Peru sees anti-graft progress in 2003

Peru's judiciary has looked inept, incompetent and inefficient in its efforts to extradite former President Alberto Fujimori from Japan to face charges of responsibility for murder, according to the state attorney investigating corruption during his term.

Luis Vargas Valdivia's damning assessment, in an interview with Reuters, came days after Peru named a new official to translate the 700-page extradition request that has been gathering dust for the past six months.

The new translator will charge $70,000 - more than double the estimate of the previous appointee, who never even started the job because of contract problems. She also expects to take nine months, more than twice as long as had first been hoped.

"At times, we've done a lot to help score own goals," Vargas Valdivia conceded in the green prefabricated trailer at the justice ministry that is the anti-graft nerve centre.

"Abroad, we look inept, incompetent. I think it's pure inefficiency," he said.

Fujimori, who ruled Peru with an iron fist from 1990 until he was toppled in a mass corruption scandal in 2000, is wanted for alleged responsibility in the murders of 25 people by an army death squad in the early 1990s. He denies all charges.

At the height of the scandal he fled to Japan, where his Japanese citizenship shields him from being hauled back for trial. Japan does not usually extradite its nationals, and the two countries have no extradition treaty anyway.

But Vargas Valdivia said he believed he had sufficient proof of wrongdoing to put the former president on trial, adding that, just as in the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, he did not have to prove that Fujimori expressly ordered the killings, but simply that he knew of the activities of the death squad and either condoned or turned a blind eye to them.

Investigators have yet to find bank accounts full of illicit cash linked to Fujimori, but Vargas Valdivia said he had no doubt the former president "stole (state cash) shamelessly." Fujimori denies the charge.

"Extradition is difficult, but not impossible," the state attorney said. He said he hoped the extradition request could be presented in the first half of 2003 and, even if Japan then dragged its feet, Peru could begin a public opinion campaign to convince Japan that "he's no samurai."

Meanwhile, Vargas Valdivia saw an end to months of delays that have held up the first public trial of Fujimori's spy chief and right-hand man, Vladimiro Montesinos, from a scheduled October start.

Montesinos, himself a trained lawyer, tried to get the judges changed, but Vargas Valdivia said his petition had finally been studied and thrown out, and a new date for the trial should be set within days. He hoped the first trial could start in January and the pace could quickly ratchet up with parallel hearings in different cases taking place every day.

That will represent a mammoth workload. Montesinos, who has been sentenced to nine years for abuse of authority in one closed-door trial, faces more than 60 trials on charges ranging from ordering murder to money laundering. Even the least complex charges run to 5,000 pages each, Vargas Valdivia said.

Peruvians, who were outraged when the Fujimori-Montesinos scandal broke in late 2000, seem hardly to care these days. Vargas Valdivia said "people are waiting for the public trial... it won't be a circus."