Alberto Fujimori

Biography

Alberto Fujimori was born in Lima in 1938 to Japanese immigrant parents. He studied agricultural engineering at the National Agrarian University in La Molina, graduating first in his class in 1961, and did further study at the University of Strasbourg and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he earned a master's degree in mathematics. He returned to teach at La Molina, became its rector in 1984, and from 1987 also presided over Peru's national assembly of university rectors.

Running as a political outsider with the Cambio 90 movement, he won the 1990 presidential election in a runoff against the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Facing hyperinflation and the Shining Path insurgency, he imposed sharp free-market reforms. In April 1992, backed by the armed forces, he dissolved Congress and the judiciary in a self-coup, then had a new constitution approved in 1993 and was re-elected in 1995. His government captured Shining Path's leader and in 1997 ended the Japanese embassy hostage crisis with a military rescue, but it relied heavily on the intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos and was marked by corruption, death-squad killings and forced sterilisations.

After a disputed third election in 2000 and the exposure of bribery by Montesinos, Fujimori fled to Japan and faxed his resignation; Congress instead removed him from office. Arrested in Chile in 2005 and extradited in 2007, he was convicted in 2009 of human rights crimes, including the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta killings, and of corruption, and sentenced to 25 years. A 2017 pardon was contested in the courts, and he was finally freed in December 2023. He died in Lima in September 2024.