“Alberto Fujimori dies at the age of 86.” “Ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori has died.” “The people mourn for ‘Chino’.” “Fujimori in history.” “Will hatred come to an end?” September 12 dawned with these headlines in Peru. It was the day after the death of Alberto Kenya Fujimori Inomoto, the outsider engineer who became president in 1990, staged a self-coup in 1992, and resigned from office in 2000 by faxing a letter from Japan.
Fujimori’s death was announced by his eldest daughter, Keiko, via X at around 6:30 p.m. on September 11. On Thursday morning, a three-day wake began in a room at the Ministry of Culture, in the Lima district of San Borja. He will be buried on Saturday in a private cemetery.
On the first day, as well as family members and political figures, hundreds of supporters came with photos and posters of Fujimori.
“The best memory of our dear Alberto is that he stabilized the economy, defeated terrorism and built schools. Before, we poor people had no televisions or cell phones. Now even the poorest, the humblest little house, has a big TV and a cell phone,” said a woman who had been waiting for over four hours to see the coffin.
How do you explain the popular fervor for a political leader who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for, among other crimes, the intellectual authorship of two massacres that claimed the lives of 25 people?
In power
Nicknamed “Chino” because of his Asian heritage, Fujimori became president in July 1990, after defeating writer (and subsequent Nobel laureate) Mario Vargas Llosa. On the campaign trail, he took advantage of the crisis of traditional politics to position himself as an agronomist engineer whose roots were outside the political system.
This crisis corresponded to the state of the country he inherited: annual inflation exceeded 2,700% in 1989 and Peruvian society was reeling from the attacks of the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path).
Despite rejecting the need for economic adjustment during the campaign, upon taking office Fujimori adopted a harsh anti-inflationary plan known as “Fujishock.” This caused an abrupt devaluation of Peruvian salaries, provoking discontent among unions and in Congress.
On April 5, 1992, in the face of a hostile parliament, Fujimori carried out a self-coup. With the backing of the armed forces, he dissolved Congress and intervened in Peru’s judicial institutions. Months later, in September, Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Shining Path, was captured.
These events resulted in high levels of popularity for the president. After passing a new Constitution in 1993, he comfortably won the 1995 elections with a broad base of support, especially among the working classes.
After using the constitutional reform to impose the right to a second re-election, Fujimori won the elections again in 2000. However, his victory was overshadowed by accusations of electoral fraud that sparked mass protests across the country. Ultimately, serious corruption allegations against his regime and his shadowy advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos, led to his resignation.
Fujimori had left the country to attend the APEC forum in Brunei. After that, he was supposed to go to Panama for another event, but during a stopover in Tokyo, he decided to remain in Japan. From there, he sent his letter of resignation by fax. Congress refused to accept his resignation and dismissed him for “permanent moral incapacity.”
Presidential résumé
Upon his return to Peru in 2007, Fujimori was tried for a series of crimes denounced by social sectors and the press, even while he was still in office. These included allegations that his government amounted to a civic-military regime.
Among these crimes was the formation of the Colina Group, a paramilitary squad that carried out two massacres between 1991 and 1992. The first was in the Lima neighborhood of Barrios Altos, where 15 people were killed as they attended a party, one of whom was an 8-year-old boy. The following year, at La Cantuta University, nine students and a professor were killed.
In 2009, the Supreme Court sentenced Fujimori to 25 years in prison for the perpetration-by-means of these massacres. It was the first time that a former constitutional president in Latin America had been tried and convicted for crimes against humanity in his own country.
This sentence was soon followed by others for his participation in two kidnappings, wiretapping, spurious payments to congressmen, and various acts of corruption.
With his death, cases such as the Pativilca massacre and the forced sterilization of more than 270,000 women and 22,000 men, most of them Indigenous, have gone untried.
Political relevance
In recent decades, Fujimori played a central role in Peruvian politics and his political movement, Fujimorism, made it onto three ballots under the leadership of Keiko Fujimori.
Héctor Villalobos, politics editor at Peruvian newspaper, El Comercio, argues that “both for his followers and his detractors, the political impact of Fujimori’s figure is undeniable,” since the last three elections “were marked by the confrontation between Fujimorism and anti-Fujimorism and it is this polarity that defined them”.
Political scientist Eduardo Dargent maintains that Fujimori “has become a symbol for a sector of the right, including for people who did not even know him, but who use him, and what Fujimorism was, for their current political fights.”
“Fujimorism institutionalized a series of economic policies that will be key to understanding today’s Peru, both the good and the bad,” Dargent continued. “Fujimori was the political face of an alliance that made it possible to build, over the course of 10 years, many of the institutions that have endured.”
The grief expressed by a sector of the population, Villalobos argues, is because “the figure of Fujimori continues to polarize and will continue to do so long after his death. He maintains a large base of followers because they thank him for his success in defeating terrorism and economic recovery,” he notes.
However, he says, this is no reason to play down the institutional breakdown, institutional takeover and human rights violations that occurred during his regime. “His death closes an important chapter in our history and leaves as a legacy a political force that bears his name,” he emphasizes.
In a similar vein, Dargent states that although “many of the legacies of Fujimorism are terrible in the sense of de-institutionalizing, disrupting and destroying,” one should not “fail to recognize that it marked politics in Peru in many different ways.”