Alberto Fujimori: Who is Gregorio Parco, the lawyer who filed the habeas corpus application to free the former president

Following the decision of the Constitutional Court (TC) which declared habeas corpus founded, which released Alberto Fujimori, the former president would leave the Barbadillo prison, located in the district of Ate, starting next Monday, March 28. Lawyer Gregorio Parco Alarcón was the one who filed this appeal in 2020.

“I have no sympathy with Fujimorism, but with the engineer Alberto I am a sympathizer from the year 90 to 95,” the Iqueño lawyer told Canal N, explaining his motivations for presenting the habeas corpus that frees the former dictator after the TC reinstated the pardon granted him by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2017.

In another interview, with journalist Fernando Risco broadcast on Facebook, Parco said he had forgotten about the lawsuit and that it is a “purely technical and legal issue”. He said he has no connection with Alberto Fujimori or Fuerza Popular, although in the interview on Canal N he stated that he was a sympathizer of the former head of state from “90 to 95″ and that he had the opportunity to visit the former president in the Barbadillo prison in 2013.

POPULAR FORCE MILITANT

Despite his words, in the Register of Political Organizations (ROP) of the National Elections Jury he shows that he has political affiliation to the Popular Force party, led by Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the former dictator.

The Iqueño has been listed as a militant Popular Force since 2010 and registers active affiliation. And between 2005 and 2017 he was in the ranks of Peru Possible. Parco did not appear as a representative or member of any committee in any of the parties. The newspaper La República reported that on his social networks he only has as a description that he is a “lawyer living in Ica”.

Parco is a lawyer from the Universidad Nacional San Luis Gonzaga de Ica in 1999 and that same year he was enrolled as a member of the Ica Bar Association, with active enrollment to date.

It was precisely there that Parco presented for the first time in April 2020 the habeas corpus that would free Alberto Fujimori. The High Court of Justice denied his request, as did the Joint Emergency Chamber, which upheld the decision. After a complaint by the same lawyer, the Iquénian justice sent the appeal to the Constitutional Court to make the decision.

It wasn't the first time. In 2013, Parco had tried to get the TC to accept the former president's request for release, but the magistrates rejected this habeas corpus stating that “one cannot claim that the convicted person will be released — that is, release — as if the judicial sentence had been served or that sentence had not been effective.”

HE MET ALBERTO FUJIMORI

Speaking to Canal N, Gregorio Parco said that he spoke with former President Alberto Fujimori at the Barbadillo prison because “Mr. Guillermo Zapata de Lunahuana, Cañete” sent him to draft a lawsuit, which was declared inadmissible.

The Iqueño lawyer said that the imprisoned engineer made friends in wineries and farms in Lunahuana when he was head of state, and one of them was that of Guillermo Zapata Casas, owner of a winery in the area, although the habeas corpus he presented was on his own initiative.

“I raise the lawsuit in my personal capacity. I have seen that the pardon that is born as a law by the signature of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a criminal judge declares it null and void and that is a flagrant violation of due process and constitutional law,” he said.

“A supreme criminal judge was incompetent, had no capacity, to annul a law. And (with the ruling of Thursday, 17) the same Constitutional Court has achieved international constitutional jurisprudence, because a pardon is a presidential power,” he said.

The lawyer argued that “when someone wants to annul an ill-given law, it can be done by a constitutional judge with a process of unconstitutionality or with another law that revokes that supreme resolution.”

Parco said that the only Fujimorist he knows is the congressman of Fuerza Popular, Raúl Huamán Coronado, who represents Ica and is a well-known doctor in the region.

In conclusion, counsel said that the habeas corpus he submitted “is not political, it has been done on an academic basis, in a personal capacity and we have achieved national jurisprudence”.

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