A guilty verdict against former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori in his murder and kidnapping trial would only strengthen his party in presidential elections in 2011, his daughter said in an interview on Tuesday.
Keiko Fujimori, considered a possible front-runner in the presidential vote at the head of her jailed father’s party, said she expects her father to be acquitted but that the opposite verdict would generate solidarity for his political movement.
“My father’s true sentencing will come in the 2011 elections, in which the people will decide if Alberto Fujimori is innocent or not,” said Keiko Fujimori, a Peruvian lawmaker who received more votes than any other congressional candidate in the 2006 elections.
The 33-year-old has not officially announced her presidential candidacy but she said she is traveling across the Andean country to build support for a pro-Fujimori political coalition called Fuerza 2011, or Strength 2011.
A recent Ipsos Apoyo poll of voting preferences for 2011 presidential elections showed Keiko Fujimori in a tie with Lima Mayor Luis Castaneda, each with 19 percent support. The poll was conducted in 16 cities and had a margin for error of 3.1 percentage points.
Alberto Fujimori, 70, faces up to 30 years in prison on charges of murder and kidnapping for allegedly authorizing a military death squad responsible for two massacres and several kidnappings in the early 1990s.
He denies authorizing a dirty war against the Shining Path and its sympathizers, and says he had no knowledge of death squad activity until after the massacres.
A verdict by the three-judge panel is expected next month.
Running for more than a year, the televised trial has stirred mixed emotions in a country where many still admire Fujimori and credit him with leading the country out of an economic crisis and defeating a bloody Maoist insurgency. A truth commission found that nearly 70,000 people were killed in the 20-year conflict, almost a third by the military.
But critics refer to Fujimori’s 10-year presidency as “the dictatorship,” a government marked by corruption and human rights abuses.
A recent Universidad de Lima poll in Peru’s capital found that 71 percent believe Fujimori is guilty. The poll was published on March 10. It surveyed 630 people in Lima with an error margin of 4 percentage points.
Fujimori fled to his ancestral Japan in 2000 and faxed in his resignation amid a corruption scandal involving his spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos, currently jailed for corruption and running drugs to Colombian rebels.
Analysts say many Peruvians could see a vote for Keiko as a vote for a Fujimori presidency free of the shadow of Montesinos, whom some believe came to be more powerful than Fujimori himself.
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