Alberto Fujimori, who ruled Peru with an iron fist between 1990 and 2000 and spent the last years of his life in prison for corruption and crimes against humanity, died Wednesday in Lima at the age of 86, leaving a country deeply divided over him.
A dictator is dead, and some are still mourning him. The former leader died on the night of September 11-12. Born in Japan, he had been released in December by order of the Constitutional Court “for humanitarian reasons”despite opposition from the Inter-American Justice, after spending 16 years in a prison in eastern Lima. He was serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity, including two massacres of civilians committed by an army squadron as part of the fight against the Shining Path Maoist guerrillas in the early 1990s. “He had to pay for what he did, but now that he is dead, what can we do… He has not served his sentence”says Juana Carrion, president of the Association of Relatives of Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared Persons of Peru.
The former president, nicknamed “El Chino” (the Chinese), who deeply divided the country, has been hospitalized several times in recent years. He was diagnosed in May with a malignant tumor in his tongue, on which he had had a cancerous lesion for more than 27 years. In 2018, Alberto Fujimori made public a diagnosis of a lung tumor. His health had deteriorated rapidly in recent days, while he had finished radiotherapy in his mouth in August, according to sources close to the family.
A Catholic priest arrived Wednesday afternoon at his home in the San Borja neighborhood of Lima, where he lived with his eldest daughter, Keiko Fujimori. She later announced that a wake would be held starting Thursday at the National Museum in Lima, specifying that her father’s burial would take place on Saturday. “We will receive all those who want to say goodbye to him in person”she said on X.
The Presidency of the Republic has confirmed “the sad news”presenting his “sincere condolences to the family”. “May God rest his soul and may he rest in peace,” concludes the presidential statement. By a decree signed this Thursday, the current head of state, Dina Boluarte, has declared a three-day national mourning. Fujimori will receive the “funeral honors befitting a sitting president”it is written in the text. After the announcement of his death, supporters of Alberto Fujimori marched in front of his residence to pay tribute to him. Like Nancy Gonzalez, for whom the former president has “put an end to terrorism” and has “stabilized the economy”.
“Authoritarian and populist”
A follower of neoliberalism, Alberto Fujimori was a “precursor in Latin America of a style of politics”said political analyst Augusto Alvarez. According to him, the former president, who burst onto the public scene with his unexpected electoral victory over the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, future Nobel Prize winner for literature, promoted a model “authoritarian and populist” which has been reproduced in many other countries, both by left-wing and right-wing movements.
Alberto Fujimori leaves a mixed image in the country. For some, he is the man who boosted the country’s economic growth with his ultra-liberal policies, and successfully fought the guerrillas of the Shining Path (Maoist) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Guevarist). Others remember above all the corruption scandals and his authoritarian methods that earned him his conviction.
His daughter Keiko Fujimori took up his political torch but failed three times in the second round of the presidential election. On July 14, the leader of the country’s main right-wing party announced that her father would run in the 2026 presidential election, not knowing whether she would be able to participate because, prosecuted for money laundering, the prosecutor’s office requested a 30-year prison sentence against her. Peru approved a law in early August declaring crimes against humanity committed before 2002 statute-barred, which could have benefited Alberto Fujimori.
Approved despite a resolution by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in mid-June calling for the suspension of the legislative process, it will benefit hundreds of other officers accused of abuses during the internal conflict of the 1980s and 1990s which left some 69,000 dead and 21,000 missing.
Updated at 9:20 a.m.: addition of a three-day national mourning decreed in Peru.
