Peru will bury former President Alberto Fujimori on Saturday, who ruled with an iron fist between 1990 and 2000 and spent his final years in prison for corruption and crimes against humanity.
Peru’s former strongman, of Japanese origin, died on Wednesday at the age of 86 at his home in Lima from cancer.
After three days of national mourning, Peru will bid farewell, during an equally national funeral, to Alberto Fujimori, who marked Peru’s recent history by fighting the Maoist guerrillas, but who also deeply divided his fellow countrymen.
Nearly a quarter of a century after leaving power in exile, the right-wing leader nicknamed “El Chino” (The Chinese) has as many supporters as he does detractors.
Since Thursday, thousands of his supporters have marched in front of his coffin at the Ministry of Culture. Many have come with flowers, photos and the former president’s face printed on T-shirts.
“He defeated terrorism and was the best president Peru could have,” said Jackeline Vilchez, who comes from a family of “Fujimoristas” and came to pay homage in front of the residence of the former head of state.
For some, he remains the man who stimulated the country’s economic growth through his ultra-liberal policies and successfully fought the guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso (Maoist) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Guevarist).
After his victory over Sendero Luminoso and the arrest of its leader Abimael Guzman, the American magazine Time named him South American Personality of the Year in 1993.
– 16 years in prison –
Others, on the contrary, remember above all the corruption scandals and his authoritarian methods.
Relatives of victims of massacres perpetrated by the army under his leadership deplored the fact that he died without showing remorse.
“He left without asking for forgiveness from the families (of the victims, ed.), he made fun of us,” Gladys Rubina, sister of one of the victims of the Barrios Altos massacre, told AFP in tears Lima.
The former leader was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity, specifically for two massacres of civilians committed by an army squadron as part of the fight against Sendero Luminoso in the early 1990s: one in the Barrios Altos neighborhood (15 dead, including a child) and the other at Cantuta University (ten dead).
The former leader was also prosecuted for the 1992 murder of six peasants suspected of being linked to Sendero Luminoso by soldiers.
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the internal conflict of the 1980s and 1990s left approximately 69,000 dead and 21,000 missing in Peru, mostly civilians.
After 16 years in prison, he was released in December by order of the Constitutional Court “for humanitarian reasons,” despite opposition from the inter-American judicial system.
– “Let history be the judge” –
Alberto Fujimori had been hospitalized several times in recent years. He was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his tongue and, in 2018, he made public his diagnosis of lung cancer.
His health had deteriorated rapidly in recent days, sources close to the family told AFP.
The former president burst onto the public scene in 1990 with his unexpected electoral victory over the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, future Nobel Prize winner for literature.
His daughter Keiko Fujimori took up his political baton but failed three times in the second round of the presidential election.
According to his daughter, as recently as July, Fujimori had been considering a comeback attempt in the 2026 elections.
On his 80th birthday in 2018, he told AFP: “Let history judge what I did well and what I did badly.”
His downfall began in 2000 due to a corruption scandal. He then took refuge in Japan, a country of which he also had citizenship, and resigned by fax.
Lima then spent years trying to convince Tokyo to extradite him, in vain. After a long legal battle, it was finally Chile, where Alberto Fujimori had gone in 2005, that extradited the former president two years later.