US court rejects suspending extradition of Alejandro Toledo to Peru

A US federal court panel has rejected an appeal by former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo to stop his extradition to his country, where he is accused of accepting millions of dollars in bribes in a massive corruption scandal that involved four other former presidents.

Toledo, 77, is accused of taking $20 million in bribes from Odebrecht, a giant Brazilian construction company that has admitted to US authorities that it bribed officials for decades to win contracts across Latin America.

The ex-president wanted his extradition to be suspended pending the resolution of his challenge against the decision of the US State Department to return him to Peru.

Toledo, who was president from 2001 to 2006, was arrested in July 2019 at his home in Menlo Park, California. He was initially held in solitary confinement at the Santa Rita Jail, about 60 kilometers east of San Francisco, but was released in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then he has been under house arrest.

The judge in the extradition case, Thomas Hixson, revoked Toledo’s bail on Wednesday and ordered him to turn himself in to the US Marshals Service at 9:00 a.m. Friday in San Francisco to be returned to prison, as requested by US Attorney Ismail Ramsey.

The prosecutor said the Marshals Service would take steps to turn him over to Peruvian authorities. However, the date on which he would do so is unknown.

The Odebrecht-related corruption scandal has rocked politics in Peru, where nearly every living former president is on trial or under investigation.

Former President Ollanta Humala is fighting accusations that he and his wife received more than $3 million from Odebrecht for their presidential campaigns in 2006 and 2011. Both deny any wrongdoing.

Former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who finished his term in 2018, is under house arrest on similar charges.

Alan García, who ruled Peru from 2006 to 2011, shot himself in the head in 2019 as authorities came to his home to arrest him in connection with the Odebrecht investigation.

In order to stop his extradition, Toledo argued that Peru had not produced documents or shown probable cause, but the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco said in its ruling that the Peruvian prosecutor’s office presented documents with sufficient charges to support the extradition.

The three-judge panel said the statements of two witnesses in the corruption case against Toledo were sufficient “to establish probable cause at an extradition hearing.”

“In addition, Toledo admitted that $21 million in bribes were transferred to accounts controlled by his head of security, $17.5 million ended up in his mother-in-law’s company, and $500,000 was deposited in a bank account in his name or used to acquire real estate in his name,” the court wrote.

Toledo further argued that they should not return him because he would have to wait up to three years in a prison in Peru to be formally charged, which would put his life in danger due to his age and poor health.

The appeals court recognized the serious consequences for Toledo’s health of being locked up in a Peruvian prison where conditions were poor, but the judges said they based their ruling on the improbability that Toledo would succeed in preventing his extradition in court.

“The panel confirmed that the United States will serve the public interest by complying with a valid extradition request, because proper compliance furthers relations between the two countries and strengthens efforts to establish international rule of law,” the court said.

Toledo has been a legal permanent resident of the United States residing in California and his ties to the state date back to the 1970s, when he was a student at Stanford University. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford until 2017, though the university said he held an unpaid position. He was working on a book.

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