Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) died this Wednesday at his home in Lima at the age of 86 from cancer. Last December, Fujimori was released from prison where he was serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity, benefiting from a pardon.
Fujimori was born in 1938 and ruled Peru in an authoritarian government between 1990 and 2000. His first victory was against writer Mario Vargas Llosa and he was re-elected two more times amid allegations of fraud.
On April 5, 1992, Fujimori carried out a coup d’état with the support of the armed forces that led him to assume all the powers of the State, after closing Congress and intervening with the judiciary and the Court of Constitutional Guarantees. Under pressure from countries and international organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the leader convened a Constituent Congress that promulgated a new Political Constitution in 1993, which is still in force.
During his term, serious human rights violations were committed and the largest corruption network in Peruvian history was created, led by his “shadow” advisor Vladimiro Montesinos, also imprisoned.
With the release in September 2000 of a video in which Montesinos was seen giving money to an opposition MP, he was forced to announce that he would call new elections, in which he assured that he would not run. Two months later, he fled the country and resigned from the presidency through a fax sent from Japan, where he remained until 2005, when he went to Chile, which extradited him to Peru in 2007.
The former leader had been serving his sentence since 2009 in a police prison in Lima adapted exclusively for him and which, according to his opponents, was a “golden prison”, incomparable with the living conditions of the rest of the country’s prison population and where he continually received his family and supporters.
In recent years, he has undergone six surgeries for a precancerous tongue condition known as leukoplakia, and has also struggled with stomach, vascular, blood pressure and lung problems. In 2017, then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski pardoned him on the grounds that a medical commission had determined that he suffered from a “progressive, degenerative and incurable disease” and that the conditions of detention posed a serious risk to his life.
Subsequent investigations showed that the pardon was granted following an apparent political deal with the former president’s younger son, then-lawmaker Kenji Fujimori, to prevent impeachment over corruption charges against Kuczynski, who eventually resigned from office in March 2018.
The presidential pardon was later overturned by a judge and Fujimori had to return to prison, after Kuczynski left office and Kenji was ousted by Congress amid a difficult political confrontation with his sister Keiko. In October 2021, he underwent a cardiac catheterization at an exclusive clinic in Lima, to relieve an obstruction in an artery, and in November he was hospitalized again due to complications related to pulmonary fibrosis. To these illnesses he added a new malignant tumor detected last May.
His death also interrupted other trials opened against him and for which thousands of victims are still waiting for compensation. Among them, forced sterilizations, the massacre of six peasants, the sale of weapons to the demobilized FARC and a corruption case.
Forced sterilizations
Under the Fujimori regime, a birth control plan was designed and presented that proposed to reduce poverty rates and birth rates among the rural population and the Peruvian jungle, in order to improve the economic conditions of the country.
However, this plan gave priority to so-called voluntary surgical contraception (VSC), mainly in women, without respecting the protocols of prior information, willingness and adequate conditions, and by imposing “quotas” for doctors in charge of operations.
This case has been opened and archived several times in Peru since the events were reported and, in addition to Fujimori, among those responsible, were included the Ministers of Health of the time for allegedly giving instructions for the execution of this program, with incentives for the medical personnel who participated.
Last August, the Peruvian justice system confirmed the cancellation of the criminal charge against the former president, which nullified all the procedures and procedural acts carried out between 2021 and 2023. This decision, as reported by local media at the time, confirmed the return of the case until the stage of the presentation of the criminal complaint by the public prosecutor’s office, that is, until March 2019.
The Pativilca case
His former presidential adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos, the “strong man” of his government, sentenced last January to 19 years and 8 months in prison for the massacres of Pativilca and La Cantuta, committed in 1992 by the secret military group, is eternally associated with Fujimori. Coline.
Judge Miluska Cano, who presides over the Fourth National Superior Criminal Chamber, then clarified that this sentence is considered “expurgated” (already served) because the former councilor has been in prison since January 2001 and in this case she accepted the “mediating paternity” (in the area of the fact) of the commission of the crimes of qualified homicide, murder and forced disappearance.
The prosecutor’s office has requested that all those involved in the trial, including Fujimori, Montesinos and 21 others, be sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison.
The other defendants did not accept the legal concept of “early termination”, which is why they had to continue to be prosecuted.
Arms sales to FARC
Fujimori, who resigned in 2000 by fax from Japan, the country of origin of his parents and whose nationality he claimed, could not be transferred to Peru, since the Asian country does not extradite its compatriots. That is why the former president was arrested during an unexpected visit to Chile.
From that point on, any new case had to have the approval of the Chilean courts. The Peruvian attorney general’s office announced last January that the southern country’s Supreme Court had approved a request to expand the crimes for which Fujimori was extradited in 2007.
Although he did not specify what crimes were involved, local media reported that they included the illegal sale of weapons to the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas in 1999.
In this case, he is accused of alleged crimes against public safety (illegal delivery of firearms) and against public tranquility (illegal association with a view to committing an offence).
Chavimochic
As the newspaper El Comercio recalls, an accusation was also brought against Fujimori in the “Chavimochic case.” In this process, the former president was accused of having authorized the use of $800,000 of public funds for one of his friends, Augusto Miyagusuku, to buy agricultural land in the Chavimochic irrigation project, in the northern department of La Libertad.
According to the newspaper, which cites the prosecutor’s accusation, the purchase of the land “was a direct product of the criminal activities in which the accused Miyagusuku and Alberto Fujimori participated, the former acting as a front man for the latter.”
In addition, and with less media coverage so far, Fujimori has been claimed for other cases such as the alleged extrajudicial executions in Castro Castro’s prison (1992) and after the rescue at the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima (1997) or the kidnapping and homicide of six members of the Ventocilla family, committed in 1992 by the Colina group.
