Peru’s former president Alberto Fujimori dies aged 86

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Peru’s former president Alberto Fujimori has died of cancer aged 86, his family announced on Wednesday.

The hardline conservative led the South American nation from 1990 to 2000, during which he oversaw an economic revival and crushed the “Shining Path” guerrilla group while exerting an authoritarian grip on the country’s politics. In 2009, he was convicted of human rights abuses and corruption during his tenure and given a 25-year sentence.

“After a long battle with cancer, our father Alberto Fujimori has just met the lord,” his daughter Keiko Fujimori, also a prominent politician, wrote on X, in a message also signed by his three other children. “We ask those who appreciated him that they accompany us in praying for his soul’s eternal rest.”

An agronomist of Japanese descent, Fujimori came to power following an economic crisis known in Peru as the “lost decade”. GDP contracted by about a quarter from 1987 to 1990, while hyperinflation led the country to abandon its currency and introduce the nuevo sol, which Peru still uses, in 1991.

In 2009, Fujimori was convicted of ordering the massacres of 25 people in 1991 and 1992. He was released from prison in December last year on humanitarian grounds over his ailing health and left jail on the outskirts of the capital Lima last year in an oxygen mask.

Fujimori had been previously pardoned in December 2017 by then-president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski though he was returned to prison when the Supreme Court overturned the pardon amid pressure from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

The former president remained a towering figure in Peruvian politics until his death, with his daughter in July announcing her intention to run for president in 2026.

Fujimori was a little-known agricultural engineer when he defeated author Mario Vargas Llosa in the race for the presidency in 1990. His family’s origins made him popular among Peru’s peasant masses, descendants of Inca tribes, who felt marginalised by the country’s white elite that traced their roots to Europe.

Fujimori attacked the country’s two pressing problems: economic collapse, including 7,500 per cent annual inflation, and Shining Path, which controlled a third of the country and terrorised the rest.

Citing the need for no-holds-barred policies and backed by army tanks, Fujimori dissolved Congress and suspended the constitution in 1992, taking on dictatorial powers.

When the founder and leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, was captured that year and the group’s back broken, Fujimori paraded the guerrilla chief in prison pinstripes. In 1995, under international pressure to restore democracy, Fujimori reinstated Congress.

The key to his downfall was his closeness to shadowy intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos. In September 2000, a videotape surfaced showing Montesinos bribing an opposition congressman with $15,000 to support Fujimori. Hundreds more videotapes emerged, all recorded by the intelligence chief himself to keep track of his bribes.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Fujimori, while on a visit to Brunei, fled to Japan in November 2000 and was granted citizenship because of his parentage. He resigned the Peruvian presidency by fax, but Peru’s Congress ruled that he had shown “moral incapacity” and called for his extradition. It said there was evidence he had full knowledge of death squads attached to Montesinos and his intelligence service.

Japan refused to extradite him and allowed him to live in exile in Tokyo.

Fujimori claimed he was innocent, blaming Montesinos, and always said he had hoped to return to Peru “in an active role”. Instead, he was arrested in 2005 while visiting Chile and extradited to Peru.