Should he live long enough – and not receive one of those pardons Latin American leaders are wont to confer on fellow kleptocrats – Alejandro Celestino Toledo will be ninety-nine when he finally leaves his jail cell.
Born into the poverty of a Quechuan peasant family in 1946, Toledo rose to be Peru’s president from 2001 to 2006. In that role he trousered $35 million for awarding a highway contract to the Brazilian engineering, construction, chemicals and petrochemicals giant, Odebrecht.
For years Odebrecht built some of the region’s most crucial infrastructure projects. But then it became well-known for another superlative: its involvement in one of the biggest corruption cases in history.
In 2016 it signed the world’s largest leniency deal with US and Swiss authorities, in which it confessed to corruption and paid $2.6bn in fines. Seventy-seven company executives agreed to plea bargains with Brazilian authorities, and their statements to investigators were made public. BBC News, April 2019
In court last week, his lawyers having failed to have Peru’s request for extradition from the USA thrown out, Mr Toledo ‘strenuously denied any wrongdoing’ but public settlements eight years ago by Odebrecht executives – the bribers taking the bribed down with them – sealed his fate as a Lima judge awarded the errant septuagenarian a sentence of twenty years and six months.
During the trial, says Time Magazine:
The former president frequently smirked, and laughed when the judge mentioned multi-million-dollar sums, and when she struggled to read transcripts and other evidence …
But on hearing the verdict, Toledo adopted a somewhat altered tone as:
… he asked the court with broken voice and hands together, as if praying, to let him return home, citing his age, cancer and heart problems.
If a twenty year stretch is anything to go on, Judge Inés Rojas was buying neither his newfound contrition nor his sob story, but legal eagles note a landmark aspect of Toledo’s conviction. On top of the 2019 plea bargaining by Odebrecht executives, one other, made public by a Brazilian court, would prove damning for Toledo:
Judge Rojas at one point read parts of the testimony from a former Odebrecht executive in Peru, Jorge Barata, who told prosecutors that the former president called him up to three times after leaving office to demand that he be paid. Toledo lowered his gaze and looked at his hands as Rojas read the expletive-laden remarks that Barata recounted to prosecutors.
Plea-bargained testimony alone is iffy. Informers have every incentive to tell prosecutors what they want to hear. Last year in Brazil, where Odebrecht is registered, other parties to this super-scam had plea-bargained testimony ruled inadmissible. But in Lima last week, weight of detail and number of witnesses – 100 says this ICIJ account – did for Toledo.
Such cases aren’t normal steel city terrain. With limited resources I favour the macro-view, and in the wider scheme of things Toledo is a minnow, a Bernie Madoff 1 – a little too greedy, and a lot too sure of himself and the reach of his rainwear.
Had he played a slightly longer game, been a little more discreet, this man of lowly birth might have used the revolving door as have so many before him and as will so many to come. Had he been more careful, left fewer smoking guns, he might have exited office for the usual rewards; sinecures for services rendered, else positions where insider knowledge and ability to procure access would leave him still useful to corporate power. Had he not overreached himself, or had he hedged his bets – against matters above his pay grade subjecting a fraud against his people, with his a bit part, to harsh light of day – he’d be spending the evening of his life in opulently American ease.
As opposed to a Peruvian jail cell.
But for his lowly origins, Mr Toledo’s career would be a textbook case of Made in the USA. Early impoverishment aside, it could be that of a Keir Starmer, Ursula Von der Leyen or any number of US-bought politicians within and beyond the West. Just as the future leaders of former colonies once learned British values at Eton and Oxbridge, so do future leaders under Washington aegis assimilate its neoliberal values in Ivy League institutions and stints at Goldman-Sachs. With a first degree at University of San Francisco, and doctorate at Stanford, Toledo cut his teeth as a political-economic analyst before cruising into the Peruvian political scene in the mid nineties, to bag the top slot in 2001.
