Peru's Former President Humala Freed After Money-Laundering Conviction Is Overturned

Peru's former president Ollanta Humala walked free after a court overturned his conviction for money laundering. Humala, 64, and his wife had been sentenced last year to 15 years in prison in a case connected to the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, whose payments to politicians across Latin America produced one of the region's widest corruption investigations.

Humala was the first former Peruvian leader to face trial in the Odebrecht affair, which has also implicated three other former presidents: Alejandro Toledo, Martín Vizcarra, and Pedro Castillo. The reversal of a sentence handed down only last year shows how contested and unstable the legal outcomes remain, with convictions and acquittals following one another as courts and prosecutors change course.

For a country that has cycled through multiple presidents and repeated institutional crises, the case is another instance of the judiciary and the political class locked in a struggle whose resolutions rarely hold. That instability is the context in which investors assess Peru, a major copper producer whose mining output matters to global metal supply.