Alberto Fujimori dies at 86

LIMA (AP):

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 privatisations 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 neighbouring Chile, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru’s presidency 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 death-squad 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.

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 six per cent 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.