Alberto Fujimori, former controversial president of Peru, dies at 86

Sept. 11 (UPI) — Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru who led the country through the turbulent 1990s, has died following a battle with cancer, his daughter, Keiko Fujimori, announced Wednesday night. He was 86 years old.

“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just departed to meet the Lord,” she said on social media. “We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the enter rest of his soul.

“Thanks for so much, dad!”

The senior Fujimori’s death comes after he announced in May that he had been diagnosed with a new malignant tumor.

The Peruvian leader of Japanese immigrants had battled cancer for decades, stating in the spring that the fight had begun 27 years earlier.

He had run Peru as a three-term president from 1990 to 2000, when he fled the country amid a scandal involving his intelligence chief who was caught on video paying a bribe to an opposition legislator.

From a Tokyo hotel room on Nov. 20, 2000, he resigned via fax.

He was arrested and deported back to Peru after moving to Chile in 2005 en route to Peru where he had intentions to run for another term. He was then convicted on multiple charges, including those stemming from the deaths of 25 dissidents in 1991 and 1992 as well the kidnapping of an investigative journalist.

In 2013, Fujimori had sought a pardon on humanitarian grounds as he was fighting tongue cancer that was rejected by then President Ollanta Humala.

However, he was released in December 2017 by then President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski due to health reasons. In a statement, Kuczynski had said that he believes “that those of us who consider ourselves democrats cannot allow Alberto Fujimori to die in prison.”

His pardon was then overturned and he was returned to prison in early 2019 but was again granted a pardon in December 2023.

Fujimori’s initial election to Peru’s highest office is notable because he was a comparative long-shot candidate, including up to weeks before the election.

The agronomist — who was educated in the United States and France — taught at Peru’s University of La Molin, but became better known due to the television program he hosted from 1987 to 1988. Ostensibly about agriculture and the environment, the show though would inevitably cover government policy and showed him to be an adapt analyst.

A UPI report published following Fujimori having fled Peru for Japan states that voters outside the capital Lima were attracted to him because he looked and sounded like the rural residents.

When he assumed office, Fujimori inherited a country facing a drastic economic crisis and an insurgency of the Maoist Shining Path Guerrillas.

Fujimori led with an authoritarian hand that garnered him high approval ratings, steered the economy on a more sustainable course and captured Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Shining Path.

He then won a second term in 1995 followed by an unprecedented third in 2000, which soon became marred by the bribery scandal involving his intelligence chief.

Alejandro Aguinaga, who had served as Fujimori’s minister of health, remarked on X on Wednesday that it was “a true honor” to have worked under the former president.

“You were, without a doubt, the best president in the history of the country,” he said. “Before your leadership, Peru was mired in the despair of hyperinflation and terrorism. With your courage and vision, you helped Peru to be reborn.”

Fujimori is to be buried Saturday in Campo Fe Huachipa cemetery, his daughter said.

“We appreciate your support and great displays of solidarity in these painful times,” she said.

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