The Peruvian politician’s family informed that Alberto Fujimori passed away on September 11 in Lima at the age of 86. “After a long battle against cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just left to meet the Lord. We ask those who appreciated him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul,” wrote his daughter Keiko in her X account.
In December 2023, a Constitutional Court ruling allowed him to be released from prison, where he was sentenced to 25 years for crimes against humanity, under a supposedly reinstated “humanitarian pardon” that was initially granted by former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. The controversial decision of the Constitutional Court defied the express order of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
A neoliberal and repressive administration
A few months ago, Fujimori, an agricultural engineer, tacitly suggested that he might return to political life as a candidate for the presidency of Peru. Fujimori was first elected president on June 10, 1990, defeating novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who had proposed a series of privatizations to stabilize the economy. Fujimori won the second round with a populist discourse. What few expected at the time, was that it would be Fujimori himself who would initiate the radical transformation of the Peruvian economy (called “Fujishock”) into a neoliberal one. He oversaw the almost total elimination of state subsidies, the privatization of state enterprises, the reduction of the state’s economic capacity, and an increase of repressive control mechanisms.
This allowed him to stage a self-coup and declare himself dictator on April 5, 1992, in alliance with the Peruvian Army and the secret approval of major Western powers. According to Fujimori, the coup was necessary to carry out economic “adjustments” without the “obstruction” of Congress and to confront the guerrilla groups in the country. And the truth is that the authoritarian Fujimori plan worked almost perfectly, as they were able to establish neoliberal economic policies in record time and defeat the Peruvian guerrillas. But it was not a “clean” victory for the Peruvian State, which, in its confrontation with the insurgent groups, committed abhorrent human rights violations against many people who were not part of the armed conflict, this includes forced sterilization of thousands of Indigenous women, massacres of peasants and workers, and more.
It was revealed years later that the Peruvian army committed summary executions of guerrillas who had either already surrendered or were unarmed, as it happened sometime later in the seizure of the Japanese embassy by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). Furthermore, although his neoliberal economic plan managed to stabilize the economy and generate a sustained increase in GDP, it condemned hundreds of thousands of Peruvians to poverty. During the 1990s alone, the gap between the richest and the poorest rose to record levels. Today, the poorest families in the country earn just under USD 120 per month, seven out of 10 Peruvians live in poverty.
The Peruvian, Colombian, and Chilean cases demonstrate that neoliberal economic reconversions have only been able to be implemented in Latin America in the context of a great deal of political repression by the state and widespread violation of human rights. This dual process (repression by the forces of law and order and neoliberal measures) seems to have been the recipe for neoliberal “success” in Latin American countries.
Fujimori’s idyllic dream began to crumble in the year 2000, when the serious acts of corruption in his government, promoted by some officials very close to the dictator, became known. The videos of Fujimori’s right-hand man, Vladimiro Montesinos, delivering packages of money (bribes) to businessmen, politicians, and others were especially famous. Fujimori fled Peru and resigned by fax from Japan. But in 2007 he was apprehended in Chile and extradited to Peru, where, as mentioned above, he was convicted of corruption and crimes against humanity.
The legacy of a dictator
Fujimori’s legacy is celebrated by the country’s most radical right wing. He is seen by many as the architect of the destruction of insurgent groups in Peru during the 1990s. He is also seen as the president who put public finances “in order” in a country that was in macroeconomic chaos. This explains why, to this day, his political heirs (his children) continue to be voted for by millions of Peruvians, who see in Fujimorism a sort of family caste that upholds certain political values such as anti-communism, populist conservatism, and the ability to resolve the country’s internal conflicts with radical solutions.
But his legacy is also harshly criticized by political actors on the right, center, and left, as well as by many human rights organizations that see in his government a model of political management based on authoritarianism, repression, and the radicalization of a neoliberal economic model that still maintains Peru as one of the most unequal countries in the world. It must also be taken into account that the convictions executed for crimes against humanity cannot be easily forgotten from the Peruvian collective memory.
Finally, it is necessary to say that his legacy is not dead, so it is expected that Fujimorism will continue to be a relevant political force in the coming years in Peru, and this may be an obstacle for several political processes that seek to improve the management of a state that today continues to be an entity that does not seem to be able to establish a national project different from the stale neoliberal model that currently prevails in the Andean country.
