Alberto Fujimori, Peru's disgraced former president, is busy planting a rose garden, learning to play guitar and cooking Japanese food in his comfortable Santiago holding cell -- complete with a billiards table, bar and karaoke machine. One of the world's most high-profile fugitives is optimistic that his political gamble will pay off.
Mr. Fujimori managed to arrive here last November on a corporate jet, check into the Marriott Hotel and order a bottle of champagne, all before authorities caught up with him.
Now he and his Chilean lawyer believe that Peru's extradition case against him will be dismissed by Chile's courts, and that he will be free to rebuild his political career.
"He is calm and patient. Muy tranquilo. He is a very gentle man," said Gabriel Zaliasnik, who successfully fought the extradition case against Carlos Menem, the former president of Argentina, also wanted for corruption charges in his homeland.
Mr. Fujimori, president from 1990 to 2000, stands accused of numerous human-rights violations and there are several criminal cases against him in Peru, including charges of embezzlement, paying his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos $15-million (U.S.) and authorizing a death squad to murder 25 people. He has argued that he is innocent of all charges and is a victim of political persecution.
The 67-year-old former agronomist resigned his presidency in 2000 amid a series of corruption scandals by sending a fax from Japan, the homeland of his parents, where he had fled. Japan has turned down Peru's repeated extradition requests.
Mr. Fujimori presumably could have lived out his days in Japan, but he harboured dreams of running for Peru's presidential election this April. Despite an Interpol arrest warrant, nobody intercepted him when he landed in Santiago on Nov. 6, 2005, from Tokyo (via a refuelling stop in Tijuana, Mexico). In Chile the courts must process international arrest warrants, and so immigration officers stamped his passport with a 90-day tourist visa and waved him through. Chilean police caught up with him at the Marriott later that night and took him away to the gendarmerie, a prison and officers' training school.
Peruvian authorities had to formally request his extradition, a long and convoluted process in Chile. An extradition case here is not merely an administrative proceeding; the judge must be convinced that evidence against the accused is not politically motivated and is strong enough to hold up under Chilean law.
Very few extradition cases have succeeded. Notably, Chilean judges recently rejected extradition requests for two Fujimori associates.
In an elegant salon inside the Peruvian embassy, Ambassador Jose Antonio Meier lights a cigarette and shakes his head over the case. He is still incredulous that Mr. Fujimori made it to Chile. He hopes Mr. Fujimori doesn't get bail, and says it is imperative that Peru have the opportunity to bring him to justice.
"We are really afraid he will escape. He is like Houdini," Mr. Meier said. "We hope Chile will extradite him so that Peruvians can judge the man who manipulated justice to his own ends for 10 years."
The incident has strained relations between Chile and Peru, two countries with a history of disagreements over maritime boundaries. Chilean president-elect Michelle Bachelet said this week the case is a purely legal matter, not an affair of state.
In any event, Mr. Fujimori's plans to launch a bid for the presidency in April's election were foiled this month when Peru's election board banned him from running. His support has slipped to less than 15 per cent, according to recent polls.
However, some poor Peruvians still credit him with ending the Shining Path insurgency and curtailing hyperinflation; Mr. Zaliasnik believes Fujimorismo is still strong in Peru and support for the ex-president would escalate if he returned.
In his suite inside the prison officers' training school, Mr. Fujimori is banned from engaging in political activities. He cannot tape his program for two Peruvian radio stations and has no access to a phone or the Internet. He is allowed visitors, and he may watch television in his living room, prepare meals in his dining room and water his roses and geraniums on the patio garden.
Although he is under 24-hour guard, the Peruvian embassy worries he may be doing more than gardening and making music -- though his lawyer denies it.
Mr. Fujimori celebrated Christmas and New Year's with his four children, and his eldest daughter Keiko was recently featured in a local magazine.
Legendary for his political cunning, Mr. Fujimori may have chosen Chile because he did not believe he would be detained.
His lawyer, however, insists he came here because he has more faith in Chile's judicial system, and wanted to be tried here, not in Peru. "It's absurd to think he wants to run away because he came to Chile to face the charges," Mr. Zaliasnik said.
For its part, Peru is taking the case very seriously: The Attorney-General flew into Santiago this month with 16,000 pages of evidence, outlining the specifics of 12 criminal cases. Among the charges of which Mr. Fujimori stands accused are: the murder of 25 people in two different incidents in the early 1990s; tapping the phones of politicians, journalists and other civilians; diverting millions in government money to his family members and to bribe members of Congress to switch their party affiliations; and transferring $15-million to Mr. Montesinos, the spy chief.
Mr. Zaliasnik says there is no evidence to link Mr. Fujimori to any of these wrongdoings. "The Peruvian government is afraid of Fujimori because they know he has a lot of political influence," he said.
Power to prison
Saddam Hussein, 68, ruled Iraq with an iron fist for more than 20 years until his overthrow and capture by the United States in 2003. He was found hiding in a hole at a farmhouse near Tikrit in northern Iraq, and is currently in prison in Baghdad and on trial for the massacre of 148 Shia Muslims in Dujail after an alleged assassination attempt there in 1982. He also stands accused of larger atrocities, including massacring thousands of Kurds in the late 1980s, and the slaughter of several thousand Shiites in southern Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean general and dictator, 90, was recently charged and put under house arrest in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of dissidents in the early years of his 1973-90 dictatorship. His presidential immunity was stripped last week for the fourth time, allowing officials to also pursue an indictment against him for the killing of two bodyguards of ousted president Salvador Allende. In March of 2000, Gen. Pinochet was released from British custody after the government ruled he was mentally unfit to face trial on charges of human-rights abuses. He currently resides at his Los Boldos coastal estate in central Chile.
Slobodan Milosevic, the unpredictable former Serbian Communist Party leader, 64, rose to power in the wake of inter-ethnic strife after the breakup of Yugoslavia following the death of Marshal Tito in 1980. He was first elected Serbian leader in 1989, and in 1997 assumed the office of president of the Yugoslav federation. Escalating conflict in Kosovo between Albanian separatists and Serbian/Yugoslav forces, and the mass exodus of Albanian refugees from Kosovo, led to a war with NATO in 1999. He lost a re-election bid in 2000 but refused to cede defeat until massive public demonstrations in Belgrade and other Serbian cities forced him to step down and flee. On March 31, 2001, he was apprehended by Yugoslav security forces after a 36-hour armed standoff at his bunker/villa in Belgrade. He is currently being held in The Hague where he is being tried on 66 charges of genocide in Bosnia, and war crimes in Croatia and Kosovo.
Manuel Noriega, the 67-year-old former general and de facto ruler of Panama, was commander-in-chief of National Defence Forces from 1983 until the U.S. invasion in 1989. U.S. forces tracked Gen. Noriega to the Vatican mission in Panama City, surrounded it and blasted it with rock music until he surrendered. He had been indicted by two U.S. grand juries, and in 1992 a Miami court convicted him on eight of 10 drug and racketeering charges. In 1999, a federal judge reduced Gen. Noriega's prison sentence to 30 years from 40, meaning the former Panamanian dictator could be eligible for release by 2007.
-- Rick Cash