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Peru’s former President Alejandro Toledo on Monday was sentenced to 20 years and six months in prison in a case involving Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which became synonymous with corruption across Latin America, where it paid millions of dollars in bribes to government officials and others. Authorities accused Toledo of accepting $35 million in bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for allowing the construction of a highway in the South American country. The National Superior Court of Specialized Criminal Justice in the capital, Lima, imposed the sentence after years of legal wrangling, including a dispute over whether Toledo, who governed Peru from 2001 to 2006, could be extradited from the United States. Judge Inés Rojas said Toledo’s victims were Peruvians who “trusted” him as their president. Rojas explained that in that role, Toledo was “in charge of managing public finances” and responsible for “protecting and ensuring the correct” use of resources. Instead, she said, he “defrauded the state.” She added that Toledo “had the duty to act with absolute neutrality, protect and preserve the assets of the state, avoiding their abuse or exploitation,” but he did not do so. At least 15 dead since July and thousands of hectares scorched as wildfires sweep Peru Odebrecht, which built some of Latin America’s most crucial infrastructure projects, admitted to U.S. authorities in 2016 to having bought government contracts throughout the region with generous bribes. The investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice spun probes in several countries, including Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador. In Peru, authorities accused Toledo and three other former presidents of receiving payments from the construction giant. They alleged Toledo received $35 million from Odebrecht in exchange for the contract to build 650 kilometers (403 miles) of a highway linking Brazil with southern Peru. That portion of the highway was initially estimated to cost $507 million, but Peru ended up paying $1.25 billion. Rojas at one point read parts of the testimony from Jorge Barata, a former Odebrecht executive in Peru, who told prosecutors that the former president called him up to three times after leaving office to demand that he be paid. Toledo lowered his gaze and looked at his hands as Rojas read the expletive-laden remarks that Barata recounted to prosecutors. Toledo has denied the accusations against him. His attorney, Roberto Siu, told reporters after the hearing that they will appeal the sentence. The former president on Monday frequently smirked, and at times laughed, particularly when the judge mentioned multimillion-dollar sums central to the case as well as when she struggled to read transcripts and other evidence in the case. Throughout the hearing, he also leaned to his right to speak with his attorney. In contrast, last week, he asked the court with a broken voice and his hands together, as if he were praying, to let him return home citing his age, cancer and heart problems. Toledo, 78, was first arrested in 2019 at his home in California, where he had been living since 2016, when he returned to Stanford University, his alma mater, as a visiting scholar to study education in Latin America. He was initially held in solitary confinement at a county jail east of San Francisco but was released to house arrest in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and his deteriorating mental health. He was extradited to Peru in 2022 after a court of appeals denied a challenge to his extradition and he surrendered to authorities. He has since remained under preventive detention. Rojas said Toledo will get credit for time served starting in April 2023. He will serve the remainder of his sentence at a prison on the outskirts of Lima that was built specifically to house former Peruvian presidents. Prosecutor José Domingo Pérez after the hearing described the sentence as “historic” and said it shows Peruvians that “crimes and corruption are punished.” Odebrecht rebranded as Novonor in 2020.

