Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) died on Wednesday at the age of 86, following a deterioration in his health in recent days associated with the cancer he suffered from.
“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just departed to meet the Lord. We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul. Thank you for so much, Dad!” reads the message posted on social media by his daughter Keiko.
The former president, who was in prison after being convicted of crimes against humanity and was later released in December 2023, died surrounded by his family.
Shortly before, sources close to the family said that his health had worsened and that “the worst” was expected. The man had cancer in his tongue.
Until his death, the former president was surrounded by controversy. He always denied the crimes he was accused of, although in most cases they were proven.
Controversial figure
Born in Lima in 1938 to a middle-class family of Japanese immigrants, Fujimori became one of the most important and powerful political figures in the country’s history.
And one of the most polarizing, since even today there is a sector of the population that defends him and supports his decade of management, despite the multiple cases of corruption and human rights violations that took place during that time.
The argument often given in his favour is that he “established order” and ended the political violence that plagued Peru in the 1980s, with the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrillas as protagonists. But, in exchange, Fujimori led a regime that extended itself thanks to a self-coup d’état and in which the authorities imposed their own tactics of terror.
None of this could have been anticipated by the young man who graduated as an agricultural engineer in the 1950s and later became a professor at the National Agrarian University, then rector and, in 1987, president of the National Assembly of Rectors. It seemed that academic life would be his destiny.
But there were only three years left until the elections that, against all predictions, would make him president.
From elections to self-coup
In 1990, Fujimori ran for the presidency of Peru for the first time. He was a marginal, unknown candidate. The contest was between the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who was the overwhelming favourite, and Luis Alva, the standard-bearer of the ruling party who was at a disadvantage, given the discredit of the then president Alan García.
But the university rector emerged as the surprise candidate. In the first round, Vargas Llosa obtained 32.5% of the votes and Fujimori, 29%. For the first time in the history of Peru, a runoff election had to be held, which took place on June 10.
Fujimori won by a landslide with 62%. He had no experience in government, nor in politics, nor a programme, nor a team. He had won with the promise of fighting neoliberalism, although he immediately became one of its most faithful representatives. He offered to fight poverty and corruption and end privileges, but he did the opposite.
To the lies of his campaign he added authoritarianism. On April 5, 1992, barely two years after having put on the presidential sash, Fujimori led a self-coup by dissolving, with the use of the Armed Forces, the Congress and intervening in the Judiciary. He ceased to be a president and began to act as a dictator with full powers.
Although a new Constitution was issued in 1993, Peruvian democracy was mortally wounded.
Moreover, from the beginning of his term, Fujimori had the help of Vladimiro Montesinos, his head of the National Intelligence Service, one of the darkest political figures in Latin America and who operated the network of corruption and persecution of all kinds of opponents. Today he is serving a 25-year prison sentence, from which he has never stopped offering bribes.
In 1992, the Government had two milestones that triggered a popularity in favor of Fujimori that survives to this day: it captured Víctor Polay Campos and Abimael Guzmán, leaders of the MRTA and Shining Path.
Thanks in part to these arrests, the president was re-elected in 1995 with 64% of the votes, more than he had received just five years earlier.
Perpetual power
At the height of his power, Fujimori pushed through an amnesty law that benefited all state representatives involved in human rights violations.
He still enjoyed majority support from the population, which was strengthened in December 1996 by the crisis unleashed by the taking of more than 800 hostages that the MRTA kidnapped in the Japanese Embassy in Lima and who, thanks to the intervention of the Vatican, were released in the following weeks.
Four months later, with the international spotlight on Peru, a military operation broadcast live on television rescued the dozens of hostages still in the diplomatic headquarters. It was the latest failure of the guerrillas.
The economic crisis and frequent cases of corruption were already affecting the government. In the midst of the collapse, Fujimori began to manoeuvre to prolong his stay in the presidential chair. Using the pretext that the new Constitution had been approved in 1993, he claimed that the 1995 election had been his “first” election. The 1990 election did not count, so he would run again in 2000.
