Toledo ordered to surrender for extradition to Peru

A US judge on Wednesday ordered former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo Manrique to turn himself in to federal agents after an appeals court denied his latest motion. to prevent his extradition to Peruwhere he faces charges of accepting millions of dollars in bribes.

San Francisco Judge Thomas S. Hixson ordered Toledo, who has been under house arrest, to turn himself in to Federal Marshals Service agents in San Jose on Friday. Toledo will be placed in a San Mateo County jail awaiting extradition to his home country, where authorities say he took bribes in a massive corruption scandal involving four former Peruvian presidents. Toledo refutes the accusations.

Federal prosecutors have said that Peruvian officials will travel to California to pick up Toledo and bring him back to Peru. It is unknown when that would occur. Hixson’s order comes after the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Tuesday denied Toledo’s latest attempt to stay his extradition.

Toledo, 77, is accused of taking $20 million in bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company that has admitted to US authorities that it bribed officials to win contracts across Latin America for decades. The former president had requested a stay of his extradition while a challenge to the US State Department’s decision to send him back to Peru was being resolved.

On Wednesday, Tamara Crepet, one of Toledo’s defense attorneys, asked Hixson to delay the former president’s extradition until Tuesday so he could see his psychiatrist one last time, but the judge ruled in favor of Assistant US Attorney Kyle Waldinger, who asked that he be taken into custody as soon as possible.

“He is an elderly person and he has health problems … and he is always going to have medical appointments, no matter when the extradition is,” Waldinger said.

Toledo, who was president of Peru from 2001 to 2006, he was arrested in July 2019 at his residence in Menlo Park, California. He was initially held in solitary confinement at the Santa Rita jail, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) east of San Francisco, but was released in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and his deteriorating health. insane, and has been under house arrest ever since.

The Odebrecht corruption scandal has rocked politics in Peru, where nearly all living presidents face trial or are under investigation.

The former president Ollanta Humala is on trial on charges that he and his wife received more than $3 million from Odebrecht for their presidential campaigns in 2006 and 2011. Both have denied wrongdoing.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who concluded his presidency in 2018, is under house arrest on similar charges.

In addition, former President Alan García, who ruled from 2006 to 2011, took his own life with a shot to the head in 2019 while the police arrived at his home to arrest him.

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