Cuba’s electrical grid went down Friday after one of the island’s major power plants failed, a day after a massive blackout swept across the Caribbean island and with no official estimate for when service will be restored. The Cuban energy ministry announced that the grid had gone down hours after the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant had ceased operations, at about 11 a.m. local time Friday. It said state-owned power company UNE was using distributed generation to provide power to some areas and that a gas-fired thermoelectric plant was starting operations. Mexico's president slams US aid for Ukraine and sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba But as darkness started to fall, millions of Cubans remained without power. Even in a country accustomed to frequent outages amid a deepening economic crisis, Friday’s supply collapse was unprecedented in modern times, aside from incidents involving intense hurricanes, like one in 2022. Various calls by The Associated Press seeking to clarify the extent of the blackout on Friday weren’t answered. In addition to the Antonio Guiteras plant, Cuba has several others and it wasn’t immediately clear whether or not they remained functional. “The power went out at 8 in the morning and it is now 5 in the afternoon and there is no electricity anywhere,” said Luis González, a 73-year-old retiree in Havana. Early Friday, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero had sought to assuage concerned citizens about the blackout Thursday evening, which was already the nation's worst in at least two years. Officials said that 1.64 gigawatts went offline during peak hours, about half the total demand at the time. Millions were left without power, and on Friday the government implemented emergency measures to slash demand, including suspending classes, shutting down some state-owned workplaces and canceling non-essential services. “The situation has worsened in recent days,” Marrero said in a special address on national television in the early hours of Friday. “We must be fully transparent ... we have been halting economic activities to ensure energy for the population.” During Marrero's address, he was accompanied by Alfredo López, the chief of UNE, who said the outage Thursday stemmed from increased demand from small- and medium-sized companies and residences’ air conditioners, as well as breakdowns in old thermoelectric plants that haven’t been properly maintained and the lack of fuel to operate some facilities. Changes to electricity rates for small- and medium-sized companies, which have proliferated since they were first authorized by the communist government in 2021, are also being considered, Marrero said. Marrero sought to provide reassurance about the outage, citing an expected influx of fuel supply from Cuba's state-owned oil company. “We are devoting absolute priority to addressing and solving this highly sensitive energy contingency,” Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X. “There will be no rest until its restoration.” The blackout has left millions of Cubans on edge. Thursday night, residents shut their doors and windows they typically leave open at night, and candles or lanterns were visible inside their homes. By Friday night, there was no indication that a solution was imminent. Prolonged electricity outages in the past have affected services like water supply and Yasunay Pérez, a Havana resident, said, with sarcasm, that she’s willing and able to bathe in the sea. “We can use all our survival (skills),” she said.

Nearly 6,300 people have fled their homes in the aftermath of an attack in central Haiti by heavily armed gang members that killed at least 70 people, according to the U.N.’s migration agency. Nearly 90% of the displaced are staying with relatives in host families, while 12% have found refuge in other sites including a school, the International Organization for Migration said in a report last week. The attack in Pont-Sondé happened in the early hours of Thursday morning, and many left in the middle of the night. Gang members “came in shooting and breaking into the houses to steal and burn. I just had time to grab my children and run in the dark,” said 60-year-old Sonise Mirano on Sunday, who was camping with hundreds of people in a park in the nearby coastal city of Saint-Marc. Bodies lay strewn on the streets of Pont-Sondé following the attack in the Artibonite region, many of them killed by a shot to the head, Bertide Harace, spokeswoman for the Commission for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Awareness to Save the Artibonite, told Magik 9 radio station on Friday. Initial estimates put the number of those killed at 20 people, but activists and government officials discovered more bodies as they accessed areas of the town. Among the victims was a young mother, her newborn baby and a midwife, Herace said. Prime Minister Garry Conille vowed that the perpetrators would face the full force of the law in comments in Saint-Marc on Friday. Read: A gang in Haiti has killed more than 20 and injured dozens after raiding a small town, official says “It is necessary to arrest them, bring them to justice, and put them in prison. They need to pay for what they have done, and the victims need to receive restitution,” he said. The U.N. Human Rights Office of the Commissioner said in a statement that it was “horrified by Thursday’s gang attacks.” The European Union also condemned the violence in a statement on Friday, which it said marked “yet another escalation in the extreme violence these criminal groups are inflicting on the Haitian people.” Haiti’s government deployed an elite police unit based in the capital of Port-au-Prince to Pont-Sondé following the attack and sent medical supplies to help the area’s lone, and overwhelmed, hospital. Police will remain in the area for as long as it takes to guarantee safety, Conille said, adding that he didn’t know whether it would take a day or a month. He also appealed to the population, saying “the police cannot do it alone.” Gang violence across Artibonite, which produces much of Haiti’s food, has increased in recent years. Since that uptick, Thursday’s attack is one of the biggest massacres. Similar ones have taken place in the capital of Port-au-Prince, 80% of which is controlled by gangs, and they typically are linked to turf wars, with gang members targeting civilians in areas controlled by rivals. Many neighborhoods are not safe, and people affected by the violence have not been able to return home, even if their houses have not been destroyed. Read more:As UN meets, Haitians express hopelessness at finding an international solution to gang crisis More than 700,000 people — more than half of whom are children — are now internally displaced across Haiti, according to the International Organization for Migration in an Oct. 2 statement. That was an increase of 22% since June. Port-au-Prince hosts a quarter of the country’s displaced, often residing in overcrowded sites, with little to no access to basic services, the agency said. Those forced to flee their homes are mostly being accommodated by families, who have reported significant difficulties, including food shortages, overwhelmed healthcare facilities, and a lack of essential supplies on local markets, according to the agency.

