Peru’s former President Alberto Fujimori dies at 86

By Laura Gamba

BOGOTA, Colombia (AA) - Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, 86, passed away Wednesday, his daughter announced in a post on X.

“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just passed away 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 so much, Dad!” Keiko Fujimori wrote, adding her name and those of her three siblings: Hiro, Sachie and Kenji.

Fujimori died in the Peruvian capital Lima nine months after having regained his freedom. The former agronomist, who governed Peru between 1990 and 2000, suffered a number of medical complications since he entered prison in 2007.

In 2009, he was convicted of kidnapping and murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for corruption and human rights violations including being the indirect author of the massacres in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, where 25 were killed.

His time in office was marked by widespread human rights abuses.

“I had to govern from hell. Not from the palace, but from a hell that those who accuse me did not experience as I did. I only hope that those who sentence me try for a moment to imagine that hell and not try to civilize it from a distance,” said Fujimori during the trial against him.

The son of Japanese immigrants was granted a humanitarian pardon by President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2017, but it was annulled within a year by Peru’s Supreme Court and he was sent back to prison in 2019. At the end of 2023, the Constitutional Court released him, but the decision failed to comply with an order by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

The political novice first ran for president in 1990, when he beat the famous writer Mario Vargas Llosa in the second round of the election.

During his presidency, he was credited with crushing two insurgencies -- the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement -- and recognized for reviving the economy after rampant hyperinflation.

On April 5, 1992, he dissolved Congress because he lacked a majority in the legislature and assumed extraordinary powers not granted under normal circumstances.

In 1995, he led a second term marked by accusations of corruption and authoritarianism, and in 2000, he won a third term in government.

In November 2000, he resigned from the presidency while in Japan and avoided extradition to Peru for six years. In 2005, while trying to return to his country, the former president ended up in Chile, which handed him over to the Peruvian justice system after two years. He always maintained his innocence.

In July, his daughter Keiko, who lost the last three elections leading a right-wing populist political movement, said her father would be Fujimorism’s main candidate for the 2026 general elections.