Alberto Fujimori, politician who restored order to Peru but was seen by many as a tyrant and thug

He defeated the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru terrorists and brought down runaway inflation but was later convicted of human-rights abuses

Alberto Fujimori, the former Peruvian president who has died aged 86, was to his supporters the man who saved Peru from the evils of terrorism and economic collapse; to his detractors, he was a corrupt authoritarian thug who rode roughshod over democratic institutions in order to stay in power.
Fujimori was a political unknown until weeks before Peru’s 1990 presidential election in which, with his new party, Cambio 90, he defeated the favourite, centre-Right candidate, the author Mario Vargas Llosa. He was the first person of East Asian descent to become head of state of a Latin American nation, and (after Arthur Chung, former president of Guyana), the second person of East Asian descent to become head of a non-Asian state.
Fujimori was credited with restoring macroeconomic stability after the disastrous presidency of Alan García, who had bequeathed an inflation rate of more than 7,000 per cent. He was also credited with defeating the Marxist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and Tupac Amaru revolutionary movements who controlled and terrorised much of Peru’s countryside and shanty towns.
In 1997 he personally directed the rescue of 74 hostages held by Tupac Amaru rebels in the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima. The siege ended with commandos storming the building, killing all 14 rebels.
But his popular support was eroded by growing disillusionment with his autocratic ways. In 1992 Fujimori sent tanks to shut down the country’s congress and courts, an “auto-coup” which enabled him to engineer a more subservient replacement under a new constitution. He was also tainted by his close ties with his unpopular intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos, with whom he had controlled almost all aspects of Peruvian society, from Congress to the courts to television stations.
In September 2000, four months after Fujimori had won a third term as president, a cable television station broadcast a video of Montesinos appearing to give a bribe of $15,000 to an opposition congressman for his defection to Fujimori’s party. The allegations severely compromised Fujimori, who announced a new election, in which he declared he would not participate. 
In late 2000, as an interim government began to examine his record, he left Peru to attend an international summit in Brunei and then continued on to Japan, where he lived in self-imposed exile, fighting off attempts to extradite him for trial in Peru.
Alberto Ken’ya Fujimori is believed to have been born in Lima on July 26 1938, though he later gave his date of birth as July 28, Peruvian Independence Day, while other reports gave it as August 4 1938. His Japanese parents, Naoichi, a cotton farmer and later a tailor, and Mutsue, née Inomoto, had moved to Peru four years earlier, and he had dual Peruvian and Japanese citizenship. His parents were Buddhist, though he was brought up as a Roman Catholic.
Educated at La Gran Unidad Escolar Alfonso Ugarte in Lima, he went on to study agricultural engineering at the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, graduating top of his year.
In 1964 he went on to study physics at the University of Strasbourg in France then won a Ford scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, where he took a master’s degree in mathematics in 1969. Returning to the Universidad Nacional Agraria, he became dean of the sciences faculty and, in 1984, rector of the university. From 1987 to 1989 he hosted a national television show, Concertando (“Getting Together”), which served as a platform for building up a reputation as a political pundit.
During the 1990 presidential election campaign, under the simple slogan “Honesty, technology and work”, Fujimori exploited public distrust of Vargas Llosa’s links with the Peruvian political establishment, and concern about the writer’s policies of neoliberal economic reform. His Japanese descent, too, helped to set him apart from the Spanish-dominated political elites. He went down particularly well in rural areas, where his knowledge of agronomy gave him an advantage in conversing with Indian campesinos.
Few pundits held out much hope for a man with no party machine behind him and few known policies. But within weeks of taking office, Fujimori, backed by International Monetary Fund advisers, had embarked on a radical programme of free-market reforms, removing subsidies, privatising state-owned companies, and hacking back the state. These measures brought hardship for ordinary Peruvians, who called the programme “Fujishock”, but they succeeded in ending rampant hyperinflation and paved the way for economic growth in the second half of the decade.
Fujimori also moved quickly to tackle the Left-wing rebels whose 10-year insurgency had brought the country to the brink of anarchy. In 1992, when he dissolved the opposition-dominated Peruvian congress and courts and seized dictatorial powers, he justified the measure by arguing that these institutions had been frustrating the security forces in their fight against the rebels.
He called for elections for what was named the “Democratic Constitutional Congress” and received a majority in this new congress, which later drafted the 1993 constitution. He also set about co-opting the judiciary, as well as enacting severe “emergency laws” to deal with terrorism.
There was little initial domestic resistance to all this. An opinion poll carried out in 1993 gave Fujimori a 73 per cent approval rating and he was soon vindicated in the eyes of many ordinary Peruvians by the capture of Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path.
In 1995 Fujimori stood for re-election and won a landslide victory over Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations. His independent party won control of the congress.
But as Peru began to return to something resembling stability, there was a growing chorus of concern that Fujimori’s authoritarian methods were being used to stifle legitimate democratic debate. Critics accused him of using the National Intelligence Service to intimidate and spy on political opponents. They also accused him of exerting control on the media and the judiciary and of using government resources for his own political campaigns.
In the forefront of the attack was Susana Higuchi, Fujimori’s former wife, from whom he had been separated in a messy, public divorce in 1996. She publicly denounced her former husband as a tyrant and accused him of corruption, claiming that he had appropriated donations made by Japanese foundations for his own purposes.
Criticism mounted as Fujimori announced that he would be seeking a third term – something which was illegal under the constitution he himself had written in 1993. Fujimori countered that as he had first been elected under the previous constitution, he had technically only served one term. When the constitutional court disagreed with him, he sacked the judges.
Had Fujimori not sought a third term, it seems probable that he would have gone down in history as one of Peru’s greatest presidents. Instead the blatantly rigged election exposed his close relationship with Vladimiro Montesinos, his hated chief  of intelligence and political fixer. When the Montesinos scandal broke, the game was up.
After Fujimori’s flight to Japan, a new transitional government set up commissions to investigate what had gone on in the previous regime, uncovering a murky web of bribery, connivance in drug trafficking and murder. 
In early 2001 a Peruvian Supreme Court judge ordered Fujimori’s arrest on various charges, including his alleged involvement with the Grupo Colina, a paramilitary death squad attached to Peru’s Intelligence Service which was allegedly responsible for a number of “disappearances” and extrajudicial executions.
Fujimori denied all allegations, claiming to be the victim of political persecution. In 2003, a formal request for extradition was turned down by Japan. Undaunted by the judicial proceedings underway against him, in 2003 Fujimori, working from Japan, established a new political party in Peru, Sí Cumple, to participate in the 2006 presidential elections.
Heartened by evidence that his party was winning 30 per cent ratings in the polls, in October 2005 he announced he was planning a political comeback. But in 2007 he was finally extradited to Peru, and in 2009 he was given a 25-year jail sentence for human-rights violations.
In 2017, after his congressman son Kenji had helped President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski survive an impeachment, Fujimori received a presidential pardon, which was overturned and reinstated several times by various higher courts. He was finally released from prison in December 2023, and had begun making public appearances again, despite having been diagnosed with cancer.
Alberto Fujimori married Susana Higuchi in 1974; they had four children but divorced in 1996; their son Kenji served as a congressman, while their daughter Keiko also served in congress, and, for a time, as her father’s “first lady”; she ran unsuccessfully for president three times. In 2006 he married his long-term partner, the Japanese businesswoman Satomi Kataoka.
Alberto Fujimori, born July 26 1938, died September 11 2024