Gang members attacked a small town in central Haiti early Thursday, killing more than 20 people, including children, according to a human rights group. Another 50 people were injured as the Gran Grif gang burned homes and cars in the town of Pont-Sondé, said Bertide Harace, spokeswoman for the Commission for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Awareness to Save the Artibonite. “A lot of people ran and left the area,” she told Radio Kiskeya. A video posted on social media shows a group of people fleeing through the brush, with one woman who was out of breath saying, “Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go.” In another video, dozens of people start running through a street after hearing rumors that the gang was approaching. Harace and others criticized police in the nearby coastal city of Saint-Marc, saying they did not mobilize to help people being attacked in Pont-Sondé. Read:As UN meets, Haitians express hopelessness at finding an international solution to gang crisis Venson François, a government prosecutor based in Saint-Marc, called the attack a “massacre” in an interview with Radio Caraïbes. Dozens of people crowded around a hospital in Saint-Marc where the injured were taken, with one man telling reporters that local authorities are not doing enough to protect people. The attack in Pont-Sondé was blamed on the Gran Grif gang. It operates in the central Artibonite region, and experts have described it as one of Haiti’s cruelest gangs. It has gained control of more territory since 2022 under the leadership of Luckson Elan, who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department last month. In January 2023, the Gran Grif gang was accused of attacking a police station in Liancourt, located near Pont-Sondé, and killing at least six officers. Violence unleashed by the gang also forced the closure of a hospital in February 2023 that serves more than 700,000 people. Read more: Human rights group calls on governments to protect Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants Former Haitian legislator Prophane Victor, who represented the Artibonite department, began arming young men who eventually formed the Gran Grif gang to secure his election and control over the area, according to a U.N. report. The U.S. also sanctioned Victor last month. The gang has about 100 members and has been accused of crimes including murder, rape, robberies and kidnappings, according to the report. While most of the gang violence is concentrated in the capital of Port-au-Prince, it has spread in recent years to the Artibonite region, where much of Haiti's food is produced.

Claudia Sheinbaum will take the oath of office Tuesday as Mexico’s first female president in more than 200 years of independence, promising to protect an expanded social safety net and fight for the poor like her predecessor, but facing pressing problems. The 62-year-old scientist-turned-politician will receive a country with a number of immediate challenges, foremost among them stubbornly high levels of violence, a sluggish economy and hurricane-battered Acapulco. Sheinbaum romped to victory in June with nearly 60% of the vote, propelled largely by the sustained popularity of her political mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He took office six years ago declaring “For the good of all, first the poor,” and promising historical change from the neoliberal economic policies of his predecessors. Sheinbaum promised continuity from his popular social policies to controversial constitutional reforms to the judiciary and National Guard rammed through during his final days in office. Despite her pledge of continuity, she is a very different personality. “López Obrador was a tremendously charismatic president and many times that charisma allowed him to cover up some political errors that Claudia Sheinbaum will not have that possibility of doing,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political analyst at Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching. “So, where López Obrador was charismatic, Claudia Sheinbaum will have to be effective.” He is not leaving her an easy situation. Her first trip as president will be to the flood-stricken Pacific coast resort of Acapulco. Hurricane John, which struck as a Category 3 hurricane last week and then reemerged into the ocean and struck again as a tropical storm, caused four days of incredibly heavy rain that killed at least 17 people along the coast around Acapulco. Acapulco was devastated in October 2023 by Hurricane Otis, and had not recovered from that blow when John hit. Sheinbaum must also deal with raging violence in the cartel-dominated northern city of Culiacan, where factional