Ten years of bloody reign
Peru’s former president Fujimori is dead
12.09.2024, 03:17
Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru for ten years. He led the country to economic growth, but was also responsible for serious human rights violations. He later spent a long time behind bars for this. He has now died from the effects of cancer.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori has died at the age of 86. “After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just been taken up to meet the Lord,” said a message published on X by his daughter Keiko Fujimori on behalf of her three siblings.
Fujimori was President of Peru between 1990 and 2000. At the beginning of his career, he appeared on the political stage out of nowhere as a clean-cut man. He was considered an outsider and initially convinced mainly indigenous people and farmers who were increasingly distrustful of the European-influenced establishment in Lima. Through shock therapy, the pragmatic agricultural scientist ended the economic crisis and hyperinflation and ensured high growth figures for years. At the same time, he had the security forces take rigorous action against left-wing and supposedly subversive forces, and parliament was disempowered. At the time, the state saw itself threatened by the Maoist terrorist organization Shining Path. In addition, tens of thousands of indigenous women were forcibly sterilized in order to reduce the number of children they had. They were seen as an obstacle to development.
Only released since December
Although the constitution only allowed two terms in office, Fujimori ran for a third term in 2000. He won the election, but was soon stumped by the Montesinos scandal. His intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, was filmed giving a bribe to an opposition MP to persuade him to join Fujimori’s party. Fujimori initially fled to Japan, but was arrested on a trip to Chile and subsequently extradited to Peru.
In 2009, Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for serious human rights violations committed by death squads during his time in office. In 2017, he was pardoned and released from prison by then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. However, the Supreme Court later overturned the decision and Fujimori was imprisoned again. Last December, the Constitutional Court finally confirmed the 2017 pardon on humanitarian grounds. Human rights organizations criticized this.
Only in July, Keiko Fujimori, the leader of the right-wing Fuerza Popular party, announced that her father would run for president again.