In an autobiography he published from prison, former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori wrote that his parents, Japanese immigrants, shared one simple hope on the eve of his birth: “that the newborn be capable of keeping the family name alive.”
Fujimori, who died Wednesday at 86, wildly surpassed those expectations. The Fujimori name not only survived but also has dominated Peruvian politics for the past three decades. No leader since Fujimori has reshaped Peru as much as he did—or left as divisive a legacy. “He changed so much about life in Peru,” José Ragas, a Peruvian historian and the author of the book The Fujimori Years (1990-2000), told Foreign Policy. “From what we buy and how we’re seen abroad. Even the way we talk.”
Many in Peru will remember Fujimori for ending an era of bread lines and terrorist attacks that scarred a generation, and for leaving the country with fresh wounds and new challenges, chief among them Fujimori himself. During his two terms in office, bookended by his sudden rise to power in 1990 and his resignation via fax from Japan in 2000, Fujimori restructured Peru’s economy, rewrote its constitution, and reordered politics and institutions around support for his increasingly corrupt and authoritarian regime.
To many Peruvians today, the Fujimori name is synonymous with brutality and deceit. The courts have upheld that view, finding him guilty in 2009 of murder in the massacres of civilians and of kidnapping a journalist and a businessman, and later of embezzling funds and usurping government functions. He will go down in history as the first president to be imprisoned in Peru through a judicial process widely considered fair—a watershed moment that won Peru international kudos for fighting the impunity of the powerful.
Fujimori, who was released from prison last December after Peru’s top court controversially reinstated a 2017 presidential pardon he’d received, died of cancer at the home of his daughter, the opposition leader Keiko Fujimori, in the Peruvian capital of Lima. He also died with two trials against him unconcluded and millions of dollars in civil reparations unpaid. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his son, former lawmaker Kenji Fujimori, and their siblings, Sachi and Hiro Fujimori, all from his first marriage to the late Susana Higuchi. He also leaves behind his second wife, Satomi Kataoka, as well as several grandchildren.
Well over two decades after his downfall, Peru still hasn’t fully gotten past Fujimori. His daughter Keiko has kept his right-wing populist movement alive, nearly winning the presidency in three elections and locking Peru into a repetitive battle over the Fujimori legacy—a reminder of the staying power of even the most controversial political dynasties.
Like other right-wing Latin American strongmen, Fujimori pursued leftist rebels aggressively and embraced neoliberal policies that swept much of the developing world at the end of the Cold War, making Peru a close ally of Washington. He named Vladimiro Montesinos, a former CIA asset with connections to drug traffickers, as his spy director and chief advisor, a decision that Keiko would later describe as the worst mistake of his life.
A former math professor who was democratically elected president in a 1990 landslide, Fujimori had an authoritarian streak from the start. During his first years in office, he was hugely popular, especially because of—and not despite—his infamous “Fujimorazo,” or self-coup, in 1992, when he sent the military to close Peru’s Congress, the courts, and newsrooms and suspended the constitution.
While the coup marked a clear break with democracy, it was supported by more than 80 percent of Peruvians. “A good part of Fujimori’s popularity is because a lot of Peruvians saw a Peruvian [Augusto] Pinochet in him,” Nobel Prize-winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who lost the 1990 election to Fujimori, wrote in 2003, referring to the longtime Chilean military dictator.
Fujimori liked to describe his political project as “reengineering Peru” rather than governing it. As president, he wore business suits with ties, his hair parted and brushed into a neat wave, square glasses framing his face. He crisscrossed the country, visiting far-flung villages and shantytowns, and projected confidence, as at ease wading into the mud of a flood-stricken village as he was flirting with regime-friendly female journalists, known as his “geishas” in Peruvian pop culture.
Dozens of words and phrases used today hark back to Fujimori or episodes from his government—the “Fujimorization” of Peruvian Spanish. He captivated media attention for a decade, his public image changing as his grip on power shifted. There was Fujimori the populist outsider, riding into the 1990 presidential race on a red tractor; Fujimori the decisive leader; Fujimori the vengeful dictator; and, finally, Fujimori the prisoner, shouting “I’m innocent!” in a courtroom.
