By José Luis Mejía
All politicians are guilty, or almost all of them. If they were judged by a court made up of good men (in the true sense of the word) –as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado would say—nine out of ten would land up, bones and crimes, in jail. Power corrupts and few go through the Government Palace without getting their hands dirty, with money or with blood, which is why they make laws with back doors, enact special rules and weave a legal web that guarantees their impunity.
In Peru, a civil court has sentenced former President Alberto Fujimori to twenty-five years in prison as the person responsible for a series of crimes that include kidnapping, torture and murder.
Are we an exception by any chance? Can it be that the Peruvian judiciary, where honest judges are the honorable exception and justice an ‘auction’, has been able to rise above its own miseries to dictate an historical verdict, or has Fujimori –the first democratically-elected president to be sentenced in Latin America for crimes against humanity– been defeated by the same circumstances that exalted him?
Is Fujimori guilty? A three-judge court says he is, and they have no lack of facts or laws with which to justify their sentence, in more than 700 pages. Tomorrow, jurists will debate whether the decision and verdict have a solid legal basis to stand on or will fall from incongruities; but today, at least today, Fujimori is guilty. Is he the only one who is guilty?
In 1990, in the closing stages of Alan Garcia’s first government, Peru was teetering on the brink of the abyss, pushed to the edge of the cliff by African levels of overwhelming inflation, voracious and shameless corruption, and the savage and murderous violence of Sendero Luminoso (not to mention the kidnappings and bombs perpetrated by the MRTA and the mafia-style impunity of the paramilitary group Comando Rodrigo Franco). At the time, hope was a bad word and to think that the young could recover and remake a devastated country was as much fiction as it was to pretend there could be a whole night without blackouts, without car bombs, without selective or mass murders, without blood dripping from all sides of the republic.
Fujimori became president of a country mired in chaos. He came to power because circumstances allowed it; he defeated Vargas Llosa thanks to a campaign of terror (sowing more fear on fear) financed by the Apra party and its followers and directed by García himself (as Garcia has recently confessed). Fujimori came to power and fought and defeated terrorism and inflation, those two monsters that were devouring everything. But to do it, he called on his own monsters: criminal autocracy and recycled corruption.
No one has to tell us what it is like to walk out onto the street and not know if we are going to be blown up by a bomb half a block away or if tomorrow someone we know is going to be assassinated. Neither is anyone going to tell the dozens of peasant communities what it is like to be caught between two fires, living between the horror of terrorism in the name of the revolution and the bestiality of terrorism in the name of democracy; they too, who never knew whether they would be killed by a Sendero Luminoso squad or an Army patrol, remember.
The truth is that Fujimori rescued Peru when the country was falling apart between the useless panic of the selfish right and the useless politics of the stunned left; the truth is that there were honest people –and there certainly were—who during the Fujimori years worked selflessly to save Peru; but also truths are the crimes, the corruption, the assassinations, the seizure of power, the audacity of those who considered themselves sacrosanct, the perversion of society, the arrogance of those who wore boots and carried arms, the haughtiness of the victor who did not have the magnanimity—nor the courage nor decency—to go home.
Fujimori gave us back the country to take it away again; that is what is being condemned beyond the jurisdiction of the judges. Terror cannot be fought with terror nor misery with despicable actions; one cannot save a country to convert it, by complicity or by fear, into the booty of a band of thieves.
Fujimori is the victim of his own arrogance. He returned from exile in Japan believing himself to be invincible, and the correlation of powers, the political chess game, those circumstances which nineteen years ago gave him victory, have now convicted him.
Politics is generally disgusting and Peruvian politics, so plagued by ignoramuses, thieves and traitors, is no exception. We owe it to Fujimori for having recovered the country but, also, he owes us for many crimes that might, or might not, be proven in a court of law. So do we have to, then, forget the corruption, the assassinations and the abasement of politics, do we have to ‘let be’, do we have to accept that it was the ‘lesser evil’ and say thank you, do we have to turn the page in the name of national reconciliation, do we have to swallow the disgust and say yes, that ‘we owe it to him’? That is the question that each person will have to answer before the court of their own conscience, if they have one.
Beyond the technicalities, the verdict is fair because whoever fights the other person’s evil to impose his own, does not have a shred of innocence. His enemies are worse? Maybe. We will have to fight so that they too go to prison and so that one day justice may be done for the good people.
Fujimori is guilty and that is now written. Maybe his only, his irreversible innocence, was to believe that his enemies would be less ferocious with him than he was with them when the circumstances were on his side.