fighting within the Sinaloa cartel broke out after drug lords Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López were apprehended in the United States after they flew there in a small plane on July 25. López Obrador has long sought to avoid confronting Mexico’s drug cartels and has openly appealed to the gangs to keep the peace among themselves, but the limitations of that strategy have become glaringly apparent in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, where gun battles have raged on the city’s streets. Local authorities and even the army — which López Obrador has relied on for everything — have essentially admitted that the fighting will only end when the cartel bosses decide to end it. But that’s only the latest hotspot. Drug-related violence is surging from Tijuana in the north to Chiapas in the south, displacing thousands. While Sheinbaum inherits a huge budget deficit, unfinished construction projects and a burgeoning bill for her party’s cash hand-out programs — all of which could send financial markets tumbling — perhaps her biggest looming concern is the possibility of a victory for Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election. Trump has already vowed to slap 100% tariffs on vehicles made in Mexico. Though that would likely violate the current U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, there are other things Trump could do to make life difficult for Sheinbaum, including his pledge of massive deportations. Things with its northern neighbor were already tense after López Obrador said he was putting relations with the U.S. embassy “on pause” after public criticism of the proposed judicial overhaul. First lady Jill Biden struck an optimistic tone for relations with the incoming Sheinbaum administration saying at a reception Monday that, “Under Dr. Sheinbaum’s presidency I know we will continue to build a more prosperous, safe and democratic region — and take the steps in our U.S.-Mexico partnership." There are areas where Sheinbaum could try to take Mexico in a new direction. For example, she has a Ph.D. in energy engineering and has spoken of the need to address climate change. López Obrador built a massive new oil refinery and poured money into the state-owned oil company. But his budget commitments do not leave her much room to maneuver. Jennifer Piscopo, professor of gender and politics at the Royal Holloway University of London who has studied Latin America for decades, said Mexico electing its first female leader is important because it will show girls they can do it too, but it can also create unrealistic expectations. “Woman firsts are powerful symbols, but they do not gain magic power,” she said. “Especially when the governance challenges are so large, expecting magic solutions overnight can also generate outsized disappointment.”

As world leaders meeting in the United Nations this week discuss the future of efforts to rein in the gangs strangling Haiti, Haitians are expressing hopelessness that an international response can turn the tide of violence. Thus far, a UN-backed force of 400 police from Kenya and about two dozen Jamaican officers have done little to quell the country's gangs, which have terrorized the country since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. World leaders have been discussing the next steps in a convoluted efforts to restore order to the Caribbean nation, and Kenya this weekend pledged 600 more officers. The United States has floated the idea of a U.N. peacekeeping force, but the idea was considered too controversial given the introduction of cholera and sexual abuse cases that occurred the last time U.N. troops were in Haiti. The deployment of Kenyan forces was, in part, to avoid tensions that may be sparked by sending another U.N. peacekeeping mission. But in a visit to Haiti by Kenya's President William Ruto over the weekend – on his way to the United Nations General Assembly session, which began on Sunday – Ruto said he would be open to expanding Kenya's operations into a larger U.N. peacekeeping mission. “On the suggestion to transit this into a fully U.N. Peacekeeping mission, we have absolutely no problem with it, if that is the direction the U.N. security council wants to take,” Ruto said. While Ruto hailed the successes of the Kenyan forces on Sunday, a recent report by a UN human rights expert said gang violence is spreading across Haiti and that Haitian police still lack the “logistical and technical capacity” to fight gangs. The ongoing violence has left Haitians like 39-year-old Mario Canteve disillusioned with further international efforts to quell the gangs, saying he no longer believes promises by world leaders that they'll be able to change