His administration was characterized by macroeconomic boom, foreign investment, free trade agreements and various investment projects in infrastructure and human development. At the same time Toledo suffered a governance crisis, scandals in his personal life, and allegations of corruption against his inner circle, signs that hit his popularity until he fell to 8% of popular approval.
Still, every good boy deserves favours and those services to financial imperialism – those free trade agreements and all-round attractiveness to foreign investors – would not go unrewarded. Toledo could expect the customary post-presidential perks. Small potatoes by Blair, Clinton or Obama standards, to be sure, but nice work if you can get it:
Following his presidency, he served as a distinguished resident member of the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and visiting professor at the Center for Democracy, Development and Law Enforcement at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Toledo has been a speaker at conferences in different countries on economics, social inclusion, and democracy … In 2006, he founded the Global Center for Development and Democracy, advocating sustainable democracies, and between 2009 and 2010 was a visiting professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and professor of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution
Then the downfall. We needn’t be maths wizards to calculate that “too greedy” + “too unlucky” + “too not one of us” = “expendable”.
Hence last week’s verdict and twenty year stretch. Few will lament his fate as Mr Toledo glumly meditates, in quarters more confined and spartan than he’s grown acclimatised to, on life’s rich tapestry. And few will be surprised to hear the conglomerate formerly known as Odebrecht, its coffers down by a cool $2.6bn, has rebranded itself to “reflect its transformative journey”.
Otherwise it’s the same old same old, really.
* * *
- Madoff copped a 150 year jail sentence – some heads had to roll – for his Ponzi scheme. But as many have observed, the US dollar and its related Bond issues are themselves one big Ponzi whose prime beneficiaries are too big to fall. Not for nothing did Barack Obama remind Wall Street bankers that his digital printing of trillions in QE dollars was all that stood “between you and the pitchforks”.
An example which highlights:
(a) Yet another case in a long line of cases in which the fate of comprador useful idiots reflects the reality of relationships between the imperial core (The Collective West/Worst) and the patsy periphery (the rest of the planet).
To be explicit, bottom line; people like Toledo are low hanging fruit ripe for such expendable treatment – ask Saddam Hussain, Gaddafi, Escobar, Bashar al-Assad**, Ngo Dinh Diem and a whole assembly of similar – because, even though they are willingly serving the interests of the core against the interests of their own peoples and societies in various ways, they are not ‘one of us’. That is not white; not Caucasian; not of North European stock/blood.
That caste being the real untouchables. Think Blair, Obama, Bush, Clinton, the whole neo con class across Europe and the North American continent…
– https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10/why-does-the-west-hate-russia-so-much.html#comment-4123895
…….and their acolytes from Baerbock to the Spanish ‘Socialist Worker’ Borrel.*
*Because, as Borrel made explicit the other year, it really is about the distinction between those in and of the ‘Garden’ and those in and of the ‘Jungle’. When push comes to shove, not only is Zelensky a prime candidate to join the expendables on such criteria, so is Netenyahu.
(b) The gullibility not only of those compromised comprador elites but also the inconsistency of the target audience for the simplistic ‘all politicians are the same’ meme. Who, despite recognising – eventually – the nature of our political class do, nevertheless, side with those they seemingly despise on one crucial point; that anyone seriously opposing that bought and paid for political class – like a Corbyn or a Benn (who are simply standard-bearers for a different approach) – is even worse. Because the same politicians they claim to despise and disagree with tell them so.
** I include Assad here as it is my understanding that at one point Syria was for a time used as either a transit point or even a site for the euphemistically termed “extraordinary rendition’ process used by the ‘coalition of the willing’ during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes, “low hanging fruit” is a neat way of encapsulating it.
Iraq and Afghanistan could be placed at a time of relative “interregnum” in Syria. Hafez was recently dead but a reluctant Bashar – still wanting to practice eye-surgery – would have been finding his feet in a job he hadn’t sought. An scs post seven years ago cited this by In Defence of Marxism’s Fred Weston:
He was making a spurious argument, to which I responded with one not relevant to this post or your comment but worth repeating: