Jailed ex-President Alberto Fujimori’s shrill protest cry in court Monday of “I am innocent!” (¡Soy inocente!) has quickly been converted into a download-able ring tone sweeping the Spanish language Internet. “Dance of the Chinaman,” Fujimori’s enigmatic campaign song from his fraud-riddled re-election campaign in 2000 serves as the background music.
Spanish King Juan Carlos’ recent invocation to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to shut up (Por qué no te callas?) is thrown in for emphasis.
Fujimori, 69, is charged with, among other things, authorizing the Colina group death squad to kill nine students and a professor in 1992 at La Cantuta University, and 15 people, including an eight-year-old boy, in a tenement in Lima’s Barrios Altos district in 1991. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
In court on Wednesday, Fujimori denied knowing of the death squad’s existence and maintained that he was never close friends with his shadowy spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, saying that their relationship was purely “hierarchical.”
