Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru who was convicted of human rights violations, has died at the age of 86.

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Alberto Fujimori, whose 10-year presidency began with triumphs that restored Peru's economy and crushed a brutal insurgency only to end in a disgrace of autocratic excesses that later landed him in prison, has died. He was 86.

His death on Wednesday in the capital Lima was announced by his daughter Keiko Fujimori in a post on X.

In December, he was pardoned of his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he plans to run for Peruvian president for a fourth time in 2026.

Fujimori, who ruled with an increasingly authoritarian hand from 1990 to 2000, was pardoned in December of his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter said in July that he plans to run for Peru's presidency for a fourth time in 2026.

The former university president and mathematics professor was the absolute political outsider when he emerged from obscurity and won the 1990 elections in Peru against the writer Mario Vargas Llosa. During his turbulent political career, he repeatedly made risky, uncompromising decisions that earned him alternate admiration and censure.

He took over a country ravaged by rampant inflation and guerrilla violence and overhauled the economy with bold measures, including mass privatization of state-owned industries. Defeating fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer, but it also earned him widespread support.

However, his presidency failed just as dramatically.

After briefly paralyzing Congress and winning a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked video footage showed his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers. The president traveled to Japan, the country of his parents, and faxed his resignation.

Five years later, he shocked supporters and opponents alike when he ended up in neighboring Chile, where he was arrested and subsequently extradited to Peru. He had hoped to run for Peruvian president in 2006, but instead ended up in court, charged with abuse of power.

The high-risk political gambler was destined to lose miserably. He was the first former president in the world to be tried and convicted for human rights abuses in his own country. While he was not found to have personally ordered the 25 death squad killings for which he was convicted, he was held responsible because the crimes were committed in the name of his government.

His 25-year sentence did not stop Fujimori from seeking his political revenge, which he planned from a prison set up in a police academy on the outskirts of Lima.

His daughter Keiko, a congresswoman, tried to restore the family dynasty by running for president in 2011, but was narrowly defeated in a runoff election. She ran again in 2016 and 2021, but lost by just 44,000 votes, despite promising during the campaign to release her father.

Fujimori told the Associated Press in 2000, seven months before his ouster, that he viewed his political rivals as chess pieces that could be outmaneuvered with cool detachment.

“I am a special case in Latin America,” he said. “I enjoyed a special education in an oriental environment, characterized by discipline and perseverance.”

Indeed, in a region slowly moving away from dictatorship toward democracy, Fujimori’s presidency was a brazen display of outright authoritarianism, known locally as “caudillismo.”

He leaves behind four children. The eldest, Keiko, became First Lady in 1996 when his father divorced his mother, Susana Higuchi, in a bitter dispute in which she accused Fujimori of torturing her. The youngest child, Kenji, was elected as a congressman.

Born on July 28, 1938, Peru's Independence Day, Fujimori's immigrant parents picked cotton until they could open a tailor shop in downtown Lima.

He graduated in agricultural engineering in 1956 and then studied in France and the USA, where he received a degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1972.

In 1984 he became rector of the Agricultural University of Lima and six years later he ran for president without ever having held political office, describing himself as a clean alternative to Peru's corrupt and discredited political class.

He capitalized on the Peruvian stereotype of the honest, hard-working Asian and raised hopes in an economically struggling country by arguing that he would attract Japanese aid and technology.

One month before the 1990 election, his poll rating rose from 6 percent to 2 out of 9. In the runoff election, he defeated Vargas Llosa.

The victory, he later said, was born out of the same frustration that drove the Shining Path.

“My government is the product of rejection, of dissatisfaction with Peru due to the frivolity, corruption and dysfunction of the traditional political class and bureaucracy,” he said.

Once in office, Fujimori initially received only applause for his tough words and practical style, while car bombings were still taking place in the capital and inflation was at nearly 8,000 percent.

He applied the same economic shock therapy that Vargas Llosa had advocated but rejected during the election campaign.

By privatizing state-owned industries, Fujimori drastically cut public spending and attracted record levels of foreign investment.

Affectionately known as “El Chino” because of his Asian heritage, Fujimori often wore peasant garb when visiting indigenous jungle communities and highland farmers, bringing electricity and drinking water to desperately poor villages. This set him apart from patrician white politicians who usually lacked his middle-class touch.

Fujimori also gave Peruvian security forces free rein to take action against the Shining Path.

In September 1992, the police arrested rebel leader Abimael Guzmán. Whether deserved or not, Fujimori reaped the rewards.

Perhaps his most famous calculation came in April 1997, when he sent US-trained commandos to the Japanese ambassador's residence, where 14 left-wing Tupac Amaru rebels had held 72 hostages for months.

Only one hostage was killed. However, all hostage takers were allegedly killed on Montesinos' orders.

When the former university professor left the dictatorships behind him in large parts of the region just a few years after seizing power, he ultimately represented a step backwards. He developed a growing taste for power and resorted to increasingly undemocratic means to accumulate even more power.

In April 1992, he paralyzed Congress and the courts, accusing them of obstructing his efforts to defeat the Shining Path and advance economic reforms.

International pressure forced him to call elections for a new assembly to replace Congress. The new legislative body, dominated by his supporters, amended the Peruvian constitution to allow the president to serve two consecutive five-year terms. Fujimori was overwhelmingly re-elected in 1995 after a brief border war with Ecuador.

Human rights activists at home and abroad sharply criticized him for his efforts to push through a general amnesty law forgiving human rights abuses committed by security forces during Peru's “anti-subversive” campaign between 1980 and 1995.

The conflict cost nearly 70,000 lives, a truth commission found. More than a third of the deaths were at the hands of the military. Journalists and businessmen were kidnapped, students disappeared and at least 2,000 peasant women from the highlands were forcibly sterilized.

In 1996, Fujimori's majority bloc in Congress enabled him to run for a third term by passing a law that did not count his first five years as president because the new constitution was not yet in force at the time of his election.

A year later, Fujimori's congress dismissed three constitutional judges who had tried to overturn the law. His opponents accused him of trying to establish a democratically elected dictatorship.

By this time, almost daily revelations were revealing the enormous extent of corruption surrounding Fujimori. About 1,500 people from his government were indicted on corruption and other charges, including eight former cabinet ministers, three former military commanders, a prosecutor general and a former Supreme Court chief justice.

The allegations against Fujimori led to years of legal battles. In December, Peru's Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori by then-President Pablo Kuczynski on Christmas Eve 2017. Fujimori left prison wearing a face mask and receiving supplemental oxygen and got into an SUV driven by his daughter-in-law.

He was last seen in public on September 4, leaving a private hospital in a wheelchair. He told the press that he had undergone a CT scan, and when asked if his presidential candidacy was still going ahead, he smiled and said: “We'll see, we'll see.”

___

Frank Bajak, the lead author of this obituary, retired from the Associated Press in 2024. Associated Press writer Regina Garcia Cano in Mexico City contributed to the article.