Peru’s specially made prison for housing disgraced former presidents is full. With an official capacity of two, last year’s extradition of ex-President Pedro Castillo from the United States forced the Barbadillo prison to expand to include three former presidents. The number dropped back down to two following a presidential pardon for ex-President Alberto Fujimori, who passed away shortly after his release. The current prison population is not an anomaly: seven of the eight Peruvian presidents since 1990 are either in jail, have been in jail, or have faced a detention order. Each of them faced corruption charges for graft during their tenure as a public official.

The fact that so many ex-presidents have been incarcerated might be taken as a sign of progress. As Rosa María Palacios, a Peruvian lawyer and political commentator, wryly observed, “In Latin America, people envy us. Many people abroad say: ‘At least you get them in jail.’” Yet despite the fact that Peru has engaged in a crackdown on presidential corruption that is unparalleled among Latin American countries, Peru’s current president is under investigation for “illicit enrichment,” Peru’s ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) remains low, and 81% of Peruvian citizens believing that corruption has increased in the past five years. 

Of course, nobody expects that prosecuting high-level government officials, even presidents, will solve the corruption problem. But one might expect that demonstrating a willingness to do what so many other systems will not do—go after the most powerful political figures in the country—would at least create a sense of optimism and momentum in the anticorruption fight. Yet this does not seem to have happened in Peru. Why not?

• First, the prosecution and conviction of former presidents has failed to send a strong signal of an institutional commitment to integrity because so many of these prosecutions have been perceived—with good reason—as highly politicized. This was not always the case: The 2009 trial and conviction of President Fujimori was widely lauded as a fair, legitimate trial and a “historic achievement.” But later proceedings against presidents (including impeachments as well as criminal investigations and prosecutions) have appeared alarmingly politicized. Part of the blame can be placed on Peru’s 1993 Constitution, which provides only flimsy, ambiguous guidance on the demarcation of authority among the branches, particularly between the executive and legislative branches, and induces these clashing branches to “fight to the death” with “no clear rules.” (See also here and here.) For example, President Kuczynski was successfully impeached, by an opposition-controlled Congress, for “permanent moral incapacity,” with no specification of what the moral incapacity was and relating to corruption allegations from over a decade before. He was ordered to be detained for the maximum time of three years before his trial on these allegations would be conducted, and he is still awaiting trial more than four years later. His successor, President Vizcarra, was an extremely popular president known for grand anticorruption reforms, which included attempts to limit congressional immunity. Following a successful dissolution of Congress after stating that legislators were obstructing his anticorruption agenda, Vizcarra was impeached by a new Congress (again under the amorphous “moral incapacity” clause) for allegedly accepting bribes when he served as a provincial governor. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch called the ouster highly dubious and a “serious threat to the rule of law.” Although Vizcarra has been under criminal investigation since his impeachment in 2020, he has not yet gone to trial. This is not to say that there is no basis for the corruption investigations of the five former presidents (see here, here and here), but the political antics surrounding the impeachments and subsequent criminal trials cast doubt on the impartiality of the proceedings.
• Second, the corruption prosecutions of these former presidents has also highlighted deeper problems with the Peruvian judicial system. Other than Fujimori, only one of the ex-presidents (Alejandro Toledo) has actually been convicted. Two of them are currently detained, but the remaining four presidential trials (except that of Alan García, who committed suicide in 2019 days before police were planning to arrest him) are still ongoing and have been stagnant for years. Peru’s exceptionally slow court system can take years and even decades to deliver verdicts. Further, Peru’s use of pre-trial detention, which can legally extend to three years before the start of the trial but is often even longer, has been criticized as overbroad and overused. Of the five presidents most recently under investigation, four were ordered to serve 18 months or more of pretrial detention in prison and two were given the maximum detention period of 36 months. As a consequence of these systemic problems, the political impact of an ex-president being detained is not as great as one might think. 
• Third, the Peruvian judicial system’s crackdown on presidential corruption has not been matched by a crackdown on those who are doing the corrupting. Corruption convictions for the wealthy businessmen who, in most cases, are the aggressor in initiating illicit deals are extremely scarce in Peru. After the Odebrecht scandal, a corruption scheme that spanned the continent and exposed the vast network of bribery among Latin American institutions, 840 people in Peru were investigated for their alleged participation, but only 23 individuals were convicted of any offense related to these bribes. Even more shockingly, despite over 1,400 Peruvian businessmen being investigated for corruption crimes in 2019, it seems that no businessmen are currently in prison on corruption charges. Prosecuting presidents might seem to send a powerful message of zero tolerance for corruption, but failing to prosecute the economic elites who pay the bribes substantially undercuts that message.

Peru’s crackdown on presidential corruption through aggressive prosecution is an important first step towards protecting Peru’s precarious democracy. The recent sentencing of ex-President Toledo to 20 years in prison certainly sends a message. Yet the politicization of the trials of these former presidents, as well as unaddressed concerns about the weakness of the judicial system and the lack of enforcement against bribe-payers, undermines the extent to which such prosecution demonstrates a genuine commitment to rooting out systemic corruption in Peru. It may be, as the saying goes, that the fish rots from the head down, but this is not a reason to treat prosecutions of presidents and former presidents as the be-all, end-all for meaningful anticorruption reform. If Peru is serious about cleaning up corruption, more extensive changes are essential.