Sawt Falasteen - Lima: US authorizes extradition to Peru of ex-president Toledo

"We have been informed that the US State Department authorized the extradition of Alejandro Toledo Manrique for the crimes of collusion and money laundering," the prosecutor's office said on Twitter.

Formally known as the Public Ministry, it said it was coordinating with "national and foreign" authorities for "the upcoming execution of his extradition."

"There is no fixed term, but fine-tuning the work between the two countries, we hope it will not take more than eight weeks," Alfredo Rebaza, a senior prosecutor at the extraditions office of the Peruvian Public Ministry, told local RPP radio.

A resident of the United States, Toledo was arrested in July 2019 on charges of corruption in Peru and has since been under US house arrest.

Lima accuses him of having received tens of millions of dollars from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht in exchange for public works contracts.

Toledo, 76, studied at Stanford University and has resided in the United States since the end of his presidency, with brief breaks in 2011 and 2016 when he ran for a second term, but was defeated on both occasions.

Prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of 20 years and six months. They also sought the extradition of his wife, 69-year-old anthropologist Eliane Karp, who is cited in one of the corruption cases.

Toledo has admitted that Odebrecht paid at least $34 million and that he received part of that money, but claims he is innocent of the charges and says that a late businessman, Josef Maiman, was in charge of the business dealings, according to Peruvian media.

- Sprawling scandal -

Odebrecht is at the heart of a sprawling scandal in which the construction giant paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes throughout the continent to secure huge public works contracts.

According to the US Department of Justice, Odebrecht paid a total of $788 million in a dozen different Latin American countries over more than a decade.

The company has admitted to paying $29 million in bribes in Peru between 2005 and 2014.

As of late Tuesday, US officials had yet to publicly announce an authorization of Toledo's extradition.

The former president is one in a long list of former Peruvian presidents either facing legal proceedings or already convicted on corruption charges.

They include Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), Ollanta Humala (2011-2016), Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018), Martin Vizcarra (2018-2020) and most recently Pedro Castillo (2021-2022).

A sixth, Alan Garcia, committed suicide in 2019 before being arrested for suspected corruption.

Since Castillo was impeached and arrested last December after trying to dissolve Congress and rule by decree, the country has been convulsed by deadly protests.

Protesters have been demanding that his successor and former vice president, Dina Boluarte, step down and new elections be held.

B.Khalifa--SF-PST