LIMA (Reuters) – Peru’s Supreme Court convicted and sentenced former President Alberto Fujimori yesterday to 7½ years in prison for giving a $15 million bribe to his spy chief, the third time he has been convicted since returning from exile in 2007 to face a raft of charges.
Fujimori, who suffers from heart trouble and will turn 71 this month, told the court he paid off Vladimiro Montesinos because he feared his trusted right-hand man was plotting a coup against him.
But critics say he gave Montesinos the cash to flee the country as Fujimori’s government collapsed in a corruption scandal in 2000. Montesinos was eventually captured in Venezuela.
“This was not a political sentence,” said Judge Cesar San Martin. “The decision today was based purely on the facts.”
Fujimori said he would appeal the ruling to a separate panel of Supreme Court judges.
During his first term that began in 1990, Fujimori was praised for defeating the brutal Shining Path guerrillas and slaying hyperinflation. But public opinion later turned against him over his autocratic style and a series of bribery scandals.
He will likely spend the rest of his life in jail.
In April, Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering a death squad to carry out two massacres that killed two dozen people in the early 1990s, when his government was battling leftist insurgents.
It was a rare case in which a former president was extradited to his home country, tried and convicted on human rights crimes.
In 2007, after arriving in Peru from Chile, he was sentenced to six years in prison for sending aides to steal incriminating documents from the house of Montesinos’ wife.
Despite the multiple jail sentences, Fujimori still has some political sway.
Polls show his daughter, Keiko Fujimori, a conservative member of Congress, is a frontrunner for the next presidential election in 2011.
Her competitors would include Ollanta Humala, a leftist who nearly won the 2006 race, and Luis Castaneda, the mayor of Lima, the capital.
