Peru has four former presidents in jail at the same time.

Lima.- The preventive prison order issued this Wednesday against former President Martín Vizcarra (2018-2020) means that Peru has a poker of former presidents in jail, coinciding four, either by current sentences and others immersed in full judicial processes for cases of alleged corruption. Vizcarra will be imprisoned as is already the case with former presidents Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), Ollanta Humala (2016-2021) and Pedro Castillo (2021-2022), while former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018) remains under investigation and unable to leave the country after having spent three years under house arrest. The former president, who appears in several voting intention polls as one of the most accepted names for the 2026 elections despite the triple disqualification imposed on him by the Congress (Parliament), was sent this Wednesday to pre-trial detention pending the conclusion of the trial in which he is accused of bribery.

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The Prosecutor’s Office is seeking a 15-year prison sentence for Vizcarra for allegedly receiving 2.3 million soles (611,000 dollars or 557,000 euros) in bribes when he was governor of the southern Moquegua region (2011-2014). According to the Public Ministry, part of the money may have been received in 2016, when he was already Minister of Transport and Communications and Vice President of Peru during Kuczynski’s presidential term, whom he succeeded in 2018 when investigations against PPK, as the former president is called, began, and he was removed from office by Congress. The National Penitentiary Institute (Inpe) has not yet announced the prison to which Vizcarra will go, although it is speculated that it could be Barbadillo, the prison for former presidents of Peru in which Toledo, Humala and Castillo are currently held, and in which the late Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) was also imprisoned.