anything in the crisis-stricken nation. “No one is coming to save Haiti. Nothing is changing," he said. “A new mission cannot save Haiti.” Canteve sells cellphone chips and repairs electronics in the capital of Port-au-Prince, 80% of which is estimated to be controlled by gangs. Facing brutal gang violence, some Haitians have organized vigilante groups to battle the gangs themselves. Such groups underscore to the lack of hope many Haitians have that an international solution can mark a shift in Haiti. Moise Jean-Pierre, a 50-year-old school teacher, recalled past U.N. missions in Haiti and said such efforts were a “waste of time.” “It would not be the first time we've had U.N. missions in Haiti,” he said. “What difference will it make?” Sentiments on the ground speak to the bind world leaders are in as they've spent years looking for a larger solution to Haiti's woes. The current security mission is expected to reach a total of 2,500 personnel, with the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin and Chad also pledging to send police and soldiers. Though it still is not clear when that would happen. Few at the U.N. have an appetite for a larger peacekeeping mission in part due to the abuses in past missions, but also because many Haitians have an aversion to foreign interventions. Experts say three previous interventions by US and the UN have not improved crises in Haiti. Some harbor hope that elections planned next year will pave the path to a Haitian-born solution. The country has not held general elections since 2016 as the crisis has dragged on. Last week, Haiti took its first steps in creating a provisional election council to prepare the nation for elections. Haiti still has many hurdles ahead of it to get there. Chief among them is violence. While Canteve, the cellphone chip salesman, called for unity and said “a new mission cannot save Haiti, the children of Haiti need to save themselves,” he also expressed doubts the country was safe enough to facilitate elections. “How can you hold an election when everything is so violent. Everyone is shooting," he said. "When police cannot even go into certain areas, what kind of election are going to get?”

A landslide caused by heavy rains has killed six people near Mexico City, authorities said. The landslide on Monday night in Naucalpan, a community northwest of Mexico City, also affected a house and school, the State of Mexico government said in a statement. The victims were four men and two women. Another three people were injured and transported to a state hospital. State Gov. Delfina Gómez ordered the deployment of rescue teams and security task forces to support affected families. The deaths in Naucalpan occurred a few days after another landslide killed nine people on Saturday in Jilotzingo, west of Mexico City in the State of Mexico. A 3-month-old baby was among the victims. Two children, ages 10 and 12, and a 34-year-old woman were rescued. Several homes were affected and authorities had to evacuate more than 100 people for fear of further landslides. The landslides and heavy rains have been pounding the State of Mexico since the start of the rainy season in late July. In cities like Chalco that have also experienced heavy torrential rains, the combination of unchecked growth and failing infrastructure have caused sewage-infused waters to invade streets, homes and businesses.

Wildfires in Peru have left at least 15 dead and more than 3,000 hectares (11.58 square miles) of cultivated land and natural areas scorched, authorities said Monday. Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén told reporters that the fires were started by human activity and that 22 of the 24 regions that make up the country have active outbreaks. He added that clouds, smoke and winds were hampering the operations of the aircraft available to fight the fires. A Civil Defense report seen by The Associated Press indicates that since July at least 15 people have died and another 98 have been injured due to the fires. Of the fatalities, 10 died in the last two weeks and more than 1,800 people have been affected. The livestock sector was reported to have lost 334 animals. Peru's National Forest and Wildlife Service, SERFOR, indicated that the effects of climate change intensify the conditions that facilitate the spread of fire. “Extremely strong winds and prolonged droughts dry out vegetation, turning it into highly flammable fuel," said Romina Liza, a specialist in monitoring and management of forest Fires at SERFOR. "This allows the fire to spread rapidly." Some of the most complicated fires are in the Amazon region, which borders Ecuador, the head of civil defense, Juan Urcariegui, told a local television station.