And so he did. Despite massive protests, he competed and declared himself the winner against economist Alejandro Toledo. The elections were suspected of fraud. So much so that even the Organization of American States (OAS) and several European countries rejected the results and denounced the arbitrary actions of Fujimori, who ignored all complaints and returned to the Presidency.
It was then that the ‘vladivideos’ broke out, as the leak of videos was called, which showed that Vladimiro Montesinos recorded politicians, businessmen and all kinds of people when he gave them bribes so that he could later blackmail them. Kleptocracy at its best. The scandal cost the all-powerful advisor his job, and he ended up fleeing the country.
End of impunity
Fujimori went on an international tour of Asia in late 2000, which was supposed to end in Panama to participate in the 10th Ibero-American Summit. But he never arrived.
Knowing that the noose around him was closing in, the agricultural engineer took advantage of the fact that he had Japanese nationality and fled to Tokyo. From there, he resigned by fax from the Presidency that he had held for the past 10 years. The manner was so anomalous that Congress rejected the resignation and dismissed him. From then on, the government headed by Alejandro Toledo requested Fujimori’s extradition, but Japan always refused.
In November 2005, evading international arrest warrants, Fujimori arrived on a private flight to Chile, where he was detained, although the Chilean justice system would take almost two years to extradite him.
On September 22, 2007, Fujimori was finally taken to Peru to begin paying for his crimes.
For the Barrio Altos and La Cantuta massacres, crimes against humanity that occurred in 1991 and 1992 and left 25 dead, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In other cases he was also found guilty of usurpation of functions, serious injuries, abuse of authority, aggravated kidnapping, wilful embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, ideological falsehood to the detriment of the State, bribery, wiretapping and tapping, and the illegal purchase of media outlets, among others. The list of crimes seemed endless.
It seemed that he would not be able to escape punishment, but at Christmas 2018, President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski granted him a “humanitarian pardon” requested by his defense lawyers on the pretext of his advanced age and health. Amid condemnation from one part of Peruvian society and celebrations from another, and with criticism from international human rights organizations, Fujimori went home. It did not last long. Almost a year later, the Supreme Court of Justice determined that he should return to prison.
Fujimori spent almost four months in a clinic until he was taken back to jail. The controversy has continued since then over the privileged prison conditions of the former president, who was the only prisoner in an 800-meter space that included a bedroom, a living room, a workshop where he could paint, a library, an infirmary and access to a garden where he grew flowers, among other amenities that made it a unique detention of its kind in a country that suffers from prison overcrowding.
Maneuvers and more trials
During the 2021 presidential campaign, his daughter, Keiko Fujimori, acknowledged that, if she won, one of her first measures would be to pardon her father. After a long post-election conflict, she had no choice but to admit her defeat to Pedro Castillo, so the debate over the former president’s arrest cooled on the public agenda.
On March 17, 2022, however, the Constitutional Court surprised everyone by declaring well-founded a habeas corpus petition filed by Gregorio Parco Alarcón, a lawyer who was not even Fujimori’s defender and who asked that the annulment of the pardon be reversed. The former president could be released.
Several polls showed that the country was divided in two, with between 43% and 52% in favour of the former president being released. The margins of error in each poll implied a technical tie between the two positions, which were also reflected on social media.
Shortly before, the trial had begun in the case of thousands of women who were subjected to forced sterilizations between 1996 and 2000.
Fujimori was accused of having implemented a family planning policy that violated human rights and that sought only to sterilize low-income women so that his government could demonstrate a reduction in poverty.
The Constitutional Court’s decision to release Fujimori was halted by a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) which warned that before implementing the measure, the Peruvian State must report on the work it had done to investigate, prosecute and punish the crimes for which Fujimori was convicted.
In August 2022, his lawyers unsuccessfully filed a new appeal to insist on his release.
In early February 2023, the Peruvian courts again rejected an appeal filed by the former president’s defense, which sought to overturn the 25-year prison sentence; therefore, it was determined that he would continue serving his sentence in prison.
However, in December 2023, he was released by order of the Constitutional Court, in consideration of his advanced age and poor health.
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