INTERNATIONAL – Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), pardoned in December for health reasons after being convicted of “crimes against humanity”died this Wednesday, September 11 in Lima at the age of 86, his family announced on the social network X.
“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just gone to meet the Lord. We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul. Thank you for everything, Dad!”announced his children Keiko, Hiro, Sachie and Kenji Fujimori.
The former leader, of Japanese origin, was released in December 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 during the fight against the Shining Path Maoist guerrillas in the early 1990s.
Surname « The Chinese »
He was released in December by order of the Constitutional Court. “for humanitarian reasons”despite the opposition of the Inter-American Justice. In May, Alberto Fujimori announced that he had been diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his tongue.
After ruling Peru with an iron fist for ten years, the dictator’s legacy still deeply divides Peruvians. Alberto Fujimori has divided Peruvians like few politicians have done in the country’s history. Because in this Andean country of 32 million inhabitants, it is difficult to forget the passage to power of the one nicknamed « The Chinese » (the Chinese).
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).
Authoritarian governance
Others remember above all the corruption scandals and his authoritarian methods, which landed him behind bars for having ordered two massacres perpetrated by a death squad in 1991-1992, as part of the fight against the Shining Path.
Born in Lima on July 28, 1938 to Japanese immigrant parents, Alberto became an agricultural engineer and then taught mathematics. In 1964, he spent a university year in Strasbourg where he learned French and, in 1970, obtained a master’s degree in mathematics in the United States.
In 1990, Alberto Fujimori surprisingly won the presidential election against the famous writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature, Mario Vargas Llosa. Due to the lack of a majority, on April 5, 1992, with the support of the armed forces, he dissolved Parliament and suspended the Constitution. The following year, he passed a new Fundamental Law giving more power to the president.
After its victory over the Shining Path and the arrest of its leader Abimael Guzman – who died in prison on September 11, 2021 – the American magazine Time In 1993, he was named South American Personality of the Year. He was re-elected president in 1995.
Dismissed for corruption cases
In 1996, Parliament passed a law allowing him to run for a third term. In May 2000, Alberto Fujimori won again, but Parliament voted to impeach him in November for corruption. The affair took on the appearance of a Hollywood script. The deposed leader fled to Japan, a country of which he also held citizenship, and resigned by fax from a hotel in the Japanese capital.
Lima spent years trying to convince Tokyo to extradite him, in vain. After a long legal battle, it was finally Chile, where he had gone in 2005, that extradited Alberto Fujimori two years later.
His family and lawyers fought to ensure that he would not end his life behind bars. In mid-March 2022, a presidential pardon granted on Christmas Eve 2017 by then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was annulled in October 2018 by the courts. On December 7, 2023, the Constitutional Court finally ordered the immediate release of the controversial former president, reinstating the pardon granted in 2017.
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