Christmas Eve pardon

Kuczynski pardons Fujimori on humanitarian grounds. The constituency that made the deal cannot afford to let it end.

On 24 December 2017, President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski signs a humanitarian pardon for Fujimori, days after surviving a vaquita-narrow impeachment vote that depended on Fujimorista abstentions. The pardon will be overturned, restored, overturned, and restored again over the next six years; Fujimori will leave prison in December 2023. Once a constituency has cheered the disappearances, its interest realigns with covering them up. The Lima professional class that tolerated Colina becomes structurally invested in impunity, because functioning justice would eventually arrive at their own door — at the dinner-table conversations they had, at the votes they cast, at the silence they kept while a neighbor's son was taken. The bargain doesn't just buy security. It buys you into the conspiracy. That is why these regimes are so hard to dislodge from inside.