Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru, dies

Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori passed away on Wednesday, September 11, at the age of 86, in Lima, Peru. “After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just gone to meet the Lord. We ask those who loved him to join us in prayer for the eternal rest of his soul. Thank you for everything, Dad!”wrote his children Keiko, Hiro, Sachie and Kenji Fujimori on the social network X.

The former autocrat, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for ten years, had been released from prison nine months earlier, freed by a decision of the Constitutional Court in December 2023, while serving a twenty-year prison sentence for crimes of human rights violations and corruption, which occurred under his presidency between 1990 and 2000.

Alberto Fujimori is undoubtedly one of the most controversial figures in the history of Peru. Hated by some, idolized by others, the fate of Alberto Fujimori has not ceased to unleash passions in a country divided over the former president.

Born on July 28, 1938 in Lima, the son of Japanese immigrants was, however, completely unknown when he ran for president in 1990. Former rector of the Agrarian University of La Molina, he had no political experience and faced the multimillion-dollar campaign of the Republican Party. The writer Mario Vargas Llosa, supported by right-wing forces, seemed doomed to failure. The agricultural engineer, however, surprised by making it to the second round of the April 1990 elections. His campaign conducted in the poorest neighborhoods, as well as his outsider persona opposed to traditional politics, proved attractive.

Peru was then in the midst of an economic crisis. Inflation reached 7,500% while the armed conflict that began in 1980 between the police and the far-left guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement deepened without finding a solution. In this context, the candidacy of the now popular “Chino” (“Chinese” in reference to his Asian origins) caused a wave of hope among Peruvians who, against all odds, elected him as head of the country with the support of the left. parties.

“Fuji Shock”

However, two weeks after taking office, Alberto Fujimori caught his voters on the wrong foot by announcing the implementation of a shock economic policy to get the country out of the crisis. Unexpectedly, the measure is even more drastic than the rigor advocated by his opponents during the campaign and which he had harshly criticized. The “Fuji shock” is the first 180-degree turn that the new president has seen. Another contested decision: the forced closure of Congress on April 5, 1992, described as a “self-coup.” The measure is popular but goes against any democratic functioning. The opposition calls for dictatorship, without success. In the process, Fujimori called a constituent assembly to draft a new basic law, approved by referendum. A Constitution that grants the State a subsidiary role with respect to private activity.

Re-elected in 1995, Fujimori enjoyed great support, especially in the poorest areas, which were grateful to him: during his term in office, many schools and roads were built in disadvantaged areas. Intoxicated by the power he embodies, Fujimori sought a third election in 2000 despite the constitutional ban, and won under accusations of fraud. Then everything collapsed around the Peruvian president. His right-hand man and great ally since the early 1990s, Vladimir Montesinos, was involved in numerous corruption scandals, for which he was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison a few years later.

Alberto Fujimori, who was implicated in the scandal, took advantage of a trip to Brunei in September 2000 to flee to Japan, where he is a national. As protests against him broke out in Peru, he resigned from the presidency on November 19, 2000, sending a fax from Tokyo, where he had settled.

Total impunity in Japan

Thus begins a new life for the former president, who enjoys total impunity in Japan. Citing his Japanese nationality, Japan refuses to extradite him despite accusations of corruption, embezzlement and crimes against humanity made in Peru. Why did he decide to leave his Japanese exile in 2005 to go to Santiago de Chile? Nobody really knows.

Was the former president thinking of running for president in Peru’s 2006 presidential elections, scheduled a few months later? One thing is certain: his arrival in Santiago on November 6, 2005 took everyone by surprise and caused a real political earthquake in the region. A long legal battle for the former president followed.

Alberto Fujimori was arrested by Chilean authorities upon his arrival in Santiago. Peru submitted an extradition request, which Chile eventually accepted in 2007. Immediately transferred to Lima in a specially designed detention centre, the former president then faced a mega-trial that brought together all the accusations against him. On 7 April 2009, Alberto Fujimori, who pleaded not guilty, was finally sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for corruption and human rights violations.

