Daddy's Girl

It seems that Keiko Fujimori, the most popular single politician in Peru recently and the daughter of disgraced (and arrested) former President Alberto Fujimori, seems to believe that the opinion of the electorate matters more than the ruling of any judge.

"My father's true sentencing will come in the 2011 elections, in which the people will decide if Alberto Fujimori is innocent or not," said Keiko Fujimori, a Peruvian lawmaker who received more votes than any other congressional candidate in the 2006 elections.

She is also voicing again the Fujimori defense of record: that her father did nothing wrong himself, but was manipulated and deceived by Vladimiro Montesinos, her father's administration's Intelligence Chief and political player.

Now, there is no doubt that V. Montesinos is a villain. That's been established and he is cooling his heels in the clink because of it. But it is going to be rather hard to convince anyone of A. Fujimori's innocence in all the dirty matters when his first action upon being warned of a possible arrest was to flee to Japan, abuse the rights of ancestral-Japanese to claim Japanese nationality, and hide out with his fortune under the protection of people who got rich fronting for his Peruvian government in Japan.

To no one's surprise, K. Fujimori is considered a likely candidate for President of Peru in the coming election cycle. She has said that were she to become President, she would pardon her father if (in her mind the unlikely event of) his conviction.