Monthly Archives: March 2018

LIMA, Peru — A day after tendering his resignation, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the third Peruvian president to fall victim to Latin America’s rumbling corruption mega-scandal, appeared to be facing increasing legal jeopardy. According to local reports, prosecutors have requested that Kuczynski be barred from leaving the country until they finalize their investigations into his dealings with the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht SA, which has admittedpaying about $800 million in bribes to win public contracts in a dozen countries, mostly in Latin America. The move marks yet another humiliation for the 79-year-old center-right economist, whose surprise…Read more …

LIMA, Peru — President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned from office on Wednesday amid a corruption scandal, just weeks before President Trump is scheduled to visit the country for a major regional summit on improved governance in the Americas. Kuczynski announced his resignation on television. He denied wrongdoing but said, “I don’t want to be an obstacle to our nation finding the unity and harmony that it so needs.” Kuczynski is one of the most prominent politicians to fall in a wave of investigations across Latin America into alleged corruption linked to a Brazilian construction firm,…Read more …

LIMA – Peruvian trust in democracy appears to be at rock bottom: a paltry 17 percent of the population believes their leadership governs “for the good of the whole population,” and just 45 percent say they support democracy as a system of governance. Peruvians' cynicism is not without good reason. Until recently, two former heads of state were in jail on corruption charges, while a third continues to fight extradition from the U.S. In December, President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski pardoned former President Alberto Fujimori, who was serving a 25 prison sentence, after himself only narrowly…Read more …

Teresita Gaviria still remembers the last time she saw her son Cristian, a 15-year-old with ambitions to be a medical doctor, alive. It was early on Jan. 5, 1998, and he was setting off with a friend on the nine-hour drive from his hometown of Medellin to the Colombian capital, Bogota. The pair never arrived. They were stopped en route by right-wing paramilitaries, who attempted to forcibly recruit the unwilling young men. It was only years later that Gaviria learned the true horror of Cristian's last moments; a jailed and repentant paramilitary revealed that her…Read more …