Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the corrupt ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori who was recently sentenced for human rights abuses during the country’s fight against Maoist terrorists, is having a hard time battling the slow release of facts relating to her father’s regime.

Alberto Fujimori defeated the terrorists by arming indigenous Andean communities so that they could defend themselves, and by building secretive intelligence organisations to carry out assassinations against ultra-leftists. He completely revitalised Peru’s failed economy after its destruction by ex-President Alan Garcia and it was this economic recovery that meant he was able to use his secretive mafia to, just as past Presidents had done, slowly siphon off huge sums of public money into his family’s private foreign accounts.

Keiko Fujimori, now a congresswoman with a fancy and very expensive education who plans to run for President and pardon her father if she wins, has been under attack by opposing political groups to explain how her education in the US was paid for, as well as the education of her siblings.

Unable to do so coherently, or keep her story straight, she has resigned to not trying to explain anything, and is now dedicating her efforts to denouncing the “politically motivated witchhunt” against her. No doubt that is is politically motivated, and a witchhunt, all with the aim of ruining her chances of winning the next elections, but the facts still speak for themselves.

Inter Press Agency (IPS) goes into some detail here.

Keiko Sofía Fujimori, who is planning to run for president of Peru in 2011, is having difficulty proving that her father, who governed this country from 1990 to 2000, did not make illicit use of public funds to pay for her studies and those of her brothers and sister at universities in the United States.

The daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who acted as First Lady after her parents separated and is now a congresswoman, has given a number of different explanations for the origins of the money, which she says amounted to 556,000 dollars.

At a recent press conference in Congress, she said her father had a personal fortune of over one million dollars, plenty to cover the expenses of his children, Keiko Sofía, Hiro Alberto, Sachi Marcela and Kenji Gerardo, at the universities of Boston, Columbia and Kansas.

Keiko Fujimori, who has promised to pardon her father, currently serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations, if she becomes president, said that her family had funds from three sources, totalling just over 1.2 million dollars.

She said her family had 400,000 dollars when her father took office in 1990. Rosa Fujimori, her aunt, lent her father 150,000 dollars, and 669,500 dollars were the proceeds from the 1999 sale of a property he owned in the municipality of Surco, in Lima province.

However, in 2001, when the former president was investigated for illicit enrichment, the parliamentary commissions in charge of the investigation concluded that his bank accounts did not show savings of 400,000 dollars, nor could his income explain the accumulation of such a sum.

They also found that the loan of 150,000 dollars to Fujimori by his sister Rosa was immediately handed over to his transport and housing minister, Antonio Páucar Carbajal, and was therefore not paid to any U.S. university.

And an expert audit ordered in 2003 by Supreme Court Justice José Luis Lecaros, who opened the investigation for illicit enrichment, confirmed that the 669,500 dollars Fujimori obtained from the property sale were not used to pay tuition at the universities of Boston, Columbia or Kansas.

The experts’ report indicated Fujimori kept 214,750 dollars in cash from the sale proceeds, and 167,376 dollars were deposited by Keiko Fujimori into her private account in Citibank in New York. She withdrew the money in 2001, after she and her brothers and sister had completed their studies.

The experts found that the money supposedly intended to pay for the studies of Fujimori’s two sons Hiro and Kenji, a further 167,376 dollars, turned up instead in an account at a Bank of Brazil branch in Panama belonging to their uncle by marriage, Rosa Fujimori’s husband and the former Peruvian ambassador to Japan, Víctor Aritomi Shinto.

The experts’ report for the Supreme Court concluded that it was “duly proven” that the beneficiaries did not use the money to finance their studies abroad.

“This is a campaign to discredit me that has been going on ever since I have been in first place in the opinion polls as a presidential candidate,” Keiko Fujimori said. “Everything has been properly proven: my father had more than a million dollars to cover tuition and upkeep for my brothers and sister and me, which cost 556,000 dollars.”

The prosecution of Alberto Fujimori for illicit enrichment, in which improper financing of his children’s higher education was one of 29 charges against him, was cut short because the former president fled to Japan, taking advantage of his dual nationality, after he was removed as president by Congress in 2000 on the grounds of being “morally unfit” to govern.

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Tags: corruption, fujimori, garcia, keiko fujimori, shining path