The soap opera that was his family life also played out on the nightly news. In one six-year period, his first wife, Higuchi, denounced him for alleged corruption and adultery, accused him of ordering intelligence agents to torture her, divorced him, and vowed to defeat him in the 1995 presidential election (he barred her party from participating, but she won a seat in Congress in 2000. Fujimori responded by appointing their daughter Keiko, then 19, as his new first lady to replace her.
Like former U.S. President Donald Trump, Fujimori had a knack for connecting to the working poor in a way that defied the script of identity politics. A university rector before running for office, Fujimori became the first Japanese Peruvian president in a country where the majority of citizens were poor and had Indigenous roots. He co-opted the rhetoric of the left and improved upon it, promising deliverables instead of ideals, Julio Carrión, the editor of a book of essays titled The Fujimori Legacy: The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru, told Foreign Policy. “He said, ‘What you need is a little health clinic in your town, a school, a bridge. You need things you can see and feel. And above all, security,’” Carrión said, describing Fujimori’s approach. “‘Security, security, security!’”
Fujimori described his improbable rise to power as fated. He told journalists that he ran for president because a soothsayer had predicted he would win, and he claimed in his autobiography that his father had a similar vision when Fujimori was born.
According to his birth certificate, Alberto Kenya Fujimori was born in Lima on Peru’s independence day, July 28, 1938. He was the second of four children of Naoichi Fujimori, a tailor, and Mutsue Inomoto, a homemaker, both from Japan’s Kumamoto prefecture.
His parents, along with tens of thousands of their compatriots, migrated to Peru in the early 20th century under labor contracts that were designed to cut costs at large agricultural estates after the abolishment of slavery a half-century earlier. They spent their first years in Peru as sharecroppers on a cotton plantation, until Naoichi saved up enough money to start a tire-repair workshop in Lima, where the family formed part of a thriving Nikkei community, one of the biggest outside Japan.
World War II brought an ugly backlash. At Washington’s request, Peru stripped Japanese immigrants of rights, sending thousands to internment camps in California and Texas. When Fujimori was a toddler, authorities seized his family’s workshop and, a few years later, shut down the Japanese Peruvian school he was attending, forcing him into another school where he didn’t speak the language and was bullied.
As a boy, Fujimori admired Eva Perón, the populist matriarch of Argentina’s Peronist movement. Bright and studious, he earned a degree in agricultural engineering at La Molina National Agrarian University in Lima, graduating first in his class in 1961. He earned master’s degrees in physics and math, respectively, from the University of Strasbourg in France and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He fell in love with Higuchi, a civil engineer, over math problems they would solve late into the night.
He said it was academia that introduced him to cutthroat politics. In 1977, he ran a failed bid to become deputy rector of the National Agrarian University, but he returned with a fresh plan in the 1984 election and unexpectedly won the rectorship. Instead of trying to forge an alliance with established insiders as he had before, he courted students, the biggest voting bloc in the election, entering the field at the last minute and positioning himself as an outsider.
He won the presidency of Peru in 1990 with a similar strategy. He was a virtual unknown who surged past the lead leftist candidate at the last minute in the first-round vote, winning himself a chance at defeating, in a runoff, the election’s longtime favorite, Vargas Llosa, a novelist from a white aristocratic family.
Peru at the time was ripe for a radical turn. Former President Alan García’s 1985-1990 administration had left the country in ruins. Nationalizations, debt defaults, and the excessive printing of money had wiped out a generation’s life savings and had sunk millions of people into poverty. Inflation ran in the quadruple digits, food shortages were common, and the Shining Path insurgency—one of Latin America’s most ruthless and cultlike rebel movements, which García once said he admired for having a “mystique” that his party lacked—was gaining ground, massacring Indigenous villagers in the Andes and bombing electrical towers to cause power outages in the capital, Lima.
“There were so many blackouts in Lima that people basically learned to live without electricity. We grew up doing our homework by candlelight. No one used refrigerators,” Peruvian journalist Marco Sifuentes told Foreign Policy. “The entire family had to go out to wait in line for bread at different bakeries every morning because bread was rationed and there was never enough.”
