(Lima) Peru began a three-day national mourning on Thursday, the day after 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.
An emotional crowd of his supporters marched Thursday past the coffin of the former president who marked Peru’s recent history by fighting Maoist guerrillas but deeply divided his compatriots.
The former Peruvian strongman died on Wednesday at the age of 86 at his home in Lima after being treated for mouth cancer.
Peru announced a national funeral and declared three days of mourning until Saturday, when he was buried.
PHOTO GERARDO MARIN, REUTERS
Alberto Fujimori’s son Kenji mourns his father’s death near his coffin.
President Dina Boluarte attended the wake but left without making a statement as Congress observed a minute of silence.
Nearly a quarter of a century after leaving power in exile, the right-wing leader of Japanese origin, nicknamed “El Chino” (The Chinese), had as many supporters as detractors.
He had the courage to “face terrorism.” “At the time he took over the country, we couldn’t even go out on the streets, there were bombings, we couldn’t go through a police station, we couldn’t go through banks,” said Milagros Parra, a 54-year-old Peruvian.
Like her, thousands of supporters lined up to see Fujimori’s body at the Culture Ministry. Many came with flowers, photos and the former president’s face printed on T-shirts.
Earlier, dozens of supporters had waited for the coffin to be taken out of his residence to be placed in a hearse.
Isabel Perez, a 56-year-old nurse, held up a sign that read: “This is the best president Peru has ever had.”
“He was an authoritarian,” says Elizabeth Martinez, 61, without stopping in front of the former president’s house.
Released for “humanitarian reasons”
PHOTO MARTIN MEJIA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Alberto Fujimori in 2016
The former leader was released in December by order of the Constitutional Court “for humanitarian reasons”, despite opposition from 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.
The former president had been hospitalized several times in recent years.
He had been diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his tongue and in 2018 he made public a diagnosis of a lung tumor.
His health had deteriorated rapidly in recent days, sources close to the family told AFP.
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.
For some, he remains 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.
Peru approved a law in early August prescribing 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.