Detained former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, photographed through a glass window, attends his trial at a police base on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, on June 28, 2016. His daughter, Keiko Fujimori, announced in a post on X that he died of cancer on Wednesday.
Martin Mejia/AP
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Martin Mejia/AP
LIMA, Peru — Alberto Fujimori, whose decade-long presidency began with victories that revived Peru’s economy and crushed a brutal rebellion only to end in the disgrace of an overbearing dictatorship that landed him in prison, has died. He was 86.
His death on Wednesday in the capital Lima was announced by his daughter Keiko Fujimori in a post on X.
Fujimori, who ruled with an increasingly authoritarian hand from 1990 to 2000, was pardoned in December on corruption charges and charges of murdering 25 people. His daughter said in July that he planned to run for president of Peru for a fourth term in 2026.
The former university president and mathematics professor was the consummate outsider politician when he rose from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election against writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Throughout his tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made bold, daring decisions that earned him both admiration and criticism.
He took over a country ravaged by hyperinflation and guerrilla violence, fixing the economy with bold moves including the massive privatization of state industries. Defeating the fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer but also won widespread support.
Presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori waves to supporters after voting in the presidential runoff election against novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in Lima, Peru, June 10, 1990.
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Matias Recart/AP
However, his presidency collapsed miserably.
After temporarily shutting down Congress and controversially pushing himself to a third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked videotapes showed his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers. The president traveled to Japan, his parents’ homeland, and famously faxed his resignation.
He stunned both supporters and foes five years later when he landed in neighboring Chile, where he was arrested and later extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for president of Peru in 2006, but instead found himself in court facing charges of abuse of power.
The high-stakes political gambler lost miserably. He became the world’s first former president to be tried and convicted in his own country for human rights abuses. He was not found to have personally ordered the killing of the 25 death squad members for whom he was convicted, but he was held responsible because the crimes were committed in the name of his government.
The 25-year prison sentence did not stop Fujimori from seeking political vindication, which he planned to do at a prison built in a police academy on the outskirts of the capital Lima.
Chilean police surround former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (left) as he leaves his home in Santiago to be extradited to Peru to face charges of human rights abuses and corruption, early September 22, 2007.
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Claudio Santana/AP
His daughter, lawmaker Keiko, tried to restore the family dynasty by running for president in 2011 but was defeated in the runoff. She ran again in 2016 and 2021, losing by just 44,000 votes after a campaign in which she promised to free her father.
“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just gone to meet God,” she said on Wednesday. “We ask his loved ones to join us in praying for the eternal repose of his soul.”
In fact, Fujimori’s presidency was a blatant display of authoritarianism, known locally as “caudillismo,” in a region that was moving away from dictatorship toward democracy.
He left behind four children. The eldest, Keiko, became first lady in 1996 when his father divorced his mother, Susana Higuchi, in a bitter fight in which she accused Fujimori of torturing her. The youngest, Kenji, was elected to parliament.
Fujimori was born on July 28, 1938, Peru’s Independence Day, to immigrant parents who worked as cotton pickers until they were able to open a tailor shop in downtown Lima.
He received a degree in agricultural engineering in 1956, then studied in France and the United States, where he received a postgraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.
In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultural University in Lima, and six years later he ran for president without holding any political office, presenting himself as a clean alternative to Peru’s corrupt and discredited political class.
He jumped from 6% in the polls a month before the 1990 election to second place out of nine in the vote. He went on to defeat Vargas Llosa in the second round.
This victory, he later said, came from the same frustration that fueled Shining Path.
“My government is the product of protest, of being fed up with Peru because of the vanity, corruption and inefficiency of the traditional political class and bureaucracy,” he said.
Upon taking office, Fujimori’s tough talk and pragmatic style initially brought him little praise, as car bombings continued to occur in the capital and annual inflation reached nearly 8,000 percent.
He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated but was opposed to during the campaign.
By privatizing state-owned industries, Fujimori cut public spending and attracted record amounts of foreign investment.
Affectionately known as “El Chino” due to his Asian ancestry, Fujimori often dressed as a peasant to visit jungle and highland communities while providing electricity and drinking water to impoverished villages. That set him apart from aristocratic white politicians who often lacked contact with ordinary people.
Fujimori also gave Peruvian security forces full authority to deal with the Shining Path issue.
In September 1992, police captured rebel leader Abimael Guzmán. Deservedly or not, Fujimori took credit.
Coming to power just years after much of the region had emerged from dictatorship, the former university professor ultimately represented a step backward. He developed a growing taste for power and resorted to increasingly anti-democratic means to amass more power.
In April 1992, he shut down Congress and the courts, accusing them of obstructing his efforts to defeat Shining Path and push through economic reform.
International pressure forced him to call elections to replace the National Assembly. The new legislature, dominated by his supporters, changed the Peruvian constitution to allow presidents to serve two consecutive five-year terms. Fujimori returned to power in 1995, after a brief border war with Ecuador, in a landslide.
Human rights advocates at home and abroad have criticized him for pushing for a general amnesty law that would pardon human rights abuses by security forces during Peru’s “anti-subversion” campaign from 1980 to 1995.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (center) is escorted out of prison by one of his lawyers, along with his son Kenji (left) after his release in Callao, Peru, on December 6, 2023.
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Martin Mejia/AP
The conflict claimed nearly 70,000 lives, a truth commission found, with the military responsible for more than a third of the deaths. Journalists and businessmen were kidnapped, students disappeared and at least 2,000 highland peasant women were forcibly sterilised.
In 1996, Fujimori’s majority in the Diet put him on track to run for a third term by passing a law that ruled that his first five years as president would not count because the new constitution had not yet come into effect when he was elected.
A year later, Fujimori’s parliament fired three Constitutional Court judges who had tried to overturn the law, and his enemies accused him of imposing a democratically elected dictatorship.
At the time, almost daily revelations revealed the enormous scale of corruption surrounding Fujimori. Some 1,500 people linked to his government were indicted on corruption and other charges, including eight former cabinet ministers, three former army chiefs, an attorney general and a former Supreme Court chief justice.
The charges against Fujimori have led to years of legal wrangling. In December, Peru’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori on Christmas Eve 2017 by then-President Pablo Kuczynski. Wearing a face mask and supplemental oxygen, Fujimori walked out of the prison doors and into a sport utility vehicle driven by his daughter-in-law.
His last public appearance was on September 4, when he left a private hospital in a wheelchair. He told reporters that he had undergone a CT scan and when asked if his presidential candidacy was still on, he smiled and said, “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
