| | |  Americas & Beyond | April 2009 
Fujimori Ends Trial Saying Has 'No Regrets'
 Carla Salazar - Associated Press
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| | Former Peru's President Alberto Fujimori, right, defends himself during a hearing of his trial at a police base in Lima, Wednesday, April 1, 2009. Fujimori, 70, accused in the military death squad killings of 25 people in two early 1990s massacres, said Wednesday that the prosecution's lack of evidence is proof of his innocence. Fujimori faces up to 30 years on several charges and a verdict is expected in mid-April. (AP/Karel Navarro) | |
Lima, Peru — Ex-President Alberto Fujimori closed out his 15-month murder and kidnapping trial on Wednesday by calmly telling a court there was no incriminating evidence against him and that he does not regret imposing security policies that crushed a fanatical Maoist insurgency.
"I say it to the whole country, I am filled with pride, Mr. President, for having returned Peru to peace," Fujimori said, addressing the presiding judge.
Fujimori, 70, faces 30 years in prison on murder and kidnapping charges for allegedly authorizing military death squad killings of 25 people in two early 1990s massacres and the kidnappings of a prominent businessman and a journalist when he sent troops to close Congress and the courts in 1992.
Dressed in a crisp, dark suit and a blue tie and standing at the center of an overflowing court room, Fujimori looked calm, a break from his outburst at the start of the trial – in which he waved his arms in outrage and shouted his innocence.
In the following months, he looked visibly depressed and ailing from a series of health issues.
"No one has been able to present a single piece of evidence against me, due to the simple fact that they don't exist. As I said at the beginning, I'm innocent," Fujimori told a packed court.
He said his legacy will live on in his daughter Keiko, who led a recent poll of potential presidential candidates for 2011. Outside the building, some 250 people gathered wearing the orange shirts of Keiko's political party with the words "Fujimori Innocent" emblazoned across the back.
Two-thirds of Peruvians polled recently approved of his rule, but 71 percent also think he'll be found guilty.
Fujimori's attorney took 14 court sessions to complete his defense, but the former president himself spoke for less than two hours and turned down the court's offer to continue his statement after a lunch break. He will finish his defense on Friday, the last step before a three-judge panel dictates a verdict.
An appeal to Peru's Supreme Court is expected regardless of the trial's outcome.
Fujimori said he "does not regret" the counterinsurgency strategy his government used to crush the brutal Maoist Shining Path rebels, but said he did not order a dirty war or operations by a military death squad.
"I had to govern from hell, not the government palace, but the hell that terrorism had installed in three-fourths of Peru. I only hope that those that sentence me try to imagine that hell and don't try to civilize it from a distance," he said.
Fujimori described his pacification strategy as "clean and successful" despite "lamentable isolated incidences."
Fujimori said he had no knowledge of the Colina death squad, whose members were released from prison in 1995 under a general amnesty he granted Peru's security forces. The amnesty was overturned by the Inter-American court of Human Rights in 2001 and the cases were reopened in Peru.
Gisela Ortiz, sister of one of the nine university students that the Colina group "disappeared" in 1992, told the Associated Press that she found Fujimori's arguments deceitful because the death squad's activities had become public knowledge prior to the killings.
"I think this court has been misused; he's trying to launch his daughter's political candidacy," Ortiz said.
No witness in the trial has directly tied Fujimori to the killings or kidnappings, though several of them had publicly made such accusations before the trial. But prosecutors say there is ample evidence that Fujimori and his spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos created an "apparatus of power" that fought terror with terror.
Fujimori inherited a country battered by rampant hyperinflation and leftist guerrillas and initially earned tremendous support for his stabilization of the economy and crackdown on the Shining Path. The rebel group faded after the capture of its leader Abimael Guzman in 1992. Nearly 70,000 Peruvians died in the violence between 1980 and 2000.
But rampant corruption, human rights abuses and the intimidation of news media and the opposition weakened his government, and he fled into exile in Japan – his ancestral homeland – amid a corruption scandal in 2000.
Associated Press writer Tamy Higa in Lima, Peru contributed to this report. |
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