Alberto Fujimori, the former Peruvian president who ruled for 10 years with an iron fist, accusations of corruption and serious human rights abuses that led to his imprisonment and imprisonment, died Wednesday of cancer in Lima, his daughter, politician Keiko Fujimori, said. He was 86.
“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just departed to meet the Lord. We ask those who appreciated him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul,” he posted in a message on X, before Twitter, which ended with a “thank you for so much, dad” and the names of his four children as a signature.
https://x.com/KeikoFujimori/status/1834052000754860452
The news of the deterioration of the 86-year-old former president’s health had been announced hours earlier by Fujimorist legislator Alejandro Aguinaga, who told the press after leaving the former president’s house that Fujimori was “fighting” for his life.
The last time he was seen publicly was on September 4, leaving a private hospital in a wheelchair. He had repeatedly pleaded for permission to leave prison due to his deteriorating health.
The first son of Japanese parents to become head of state of another country in the world by popular vote, he was elected president of Peru three times from 1990 to 2000.
Born in Lima in 1938, he spent his last months of life in freedom after benefiting from a humanitarian pardon that allowed his release in December 2023 after spending 15 years in prison on murder charges.
During his terms in office — the last of which lasted less than a year — he applied harsh economic adjustment measures, but maintained high levels of popularity. However, in 2000, after strong international criticism for human rights abuses, he fled to Japan and resigned by fax.
FUJIMORI WAS SENTENCED TO 25 YEARS IN PRISON IN 2009
The former president was later sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2009 on murder charges that accused him of being responsible for the creation and financing of a clandestine military squad during his administration that killed at least 25 people—including university students and residents of a neighborhood in the capital, including a child—who were considered former Shining Path guerrillas.
His rapid rise to power occurred amid the economic ruin that Peru was in in July 1990, at the end of the five-year government of his predecessor Alan Garcia.
In August of that year, monthly inflation reached 397% and the country endured a decade of bloody internal armed conflict between the security forces and the terrorist groups Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.
“He confronted terrorism, controlled hyperinflation and to this day his economic policy has been followed for better or worse,” Yusuke Murakami, a political science professor at Kyoto University and an expert on Fujimori, told The Associated Press.
Disappointed with political parties that failed to end the chaos, Peruvians elected as president in 1990 the agricultural engineer Fujimori, who was then an unknown mathematics professor at the National Agrarian University of La Molina. He defeated the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, in the second round.
They called him “el Chino” because of his slanted eyes and dark complexion, which brought him closer to the majority population of Peru: mestizos and indigenous people.
His parents, born in the Japanese province of Kumamoto, worked as seamstresses, tire repairmen, rose distributors and owners of a poultry farm to support the family’s three sons and two daughters.
During his campaign, he preached with his high-pitched voice a government of “the most capable and of impeccable conduct.” On one occasion, the newspapers published a photograph of him dressed as a karate fighter with a black belt and breaking a brick with his thin hands.
Days later — in April 1990 — before the New York Times he confessed that he never learned karate and that the brick was already broken in advance.
FUJIMORI’S MANDATE
Twelve days after coming to power, at 52 years old, he applied the drastic measures that he had promised not to use during his campaign to combat the highest hyperinflation in the history of Latin America, with 397% monthly, according to calculations by Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, an expert on inflation in the world.
In a televised message, his Minister of Economy announced that the price of gasoline would rise 32 times along with the rest of basic food products.
The cost tripled from one day to the next. The queues for food shot up and the police arrested about 10,000 Peruvians that weekend for looting stores.
According to the analyst Murakami, who was an official at the Japanese embassy in Lima and was in charge of political analysis on Peru in the first half of his government, he considered that his quick decisions “served him in the short term to respond to emergencies, but not in the medium and long term.”
On April 5, 1992, Fujimori announced in a televised address the closure of Parliament, the reorganization of the judicial system, and the beginning of an “emergency government” whose objectives would include drafting a new Constitution to replace the 1979 Constitution, which prohibited immediate re-election.
“Dissolve, dissolve,” was the phrase Fujimori used to announce the so-called “self-coup” and remained in the memory of Peruvians for many years.
