Peru Has Been Arresting Its Former Presidents. One’s Been Hiding in the Bay Area for Years

A former Peruvian president is facing extradition from San Francisco to answer to corruption charges in his home country. Former President Alejandro Toledo has a long history in the Bay Area, where he has been hiding from criminal charges in Peru since early 2017.

He is currently detained in federal custody in San Francisco as he faces an extradition process that could go on for months. The case is front-page news in Peru but barely a blip in the Bay Area.

Peruvian officials issued an arrest warrant for Toledo in February 2017, when he was accused of taking kickbacks from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company that admitted to paying multimillion-dollar bribes to secure contracts throughout Latin America. The scandal has already landed two former presidents of Peru in jail, including one who resigned as a result of the charges. Another ex-president committed suicide earlier this year as the police were coming to arrest him. Other high-level politicians are also facing criminal charges or are expected to be charged.

Meanwhile, Toledo had been hiding from Peruvian prosecutors in Menlo Park. The 73-year-old former president, who resettled in the Bay Area after losing a 2016 re-election bid, simply opted to not return to Peru and even tried to flee to Israel, where his wife is a citizen, without success.

His links to Northern California go back half a century. Born in extreme poverty in the Peruvian highlands of indigenous ancestry, Toledo sold newspapers and worked shining shoes until two Peace Corps volunteers ran into him. Captivated by his smarts, they helped him get a partial scholarship to attend the University of San Francisco in 1966, according to records from the school and news reports from Peru.

At USF, Toledo — who went by Alex — played on the Dons’ varsity soccer team and worked the graveyard shift at a gas station on Fulton Street to pay for the rest of his studies. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration in 1970, and moved on to complete two master’s degrees at Stanford, on in economics and one in education.

It was at Stanford that Toledo established his biggest bonds to the Bay Area. He met his future wife, a Belgian anthropologist who would go on to become the Peruvian first lady. He established connections with professors who would be by his side when he married and during his presidential inauguration.

Toledo rose to work at the United Nations and the World Bank in the late 1970s and ’80s. He obtained a Ph.D. in education from Stanford in 1993 before entering Peruvian politics. In 2000, he led the final push against Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship and became the country’s first indigenous president a year later.

Toledo would spearhead Peru’s economic recovery for the next five years. Often disrespected for his indigenous origins and brash behavior — he was known as a rampant drinker and philanderer — his presidency is now seen as fairly decent by Peruvian standards. In subsequent presidential elections, he came to be known as the “lesser evil” of the candidate pool.

Things began to unravel for him in 2015, when investigative journalists and prosecutors in Peru started digging, and noticed that his finances did not quite add up.

One of his main initiatives as a president between 2001 and 2006 was the construction of a Transoceanic Highway, Peru-to-Brazil. The contract was given to Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, one of the main players in the ongoing continental corruption scandal known as “Lava Jato” (“Car Wash”). In late 2016, prosecutors accused Toledo of receiving a $20 million kickback for that contract, and committing money laundering to make it land in his family’s bank accounts.

By then, Toledo was back at Stanford as a visiting fellow in the School of Education. The manhunt to bring him to justice became an extradition request that was addressed only this month. In the meantime, the former president and his wife — also accused for her role in the corruption scheme — were regulars at campus events related to democracy and development.

In March of this year, Toledo spent a night in the San Mateo County Jail for public intoxication.

When he was arrested in his Menlo Park house on July 16, Toledo had a suitcase with $40,000, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elise LaPunzina said at a July 19 extradition hearing in federal court in San Francisco.

Judge Thomas S. Hixson denied him release on bail, finding Toledo might try to flee.

The extradition process is scheduled to resume at a hearing Aug. 7.