Alberto K. Fujimori, the iron-fisted Peruvian president of the 1990s who initially drew admiration for his economic stewardship and crackdown on left-wing terrorist groups, only to have his reputation laid waste by convictions on human rights abuses for atrocities committed by his government, died Sept. 11 in Lima. He was 86.
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Stephanie Hanes
The cause was cancer, his daughter Keiko Fujimori said on the social media platform X.
After he left office, Mr. Fujimori’s political odyssey included a stunning series of setbacks that brought him national ignominy and global infamy. Having fled Peru in 2000 amid an unfolding corruption scandal, he spent several years in his parents’ homeland of Japan — resigning by fax — before sneaking into Chile allegedly to set up a campaign base for a 2006 presidential bid.
Instead, he was arrested and sent back to Peru — a rare instance of a former elected head of state being extradited, tried and found guilty of human rights violations in his own country. He was convicted by a Peruvian court in 2009 and received a 25-year prison sentence.
Then, in December 2017, he received a medical pardon from President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. Mr. Fujimori’s son Kenji, then a congressman, had long campaigned for his father’s release, as did his daughter Keiko, a former congresswoman who had served as her father’s first lady.
The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the pardon, saying that it was granted “on politically motivated grounds” and “undermines the work of the Peruvian judiciary and the international community to achieve justice. … It is a slap in the face for the victims and witnesses whose tireless commitment brought him to justice.”
Peru’s Supreme Court reversed the pardon in October 2018, by which point Kuczynski had resigned amid corruption allegations that included brokering a political deal with Kenji Fujimori and his powerful voting bloc to stave off a presidential impeachment battle. Later that month, Keiko Fujimori was arrested on money-laundering charges stemming from her several unsuccessful presidential bids. She lost a bid for the presidency again in 2021, but refused to concede.
In March 2022, Peru’s top court restored Kuczynski’s humanitarian pardon of Mr. Fujimori, who still remained popular in swaths of the country for his suppression of violent Maoist insurgents and for his handling of a financial crisis. His release was delayed until December 2023 because of pressure from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Peru, one of the world’s top copper producers, remains in political turmoil over the fate of several former presidents who face corruption charges. Although Mr. Fujimori was released from prison, he continued to await a final legal determination regarding the alleged forced sterilization of Indigenous women from poor communities during his administration. Amid her trial for money laundering, Keiko Fujimori claimed her father would again return to the presidency in 2026 despite frail health.
An agronomist and former college administrator, Mr. Fujimori catapulted from obscurity to his country’s highest elected office in 1990. During his seemingly quixotic bid for the presidency, he ran a campaign heavy on populism and excoriated his center-right opponent — novelist and future Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa — as the choice of the elite.
The son of Japanese immigrants, Mr. Fujimori expressed solidarity with those who had been historically marginalized because of their ethnic background or skin color. He was known colloquially as “El Chinito,” or the Little Chinaman. Others dubbed him the “Japanese Torpedo” for his rapid political rise.
Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Fujimori transformed his country from one teetering on the brink of war and economic ruin to a Latin American powerhouse. He crushed the Shining Path, the Maoist insurgent group that had long terrorized the Peruvian countryside, and stemmed a ruinous spiral of hyperinflation and economic isolation.
While winning praise for those efforts, he began to seize dictatorial powers. He shut down Congress, reshaped the army and worked with his shadowy spy boss, Vladimiro Montesinos, to terrorize dissidents and intimidate corrupt judges, journalists and politicians.
His rule paved the way for an era of “electoral authoritarianism” in Latin America — “the trappings of democracy but gutting it at its core,” said Cynthia McClintock, a Peru scholar at George Washington University. “And with the control of the media that Fujimori had in the later part of his presidency, he was able to sell himself as the savior of the country.”
After his extradition, he scoffed at Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which said Mr. Fujimori bore criminal responsibility for “murder, forced disappearances and massacres.”
He denied being the intellectual author of the Colina Group, a secret military death squad that killed dozens of citizens during the government’s fight against the Shining Path guerrillas. Mr. Fujimori said that he had never authorized murders or kidnappings and that he had protected the human rights of Peruvians by saving them from war and poverty.
“I had to govern from hell,” he said during his testimony. “That is why I am being judged.”
Even from prison, Mr. Fujimori cast a long shadow over Peru and its politics. He was the sole inmate at a spacious police station and reportedly was able to help organize his daughter’s presidential campaigns from behind bars. Some days he reportedly hosted more than 100 well-connected visitors.
Until his death, observers speculated about his lingering power. Mr. Fujimori, they had learned by this point, was not a man to be underestimated.
‘El Chinito’
Alberto Kenya Fujimori said he was born in Lima on Peruvian Independence Day — July 28, 1938 — although investigative journalists later questioned that politically expedient date. His parents had immigrated to Peru in the mid-1930s, part of a wave of Japanese who arrived in the early 20th century. His baptismal certificate listed his birth date as Aug. 4, 1938, the magazine Caretas reported.
