BRASILIA/LIMA (Reuters) – Nadine Heredia, the wife of former Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, arrived in Brazil on Wednesday as the ex-leader spent the night in jail following a 15-year sentence for money laundering.
Heredia landed in Brazil’s capital after requesting asylum, the Brazilian foreign ministry said. She was slapped with a 15-year sentence of her own on Tuesday in the same case as her husband.
The two were convicted of receiving funds from Brazilian builder Odebrecht, now known as Novonor, in a sweeping graft case in which the construction firm doled out bribes to politicians across Latin America.
Humala spent his first night imprisoned in the same jail where two other one-time heads of state, Alejandro Toledo and Pedro Castillo, are also being held. The unit was built particularly to hold former leaders.
Heredia and one of her three children took off for Brasilia at around 4 a.m. local time in a plane sent by the government of leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, lawyer Julio Espinoza told local radio RPP.
She will head to Sao Paulo later in the day, where she will stay, her lawyer in Brazil, Marco Aurelio de Carvalho, told Reuters.
Peru’s government granted Heredia and her son safe passage to travel to Brazil after conversations between the two governments, Peru’s foreign ministry said.
Humala, a retired military officer who led the Andean nation from 2011 to 2016, is Peru’s second former president to be jailed and the fourth to be implicated for his role in the case involving Odebrecht.
Former Odebrecht executives have said in Peruvian court that the firm had financed almost all presidential candidates in the country for a nearly 30-year period.
(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia and Marco Aquino in Lima; Writing by Isabel Teles and Rafael Escalera Montoto; Editing by Kylie Madry)
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