His popularity increased after a group of police investigators, who received more support from the United States embassy, captured on a Saturday night in September the leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, and key members of his leadership who from 1980 to 2000 caused more than 12,000 murders.
Years later, Fujimori took advantage of the rescue of the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima taken by rebels of the Tupac Amaru Movement. That day, army soldiers rescued 72 of 73 hostages alive and extrajudicially executed the rebels. An image of Fujimori in a bulletproof vest and military boots, victoriously walking through the liberated residence, traveled around the world.
According to various scholars, Fujimori inaugurated a new type of authoritarianism in the region: he governed with an authoritarian regime with a democratic facade and great popular support.
From the shadows, his chief spy Vladimiro Montesinos —a former lawyer for drug traffickers and an officer expelled from the army— directed an intelligence system that, using public money, favored Fujimori and cleared any kind of opposition by bribing legislators, judges, prosecutors and media owners.
His ambition for power led him to be reelected in 1995, when he won by an overwhelming majority. He did so again in 2000, despite accusations of fraud, but his third term did not last long. At the end of that year, a video was released showing how his advisor Montesinos bribed an opposition legislator. This unleashed a wave of protests that led to his downfall.
Fujimori left the country and took refuge in Japan, from where he resigned from the presidency by fax.
Nearly a decade after his government ended, Human Rights Watch described his administration as “a mafia regime” that held on to power through corruption and the manipulation of democratic institutions.
The independent press discovered that during his government, a clandestine military squad financed with public money murdered 15 neighbors during a party — among them an 8-year-old boy — as well as nine university students and a professor who were considered members of the Shining Path.
In 1994, he divorced his wife Susana Higuchi after she denounced her brothers-in-law for enriching themselves with clothes donated from Japan. Fujimori stripped her of the title of first lady and gave it to her daughter Keiko, 19 years old.
After the separation, his children stayed with him and Keiko dedicated herself to politics, running for president in 2011 and 2016. Now, she leads a center-right party that claims her father’s achievements and is a majority in the unicameral Parliament.
In mid-July, Keiko Fujimori announced on social media that her father would be a presidential candidate in 2026, despite the fact that earlier that month he had undergone surgery for a hip fracture and was undergoing immunotherapy and radiotherapy sessions to treat a cancerous tumor on his tongue that appeared in May 2024.
Transparency International calculated in 2004 that $600 million was embezzled during his government and placed him among the ten most corrupt presidents in the world.
In 2005, Fujimori traveled to Chile and a court in that country authorized his extradition to Peru two years later. Upon his return, the trial became historic: it lasted 15 months and polarized the country. Fujimori was the first democratically elected president to stand trial for human rights violations.
And although he defended himself by saying that it was political revenge, he was accused of being the indirect author of 25 murders and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
He was also convicted of corruption for making an illegal payment of $15 million to Montesinos for bribes in the last days of his government. In January 2015, he received an additional sentence for using state resources to finance newspapers that supported his second reelection, but the sentence was later withdrawn because the judge who reviewed it said he found no conclusive evidence.
Fujimori was due to be released in 2032 at the age of 95, but former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018) granted him a humanitarian pardon a few hours before Christmas 2017 due to his failing health.
Thousands protested because Fujimori, then 79, was considered the prisoner who received the most attention: he was the only inmate in an 800-square-meter prison, he could paint, receive visitors, grow flowers and listen to operas by Maria Callas, his personal doctor, Alejandro Aguinaga, told the AP.
The victims’ relatives asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to annul the pardon but this court left the case in the hands of the Peruvian Supreme Court.
He had to attend a new trial in which he was accused of being the indirect author of the massacre of six other peasants tortured, killed and burned during his government. The prosecutor asked for a new sentence of 25 years in prison for the massacre.
Finally, in December 2023, the Constitutional Court revived the 2017 pardon for suffering from hypertension, irregular heart rate and risk of tongue cancer and ordered his release.
He went to live with his daughter Keiko Fujimori, bought a cell phone, renewed his identity document and when he was asked if he still intended to be a presidential candidate in 2026, as his daughter had announced, he said smiling: “Let’s see, let’s see.”