Lima lawyer César Azabache Caracciolo wrote in a column published August 4, 2026, that the collapse of Peru's Odebrecht money-laundering cases in politics is captured in three rulings: a Supreme Court decision in the De la Puente case, and two Constitutional Tribunal rulings, in the Fujimori case and the Humala case, the latter just published.
Azabache said the harshest criticism of the Constitutional Tribunal is that it ruled without waiting for the Judiciary to do so first. He said the harshest criticism against the Supreme Court is that it was apparently enough for someone to place funds in a bank account under their own name to escape sanction. Both criticisms deserve to be taken seriously, he wrote, adding that the legal reasoning used in each ruling is not necessarily compatible from one to the next and does not always match the facts or the rules that applied to the three cases.
No formal case against Odebrecht
Azabache argued that prosecutors presented these cases as a series about money laundering in politics but never built a formal laundering case against the construction company Odebrecht itself. He wrote that the effective collaboration agreement approved in June 2019 does not include laundering charges and was never expanded to add them. He said there are no records at all showing prosecutors investigating Odebrecht for laundering assets, and that it is difficult to prove assets were truly laundered when the party accused of laundering them has never been formally charged.
He said the absence of a strong case against Odebrecht, or an expanded collaboration agreement, left room for arguments such as the claim that the cases collapsed because illegal party financing was not considered laundering at the time the acts occurred. That argument is only possible, he wrote, because Odebrecht's laundering operation has effectively become invisible in the proceedings.
Fujimori case unraveled over cash deliveries
Azabache recalled that when Judge Concepción Carhuancho ordered the first pretrial detention of Keiko Fujimori in October 2018, the judge argued that both those who delivered clandestine, exorbitant sums of cash and those who received them knew, or did not care to know, what they were doing. That reasoning held for a time, Azabache wrote, but the defense wore it down. By late 2019 it had been shown that just two people with no connection to any laundering scheme, Juan Rassmuss and Dionisio Romero, had together delivered more than $7 million in cash to Fujimori's organization. Azabache said the real problem was not the amount or the secrecy but a widespread, unchecked practice of moving cash without controls, and that prosecutors never adjusted the case in response.
Humala case and Barata's testimony
Azabache wrote that the Humala case moved in a similar direction. Former Odebrecht executive Jorge Barata ultimately confirmed that he did not offer, and Ollanta Humala did not request, the $3 million Barata acknowledged directing to Humala's 2011 campaign. Citing testimony from José Graña, Azabache said the idea of delivering the money came from Brazil's Workers' Party or from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva himself. He said it remains unknown whether anything similar happened in Venezuela, and that it is impossible to prove knowledge of an Odebrecht laundering scheme in a case where Barata appears as a messenger for a third party.
An alternative route not taken
Azabache noted that in October 2019 a professor he identified as Montoya had proposed an alternative approach: if the numbers did not add up, prosecutors could instead pursue a case over the formation of clandestine fortunes later laundered through separate processes, shifting the focus from Odebrecht's laundering operation to how leftover campaign funds were filtered into the economy by those who received them. He said prosecutors did not take up the proposal and instead defended their existing cases without changing them, despite warnings that the cases needed to change to survive.
Azabache concluded that prosecutors ultimately lost, that the process ended badly in the middle of what he called a cycle of demolition, and that it leaves loose ends that will not be tied up for a long time.
