Peru suspected collusion between Santiago and Tokyo in November 2005 when former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori unexpectedly ended his exile in Japan and traveled to Chile, according to a cable published on Thursday by WikiLeaks.
The US diplomatic cable shed light on Fujimori’s surprise trip after years of exile in Japan, as he tried to avoid prosecution in Peru on charges of corruption and abuse of power.
Then-US ambassador James Curtis Struble wrote in a Nov. 11, 2005 cable that then--Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo — a fierce Fujimori opponent — told him he suspected a plot when Fujimori surfaced in Chile.
Toledo “asked whether the [US government] had information on the Chile-Japan nexus, suggesting that those two countries connived to bring about Fujimori’s flight to Santiago,” the cable read.
Toledo said that Fujimori’s strategy “was to get the various charges against him reduced to something that would carry a sentence of two years,” Struble wrote. “Toledo indicated that he still suspected collusion between Chile and Japan.”
He also complained that Mexican President Vicente Fox “did not promptly inform him that Fujimori’s plane had transited via Tijuana,” in northwestern Mexico.
Struble said he believed that both Tokyo and Santiago were surprised by Fujimori’s trip.
Fujimori, who was Peru’s president from 1990-2000, traveled to Japan in the midst of a massive corruption scandal and resigned via fax from a Tokyo hotel in late 2000. Japan subsequently granted citizenship to the Peruvian-born politician of Japanese descent and Lima spent years unsuccessfully trying to convince Tokyo to extradite Fujimori to face the charges.
After extensive legal wrangling, Chile extradited Fujimori to Peru to face the charges in September 2007.
Following a trial, Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights abuses in 2009.
The cable was posted on the Web site of the Center for Journalistic Investigation, a Chilean organization.
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