Alberto Fujimori, 86, Leader of Peru Imprisoned for Rights Abuses, Dies
During his decade in power, he revived the economy and crushed two violent leftist insurgencies. But he was forced out in a corruption scandal and later imprisoned for human rights abuses.
Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru who in his decade in office rebuilt the nation’s economy and quelled two deadly leftist insurgencies, but who was forced out by a corruption scandal and later imprisoned for human rights abuses, died on Wednesday in Lima, the capital. He was 86.
He died of cancer at his daughter Keiko Fujimori’s home, Ms. Fujimori confirmed in a post on X. He had also been treated for arrhythmia and other ailments.
A son of Japanese immigrants, Mr. Fujimori was an obscure agricultural engineer and political novice when he ran for the presidency in 1990, famously campaigning aboard a tractor. He stunned the nation by placing a close second in a crowded field and then defeating the establishment favorite, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, in a runoff.
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In office, Mr. Fujimori tamed hyperinflation, unemployment and mismanagement; lifted economic growth and standards of living; and cracked down on drug trafficking. But he also showed little regard for Peru’s laws and institutions. He temporarily shut down Congress, governing by fiat for months. He was lauded for subduing the two insurgencies, Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, but the brutality of his methods ultimately drew global criticism and brought him a long prison sentence.
His downfall seemed as improbable as his ascent. Toppled in 2000 after a television channel broadcast a videotape showing his intelligence chief trying to bribe a congressman, Mr. Fujimori fled to Japan, where he submitted his resignation by fax from a hotel in Tokyo. After five years in exile, he traveled to Chile to try making a political comeback; instead, he was extradited to Peru.
In 2009, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for atrocities that a military unit carried out early in his presidency, killing 25 people.
Mr. Fujimori was believed to be the world’s first democratically elected former president to be found guilty of human rights violations in his own country. But even from prison he continued to attract grass-roots support.
Fujimorismo dominated Peruvian politics long after his downfall. Keiko Fujimori, his elder daughter, who had served as his first lady after her parents publicly feuded, inherited the bulk of his base. She came close to winning the presidency in 2011 and 2016, and she was the country’s chief opposition leader for several years.
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Mr. Fujimori had repeatedly sought a presidential pardon, claiming that his health was rapidly declining in prison. On Dec. 24, 2017, President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski granted him a pardon on humanitarian grounds, just three days after surviving an impeachment vote with the unexpected help of Mr. Fujimori’s supporters in Congress. The pardon set off protests in the streets and was annulled within a year by Peru’s Supreme Court. Mr. Fujimori was sent back to prison on Jan. 23, 2019.
Last December, Peru’s top court ordered Mr. Fujimori released, defying an order by an international court that said he should remain in prison. He left prison the next day. Some experts described the decision as an example of Peru’s institutional decay.
The most divisive leader in Peru’s modern history, Mr. Fujimori eluded easy historical judgment.
“The management of the economy and his success in combating the Shining Path mark his two most important legacies,” said Julio F. Carrión, a political scientist at the University of Delaware who specializes in Latin America. “Although he managed to solve the economic and security problems, he did so in an authoritarian way.”
Paulo Drinot, a historian of Peru at University College London, said of Mr. Fujimori’s presidency: “It was a very authoritarian regime from 1992 onward, and it was also, as we now know, a highly corrupt regime, which on balance was more negative than positive for Peru. It contributed to the establishment of a political culture that is highly polarized and poorly institutionalized — and, really, a sense that the country is almost ungovernable.”
Roots in Japan
Alberto Kenya Fujimori was born in Lima on July 28, 1938, the second of five children of two Japanese immigrants, Naoichi and Mutsue (Inamoto) Fujimori. His father had come to Peru to farm cotton and was later a tailor. His parents were Buddhists, but Alberto was raised Roman Catholic.
He received a degree from La Molina National Agrarian University in 1961 and did postgraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Strasbourg in France.
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When he entered the presidential race in 1989, Mr. Fujimori had never held elected office; at first, he had no political party. A bespectacled math professor, he was best known for serving as president of his alma mater and of Peru’s National Association of College Presidents, and for hosting a television program in the late 1980s called “Concertando,” which translates roughly to “working things out.”
To gain attention in a field of nine candidates, Mr. Fujimori emphasized his heritage. He embraced the nickname El Chino, which means “the Chinese Man” but is often used in Latin America as a catchall term for people of East Asian ancestry.
Claiming to be the descendant of an illustrious samurai, he posed for campaign photographs wearing Japanese robes and waving a warlord’s sword. Other times he wore a poncho or knitted sweaters and a striped hat with earflaps — an Indigenous costume that delighted Peruvians of mixed ancestry, many of whom were tired of being governed by the white elite. His slogan was “A President Like You,” and, to everyone’s surprise, it worked.
Running on a platform of “honesty, technology and work,” Mr. Fujimori promised to bring Japanese investment and technology to Peru and to integrate it into the booming trans-Pacific economy. He ran as a centrist, vowing to revive agriculture while retaining a system of large state-owned companies.
