Peru frees former president Ollanta Humala after conviction overturned

Peru freed former president Ollanta Humala on Friday evening after the Constitutional Court overturned the 15-year money-laundering conviction that had sent him to Barbadillo prison in Lima. The ruling removed one of the country’s most watched anti-corruption judgments and instantly changed the legal stakes for a former head of state who once campaigned as a reformer. Humala, 64, led Peru from 2011 to 2016.

The court said key constitutional principles had been breached during the proceedings and accepted the argument that the alleged conduct could not be prosecuted as money laundering under the laws in force at the time. That reasoning goes to the center of the case: if the prosecution relied on a legal theory that did not fit the statute in effect when the acts occurred, the conviction was vulnerable on rule-of-law grounds, not just on political ones.

Humala walked free after an order from the First National Preparatory Investigation Court, which moved to comply with the Constitutional Court ruling. His release followed the collapse of a sentence handed down on April 15, 2025, when a Peruvian court imposed 15 years in prison for receiving illicit campaign funds from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht. In that same case, his wife, former first lady Nadine Heredia, also received a 15-year sentence and later obtained diplomatic asylum in Brazil.

Outside prison, Humala framed the case as persecution, saying he had been “taken hostage by the state and by the hitmen of the justice system.” He also vowed to pursue those responsible for putting him behind bars. His words will sharpen the political fight over whether Peru’s courts corrected a constitutional error or weakened deterrence in a country where corruption cases have repeatedly shaken public trust and toppled presidents.

Humala was the first Peruvian ex-leader to face trial in the Odebrecht corruption scandal, which has also tainted Alejandro Toledo, Martín Vizcarra and Pedro Castillo. That lineage makes the ruling more than a personal victory for Humala. It is now a test of how far Peru’s prosecutors can push complex campaign-finance cases against former presidents, and whether similar convictions elsewhere in the region can survive appellate review when the legal foundation is challenged.