Alberto Fujimori, whose decade-long presidency began with triumphs in fixing Peru’s economy and defeating a brutal insurgency, only to end in a shameful autocratic excess that later sent him to prisondied. He was 86 years old.
His death on Wednesday in the capital, Lima, was announced by his daughter Keiko Fujimori in a message on X.
Fujimori, who ruled in an increasingly authoritarian manner from 1990 to 2000, was pardoned as head of state in December. convictions for corruption and responsible for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he was considering running for Peru’s president for a fourth time in 2026.
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The former university president and mathematics professor was a political outsider par excellence when he emerged from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election against writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Over the course of a tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made bold and risky decisions that earned him both adoration and reproach.
He took control of a country ravaged by rampant inflation and violent guerrilla warfare, reviving the economy with bold measures, including massive privatizations of state industries. Defeating the fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer, but also won him widespread support.
His presidency, however, collapsed in an equally dramatic manner.
After briefly paralyzing Congress and embarking on a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked videos showed his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers. went to Japanhis parents’ land, and sent his resignation by fax.
Five years later, he surprised supporters and opponents alike when he landed in neighboring Chile, where he was arrested and extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peruvian president in 2006, but ended up in court for abuse of power.
This 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 personally found guilty of the 25 death squads 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 stop Fujimori from seeking political rehabilita-tion, which he planned from a prison built into a police academy on the outskirts of Lima, the capital.
In 2011, his daughter Keiko, a member of parliament, tried to restore the family dynasty by running for president, but was narrowly defeated in the second round. She ran again in 2016 and 2021, losing 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 gone to meet the Lord,” she said Wednesday. “We ask those who loved him to accompany us in prayer for the eternal rest of his soul.”
Fujimori’s presidency was in reality a blatant display of outright authoritarianism, known locally as “caudillismo,” in a region struggling to move away from dictatorships toward democracy.
He leaves behind four children. The eldest, Keiko, became first lady in 1996 when her father divorced her mother, Susana Higuchi, after a bitter battle in which she accused Fujimori of having her tortured. The youngest child, Kenji, was elected to parliament.
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Fujimori was born on July 28, 1938, Peru’s Independence Day, to his immigrant parents who picked cotton until they were able to open a tailor shop in downtown Lima.
He graduated as an agricultural engineer in 1956, then studied in France and the United States, where he earned a graduate degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.
In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultural University of 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 and discredited political class.
He went from 6% of the vote a month before the 1990 elections to second place out of nine candidates. He then beat Vargas Llosa in the second round.
The victory, he later said, came from the same frustration that fueled the Shining Path.
“My government is the product of the rejection, of the fed-up feeling of Peru with the frivolity, corruption and non-functioning of the traditional political class and the bureaucracy,” he said.
Once in power, Fujimori’s tough talk and pragmatic style won him nothing but applause, as car bombings continued to ravage the capital and annual inflation approached 8,000 percent.
He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa advocated but which he opposed during the campaign.
By privatizing state-owned industries, Fujimori cut public spending and attracted record foreign investment.
Affectionately known as “El chino” because of his Asian heritage, Fujimori often wore peasant clothing to visit indigenous jungle communities and highland farmers, while delivering electricity and clean water to poorer villages. This distinguished him from patrician white politicians who generally lacked his commoner side.
Fujimori also gave Peruvian security forces carte blanche to attack the Shining Path.
In September 1992, police captured rebel leader Abimael Guzmán. Fujimori took credit for it, rightly or wrongly.
Coming to power just a few years after most countries in the region had shaken off dictatorship, the former university professor represented a step backwards. He developed a growing taste for power and resorted to increasingly undemocratic means to accumulate more of it.
In April 1992, he shut down Congress and the courts, accusing them of obstructing his efforts to defeat Shining Path and spur economic reforms.
International pressure forced him to call elections 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 power in 1995, after a brief border war with Ecuador, in a landslide electoral victory.
Human rights activists in Peru and abroad have criticized him for passing a general amnesty law pardoning human rights violations committed by security forces during Peru’s “anti-subversive” campaign between 1980 and 1995.
According to a truth commission, the conflict has left nearly 70,000 people dead, with the military responsible for more than a third of the deaths. Journalists and businessmen have been kidnapped, students have disappeared and at least 2,000 highland peasant women have been forcibly sterilized.
In 1996, Fujimori’s majority bloc in Congress put him on track for a third term by approving a law that said his first five years as president did not count because the new constitution was not yet in place when he was elected.
A year later, Fujimori’s Congress dismissed three Constitutional Court judges who had tried to overturn the legislation, and his opponents accused him of imposing a democratically elected dictatorship.
At the time, almost daily revelations showed the monumental scale of the corruption surrounding Fujimori. Some 1,500 people linked to his government were being prosecuted for corruption and other charges, including eight former ministers, three former military commanders, a prosecutor general and a former president of the Supreme Court.
The charges against Fujimori have sparked 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 receiving supplemental oxygen, Fujimori walked out of prison and into a sport utility vehicle driven by his daughter-in-law.
The last time he was seen in public was on September 4, when he was leaving a private hospital in a wheelchair. He told reporters he had undergone a scan and when asked if his presidential bid was still on, he smiled and replied: “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
