A former first lady of Peru fled to the Brazilian Embassy in Lima on Tuesday, seeking asylum as she and her husband were sentenced to prison in a money laundering verdict that makes him the third Peruvian president jailed on corruption charges in the last two decades.
The former president sentenced on Tuesday, Ollanta Humala, had been convicted along with his wife, Nadine Heredia, of laundering money from a construction firm at the center of a sprawling Latin American corruption scandal to finance one of his campaigns for president.
Both Mr. Humala, a former army commander who was president from 2011 to 2016, and his wife were sentenced to 15 years in prison.
They had been accused of receiving almost $3 million in illegal contributions in his 2011 race, mostly from Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant linked to bribery cases across Latin America. He was also convicted of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez for an unsuccessful 2006 campaign.
Mr. Humala and Ms. Heredia have denied wrongdoing.
In a sign of Peru’s longstanding struggles with corruption and political dysfunction, and the periodic attempts to rein those problems in, Mr. Humala is one of six former presidents to have faced potential jail time over the last two decades — so many that the authorities have turned a former police academy on Lima’s outskirts into a small prison for them.
On Tuesday, the police escorted Mr. Humala, 62, from the courtroom after his sentence was read out. But his wife did not attend the hearing — in which a judge ordered their immediate imprisonment.
Instead she went with their youngest son to the Brazilian Embassy, Peruvian officials said later on Tuesday, adding that Brazil had granted them both asylum under the 1954 Convention on Diplomatic Asylum, an agreement both countries signed.
The Peruvian government indicated it would not attempt to fight Brazil’s decision, saying in a statement from the foreign ministry that it had given Ms. Heredia, 48, and her son guarantees for their safe transfer out of the country.
A lawyer for Mr. Humala denied any wrongdoing by the couple and said he would appeal the sentencing.
Several of Mr. Humala’s predecessors and successors were also entangled in Odebrecht investigations. Alejandro Toledo, Peru’s president from 2001 to 2006, was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison in a case revolving around $35 million in bribes. Alan García, who served terms in the 1980s and 2000s, died by suicide in 2019, just as the authorities arrived at his home to detain him. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the president after Mr. Humala, spent years under house arrest over the course of an ongoing inquiry. (He has denied wrongdoing.)
But two others faced starker charges. Alberto Fujimori, who pulled Peru into authoritarianism with brutal tactics in the 1990s, was jailed for more than a decade after he was convicted of human rights abuses and corruption charges. He was released in 2023, following an intensely controversial presidential pardon, and died last year at 86.
And most recently, Pedro Castillo, a former schoolteacher who became Peru’s first left-wing president in more than a generation, faces charges of rebellion and abuse of authority for having tried to dissolve Congress and install an emergency government in 2022.
Mitra Taj contributed reporting from Lima, Peru.
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