President Alberto Fujimori dies at the age of 86. His decade-long presidency began with triumph, reviving Peru's economy and putting down a brutal rebellion, but ended in the ignominy of authoritarian excess and his subsequent imprisonment.
His death on Wednesday in the capital, Lima, was announced by his daughter, Keiko Fujimori, in a post on X.
He was pardoned in December after being convicted of corruption and taking responsibility for the killings of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he planned to run for Peru's presidency for a fourth time in 2026.
Fujimori, who ruled as a dictator from 1990 to 2000, was convicted of corruption and being responsible for the killings of 25 people but was pardoned in December. His daughter said in July that he planned to run for a fourth term as Peru's president in 2026.
The former university rector and mathematics professor was a total political outsider when he rose from obscurity to win Peruvian elections in 1990, beating the writer Mario Vargas Llosa. During his turbulent political career, he repeatedly made risky and drastic decisions that drew alternate praise and criticism.
He took over a country devastated by runaway inflation and guerrilla violence, and rebuilt the economy with bold moves that included large-scale privatization of state-run industries. He also won widespread support, though it took some time to defeat the fanatic “Light Path” rebels.
However, his presidency has collapsed just as dramatically.
After briefly shutting down Congress and embarking on a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 after a videotape was leaked showing his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers. The president went to Japan, the home country of his parents, and famously faxed his resignation.
Five years later, he stunned both his supporters and opponents when he landed in neighboring Chile, where he was arrested and then extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peru's presidency in 2006, but was eventually indicted and put on trial on charges of abuse of power.
This high-stakes political gambler lost miserably. He became the first former president in the world to be tried and convicted in his own country for human rights violations. Although he was not found to have personally ordered the murders of the 25 convicted death squads, he was deemed responsible because the crimes were committed in the name of his government.
Even after serving his 25-year sentence, Fujimori continued to seek political rehabilitation, which he continued to do from a prison he built inside a police academy on the outskirts of the capital, Lima.
The congressman's daughter, Keiko, ran for president in 2011 to restore power to the family, but lost narrowly in a runoff election. She ran again in 2016 and 2021, but lost by just 44,000 votes, despite promising to free her father.
In 2000, seven months before he left power, Fujimori told The Associated Press that he viewed his political opponents as chess pieces that had to be outwitted by calm.
“I'm a special case in Latin America,” he says, “I've had a special education in an Eastern environment that values discipline and perseverance.”
In reality, President Fujimori's administration was a blatant display of naked authoritarianism, known locally as “caudilismo,” in a region making uneasy progress from dictatorship to democracy.
He has four children: his eldest, Keiko, who became first lady in 1996 when his father divorced his mother, Susana Higuchi, who became embroiled in a bitter feud after accusing Fujimori of torturing her; and his youngest, Kenji, who was elected to parliament.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori waves at his home in Santiago, Chile, after leaving a prison officers training school in the city on May 18, 2006. (AP Photo/Claudio Santana, File)
Fujimori was born on July 28, 1938, Peru's Independence Day, to immigrant parents who picked cotton before opening a tailoring shop in downtown Lima.
He received a degree in agricultural engineering in 1956, then studied in France and the United States, and received a graduate degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.
In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultural University of Lima, and six years later, despite never having held political office, he ran for president, pitching himself as a clean alternative to Peru's corrupt and discredited political class.
He exploited stereotypes of Peruvians as honest, hardworking Asians and offered hope to an economically struggling country, claiming to attract Japanese aid and technology.
He rose from 6% in the polls a month before the 1990 election to finish second out of nine candidates, then defeated Vargas Llosa in the runoff election.
He later said the victory was born out of the same frustration that drove “Shining Path.”
“My government is the product of rejection and loathing of the pettiness, corruption and dysfunction of Peru's traditional political class and bureaucracy,” he said.
When he took office, with the capital ravaged by a series of car bomb attacks and annual inflation approaching 8,000 percent, Fujimori's tough rhetoric and hands-on style initially won him nothing but praise.
He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated but opposed during the election campaign.
President Fujimori privatized state industries, cut public spending and attracted record foreign investment.
Fujimori, nicknamed “El Chino” for his Asian ancestry, often wore peasant clothing when visiting indigenous peoples in the jungle and farmers in the highlands, and provided electricity and drinking water to extremely impoverished villages. This set him apart from other aristocratic white politicians who lacked common sense for the people.
President Fujimori also gave Peruvian security forces free reign to confront the “Path of Light.”
In September 1992, police arrested rebel leader Abimael Guzmán, and the credit, deservedly or not, went to Fujimori.
Perhaps his most famous calculation came in April 1997, when he sent U.S.-trained special forces into the Japanese ambassador's residence, where 14 leftist Túpac Amaru rebels had been holding 72 people hostage for months.
Only one hostage was killed, but all the hostage-takers were allegedly killed on Montesinos' orders.
Having come to power just a few years after dictatorships had collapsed across much of the region, the former university professor ended up becoming a symbol of regression: His hunger for power led him to resort to increasingly anti-democratic tactics to amass more power.
In April 1992, Trump shut down Congress and the courts, accusing them of undermining his efforts to push through economic reform by defeating the “Shining Path.”
International pressure forced Fujimori to call elections for a parliamentary alternative. This new legislative body, dominated by Fujimori's supporters, amended the Peruvian constitution to allow the president to serve two consecutive five-year terms. After a brief border war with Ecuador, Fujimori returned to office in a landslide victory in 1995.
National and international human rights groups have sharply criticized the president for passing a general amnesty law that pardoned human rights violations committed by security forces during “anti-subversive” operations in Peru between 1980 and 1995.
According to a truth commission investigation, the conflict left some 70,000 people dead, more than a third of whom the military was responsible for. Journalists and businessmen were kidnapped, students disappeared, and at least 2,000 plateau peasant women were forcibly sterilized.
In 1996, Fujimori's majority in Congress approved a law that did not count the first five years of his presidential term because the new constitution had not yet been implemented when he was elected, setting him on the path to a third term.
A year later, President Fujimori's Congress fired three Constitutional Court judges who had tried to overturn the law, and his opponents accused him of imposing a democratically elected dictatorship.
At the time, almost daily revelations revealed the enormous scale of the corruption surrounding Fujimori: some 1,500 people connected to his government were indicted on corruption and other charges, including eight former cabinet ministers, three former military commanders, one attorney general and one former chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The charges against Fujimori led to a years-long legal battle. In December, Peru's Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a humanitarian pardon that then-President Pablo Kuczynski granted Fujimori on Christmas Eve 2017. Wearing a mask and receiving supplemental oxygen, Fujimori walked out the prison door and into a sports utility vehicle driven by his daughter-in-law.
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Trump was last seen in public on Sept. 4, leaving a private hospital in a wheelchair. He told reporters he had a CT scan and, when asked if he was still planning on running for president, smiled and said, “We'll see, we'll see.”
