“Corruption kills people… Every dollar of dirty money was obtained by creating mountains of corpses and rivers of blood”

The next issue of The Day will feature an exclusive interview with a man who fights corruption on the global scale – Jose Carlos Ugaz Sanchez-Moreno, Chairman of the Board at Transparency International and former Ad-Hoc Attorney of Peru. This is the first time he visits Ukraine.

On June 6-8 Ugaz is going to meet President Petro Poroshenko, Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko, the Prosecutor General, the Parliamentary Anti-Corruption Committee and, time permitting, representatives of the newly-created anti-corruption agencies – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption.

Jose Ugaz has a unique experience of combating corruption within the elites and knows how to introduce anti-corruption purges in the courts and the prosecutor’s office. Ugaz’s efforts lead to the 25-year imprisonment of Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru, who himself earlier appointed Ugaz to the post of Ad-Hoc Attorney. At the time of his first appointment, Ugaz was tasked with an investigation of the illegal activities of Vladimiro Montesinos, head of Peru’s National Intelligence Service.

President Fujimori ruled Peru with an authoritarian regime: media were controlled by the government, the opposition leaders were either bought out with bribes or killed by illegal government-created militant groups, and elections were rigged. Montesinos was the right-hand man of the president, but later joined the opposition leaders who accused Fujimori of corruption. Ugaz was appointed the attorney in order to eliminate the president’s opponent. However, this personnel decision turned out to be extremely unfortunate for Fujimori – Ugaz joined the conflict against him.

Later, when the brother of Pablo Escobar, a notorious Colombian drug dealer, revealed in an interview said that Montesinos had received a million dollars from Pablo to aid Fujimori’s campaign in 1989, Ugaz with his deputies initiated an investigation against the president. Ugaz’s team immediately undertook an extensive cleansing within the state apparatus. In 14 months they had put up to twenty prosecutors and judges in jail, including four members of the Constitutional Court and the Attorney General. “We had opened criminal cases against 1,500 people and started 200 trials; by the time I left the office, we had returned 75 million dollars to the country from offshores in Switzerland, Mexico, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands. And 205 more million dollars had been frozen abroad,” said Ugaz in a 2013 interview.

Ugaz’s investigation prompted Fujimori to flee to Japan, and he spent five years there. When former president returned to Latin America, the case was taken over by the Supreme Court of Peru. Litigation had lasted more than two years. Fujimori was convicted of several murder cases with aggravating circumstances, assaults and kidnapping, and the theft of 15 million dollars. He received a 25-year sentence in the case about the illegal activity of militant groups.

“If you fight corruption, you must have patience. If you’re impatient, you are gone. I started my activist work when I was eighteen, and the first results came when I was forty,” says Ugaz.

In 2002 Ugaz became chairman of PROETICA, the national Transparency International office in Peru. He was a member of the UN Peace mission and the UN Observer Mission at elections in El Salvador, and worked at the World Bank in 2004-06. He had been teaching criminal law at the Catholic University of Peru since 1986. In 2011 Ugaz was elected as a board member of Transparency International, and in 2014 he became the chairman of this global anti-corruption network.