with 100% scrutinized, Keiko Fujimori further from triumph and closer to prison

Since Keiko Fujimori said he suspected his competitor’s match Pedro Castillo He had put in place a mechanism to withdraw votes from the Peruvian ballot. Subsequent events not only contradicted him, but also took him further and further away from electoral victory. New incidents of the trial you are facing, They roll it again in the direction of the prison.

On Wednesday evening, the presidential candidate presented himself again at a press conference to report who had gathered more evidence irregularities in the elections, and announced that an army of lawyers will lift the nullity of the results in 802 polling stations across the country, representing a universe of 300,000 votes in total.

Precisely is the amount who could help Keiko Fujimori defeat leftist Pedro Castillo, who retains a small but solid advantage over the daughter of former inmate Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who is running for president for the third time in a row, after frustrated attempts to 2011 and 2016.

However, as Keiko Fujimori focuses on tarnishing the outcome of the ballot because it seems unfavorable, the head of the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE), Piero Corvetto, said Thursday afternoon that 100% of the reports “of an election had been processed safe, calm, clean and transparent, as we promised ”.

With 100% of the cases processed, the leftist Pedro Castillo obtained 50.198% of the valid votes and Keiko Fujimori 49.802%, which implies a difference of 69 thousand 546 votes.

Keiko’s difficulties

Knowing the trend that favored Professor Castillo, Fujimori precisely, in accordance with his account of alleged fraud, announced the request to quash the results in 802 tables with the idea of grab a few thousand votes to win the election.

It won’t be easy to prove it for the evidence of the alleged machinations of representatives of Peru Libre, the party of Pedro Castillo, to wrest votes from Keiko Fujimori, is lacking in truth.

Candidate Fujimori, for example, cited a case in the mountainous town of Acora, in the department of Puno, on the border with Bolivia. Reported that the three members of the table belonged to the same Catacora family and that Peru Libre had named them, which explained that, surprisingly, at this table, he had obtained only one vote, against 197 for Castillo.

A journalist from the Lima daily The Republic went to Acora and interviewed Bertín, Luis and Humberto Catacora, and confirmed that the three were not members of the same Aymara family, because in the city where they live almost everyone has the same last name. They did not even know each other until they were summoned to be members of the polling station. As if that were not enough, they have no relation with the Peru Free party and were selected by lot, which was ratified by the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE).

Election experts recalled that when Alberto Fujimori committed fraud in an attempt to win a third election in 2000, kept the electoral bodies under its control, had millions of dollars in public funds to fund his campaign and had the support of the majority of the media by paying them impressive bribes.

A big difference with Pedro Castillo, that he could not even reach the representatives necessary to monitor the polling stations across the country to defend the votes in their favor.

While Keiko Fujimori’s plan to cancel the 802 table vote was in full swing, prosecutor José Domingo Pérez in charge of the investigation against the presidential candidate, asked the justice to return to prison because he violated the ban on contacting witnesses in the case.

Perez, whatwho asked for 30 years and 10 months in prison for Fujimori for receiving $ 17.3 million in illegal contributions – including those from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht – to fund his presidential campaigns in 2011 and 2016, she noted that the accused had met the former congressman of Fujimori, Miguel Torres Morales. Indeed, during Thursday’s press conference in which he announced the cancellation of the polling stations, Fujimori introduced attorney Torres as a legal strategist.

It was the second worst news about her trial that Keiko Fujimori received.

On June 4, just 48 hours before the Sunday June 6 poll, Judge Víctor Zúñiga rejected a request from Keiko and others involved in the case, to cancel the closure of the tax investigation. By this maneuver, the defendants, including the presidential candidate, intended to postpone the start of the oral trial. But they did not succeed.

For all this, it was urgent for Fujimori to win the elections: accede to the presidency the legal proceedings against him would be suspended until the end of his term in 2026.

This is one of the powerful reasons why the daughter of the doomed former president Alberto Fujimori urgently needed to defeat the very modest schoolteacher and peasant Pedro Castillo.

As the results grow, victory seems elusive for Keiko and they bring her closer to the legal action, who seeks to return to prison.

PB