EGN NEWS DESK
LIMA, Peru — Alberto Fujimori, whose decade-long presidency started with triumphs righting Peru’s financial system and defeating a brutal insurgency solely to finish in a shame of autocratic extra that later despatched him to jail, has died. He was 86.
His demise Wednesday within the capital, Lima, was introduced by his daughter Keiko Fujimori in a publish on X.
He had been pardoned in December from his convictions for corruption and duty for the homicide of 25 folks. His daughter mentioned in July that he was planning to run for Peru’s presidency for the fourth time in 2026.
Fujimori, who ruled with an more and more authoritarian hand in 1990-2000, was pardoned in December from his convictions for corruption and duty for the homicide of 25 folks. His daughter mentioned in July that he was planning to run for Peru’s presidency for the fourth time in 2026.
The former college president and arithmetic professor was the consummate political outsider when he emerged from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election over author Mario Vargas Llosa. Over a tumultuous political profession, he repeatedly made dangerous, go-for-broke selections that alternately earned him adoration and reproach.
He took over a rustic ravaged by runaway inflation and guerrilla violence, mending the financial system with daring actions together with mass privatizations of state industries. Defeating fanatical Shining Path rebels took slightly longer but in addition received him broad-based assist.
His presidency, nonetheless, collapsed simply as dramatically.
After briefly shutting down Congress and elbowing himself right into a controversial third time period, he fled the nation in shame in 2000 when leaked videotapes confirmed his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers. The president went to Japan, the land of his dad and mom, and famously faxed in his resignation.
He shocked supporters and foes alike 5 years later when he landed in neighboring Chile, the place he was arrested after which extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru’s presidency in 2006, however as an alternative wound up in court docket dealing with expenses of abuse of energy.
The high-stakes political gambler would lose miserably. He grew to become the primary former president on this planet to be tried and convicted in his personal nation for human rights violations. He was not discovered to have personally ordered the 25 death-squad killings for which he was convicted, however he was deemed accountable as a result of the crimes had been dedicated in his authorities’s title.
His 25-year sentence didn’t cease Fujimori from looking for political revindication, which he deliberate from a jail inbuilt a police academy on the outskirts of Lima, the capital.
His congresswoman daughter Keiko tried in 2011 to revive the household dynasty by working for the presidency however was narrowly defeated in a runoff. She ran once more in 2016 and 2021, when she misplaced by simply 44,000 votes after a marketing campaign wherein she promised to free her father.
“After an extended battle with most cancers, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has simply departed to satisfy the Lord,” she mentioned on X Wednesday. “We ask those that liked him to accompany us with a prayer for the everlasting remainder of his soul.”
Fujimori’s presidency was, the truth is, a brash show of outright authoritarianism, recognized domestically as “caudillismo,” in a area shakily stepping away from dictatorships towards democracy.
He is survived by his 4 kids. The oldest, Keiko, grew to become first woman in 1996 when his father divorced his mom, Susana Higuchi, in a bitter battle wherein she accused Fujimori of getting her tortured. The youngest youngster, Kenji, was elected a congressman.
Fujimori was born July 28, 1938, Peruvian Independence Day, and his immigrant dad and mom picked cotton till they might open a tailor’s store in downtown Lima.
He earned a level in agricultural engineering in 1956, after which studied in France and the United States, the place he obtained a graduate diploma in arithmetic from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.
In 1984 he grew to become rector of the Agricultural University in Lima, and 6 years later, he ran for president with out ever having held political workplace, billing himself as a clear various to Peru’s corrupt, discredited political class.
He soared from 6% within the polls a month earlier than the 1990 election to complete second out of 9 within the balloting. He went on to beat Vargas Llosa in a runoff.
The victory, he later mentioned, got here from the identical frustration that fueled the Shining Path.
“My authorities is the product of rejection, of being fed up with Peru due to the frivolity, corruption and nonfunctioning of the normal political class and the paperwork,” he mentioned.
Once in workplace, Fujimori’s robust speak and hands-on fashion at first received him solely plaudits, as automotive bombings nonetheless ripped via the capital and annual inflation approached 8,000 %.
He utilized the identical financial shock remedy that Vargas Llosa had advocated however he had argued in opposition to within the marketing campaign.
Privatizing state-owned industries, Fujimori slashed public spending and attracted document overseas funding.
Known affectionately as “El chino,” resulting from his Asian ancestry, Fujimori typically donned peasant garb to go to jungle Indigenous communities and highland farmers, whereas delivering electrical energy and consuming water to dirt-poor villages. That distinguished him from the patrician, white politicians who sometimes lacked his commoner’s contact.
Fujimori additionally gave Peru’s safety forces free rein to tackle the Shining Path.
In September 1992, police captured insurgent chief Abimael Guzmán. Deservedly or not, Fujimori took credit score.
Taking energy simply years after a lot of the area had shed dictatorships, the previous college professor in the end represented a step again. He developed a rising style for energy and resorted to more and more anti-democratic means to amass extra of it.
In April 1992, he shut down Congress and the courts, accusing them of shackling his efforts to defeat the Shining Path and spur financial reforms.
International strain pressured him to name elections for an meeting to exchange the Congress. The new legislative physique, dominated by his supporters, modified Peru’s structure to permit the president to serve two consecutive five-year phrases. Fujimori was swept again into workplace in 1995, after a short border conflict with Ecuador, in an election landslide.
Human rights advocates at dwelling and overseas blasted him for pushing via a normal amnesty legislation forgiving human rights abuses dedicated by safety forces throughout Peru’s “anti-subversive” marketing campaign between 1980 and 1995.
The battle would declare almost 70,000 lives, a reality fee discovered, with the army accountable for greater than a 3rd of the deaths. Journalists and businessmen had been kidnapped, college students disappeared and at the very least 2,000 highland peasant girls had been forcibly sterilized.
In 1996, Fujimori’s majority bloc in Congress put him on the trail for a 3rd time period when it permitted a legislation that decided his first 5 years as president didn’t rely as a result of the brand new structure was not but in place when he was elected.
A 12 months later, Fujimori’s Congress fired three Constitutional Tribunal judges who tried to overturn the laws, and his foes accused him of imposing a democratically elected dictatorship.
By then, nearly every day revelations had been displaying the monumental scale of corruption round Fujimori. About 1,500 folks related to his authorities had been prosecuted on corruption and different expenses, together with eight former Cabinet ministers, three former army commanders, an lawyer normal and a former chief of the Supreme Court.
The accusations in opposition to Fujimori led to years of authorized wrangling. In December, Peru’s Constitutional Court dominated in favor of a humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori on Christmas Eve in 2017 by then-President Pablo Kuczynski. Wearing a face masks and getting supplemental oxygen, Fujimori walked out of the jail door and bought in a sport utility automobile pushed by his daughter-in-law.
The final time he was seen in public was on Sept. 4, leaving a personal hospital in a wheelchair. He instructed the press that he had undergone a CT scan and when requested if his presidential candidacy was nonetheless going forward, he smiled and mentioned “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
—Frank Bajak, the principal author of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2024. Associated Press author Regina Garcia Cano in Mexico City contributed.
