Alberto Fujimori, whose Decade-long presidency What began as a campaign that set Peru’s economy on the right track and defeated a brutal rebellion ended with the humiliation of authoritarian extremism that later landed him in prison, has died in his 86th year.
His death on Wednesday in the capital, Lima, was announced by his daughter Keiko Fujimori in a post on X.
In December, he was pardoned for convictions on corruption charges and the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he plans to run for Peru’s president for a fourth time in 2026.
Fujimori, who ruled increasingly autocratically in 1990-2000, was pardoned of his crimes in December. for corruption And he has claimed responsibility for killing 25 people. His daughter said in July that he plans to run for Peru’s presidency for a fourth time in 2026.
The former university president and mathematics professor was a consummate political outsider when he emerged from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election over writer Mario Vargas Llosa. In his tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made bold, risky decisions that earned him both praise and condemnation.
He took charge of a country devastated by runaway inflation and guerrilla violence, and fixed the economy with bold actions, including large-scale privatization of state-owned industries. It took him some time to defeat the radical Shining Path rebels, but that won him widespread support.
However, his presidency also ended in dramatic fashion.
After briefly shutting down Congress and pushing himself into a controversial third term, he fled the country in 2000 after leaked videotapes showed his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos bribing lawmakers. The president fled to Japan, the land of his parents, and famously faxed in his resignation.
He stunned both supporters and opponents when he arrived in neighboring Chile five years later, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru’s presidency in 2006 but instead had to go to court, facing charges of abuse of power.
The high-stakes political gambit lost miserably. He became the world’s first former president to be tried and convicted for human rights violations in his own country. He was not accused of personally ordering the 25 death squad killings for which he was convicted, but was deemed responsible because the crimes were committed in the name of his government.
The 25-year sentence did not deter Fujimori from attempting a political revenge he planned from a prison housed in a police academy on the outskirts of the capital, Lima.
His daughter Keiko, a congresswoman, tried to restore the family dynasty by running for president in 2011, but was defeated in the second round. She ran for re-election in 2016 and 2021, but lost by just 44,000 votes after a campaign in which she promised to release her father.
Fujimori told The Associated Press in 2000, seven months before his fall from power, that he viewed political rivals as chess pieces that could be defeated with calm.
“I am a special case in Latin America,” he said. “I have had a special training in an Oriental environment of discipline and perseverance.”
In reality, Fujimori’s presidency was a brazen display of blatant authoritarianism, known locally as “caudillismo,” in a region that was moving from dictatorship to democracy.
They have four children. The eldest daughter Keiko became First Lady in 1996 after her father divorced her mother, Susana Higuchi, during which time she accused Fujimori of abusing her. The youngest daughter, Kenji, was elected to Congress.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori waves at his home in Santiago after leaving an academy for training correctional officers in Santiago, Chile, May 18, 2006. (AP Photo/Claudio Santana, File)
Fujimori was born on July 28, 1938, Peru’s Independence Day, and his immigrant parents picked cotton until opening a tailor shop in downtown Lima.
He earned a degree in agricultural engineering in 1956 and then studied in France and the United States, where he received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.
In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultural University in Lima, and six years later, he ran for president without having held any political office, presenting himself as a clean alternative to Peru’s corrupt, discredited political class.
He capitalized on Peru’s image of honest, hard-working Asians and offered hope to the economically troubled nation, arguing that they would attract people. Japanese aid and Technology.
A month before the 1990 election, he rose to second place out of nine with 6 percent of the vote. He defeated Vargas Llosa in a runoff.
He later said that this victory came from the same desperation that had fueled Shining Path.
“My government is the result of a feeling of rejection and frustration with the pettiness, corruption and inefficiency of the traditional political class and bureaucracy in Peru,” he said.
Once in office, Fujimori’s tough-talking and hands-on style initially won him only praise, as car bombs were still exploding in the capital and annual inflation approached 8,000 percent.
He implemented the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated, but which he had argued against during the campaign.
By privatizing state-owned industries, Fujimori cut public expenditure and attracted record foreign investment.
Known as “El Chino” because of his Asian ancestry, Fujimori often dressed as a peasant to visit indigenous communities and mountain farmers in the jungle while bringing electricity and drinking water to poor villages. This set him apart from elite, white politicians who lacked the common people’s touch.
Fujimori also gave Peruvian security forces a free hand to attack Shining Path.
In September 1992, police captured rebel leader Abimael Guzmán. Whether he deserved it or not, Fujimori took credit for it.
Perhaps his most famous execution occurred in April 1997, when he sent US-trained commandos into the Japanese ambassador’s residence, where 14 leftist Tupac Amaru rebels had held 72 people hostage for months.
Only one hostage was killed. All the hostage-takers, however, were killed, reportedly on Montesinos’ orders.
Taking power only a few years after the end of dictatorships in much of the region, the former university professor ultimately represented a step backward. He developed an increasing hunger for power and resorted to anti-democratic means to gain more of it.
In April 1992 he closed down Congress and the courts, accusing them of obstructing his efforts to defeat the Shining Path and promote economic reforms.
International pressure forced him to hold elections for the Assembly, replacing Congress. The new legislative body, dominated by his supporters, changed Peru’s constitution to allow the president to serve two consecutive five-year terms. After a brief border war with Ecuador in 1995, Fujimori won a landslide election.
He was heavily criticized by human rights advocates at home and abroad for passing a general amnesty law that condoned human rights abuses committed by security forces during Peru’s “anti-subversive” campaign between 1980 and 1995.
The truth commission found that the conflict claimed nearly 70,000 lives, with the military responsible for more than a third of the deaths. Journalists and businessmen were abducted, students disappeared, and at least 2,000 hill peasant women were forcibly sterilized.
In 1996, Fujimori’s majority faction in Congress advanced him to a third term when it approved a law that would not count his first five-year term as president, since the new constitution had not come into effect when he was elected.
A year later, Fujimori’s Congress dismissed three Constitutional Tribunal judges who had attempted to overturn the law, and his opponents accused him of imposing a democratically elected dictatorship.
By then, almost daily revelations were showing the vast scale of the corruption surrounding Fujimori. Nearly 1,500 people connected to his government were put on trial on corruption and other charges, including eight former cabinet ministers, three former military commanders, an attorney general and a former head of the Supreme Court.
The charges against Fujimori sparked years of legal battles. In December, Peru’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori by then-President Pablo Kuczynski on Christmas Eve in 2017. Wearing a face mask and taking oxygen, Fujimori walked out the prison door and got into a sports utility vehicle driven by his daughter-in-law.
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He was last seen in public on September 4, when he left a private hospital in a wheelchair. He told the press that he had undergone a CT scan and when asked if his presidential candidacy was still on, he smiled and said “We’ll see, we’ll see.