Vargas Llosa was a prominent free market advocate and public intellectual who was seen as the natural antidote to García’s fiery nationalism. But voters were not enthused by him (he later said he lacked the natural gifts needed to be a politician), and many worried that his plans for implementing a so-called shock liberalization program would bring only more strife. Fujimori tapped into those anxieties. He ran on a “say no to the shock” platform, promising not to privatize state companies and lambasting his rival for thinking he could “make Peru a Switzerland.”
“You represent the rich, who have already been in power. And you’re going to apply a shock against the poorest,” Fujimori told Vargas Llosa in a presidential debate a week before the election. Fujimori seized on an ad by Vargas Llosa’s campaign that portrayed bureaucrats as monkeys in suits, warning mass firings would occur if Vargas Llosa came to power. “You think we Peruvians are monkeys. Well, we don’t accept being part of an experiment.”
Fujimori beat Vargas Llosa by a stunning 25 percentage points. In his 1993 memoir, A Fish in the Water, Vargas Llosa wrote that he was naive to think Peruvians would vote “for ideas”: “They voted as people vote in an underdeveloped democracy, and sometimes in advanced ones, for images, myths, thrills, or for dark feelings and resentments unhinged from reason.”
Within days of Fujimori taking office, his government implemented shock economic reforms that he had vilified as a candidate. His finance minister wrapped up an announcement about the end of price and currency controls with a foreboding “may God help us.” A series of free market reforms followed that laid the foundation for Peru’s current economic model. Tariffs were slashed, the tax system streamlined, state industries privatized, and labor laws loosened.
The “Fujishock,” as it would become known, worked to stabilize Peru’s economy, bringing back Peru’s access to international loans and foreign investment. Inflation fell to roughly 11 percent by 1995 from more than 7,000 percent in 1990, and recession eventually gave way to years of robust economic growth. “Almost overnight, as Peru’s doors opened to the world, shiny new cars appeared on the streets; supermarket shelves were transformed with imported products,” Sally Bowen, a former Peru correspondent for the Financial Times, wrote in her memoir, Accidental Journalist.
Doors also opened for Fujimori. His economic strategy had secured crucial support from Washington and Lima elites, many of whom would now look the other way as he seized authoritarian powers.
Some considered him a pragmatist, not an ideologue. “Political decisions were made due to expediency,” Bowen wrote in her book. “He loved to make an announcement that would surprise or shock: presumably it gave him a thrill of power.” Political scientists labeled him a “democratic dictator” and an “electoral authoritarian,” one of a pioneering group of strongmen who disguised themselves as democrats, using limited competition in elections as cover for their control of institutions.
Fujimori justified his self-coup as a defense of democracy, necessary to override corruption and implement his anti-terrorism strategy and economic restructuring.
On Sept. 12, 1992, five months after his self-coup, a new political victory fell into Fujimori’s lap. While he was pursuing a hypermilitarized strategy to quash Shining Path rebels, a special police unit that had been formed prior to Fujimori’s rise to power quietly tracked down and captured the rebels’ messianic leader, Abimael Guzmán, one of the most feared and despised figures in Peru at the time. Guzmán had been hiding in a ballet teacher’s apartment in Lima and was soon paraded in a cage before news cameras.
From captivity, Guzmán called on his followers to disarm. Most of them did, effectively ending a 12-year insurgency that had terrorized the nation. (One band of Shining Path rebels refused to give up and formed a splinter group, the Militarized Communist Party of Peru, that continues to hide out in a drug-trafficking region of the country today.)
Although Fujimori had been kept in the dark about the police operation, he framed Guzmán’s arrest as proof that his war on terrorism, as well as the special powers he had seized to wage it, were working. At the same time, special forces and paramilitary groups that Fujimori had deployed to extrajudicially eliminate terrorists were facing growing accusations of horrific human rights abuses. Critics accused Fujimori of using these forces against his political foes.