The Fujimoris initially worked on a cotton plantation and then opened a tire repair shop in a working-class district of Lima. Although they spoke Japanese at home, the young Alberto went to Spanish-speaking schools and assimilated into Peruvian culture.
His macho, plain-spoken manner played well with his working-class supporters, who would later cheer as he rode into town on a tractor — the “Fujimobile” — pulling a billboard urging Peruvians to vote for “El Chinito.”
Mr. Fujimori received a degree from Peru’s La Molina National Agrarian University and did graduate work in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. He became an agronomy professor and then, in 1984, rector of La Molina.
Around this time, he helped brief President-elect Alan García on agricultural matters, and García suggested that Mr. Fujimori moderate a weekly public affairs talk show on a state-owned TV network. A few years later, Mr. Fujimori launched his bid for the presidency. As a first-time candidate, he beat Vargas Llosa in a landslide in 1990.
After the election, Mr. Fujimori delved into the two main problems facing Peru: internal war and economic meltdown. Weeks into his presidency, Mr. Fujimori decided that following a program recommended by the International Monetary Fund was the only choice to stem a financial meltdown — despite having opposed such measures during the campaign.
The drastic economic policies had an effect: According to the U.S. State Department, inflation dropped from 7,650 percent in 1990 to 139 percent in 1991; in 1994, inflation was 15 percent, and Peru’s economy expanded by 12 percent — the fastest-growing economy in the Americas.
The new president also authorized the army — and Montesinos — to do whatever it took to eliminate the Shining Path.
It was during this time that the Colina Group killed 15 innocent people, including an 8-year-old boy, at a neighborhood party in a mistaken attempt to assassinate terrorists. The death squad also kidnapped and killed nine university students suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers. Both events became central to the criminal case against Mr. Fujimori.
When opposition politicians and the judiciary tried to block his methods, Mr. Fujimori suspended the constitution and closed Congress. A few months later, Mr. Fujimori announced that Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path’s leader, had been captured.
Many Peruvians hailed Mr. Fujimori’s brash policies. He made their country safer, they believed, and was not afraid to take on traditional power structures. For example, he once angered the Catholic Church by promoting birth control.
But he was beginning to face detractors — one of the most public of whom was his wife, Susana Higuchi. Higuchi and the president had four teenage children when, in a dramatic outburst, she publicly accused him of corruption and, later, of attempting to kill her.
Mr. Fujimori eventually kicked her out of the presidential residence and made his daughter Keiko first lady. As stunned Peruvians watched on television, Higuchi mounted a short-lived hunger strike and formed her own political party to run against him in the 1995 presidential election.
Mr. Fujimori responded by pushing a law through Congress barring relatives of sitting presidents from running for the office. The two divorced in 1996. In 2006, he married Japanese hotel magnate Satomi Kataoka, his companion during his exile in Japan.
During his second term, Mr. Fujimori earned international attention in December 1996 when members of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement took hostage hundreds of dignitaries — including Fujimori’s relatives — during a party at the Japanese ambassador’s house in Lima.
Mr. Fujimori ignored the advice of international hostage negotiators, as well as the wishes of the Japanese, who wanted a peaceful end to the standoff, and authorized a commando raid of the residential compound four months later.
All but one of the hostages survived, while all of the guerrillas were killed. A day later, Mr. Fujimori went to the ambassador’s home to be videotaped with the headless bodies of the hostage-takers at his feet.
“Gentlemen, in Peru, we are not going to accept terrorism,” Mr. Fujimori said. “In Peru, we are going to strengthen the principles of democracy. We have given an example to the international community that you cannot permit terrorist blackmail, you must not surrender.”
He also made headlines for his hard-line position on Lori Berenson, an American who was convicted by a Peruvian military court in 1996 of assisting the Túpac Amaru. She spent 15 years in prison.
Despite his widening international profile, Mr. Fujimori had begun to lose support at home. Discontent stemmed from a slowing economy, growing questions about corruption, and increasing unease about Montesinos’s role in drug trafficking, arms dealing and other sordid businesses.
In 2000, speculation about corruption intensified with the revelation that the spy boss had secretly recorded about 1,500 videocassettes of businessmen, journalists, judges and politicians accepting bribes or visiting brothels — all perfect blackmail material.
Mr. Fujimori fled to Japan and faxed his resignation letter; Montesinos went into hiding but was caught and convicted in dozens of trials. He is thought to have stolen $1 billion from Peruvian coffers. Montesinos remains in prison.
A complete list of Mr. Fujimori’s survivors was not immediately available.
After his human rights convictions, Mr. Fujimori pleaded guilty to corruption charges. In Peru, sentences are maxed out at 25 years and served concurrently.
During his trial, he showed little remorse for the course he had set for his country.
“Because of my government, the human rights of 25 million Peruvians were rescued, without exceptions,” he said at the time. “If any detestable acts were committed, I condemn them. But they were not done on my orders.”
