The controversial political legacy of the former Peruvian president

He ruled Peru with an iron fist between 1990 and 2000. Alberto Fujimori died Wednesday at the age of 86, a few months after his release from prison where he was serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and human rights violations.

Former President Alberto Fujimori is a prominent figure on the South American continent, who still divides Peruvians. He died at the age of 86 on Wednesday, September 11, just a few months after regaining his freedom. Released in December “for humanitarian reasons”, he spent 16 years in a prison in eastern Lima, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity. These included two massacres of civilians committed in the early 1990s by an army squadron as part of the fight against the Maoist guerrillas. His release from prison had angered the victims’ families, as much as it had delighted his supporters, nostalgic for this man who led Peru between 1990 and 2000. The ultimate contrast of a controversial figure with an improbable destiny.

Alberto Fujimori, a modest agricultural engineer and son of Japanese immigrants, came to power in 1990, almost out of nowhere, by winning the presidential election against Mario Vargas Llosa, who became the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2010. Barely sworn in, the candidate who presented himself as the one for the poor and the excluded imposed a severe austerity cure and privatized everything. This method will remain for some the plan that allowed a country in agony to recover.

Alberto Fujimori also quickly shifted to an authoritarian or even dictatorial power. Peru also ended terrorism and far-left guerrillas, but it was at the cost of targeted assassinations and army operations that he had ordered, such as the Cantuta massacre where nine students and their university professor were assassinated in 1992.

These atrocities earned him a conviction for crimes against humanity by his country’s justice system, which is quite rare. He was convicted in 2009, almost 10 years after his incredible escape to Japan. Surrounded by accusations of corruption, he took advantage of a presidential trip to go into exile and sent his resignation by fax!

Exiled, convicted, imprisoned, this president will remain influential, and it is on his name alone and his controversial political legacy that his daughter will brush with the presidency a few years later. A former sulphurous president who was pursued by another affair: a scandal of forced sterilizations as part of a vast plan to reduce the birth rate. We are talking here about hundreds of thousands of women concerned, most of them in poor communities in the Andes. The case has never been judged.