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He developed an unlikely base of support among evangelical Christians, businesspeople, university students and professors, and the poor. He vowed to end the guerrilla warfare, drug trafficking, political violence and economic stagnation that had hobbled Peru for decades.
Once in office, Mr. Fujimori first made his mark with a program of market reforms that was likened to shock therapy and that had been a key proposal of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s. Mr. Fujimori had vowed not to carry it out but did anyway.
In a flurry of decrees, he cut tariffs, gave employers more power to fire workers, eliminated restrictions on foreign investment, broke up monopolies in insurance and ports, set conditions for the sale of shares in state-owned enterprises, and allowed peasants to sell or mortgage land obtained under reform programs.
Prices of goods like milk and bread quickly skyrocketed, but in the long run Mr. Fujimori was hailed for finally stabilizing the Peruvian economy, partly through the introduction of a new currency.
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His next challenge was the escalating violence of the Shining Path, led by a charismatic former university philosophy lecturer, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, who had synthesized ideas from Marx, Lenin and Mao. Founded in 1970 in Ayacucho, in the Andean highlands, the group ignited a violent insurgency in 1980. By the time Mr. Fujimori came into office, Shining Path had extended its reach into the shantytowns of Lima and was routinely carrying out assassinations and bombing banks, embassies and power stations.
No one was prepared, however, when Mr. Fujimori announced on television on April 5, 1992, that he was dissolving Congress, reorganizing the judiciary and suspending the Constitution. He had lacked a majority in the legislature, and he said the moves were essential to his crackdown on terrorism. As troops in armored personnel carriers took to Lima’s main thoroughfares, the United States condemned the power grab, and the Peruvian Congress, meeting in secret at the home of a lawmaker, voted for impeachment.
The move was labeled an “autogolpe,” or “self-coup” — a kind of putsch in which a leader, despite having come to power through democratic means, assumes extraordinary powers not granted under normal circumstances. But most Peruvians, who loathed lawmakers, welcomed it, and Mr. Fujimori deflected international criticisms by saying that the measure was only temporary.
By then Mr. Fujimori had tied his fortunes to those of Vladimiro Montesinos, a lawyer and former police captain with a history of working with the C.I.A. When Mr. Fujimori ran in 1990, Mr. Montesinos helped defend him against accusations of tax evasion; after the election, Mr. Montesinos became the president’s top intelligence adviser, eventually amassing enormous influence over the military and the judiciary.
At his urging, antiterrorism laws were strengthened so that defendants could be hauled before hooded military judges, given little or no due process and sentenced to 20-year terms in solitary confinement.
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Many called the crackdown a “dirty war,” likening it to the right-wing death squads that targeted leftists and dissidents in Argentina in previous decades. But Mr. Fujimori insisted that expedited trials and draconian prisons were essential to bringing rebel violence under control.
His argument gained currency in July 1992, when Shining Path guerrillas killed and maimed scores of people with car bombs in an upscale Lima neighborhood, underscoring the ferocity of their methods. Then, less than two months later, came the stunning news that the police had captured Mr. Guzmán, ending a 12-year manhunt. Mr. Guzmán was paraded before journalists in a cage and later sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Fujimori’s popularity soared. Voters rewarded him by approving a new Constitution in 1993 that strengthened the powers of the presidency. Foreign investment started to pour in, and in 1994 Peru enjoyed one of the highest rates of growth of any nation.
It was enough for Mr. Fujimori to handily secure re-election with nearly two-thirds of the vote; his nearest rival, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the former United Nations secretary general, got 22 percent.
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A New Crisis
But before long came another crisis. On Dec. 17, 1996, heavily armed guerrillas from the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement stormed the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima, taking 490 hostages, including the foreign minister, several justices of the Constitutional Court, top police commanders and Mr. Fujimori’s mother, who had gathered there to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Akihito. The rebels demanded the release of their jailed comrades, including an American sympathizer, Lori Berenson.
Most of the hostages, including Mr. Fujimori’s mother, were soon released, but negotiations over 72 remaining ones dragged on for months. Mr. Fujimori even flew to Cuba to discuss with Fidel Castro a possible offer of asylum to the rebels. The standoff continued until April 22, 1997, when soldiers stormed the residence, killing 14 guerrillas, some of whom had tried to surrender. All but one of the hostages survived.
The resolution of the crisis temporarily buoyed Mr. Fujimori’s popularity, but it had begun to decline. When several Supreme Court justices held that he could not seek a third term, his allies in Congress fired them, arguing that he was entitled to run for re-election since his first term had started during a previous Constitution. After a Lima television station revealed that the government had wiretapped the phones of prominent citizens and journalists, the government revoked the citizenship of the station’s owner, a native of Israel who had become a naturalized Peruvian citizen.
