Former Peru president who was convicted for human rights abuses dies aged 86
12 September 2024, 06:34
Alberto Fujimori was in office from 1990 to 2000, but was jailed after returning from exile in Japan.
Former Peru president Alberto Fujimori has died in the capital Lima aged 86, his daughter has confirmed.
Mr Fujimori’s decade-long presidency began with triumphs righting Peru’s economy and defeating a brutal insurgency only to end in a disgrace of autocratic excess that later sent him to prison.
Governing with an increasingly authoritarian hand from 1990 to 2000, he was pardoned in December from his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter Keiko Fujimori said in July he was planning to run for Peru’s presidency for the fourth time in 2026.
The former university president and mathematics professor was the consummate political outsider when he emerged from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election over writer Mario Vargas Llosa.
Over a tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made risky, go-for-broke decisions that alternately earned him adoration and reproach.
He took over a country ravaged by runaway inflation and guerrilla violence, mending the economy with bold actions including mass privatisations of state industries. Defeating fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer but also won him broad-based support.
His presidency collapsed just as dramatically.
After briefly shutting down Congress and elbowing himself into a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked videotapes showed his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers.
The president went to Japan, the land of his parents, and famously faxed in his resignation.
He stunned supporters and foes alike five years later when he landed in neighbouring Chile, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru’s presidency in 2006, but instead wound up in court facing charges of abuse of power.
He became the first former president in the world to be tried and convicted in his own country for human rights violations. He was not found to have personally ordered the 25 death-squad killings for which he was convicted, but he was deemed responsible because the crimes were committed in his government’s name.
His 25-year sentence did not stop Mr Fujimori from seeking political revindication, which he planned from a prison built in a police academy on the outskirts of Lima.
His congresswoman daughter tried in 2011 to restore the family dynasty by running for the presidency, but was narrowly defeated in a runoff. She ran again in 2016 and 2021, when she lost by just 44,000 votes after a campaign in which she promised to free her father.
“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just departed to meet the Lord,” she said in a statement on X on Wednesday. “We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul.”
He is survived by his four children. The oldest, Keiko, became first lady in 1996 when his father divorced his mother, Susana Higuchi, in a bitter battle in which she accused Fujimori of having her tortured. The youngest child, Kenji, was elected a congressman.
Fujimori was born on July 28 1938, Peruvian Independence Day, and his immigrant parents picked cotton until they could open a tailor’s shop in downtown Lima.
In December, Peru’s Constitutional Court ruled in favour of a humanitarian pardon granted to Mr Fujimori on Christmas Eve in 2017 by then-president Pablo Kuczynski.
Wearing a face mask and getting supplemental oxygen, he walked out of the prison door and got in a sport utility vehicle driven by his daughter-in-law.
The last time he was seen in public was on September 4, leaving 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 going ahead, he smiled and said “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
