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Peru’s National Farewell to Controversial Former President Fujimori
Peru paid a moving final tribute Saturday to Alberto Fujimori, the iron-fisted former president convicted of corruption and crimes against humanity who deeply divided the Andean country. The former head of state (1990-2000), who marked Peru’s recent history by fighting Maoist guerrillas and boosting the country’s economic growth with his ultra-liberal policies, received a state funeral after dying Wednesday at the age of 86 in his Lima home from cancer. After three days of national mourning, his remains received state honors at the presidential palace during an official ceremony silently led by President Dina Boluarte. At nightfall, he was buried in the Huachipa cemetery in eastern Lima, surrounded by his family and loved ones. Earlier, a religious ceremony was held at the Grand National Theater in Lima, adjacent to the Ministry of Culture, where thousands of sympathizers have filed past his coffin since Thursday. In the packed hall, only members of Alberto Fujimori’s family and his close friends were present, facing an altar surrounded by wreaths of white roses and a portrait of the former president. “Chino, Chino!” chanted the hall, using the nickname of the man who was born in Japan. “You are finally free from hatred and vengeance (…) you are free from these sixteen years of unjust imprisonment (…) the Peruvian people have absolved you of so much persecution,” said his daughter Keiko. After sixteen years in prison, the former right-wing leader was released in December on the orders of the Constitutional Court “for humanitarian reasons”, despite opposition from the Inter-American justice system. – “Perpetuating his legacy” – Outside the theatre, hundreds of supporters followed the ceremony on a giant screen, brandishing photos of the former leader. “We will perpetuate his legacy, because Fujimorism never dies, it will remain in history,” said Edgar Grados, a 43-year-old shopkeeper who said he had traveled more than a hundred kilometers to pay his last respects. After the former president’s victory over the Shining Path and the arrest of its leader Abimael Guzman, the American magazine Time named him South American personality of the year in 1993. Others, however, remember above all the corruption scandals that affected him and his authoritarian methods. The former leader was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity, in particular for two massacres of civilians committed by an army squadron as part of the fight against the Shining Path in the early 1990s: one in the Barrios Altos neighborhood (fifteen dead, including a child) and the other at the University of La Cantuta (ten Alberto Fujimori was also prosecuted for the 1992 assassination by soldiers of six peasants suspected of being linked to the Shining Path. The internal conflict of the 1980s and 1990s left some 69,000 dead and 21,000 missing in Peru, most of them civilians, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). – “Let history judge” – He had been hospitalized several times in recent years. He had been diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his tongue and, in 2018, he made public a diagnosis of a lung tumor. The former president burst onto the public scene in 1990 with his unexpected electoral victory over the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, future Nobel Prize winner for literature. His daughter Keiko took up his political torch but failed three times in the second round of the presidential election. As recently as July, Fujimori had considered a comeback bid in the 2026 elections, according to his daughter. On his 80th birthday in 2018, he told AFP: “Let history judge what I did right and what I did wrong.” His downfall began in 2000 with a corruption scandal. He fled to his native Japan and resigned by fax. Lima then spent years trying in vain to convince Tokyo to extradite him. After a long legal battle, it was finally Chile, where he had gone in 2005, that extradited him two years later. ljc-cm/cco/sf/am/mm
