The fate of the former president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, has been decided. His extradition from the United States to Peru is imminent, as all legal maneuvers to extend his stay in California have been exhausted. According to Peruvian authorities, his extradition is a matter of weeks. He was convicted of accepting $30 million in bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for the award of public works while he was president (2001-2006). He is 76 years old.

The extradition of Alejandro Toledo to Peru could take up to two months

Alejandro Toledo’s personal story is worthy of a new biography. Born in a town near the fishing port of Chimbote, where his family moved when he was 4 years old, he was the eighth of 16 siblings, only nine of whom survived due to the precarious family economy. His natural destiny would be a shoeshine boy or a shopkeeper. Thanks to the intervention of a Peace Corps member assigned to Chimbote, Toledo was able to immigrate to the United States and crown his educational career with a doctorate in education from Stanford University.

What a long list of Peruvian ex-presidents in prison or facing legal cases

The highlight of his political career, before he was elected president in 2001, was leading the Los Cuatro Suyos mass march, which ended the endless dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori. That brave and popular leadership paved the way for the return of democracy.

I had a personal experience with Alejandro Toledo in the late nineties, when I accompanied him to Harvard…

I had personal experience with Alejandro Toledo in the late 1990s, when I accompanied him to Harvard—where he was a research associate—to obtain approval to enable him to establish a government program at the Escuela Superior de Administración de Negocios (ESAN) in Peru, where Toledo was an academic. The reception of the professors, including Jeffrey Sachs, reflected an extraordinary sympathy for Toledo, not so much because of his academic achievements, but because he was an exceptional case of a potential president – with pronounced indigenous features – of a Latin American country, in which white-dominated elites prevail. An anecdotal fact of the day was that we attended one of Jamil Mahuad’s introductory lectures together, the one based on the legends of the Ecuadorian natives, which dazzled the students so much.

At the time of writing this column, the shackled former president, who is under house arrest, has been called to voluntarily surrender to justice. He refused, alluding to the insignificant process habeas corpus which is not finished yet. This process will be quickly rejected this March, leaving nothing but police coordination to transfer him.

The song of the Chilean group Quilapayún describes the pride of returning to the homeland after the exile caused by the military dictatorship. The lyrics go like this: “I return with my fat love / I return in my soul and I return in my bones / To find a pure homeland / At the end of the last kiss.“.

Toledo’s return to Peru is the opposite of the lyrics of this song. It will be a more Kafkaesque experience, in which the character wakes up one day to realize that he has turned into an insect. Alan García could not resist this metamorphosis and decided to commit suicide. (OR)