Peru's Alberto Fujimori leaves complicated legacy

With two countries of birth, Peru and Japan, Alberto Fujimori's very nationality was an anomaly.

Fujimori, who died on September 11 at the age of 86, could never have become president if he had not been born in Peru. And according to his Peruvian passport, he came into the world in Lima in 1938, the son of Japanese immigrants.

However, a 1997 journalistic investigation found that his father had also entered him into a Japanese birth register — and had given his place of birth as Japan.

Fujimori took advantage of this loophole in 2000, when he fled into exile in Japan, resigning the leadership of Peru by fax. By that time, "El Chino" ("The Chinese"), as the Peruvians called him, had been in office for 10 years. He had just won his third presidency, in what was probably a rigged election, when serious allegations of corruption were made against him and the head of his secret service.

Latin American dream

Fujimori's rise to the top was as sensational as his fall. As the son of cotton pickers from an ethnic minority, he was not an obvious candidate for greatness.

However, Fujimori made it to university, where he forged a remarkable academic career. He studied agricultural engineering, mathematics and physics in Peru, France and the United States, was appointed university dean, then rector, eventually becoming president of the National Commission of Peruvian University Rectors.

He entered politics in the late 1980s, and ran for president in 1990 as a rank outsider, the candidate of the protest party Cambio 90 (Change 90). There was widespread frustration with the established political class at the time, and this enabled Fujimori to defeat the right-wing liberal candidate — Mario Vargas Llosa, later a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature — in the runoff.

Fujimori's victory owed more to the left's dislike of Vargas Llosa than to Fujimori's charisma. The image of the diminutive, finger-pointing professor at the lectern came across as the antithesis of the South American dictator.

But Fujimori's energetic way of speaking, his short, concise sentences, appealed to many who came from simple backgrounds. And his motto — "honesty, technology, work" — was effective because, coming from this hardworking upstart, it carried conviction.

This was also why the majority of the population applauded when, in 1992, the president centralized power, suspended the constitution and shut down Congress, whose deputies the public considered to be thoroughly corrupt.

The following year, he replaced the system of two legislative chambers with a newly elected, single-assembly parliament, in which he now had a majority, in a sort of "self-coup." 

Defeating inflation and terrorism

In addition to Peru's political transformation, Fujimori tackled the country's two main problems: the economy, and the civil war.

In the 1990s, the country found itself in a deep economic and debt crisis, exacerbated by hyperinflation. Fujimori trimmed inflation to bearable levels with a currency reform and a drastic neoliberal approach dubbed the "Fujishock." It brought Peru some of the most economically successful years in its history.

Fujimori was also successful in combating both the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru leftist rebels. Under Fujimori, the military changed its strategy in relation to the civil war. Instead of massacring suspected collaborators and their relatives, retaliation of this kind was largely left to the rebels; the military's emphasis shifted to more targeted strikes against the terrorists.

Efforts were also made to gain the trust of the long-suffering rural population, depriving the guerrillas of support. By 1997, after passing a series of amnesty laws, Fujimori had finally persuaded both groups to disband and surrender their weapons.

Flight to Japan

Fujimori loyalists, of whom there are many, still celebrate his successes to this day.

However, they are inclined to ignore the dark side of his rule: murderous death squads, corruption, nepotism, mass forced sterilization of Indigenous women and extrajudicial shootings. All of these have been well documented, thanks to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in 2001.

Allegations of corruption had been swirling around Fujimori for some time before his highly controversial 2000 reelection. Shortly afterwards, videos emerged that showed Fujimori's right-hand man, his secret service chief Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing opposition politicians.

The president fled Peru for the land of his ancestors — but ambition eventually lured him back. He wanted to lead his party's 2006 election campaign from neighboring Chile, even planning to return and run for office himself.

However, Chile complied with a request from the Peruvian judiciary and arrested Fujimori shortly after he arrived there in late 2005. In 2007, he was finally extradited to Peru.

Sentenced to 25 years

Just one day into his trial, Fujimori was sentenced to six years in prison for abuse of power, after he confessed to ordering a house search without a warrant. The judges subsequently also found him guilty of trespassing, bribery, embezzlement, attempted obstruction of justice and human rights abuses, including the ordering of massacres and kidnappings.

The combined sentences totaled more than 50 years, but would be served concurrently, meaning Fujimori would spend 25 years in prison.

By this time, the former president was 69 years old and already in poor health. On this basis, he argued for years, in vain, that he should at least be allowed to serve out his sentence under house arrest. In a 2012 opinion poll, 59% of respondents were in favor of a pardon.

Release on humanitarian grounds

In 2017, Fujimori was indeed pardoned by President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. The move divided Peruvian society, also because it was presumably part of a political deal between Kuczynski and Fujimori's party, now led by his daughter, Keiko.

But in an an equally controversial move, the pardon was annulled in 2018, sending Fujimori back to Barbadillo Prison on the outskirts of Lima.

He was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in December 2023, two-thirds of the way through his sentence.

This article was originally written in German.

Edited by: Martin Kuebler