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LIMA, Jan 18 (Reuters) – Peru’s presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori said that if she is elected in the April elections she will pardon her father and former president Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence for abuse of human rights.
The applicant also said in an interview with a local television channel Sunday night that if she fails to come to power, she will ask the next president to pardon her 82-year-old father, who ruled for two consecutive terms between 1990 and 2000.
“After what we have had to live, I am in favor of a pardon for my father and I prefer to say it like that, openly, as I also said openly when I was against it, betting on the legal and constitutional route,” he told América Televisión.
The position of Keiko Fujimori, who is trying for the country’s leadership for the third time in elections, differs on the issue of a humanitarian pardon for her father in the 2016 election campaign. The 45-year-old presidential candidate currently ranks second in the elections. polls for the April 11 elections, with 8% voting intentions.
Alberto Fujimori received in 2017 a humanitarian pardon from former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, but the benefit was annulled by the Supreme Court when it considered that irregularities were committed in the appointment of a doctor who recommended the release of the former president suffering from illness.
“After everything we have seen and what we have been through, I believe that what my father has experienced is enough and that has made me change my mind” said Keiko Fujimori.
The presidential candidate who leads the right-wing Popular Force party has twice served pretrial detention amid a tax investigation for money laundering and allegedly received money from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht for her 2011 electoral campaign.
Alberto Fujimori was convicted of being the mediator of the murder of 25 people, including a minor, committed by a paramilitary group in the early 1990s in the midst of a war between the state and the rebel group Sendero Luminoso. (Report by Marco Aquino, edited by Gabriela Donoso)