LIMA, Peru (AP) — Alberto Fujimori, whose decades-long presidency began with triumphs in restoring Peru’s economy and defeating a brutal uprising but ended in a disgrace of autocratic excesses that later sent him to prison, has died. He was 86.
His death was announced in the capital Lima on Wednesday by his daughter Keiko Fujimori in a message on X.
He had been pardoned in December of his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he was planning to run for president of Peru for the fourth time in 2026.
Fujimori, who ruled increasingly authoritarianly in 1990-2000, was pardoned in December of his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he was planning to run for president of Peru for the fourth time in 2026.
The former university president and mathematics professor was the consummate political outsider when he emerged from anonymity to win Peru’s 1990 elections. writer Mario Vargas LlosaThroughout his tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made risky decisions that earned him alternately admiration and reproach.
He took power in a country ravaged by soaring inflation and guerrilla warfare, and revived the economy with bold measures, including massive privatizations of state-owned companies. Defeating fanatical rebels of the Shining Path took a little longer, but it did earn him broad support.
However, his presidency ended just as dramatically.
After briefly shutting down Congress and forcibly maneuvering himself into a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked videotapes showed his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinosbribery of lawmakers. The president went to Japan, the country of his parents, and faxed his resignation.
Five years later, he stunned supporters and opponents alike when he arrived in neighboring Chile, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for president of Peru in 2006, but instead found himself on trial for abuse of power.
The high-stakes political gambler would lose miserably. He became the first former president in the world to be tried and convicted in his own country for human rights abuses. He was found not to have personally ordered the 25 death-squad killings for which he was convicted, but he was held responsible because the crimes were committed in the name of his government.
His 25-year prison sentence did not deter Fujimori from seeking political revenge, which he planned from a prison built inside a police academy on the outskirts of the capital, Lima.
His daughter, a congresswoman Keiko attempted to restore the family dynasty by running for president in 2011, 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.
Fujimori told The Associated Press in 2000, seven months before his fall, that he saw his political rivals as chess pieces that he had to eliminate with cool detachment.
“In Latin America, I am a special case,” he said. “I have had a special formation within an oriental environment of discipline and perseverance.”
Fujimori’s presidency was, in fact, a brazen display of outright authoritarianism, known locally as “caudillismo,” in a region teetering away from dictatorships and transitioning to democracy.
He is survived by his four children. The eldest, Keiko, became first lady in 1996 when his father divorced his mother, Susana Higuchi, in a bitter battle in which she accused Fujimori of torturing her. The youngest, Kenji, was elected to Congress.
Fujimori was born on July 28, 1938, Peruvian Independence Day, and his immigrant parents picked cotton until they were able to open a tailor shop in downtown Lima.
He received his degree in agricultural engineering in 1956 and subsequently studied in France and the United States, where he received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.
In 1984 he became rector of the University of Agriculture in Lima and six years later he ran for president, without ever having held political office, presenting himself as a clean alternative to Peru’s corrupt, discredited political class.
He played on the Peruvian stereotype of the honest, hardworking Asian and created hope in an economically struggling country by claiming he would attract Japanese aid and technology.
He rose from 6 percent in the polls a month before the 1990 election to second out of nine in the vote, defeating Vargas Llosa in a runoff.
The victory, he later said, came from the same frustration that formed the basis for the Shining Path.
“My government is the product of rejection, of being fed up with Peru because of the frivolity, corruption and the dysfunctionality of the traditional political class and the bureaucracy,” he said.
Once in power, Fujimori’s tough talk and practical approach initially earned him only praise, even as the capital continued to be hit by car bombings and annual inflation soared to nearly 8,000 percent.
He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated but opposed during the campaign.
Fujimori privatized state-owned enterprises, cut government spending and attracted record levels of foreign investment.
Fujimori, affectionately known as “El Chino” because of his Asian heritage, often wore peasant clothing to visit indigenous communities in the jungle and farmers in the highlands, while delivering electricity and drinking water to poor villages. This set him apart from patrician white politicians who typically lacked the skills of the common man.
Fujimori also gave Peruvian security forces free rein to enter the Shining Path.
In September 1992, police arrested the rebel leader Abimael GuzmanWhether it was fair or not, Fujimori took the honors.
His most famous calculation came in April 1997, when he sent US-trained commandos into the Japanese ambassador’s residence, where 14 leftist Tupac Amaru rebels had been holding 72 hostages for months.
Only one hostage was killed. However, all the hostages were killed, reportedly on Montesinos’ orders.
The former university lecturer took power just years after much of the region had shaken off dictatorship and ultimately represented a step backwards. He developed a growing taste for power and resorted to increasingly anti-democratic means to gain more of it.
In April 1992, he closed down Congress and the courts, accusing them of obstructing his efforts to thwart the Shining Path and implement economic reforms.
International pressure forced him to call for elections for an assembly to replace Congress. The new legislative body, dominated by his supporters, amended Peru’s constitution to allow the president to serve two consecutive five-year terms. Fujimori was returned to office in 1995, after a brief border war with Ecuador, in an election victory.
Human rights activists at home and abroad criticized him for pushing through a general amnesty law that forgives human rights violations committed by security forces during Peru’s “anti-subversive” campaign between 1980 and 1995.
The conflict is said to have cost nearly 70,000 lives, a truth commission found, with the military responsible for more than a third of the deaths. Journalists and businessmen were kidnapped, students disappeared and at least 2,000 highland women were forcibly sterilized.
In 1996, Fujimori’s majority bloc in Congress put him on track for a third term. They passed a law that waived his first five years as president, since the new constitution had not yet gone into effect when he was elected.
A year later, Fujimori’s Congress dismissed three Constitutional Court judges who tried to overturn the legislation. His opponents accused him of establishing a democratically elected dictatorship.
By then, almost daily revelations were revealing the monumental scale of corruption surrounding Fujimori. Some 1,500 people with ties to his government were being prosecuted on corruption and other charges, including eight former ministers, three former military commanders, a prosecutor general and a former Supreme Court chief.
The charges against Fujimori led to years of legal wrangling. In December, Peru’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori on Christmas Eve 2017 by then-President Pablo Kuczynski. Wearing a face mask and supplemental oxygen, Fujimori walked out of prison and into an SUV driven by his daughter-in-law.
The last time he was seen in public was on September 4, when he left a private clinic in a wheelchair. He told the press that he had undergone a CT scan and when asked if his presidential bid was still going ahead, he smiled and said, “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
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Frank Bajak, the lead writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2024. Associated Press writer Regina Garcia Cano in Mexico City contributed.