Peru’s truth commission would later find that of the estimated 69,000 victims of Peru’s 1980-2000 internal conflict, most of whom were Indigenous people, state security forces had killed some 20,000. In 2009, Fujimori was found guilty of commanding paramilitary groups that massacred 15 people, including an 8-year-old boy, at a party in Lima, and the slaying of nine students and a professor in 1991.
But Guzmán’s capture, along with the improving economy, gave a sense of order restored, and in 1993, voters rewarded Fujimori by approving a new constitution that strengthened presidential powers and allowed him to run for a second consecutive term. In 1995, he was reelected in a landslide, beating his closest rival, former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, by more than 40 percentage points.
In his second term, Fujimori racked up more political wins, and fresh controversies. In 1996, he launched a birth control program that was initially embraced by feminists but was later blamed for forcibly sterilizing thousands of Indigenous women in poor Andean regions. In 1997, he commanded a dramatic operation that freed dozens of hostages who had been held captive by Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement rebels at the Japanese Embassy in Lima, and a year later he signed a peace deal with Ecuador that ended a territorial dispute, which was widely seen as a win at home.
It all fell apart on Sept. 14, 2000, when a small cable news channel, Canal N, broadcast a grainy video showing Fujimori’s spymaster, Montesinos—who reportedly received millions of dollars from the CIA during Fujimori’s tenure to help fight the war on drugs—giving stacks of cash to a mayoral candidate. It was the first of a flood of “Vladivideos” from Montesinos’s private collection that would leak to the press, fueling further outrage. Montesinos had videotaped his dirty dealings—allegedly distributing bribes to lawmakers, businessmen, state officials, and media bosses—presumably to save as receipts or use in potential blackmail.
Fujimori tried to distance himself from what Montesinos was up to, but by then, Fujimori had won a third term in a vote that was widely seen as rigged and he was facing growing calls from Washington and the international community to hold new elections. On Nov. 17, 2000, as anti-government protests and unrest spread in Peru, Fujimori flew to Japan after attending a summit in Brunei, checked into a hotel in Tokyo, and sent his resignation letter by fax three days later.
Japan granted Fujimori exile, and for five years he lived there, where he met Satomi Kataoka, a businesswoman from Tokyo’s upper class, whom he would marry in 2006. From there, he plotted a comeback. Peru’s then-president, Alejandro Toledo, was widely unpopular, and Fujimori saw an opportunity in the 2006 elections. This time, however, his audacity backfired. In 2005, he was arrested during a stop in neighboring Chile and two years later was extradited to Peru, where he faced more than 20 counts of criminal charges. He was given his first conviction in 2009.
But that wouldn’t be the last of Fujimori. While he didn’t participate in the 2006 elections, his daughter Keiko did, winning a seat in Congress and leading a fujimorista bloc that still holds some sway today.
Fujimori’s supporters in Congress lobbied for a presidential pardon for years, and on Christmas Eve 2017, then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski granted him one on humanitarian grounds, three days after Kuczynski survived an impeachment vote with the help of a faction of fujimoristas. The move triggered mass protests. Within a year, Kuczynski resigned, and Peru’s Supreme Court annulled the pardon, finding it had been granted illegally. Fujimori was taken back to prison in 2019. In March 2022, Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal reinstated the pardon and ordered Fujimori’s release, but the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled against it before he could be released. In December 2023, the Constitutional Tribunal voted to reaffirm its decision to release Fujimori despite the Inter-American Court’s orders, and he was released shortly after.
But Fujimori wasn’t the last president to be imprisoned, a source of vindication for some of his supporters. Three of his successors went on to be jailed in connection with corruption probes, and a fourth, García, died by suicide to avoid arrest in 2019. At one point, Fujimori shared his prison quarters, built for him at a military base, with Ollanta Humala, a former president who once led a military rebellion against Fujimori’s government, while Humala’s wife was jailed at a women’s prison where Keiko was detained.
Fujimori never admitted to committing crimes, but at times he showed contrition. Days after he was pardoned in 2017, amid an angry backlash, he acknowledged that he had “let down some compatriots.” In a video posted to Facebook, he said, “I ask them to forgive me with all my heart.” This July, Keiko announced that her father intended to run for president again in 2026.
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