Alberto Fujimori, whose decade-long presidency began with triumphs righting Peru’s economy and defeating a brutal insurgency only to end in a disgrace of autocratic excess that later sent him to prison, has died. He was 86. His death Wednesday in the capital, Lima, was announced by his daughter Keiko Fujimori in a post on X. He had been pardoned in December from his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he was planning to run for Peru’s presidency for the fourth time in 2026. Fujimori, who governed with an increasingly authoritarian hand in 1990-2000, was pardoned in December from his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he was planning to run for Peru’s presidency for the fourth time in 2026. The former university president and mathematics professor was the consummate political outsider when he emerged from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election over writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Over a tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made risky, go-for-broke decisions that alternately earned him adoration and reproach. He took over a country ravaged by runaway inflation and guerrilla violence, mending the economy with bold actions including mass privatizations of state industries. Defeating fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer but also won him broad-based support. His presidency, however, collapsed just as dramatically. After briefly shutting down Congress and elbowing himself into a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked videotapes showed his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers. The president went to Japan, the land of his parents, and famously faxed in his resignation. He stunned supporters and foes alike five years later when he landed in neighboring Chile, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru’s presidency in 2006, but instead wound up in court facing charges of abuse of power. The high-stakes political gambler would lose miserably. He became the first former president in the world to be tried and convicted in his own country for human rights violations. He was not found to have personally ordered the 25 death-squad killings for which he was convicted, but he was deemed responsible because the crimes were committed in his government’s name. His 25-year sentence did not stop Fujimori from seeking political revindication, which he planned from a prison built in a police academy on the outskirts of Lima, the capital. His congresswoman daughter Keiko tried in 2011 to restore the family dynasty by running for the presidency but was narrowly defeated in a runoff. She ran again in 2016 and 2021, when she lost by just 44,000 votes after a campaign in which she promised to free her father. “After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just departed to meet the Lord," she said on X Wednesday. "We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul.” Fujimori’s presidency was, in fact, a brash display of outright authoritarianism, known locally as “caudillismo,” in a region shakily stepping away from dictatorships toward democracy. He is survived by his four children. The oldest, Keiko, became first lady in 1996 when his father divorced his mother, Susana Higuchi, in a bitter battle in which she accused Fujimori of having her tortured. The youngest child, Kenji, was elected a congressman. Fujimori was born July 28, 1938, Peruvian Independence Day, and his immigrant parents picked cotton until they could open a tailor’s shop in downtown Lima. He earned a degree in agricultural engineering in 1956, and then studied in France and the United States, where he received a graduate degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972. In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultural University in Lima, and six years later, he ran for president without ever having held political office, billing himself as a clean alternative to Peru’s corrupt, discredited political class. He soared from 6% in the polls a month before the 1990 election to finish second out of nine in the balloting. He went on to beat Vargas Llosa in a runoff. The victory, he later said, came from the same frustration that fueled the Shining Path. “My government is the product of rejection, of being fed up with Peru because of the frivolity, corruption and nonfunctioning of the traditional political class and the bureaucracy,” he said. Once in office, Fujimori’s tough talk and hands-on style at first won him only plaudits, as car bombings still ripped through the capital and annual inflation approached 8,000 percent. He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated but he had argued against in the campaign. Privatizing state-owned industries, Fujimori slashed public spending and attracted record foreign investment. Known affectionately as “El chino,” due to his Asian ancestry, Fujimori often donned peasant garb to visit jungle Indigenous communities and highland farmers, while delivering electricity and drinking water to dirt-poor villages. That distinguished him from the patrician, white politicians who typically lacked his commoner’s touch. Fujimori also gave Peru’s security forces free rein to take on the Shining Path. In September 1992, police captured rebel leader Abimael Guzmán. Deservedly or not, Fujimori took credit. Taking power just years after much of the region had shed dictatorships, the former university professor ultimately represented a step back. He developed a growing taste for power and resorted to increasingly anti-democratic means to amass more of it. In April 1992, he