Who was Alberto Fujimori, the convicted former president of Peru who died after suffering from cancer?

This Wednesday, September 11, 2024, Alberto Fujimori passed awayformer president of Peru, at 86 years old after suffering from tongue cancer.

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Alberto Kenya Fujimori Inomoto He was a politician of Asian descent born in Lima, Peru, on July 28, 1938.

Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori burst into politics in 1990 and has since divided Peruvian society. This division, which persists to this day, separates those who praise his figure, those who claim that he saved his country from terrorism and economic collapse, and those who point out that he was an autocrat who committed serious human rights violations.

Fujimori, 86, died on Wednesday at the Lima home of his daughter Keiko. He died in freedom after a controversial decision that allowed him to leave prison last December.

Nicknamed Chino for his oriental features, despite being of Japanese descent, he was born in 1938 and ruled Peru with an iron fist between 1990 and 2000.

On the first occasion, he defeated the writer Mario Vargas Llosa as an anti-establishment candidate. and was re-elected twice more amid allegations of fraud.

On April 5, 1992, Fujimori carried out a coup d’état with the support of the Armed Forces that led him to assume all powers of the State, after closing Congress and intervening in the Judiciary and the Constitutional Guarantees Court.

Following pressure from countries and international organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS), The ruler called a Constituent Congress that promulgated a new Political Constitution in 1993, which is still in force.

In 1994, he divorced Susana Higuchi after a family conflict that included his wife filing a complaint with Congress. that she had been tortured by the security services, and led her eldest daughter, Keiko, to become the country’s first lady when she was just 19.

Higuchi passed away in December 2021 at the age of 71, from lung cancer that he had been suffering from for the past few years.

Fujimori’s supporters admire him for having defeated the terrorist groups Sendero Luminoso and MRTA during his administration, and for having stopped the “hyperinflation” that he inherited from Alan García’s first government (1985-1990).

However, serious human rights violations were also committed during his mandate. and the largest corruption network in Peruvian history was created, led by his “shadow” advisor Vladimiro Montesinos, who is also in prison.

In September 2000, when a video was released showing Montesinos giving money to an opposition congressman, he was forced to announce that he was going to call new elections, which he said he would not run in.

Two months later, he fled the country and resigned from the presidency via a fax sent from Japan, where he remained until 2005, when he traveled to Chile, which extradited him to Peru in 2007 to face charges of corruption and human rights violations.

In 2009, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights abuses, including the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres.

The former president served his sentence in 2009 in a Lima police prison adapted exclusively for him, which, according to his opponents, was a “golden prison” that did not compare to the conditions of the rest of the country’s prison population and where he continually received his family and supporters.

In that prison he gradually gained fellow inmates. For months he shared it with Alejandro Toledo, his main opponent at the end of his term, and Pedro Castillo, whose coup message reminded many of that delivered by Fujimori in 1992.

Over the past few years, Chino has undergone six operations for a precancerous condition in his tongue, known as leukoplakia, and also faced stomach, vascular, blood pressure and lung problems.

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