By the time Mr. Fujimori formally announced his re-election campaign in 1999, Peru’s swing toward authoritarianism had been widely deplored. Mr. Fujimori’s ex-wife, Susana Higuchi — who in 1994 accused him of having a mistress and locking her out of the palace, preventing her from seeing their children and even plotting to kidnap her — ran for Congress and denounced him as a dictator. (She was blocked from running for president against her husband in 1995 but won a congressional seat in 2000.)
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In April 2000, Mr. Fujimori placed first in an election marred by accusations of fraud, though not by a margin large enough to avoid a runoff against his nearest rival, Alejandro Toledo, a former business-school professor who, like Mr. Fujimori, came from humble roots.
Mr. Toledo, citing what he called vote fraud and campaign irregularities, urged his voters to abstain, and international election observers withdrew in disgust. Mr. Fujimori declared victory, but it was a hollow one: As he was sworn in for the third time, police officers fired water cannons and tear gas at protesters.
Mr. Fujimori’s downfall came swiftly. Seven weeks into his new term, on Sept. 14, 2000, a cable television channel transmitted a 58-minute videotape that showed Mr. Montesinos handing $15,000 to an opposition politician, Alberto Kouri, hoping to entice him to defect to Mr. Fujimori’s party.
More tapes showing bribes emerged. It was later revealed that Mr. Montesinos, imprisoned since 2003, had orchestrated not only political repression but also a lucrative series of embezzlement, influence-peddling and graft schemes. He had recorded many of his meetings, if not all of them, for potential blackmail; the tapes would go on to become Exhibit A in scores of corruption trials after Mr. Fujimori’s resignation.
The scandal prompted Mr. Fujimori to announce that he would call new elections and not seek a new term. He also said he would dismantle the feared intelligence service that Mr. Montesinos had led.
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Ostensibly to shore up support for a political transition, Mr. Fujimori visited Washington and then Tokyo; from there, he submitted his resignation. In a final slap at him, the Peruvian Congress refused the resignation but declared the presidency vacant, saying that he was “morally unfit” to serve.
Allowed to settle in Japan — he was eligible for citizenship through his parents — Mr. Fujimori tried to style himself as a commentator on terrorism. He mused about running for Parliament in Japan and about making a political comeback in Peru. As Peru’s government spent years trying unsuccessfully to have Mr. Fujimori extradited, a government-appointed truth commission concluded that 69,000 people had died between 1980 and 2000 in conflicts between rebels and the government.
While the commission concluded that Shining Path was responsible for most of the deaths, it also accused Mr. Fujimori and two predecessors, Fernando Belaúnde and Alan García, of widespread abuses. It found that three in four victims who died were Quechua speakers, most of them innocent civilians caught in the fighting.
Not content with exile, Mr. Fujimori plotted a return to power. But hours after landing in Chile in what was to be the first leg of a triumphal return, he was arrested on a longstanding international warrant. He lost a bid for a seat in Japan’s Parliament while under house arrest and was sent back to Peru in 2007.
‘I Did Nothing Wrong’
At his trial, which began that December and included testimony by more than 80 witnesses and nearly two dozen outside experts, prosecutors argued that Mr. Fujimori had done nothing to stop a military death squad, the Colina group, from engaging in two atrocities: the massacre of 15 people, including an 8-year-old boy, at a barbecue in Lima in November 1991, and a raid at La Cantuta University that left nine students and a professor dead in July 1992.
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“I did nothing wrong,” Mr. Fujimori insisted in court. “The Peru that I inherited was a disaster. It was a Peru that had to be rescued.” The campaign against terrorism, he insisted, was intended to “eliminate the disorder and anarchy that had taken hold of Peru.”
In April 2009, Mr. Fujimori was convicted of murder, aggravated kidnapping and battery, as well as crimes against humanity. He received a 25-year sentence.
Even that was not the end of his legal troubles. Later that year, he admitted that he had made a $15 million payoff to Mr. Montesinos to stave off a coup, and he also admitted to authorizing illegal wiretaps and bribery. In 2015, he was convicted of using public money to influence newspaper coverage during his 2000 re-election campaign.
In addition to his daughter Keiko, Mr. Fujimori is survived by a younger daughter, Sachi, and two sons, Hiro and Kenji, all from his marriage to Ms. Higuchi; his second wife, Satomi Kataoka; and several grandchildren.
Alberto Fujimori was not one given to introspection. In interviews for the 2006 documentary film “The Fall of Fujimori,” produced while he was in exile, Mr. Fujimori insisted that he had done what was necessary to restore order to Peru, and he denied condoning abuses. Mr. Montesinos had concealed his “evil character,” he said. He added, “I haven’t stolen a single dollar.”
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He continued to insist that he was innocent of crimes even while speaking from his jail cell, in a compound that was built for him on the outskirts of Lima, where he gardened, painted and composed Twitter posts. But at times he expressed contrition.
In 2012, while waiting for a response to a request for a pardon, he painted a portrait of himself smiling and waving, dressed in a poncho and a hat crowned with flowers. He signed it, writing, “Forgive me for what I did not get to do, and what I couldn’t avoid.”
Mitra Taj, Marcelo Rochabrún and Andrea Zarate contributed reporting.
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