shut down Congress and the courts, accusing them of shackling his efforts to defeat the Shining Path and spur economic reforms. International pressure forced him to call elections for an assembly to replace the Congress. The new legislative body, dominated by his supporters, changed Peru’s constitution to allow the president to serve two consecutive five-year terms. Fujimori was swept back into office in 1995, after a brief border war with Ecuador, in an election landslide. Human rights advocates at home and abroad blasted him for pushing through a general amnesty law forgiving human rights abuses committed by security forces during Peru’s “anti-subversive” campaign between 1980 and 1995. The conflict would claim nearly 70,000 lives, a truth commission found, with the military responsible for more than a third of the deaths. Journalists and businessmen were kidnapped, students disappeared and at least 2,000 highland peasant women were forcibly sterilized. In 1996, Fujimori’s majority bloc in Congress put him on the path for a third term when it approved a law that determined his first five years as president didn’t count because the new constitution was not yet in place when he was elected. A year later, Fujimori’s Congress fired three Constitutional Tribunal judges who tried to overturn the legislation, and his foes accused him of imposing a democratically elected dictatorship. By then, almost daily revelations were showing the monumental scale of corruption around Fujimori. About 1,500 people connected to his government were prosecuted on corruption and other charges, including eight former Cabinet ministers, three former military commanders, an attorney general and a former chief of the Supreme Court. The accusations against Fujimori led to years of legal wrangling. In December, Peru’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori on Christmas Eve in 2017 by then-President Pablo Kuczynski. Wearing a face mask and getting supplemental oxygen, Fujimori walked out of the prison door and got in a sport utility vehicle driven by his daughter-in-law. The last time he was seen in public was on Sept. 4, leaving a private hospital in a wheelchair. He told the press that he had undergone a CT scan and when asked if his presidential candidacy was still going ahead, he smiled and said “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Brazil is enduring its worst drought since nationwide measurements began over seven decades ago, with 59% of the country under stress — an area roughly half the size of the U.S. Major Amazon basin rivers are registering historic lows, and uncontrolled manmade wildfires have ravaged protected areas and spread smoke over a vast expanse, plummeting air quality. “This is the first time that a drought has covered all the way from the North to the country's Southeast,” Ana Paula Cunha, a researcher at the National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters, said in a statement Thursday. “It is the most intense and widespread drought in history.” Smoke on Monday afternoon caused Sao Paulo, a metropolitan area of 21 million people, to breathe the second most polluted air in the world after Lahore, Pakistan, according to data gathered by IQAir, a Swiss air technology company. About 1,100 kilometers (683 miles) to the north, a wildfire is sweeping through Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, one of Brazil’s most famous tourism sites. “This year, the dry season started much earlier than in previous years, whereas the rain season was intense yet short,” Nayara Stacheski, head of the park, told The Associated Press. “The wind is strong, the air humidity is very low and it’s extremely hot. All this worsens the wildfire.” On Monday, there was one uncontrolled wildfire in a remote area. A helicopter was expected to arrive to transport firefighters. Another fire was controlled by 80 firefighters, with support from two aircraft. Two other fires were threatening to enter the park. The blazes in one of the few protected areas of Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna, are just the latest drama in the country beset by months of blazes. From the beginning of the year until Sept. 8, Brazil registered almost 160,000 fires, the worst year since 2010. In Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland area, it has been the second worst fire year on record. Most fires are manmade as part of the deforestation process or for clearing pastures and agricultural land. So far this year, an area the size of Italy has burned in Brazil. Fire is not the only problem. More than 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) from Chapada dos Veadeiros to the Northeast, the Amazon — the world’s most voluminous river — and one of its main tributaries, the Madeira River, have registered new daily record lows at the city of Tabatinga. There's no end sight — significant rain is not expected until October. Low river levels have stranded dozens of communities only accessible by water. One of the largest is Fidadelfia, inhabited by 387 families of the Tikuna tribe. Due to the drought, there is shortage of potable water and children are drinking dirty water, leading to a surge in illnesses. Food is becoming scarce as crops die and it’s increasingly difficult to travel to the city, local leader Myrian Tikuna told the AP. Tikuna sent a selfie taken Monday in her community. Instead of water, endless banks of sand dominate the landscape. “This used to be the Amazon River," she said. "Now it’s a desert. If things get worse, our people will disappear. Now we are realizing the severity of climate change.”