Peru declared three days of national mourning on Thursday following the death of Alberto Fujimori, who ruled the country with an iron fist between 1990 and 2000 and spent the last years of his life in prison for corruption and crimes against humanity.
A state funeral will be reserved for the former leader, who died Wednesday in Lima at the age of 86, leaving a country deeply divided over him. Mr Fujimori will receive the “funeral honours appropriate to a sitting president”, according to a decree signed by head of state Dina Boularte.
“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just gone to meet the Lord. We ask those who loved him to join us in prayer for the eternal rest of his soul. Thank you for everything, Dad!” announced his children Keiko, Hiro, Sachie and Kenji Fujimori.
Mr Fujimori’s eldest daughter, Keiko, later announced that a wake would be held starting Thursday at the National Museum in Lima, adding that her father’s burial would take place on Saturday.
“We will receive everyone who wants to say goodbye to him in person,” she said on X.
The Presidency of the Republic confirmed “the sad news”, presenting its “sincere condolences to the family”. “May God rest his soul and may he rest in peace”, the presidential statement concluded.
“We will coordinate with the family to find out their wishes regarding the funeral of the former president,” said the ministerial chief of staff.
The former leader, born in Japan, was released in December by order of the Constitutional Court “for humanitarian reasons”, despite the opposition of the Inter-American justice system, after spending 16 years in a prison in eastern Lima.
He was serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity, including two massacres of civilians committed by an army squadron as part of the fight against the Shining Path Maoist guerrillas in the early 1990s.
“He had to pay for what he did, but now that he is dead, what can we do… He has not served his sentence,” said Juana Carrion, president of the Association of Relatives of Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared Persons of Peru.
The former president, nicknamed “El Chino” (the Chinese), who deeply divided the country, has been hospitalized several times in recent years. He was diagnosed in May with a malignant tumor on his tongue, on which he had had a cancerous lesion for more than 27 years. In 2018, Mr. Fujimori made public a diagnosis of a lung tumor.
His health had deteriorated rapidly in recent days, after he had completed radiotherapy to his mouth in August, sources close to the family told AFP.
A Catholic priest arrived on Wednesday afternoon at his home in the San Borja neighborhood of Lima, where he lived with his eldest daughter, Keiko Fujimori.
After the announcement of his death, supporters of Mr. Fujimori marched in front of his residence to pay tribute to him. Like Nancy Gonzalez, for whom the former president had “put an end to terrorism, stabilized the economy.”
Mr Fujimori was last seen in public on September 5 leaving a clinic in the Miraflores neighborhood where he had undergone a CT scan, as he himself revealed.
“Authoritarian and populist”
A follower of neoliberalism, Alberto Fujimori was a “precursor in Latin America of a style of politics,” political analyst Augusto Alvarez told AFP.
According to him, the former president, who burst onto the public scene with his unexpected electoral victory over the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, future Nobel Prize winner for literature, promoted an “authoritarian and populist” model that has been reproduced in many other countries, both by left-wing and right-wing movements.
The former president leaves a mixed image in the country. For some, he is the man who boosted the country’s economic growth with his ultra-liberal policies, and successfully fought the guerrillas of the Shining Path (Maoist) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Guevarist).
Others remember mainly the corruption scandals and authoritarian methods that earned him his conviction.
His daughter Keiko Fujimori took up his political torch but failed three times in the second round of the presidential election.
On July 14, the leader of the country’s main right-wing party announced that her father would run in the 2026 presidential election, not knowing whether she would be able to participate because, prosecuted for money laundering, the prosecution requested a 30-year prison sentence against her.
Peru approved a law in early August declaring statute-barred crimes against humanity committed before 2002 that could have benefited Alberto Fujimori.
Approved despite a resolution by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in mid-June calling for the suspension of the legislative process, it will benefit hundreds of other officers accused of abuses during the internal conflict of the 1980s and 1990s which left some 69,000 dead and 21,000 missing.