Court OKs extradition of former Peruvian president from Bay Area
Alejandro Toledo Manrique, a former president of Peru, was arrested in San Mateo County on March 17, 2019. In February 2017, Peru’s government accused him of taking $20 million in bribes from a Brazilian construction company.
San Mateo County Sheriff's OfficeA federal appeals court refused Wednesday to block the extradition of former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo Manrique from his home in the Bay Area to Peru, where he faces charges of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from a construction company.
Toledo, now in his late 70s, was born in Peru but has spent most of his life in the Bay Area. He arrived as a penniless student at age 19 and attended the University of San Francisco and Stanford University, where he earned a doctoral degree and later became a professor.
He returned to Peru in the mid-1990s, started a political organization and led the opposition to autocratic President Alberto Fujimori. He ran twice for president and was elected in 2001 after Fujimori resigned.
The first indigenous Peruvian to hold the office, Toledo led a government that favored business and free trade, boosting the nation’s economy and reducing poverty while clashing at times with labor unions. His term ended in 2006.
Toledo then returned to Northern California and became a teacher and researcher at Stanford, returning once to Peru for another presidential campaign that was unsuccessful. In February 2017, Peru’s government accused him of taking $20 million in bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company that won a major highway contract during his administration, and laundering it through several companies and offshore accounts to avoid detection. He has denied the charges and said he never received any of the $20 million.
U.S. prosecutors ordered Toledo to be arrested in July 2019 and held without bail to await extradition. A federal judge in San Francisco granted bail three months later and placed him under house arrest at his home in Menlo Park. The U.S. State Department approved Peru’s extradition request last month.
In Wednesday’s ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there was enough evidence of Toledo’s guilt to support the extradition order.
“Toledo has presented evidence that extradition to Peru could put his life at risk,” the three-judge panel acknowledged, citing “dire” conditions in the nation’s prisons, his age and health problems, and the possibility that he could be held as long as three years while awaiting formal charges. But the court said Peru had shown a legal basis for his extradition that Toledo has been unable to refute.
Two of his alleged accomplices have testified that Toledo arranged to have the construction company pay him “millions in bribes through various intermediary accounts,” the court said.
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