor José Domingo Pérez called the sentence “historic” and said it showed Peruvians that “crimes and corruption are punished.”
Years of legal fights
Toledo denied the charges of money laundering and collusion. His attorney, Roberto Siu, said they would appeal.
It had taken a long time to get him into the dock. Toledo was first arrested at his California home in 2019, where he had lived since 2016 after returning to Stanford University as a visiting scholar. He was held in solitary confinement at a county jail east of San Francisco, then moved to house arrest in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and his worsening mental health. He was extradited to Peru in 2022 after an appeals court rejected his challenge, and has been in preventive detention since. Rojas said time served would count from April 2023, and that he would serve the rest of the sentence at a prison outside Lima built to house former presidents.
Odebrecht, since renamed Novonor, admitted to US authorities in 2016 that it bought government contracts across Latin America with bribes. In Peru, authorities accused Toledo and three other former presidents of receiving payments from the company.
Sources
- Peru: Ex-president Toledo sentenced to more than 20 years
- Peru's former president Alejandro Toledo sentenced to 20 years in corruption case | PBS News
