San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)

Ex-Peru president was convicted of human rights abuses

ALBERTO FUJIMORI 1938-2024

LIMA, Peru — Alberto Fujimori, whose decade-long presidency began with triumphs righting Peru’s economy and defeating a brutal insurgency only to end in autocratic excess that later sent him to prison, has died. He was 86.

His death Wednesday in the capital, Lima, was announced by his daughter, Keiko Fujimori, in a post on X.

Fujimori, who governed with an increasing­ly authoritar­ian hand in 1990-2000, was pardoned in December from his conviction­s for corruption and responsibi­lity for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that 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 privatizat­ions of state industries. Defeating fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer but also won him broad-based support.

His presidency, however, 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 neighborin­g Chile, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru’s presi

dency in 2006, but instead wound up in court facing charges of 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 violations. He was not found to have personally ordered the 25 deathsquad 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 Fujimori from seeking political revindicat­ion, which he planned from a prison built in a police academy on the outskirts of Lima, the capital.

His congresswo­man daughter Keiko 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 on X Wednesday. “We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul.”

Fujimori’s presidency was, in fact, a brash display of outright authoritar­ianism, known locally as “caudillism­o,” in a region shakily stepping away from dictatorsh­ips toward democracy.

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 July 28, 1938, Peruvian Independen­ce Day, and his immigrant parents picked cotton until they could open a tailor’s shop in downtown Lima.

He earned a degree in agricultur­al engineerin­g in 1956, and then studied in France and the United States, where he received a graduate degree in mathematic­s from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.

In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultur­al University in Lima, and six years later, he ran for president without ever having held political office, billing himself as a clean alternativ­e to Peru’s corrupt, discredite­d political class.

He soared from 6% in the polls a month before the 1990 election to finish second out of nine in the balloting. He went on to beat Vargas Llosa in a runoff.

The victory, he later said, came from the same frustratio­n that fueled the Shining Path.

“My government is the product of rejection, of being fed up with Peru because of the frivolity, corruption and nonfunctio­ning of the traditiona­l political class and the bureaucrac­y,” he said.

Once in office, Fujimori’s tough talk and handson style at first won him only plaudits, as car bombings still ripped through the capital and annual inflation approached 8,000 percent.

He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated but he had argued against in the campaign.

Privatizin­g stateowned industries, Fujimori slashed public spending and attracted record foreign investment.

Known affectiona­tely as “El chino,” due to his Asian ancestry, Fujimori often donned peasant garb to visit jungle Indigenous communitie­s and highland farmers, while delivering electricit­y and drinking water to dirtpoor villages. That distinguis­hed him from the patrician, white politician­s who typically lacked his commoner’s touch.

Fujimori also gave Peru’s security forces free rein to take on the Shining Path.

In September 1992, police captured rebel leader Abimael Guzmán. Deservedly or not, Fujimori took credit.

Taking power just years after much of the region had shed dictatorsh­ips, the former university professor ultimately represente­d a step back. He developed a growing taste for power and resorted to increasing­ly anti-democratic means to amass more 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 economic reforms.

Internatio­nal pressure forced him to call elections for an assembly to replace the Congress. The new legislativ­e body, dominated by his supporters, changed Peru’s constituti­on to allow the president to serve two consecutiv­e five-year terms. Fujimori was swept back into office in 1995, after a brief border war with Ecuador, in an election landslide.

Human rights advocates at home and abroad blasted him for pushing through a general amnesty law forgiving human rights abuses committed by security forces during Peru’s “anti-subversive” campaign between 1980 and 1995.

The conflict would claim 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 peasant women were forcibly sterilized.

In 1996, Fujimori’s majority bloc in Congress put him on the path for a third term when it approved a law that determined his first five years as president didn’t count because the new constituti­on was not yet in place when he was elected.

A year later, Fujimori’s Congress fired three Constituti­onal Tribunal judges who tried to overturn the legislatio­n, and his foes accused him of imposing a democratic­ally elected dictatorsh­ip.

By then, almost daily revelation­s were showing the monumental scale of corruption around Fujimori. About 1,500 people connected to his government were prosecuted on corruption and other charges, including eight former Cabinet ministers, three former military commanders, an attorney general and a former chief of the Supreme Court.

The accusation­s 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 in 2017 by then-President Pablo Kuczynski. Wearing a face mask and getting supplement­al oxygen, Fujimori walked out of the prison door and got in a sport utility vehicle driven by his daughterin-law.

The last time he was seen in public was on Sept. 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.”