The court held Fujimori responsible for the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres, carried out in 1991 and 1992 by the “Colina Group”, a secret commando made up of soldiers who carried out numerous murders in the fight against terrorism. The murders left 25 men, women and children dead. At the end of a trial considered exemplary, the court determined that the former head of state not only knew of the existence of the Colina Group but also directed its operations.

The verdict is welcomed by NGOs: it is the first time that a head of state has been convicted by his country’s courts for violating human rights. Fujimori’s opponents also welcome the conviction of a dictator whom they accuse of having destroyed Peru’s system of representation and of having widespread corruption at the highest levels of the state sphere.

However, the verdict is far from unanimous. In Peru, part of the population attributes the end of terrorism in the 1990s to Alberto Fujimori. It was under his government that the leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, was arrested in 1992, an arrest that marked the beginning of the end of the world. A far-left guerrilla war.

His daughter, his political heir

Many Peruvians also believe that by leading a liberal economic policy based on a wave of massive privatisations, Alberto Fujimori not only put back on its feet a country that was in ruins at the end of the 1980s, but is also at the origin of the economic crisis and growth that the country experienced until the end of the 2010s, arguments that his daughter and political heir Keiko took up during her campaign for the presidential elections of 2011 and 2016. Two elections that she narrowly lost, but which then showed the strength of Fujimorism, a movement based mainly on the cult of the former president.

Weakened by corruption cases and accused of having been corrupted by a criminal organisation, the movement nevertheless suffered the preventive detention, in October 2018, of Keiko Fujimori, in the Odebrecht case, named after this Brazilian company, BTP, accused of paying bribes throughout Latin America. America. In January 2020, Fuerza Popular, her party, retained only 15 of the 73 seats it had held since 2016.

A week before Keiko Fujimori was arrested in October 2018, her father Alberto was also sent back to prison. Because Alberto Fujimori spent the last years of his life trying to get out of prison and denounce the conditions of his imprisonment. Insisting on the fragile state of health of the former head of state, his children submitted a request for humanitarian pardon in October 2012, which was rejected eight months later by President Ollanta Humala (2011-2016). A rejection particularly motivated by Alberto Fujimori’s lack of remorse towards the victims of the Colina Group.

In December 2017, it was through Humala’s successor, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (“PPK”), that the former autocrat obtained a pardon, on medical grounds, after twelve years in prison. However, PPK pledged, during his 2016 presidential campaign, not to release Fujimori. “Those of us who consider ourselves democrats cannot allow Alberto Fujimori to die in prison. Justice is not revenge.”the president justified, referring to his arterial and cardiac problems.

This controversial decision provoked widespread criticism abroad and divided Peruvian opinion, half of which criticized the pardon, expressing it on several occasions through demonstrations and accusing Kuczynski of having negotiated it in exchange for his permanence in power with the support of the political movement founded by Fujimori, while the other half believed that the former autocrat had already paid his debt and that it was time to turn the page on the “years of lead”.

“Supreme and main responsible” for forced sterilizations

In October 2018, the Supreme Court of Justice annulled this pardon, considering that a request from victims of the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres was admissible and refuting the terminal nature of Alberto Fujimori’s illness. “The end of my life is near,” the then 80-year-old tweeted when announcing his return to prison on January 23, 2019, after 100 days in the Centenario clinic in Lima, following an illness shortly after the announcement of the cancellation of his pardon.

In April 2022, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) had prevented a new attempt at early release of the former president, decided by the Constitutional Court three weeks earlier, but ultimately ignored the IACHR’s opinion by ordering his release in December 2023, for health reasons.

At the end of his life, Alberto Fujimori was still on trial for the torture and murder of six villagers in Pativilca, north of Lima, by a death squad in 1992. He had also been embroiled in the scandal of hundreds of thousands of forced sterilizations carried out as part of a plan to reduce the birth rate in the late 1990s. After more than twenty years of waiting, the file arrived in March 2022 before the criminal court, which opened an investigation, in which Mr. Fujimori was designated as the culprit. “supreme and main responsible” of this policy. But the investigation was cancelled by the Supreme Court on November 30, 2023, returning the case to its starting point.