Alberto Kenya Fujimori Fujimori was born on July 28, 1938 in Lima, Peru to a small family of Japanese origin. His parents were Naoichi and Mutsue Fujimori, who had left for Peru alone in the Port of Yokohama in 1934. According to migratory documents, the couple did not bring any children with them, which dispels the hypothesis that the former president was born in Japan.

Fujimori went to primary school at Nuestra Señora de la Merced School and La Rectora Public School. He went to high school at Alfonso Ugarte. In 1956 he entered the National Agrarian University of La Molina. There, he received a degree in agronomic engineering in 1961. He was first in his class.

In 1956 he began to give math classes in the School of Sciences at National Agrarian University of La Molina. He later went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and in Strasbourg, France. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Gleboux in Belgium and the University of San Martín de Porres in Lima. Years later he was named chairman of the Department of Mathematics. Between 1984 and 1989 he held the position of Rector of the National Agrarian University of La Molina. In 1987 he became the President of the National Assembly of Rectors.

In 1974 he married Susana Higuchi, a civil engineer. He had four children with her: Keiko, Sashi, Hiro, and Kenyi. The two got divorced in 1998.

En 1990, Fujimori was one of the candidates for the presidency of Peru on the Cambio 90 ticket. In the first round of voting, he received approximately 29% of the votes, coming behind the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who received 34% of the votes.

During his electoral campaign, Fujimori appealed to the voters in rural areas, the indigenous, the mestizos, and the lower classes who distrusted the relationship between Vargas Llosa and the Peruvian elite and who believed in Fujimori’s populist program. Both candidates promised to end the disastrous economic situation, which has been complicated further by the havoc caused by the terrorist attacks of the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). Fujimori’s platform was based on economic development and the bettering of the conditions that campesinos lived in. Fujimori won the second round of voting with 60% of the votes, making him the first person of Japanese decent to govern Peru.

In April 1992, Fujimori dissolved Congress, annulled parts of the Constitution, and arrested his political rivals, arguing that these measures were intended to combat the Shining Path and narcotics traffickers. In September of that year, the leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, was captured, found guilty, and condemned to life imprisonment. On November 22, 1992, a new Congress was elected. The majority party, known as Cambio 90-Nueva Mayoría, preserved Fujimori’s power. Fujimori was reelected in the presidential elections of 1995 over the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, after having reformed the Constitution in order to allow Fujimori to run for a second term.

Fujimori’s government went through a serious crisis when, in December 1996, a group of MRTA members assaulted the residency of the Japanese ambassador in Lima, taking a great number of hostages. They demanded the liberation of MRTA prisoners. On February 11 of the next year, negotiations between the MRTA and the government, which had been broken off on December 28, 1996, were renewed. At that time, the MRTA still held 72 hostages. On March 2 and 3, 1997, Fujimori himself traveled to the Dominican Republic and Cuba in order to negotiate the exile of the MRTA hostage-takers. Finally, on April 22, troops from the Peruvian Army assaulted the ambassador’s residence and captured it. All fourteen members of the MRTA were killed and 71 of the 72 hostages were freed.

On December 27, 1999, Fujimori formally announced his candidacy for reelection, news that, while expected, was called a constitutional violation by the opposition parties who said that Fujimori wanted to perpetuate his autocratic regime. According to the controversial Authentic Interpretation of the Constitution Law, which was approved by Congress in 1997, Fujimori’s first five-year term had began in 1995 under the new Constitution, and Fujimori could, if he desired, run for a second term which would begin in 2000.

In his campaign, Fujimori touted his achievements in the economy, such as reducing inflation to 3.5%, stabilizing prices, and having the economy steadily grow since 1990. He also campaigned on his achievements in foreign relations and in the anti-subversive war, which had recently seen the capture of Guzmán’s replacement as the head of the Shining Path, Óscar Ramírez Durand, a/k/a Feliciano, on July 14, 1999. Ramírez Durand’s capture was truly a mortal blow to the Maoist guerrillas.

Nevertheless, it was in these months that popular frustration with Fujimori crystallized. This was due to the repressive excesses committed by the security forces, which carried out many human rights violations, as well as the authoritarianism of the president and the degradation of the economic situation, which in 1998 saw a fall in production and a big increase in unemployment. The economic changes made people question the viability of the neoliberal model after years of macroeconomic efficiency.

With social tension unseen since 1990, Fujimori said that he was sure to beat his rival Alejandro Toledo, who was the head of the Peru Possible electoral movement, in the first round of elections which were to talk place on April 9, 2000. Toledo, however, skillfully capitalized on the people’s discontent with Fujimori.

After a chaotic electoral period and the subsequent balloting which saw serious suspicions of fraud, after a delay of several days the results of the first round of elections were published. These results showed Fujimori won with 49.8% of the votes, only decimal points away from an absolute majority.

On May 18, Toledo announced that he would not contest the second round unless it was postponed from May 28 to June 18 in order to correct the multiple irregularities that, as the Organization of American States (OAS) observers agreed, prevented the election from being clean. However, neither the withdrawal of the OAS from the process (May 22) nor the veiled threat of sanctions by the United States (May 26) discouraged Fujimori, who held the elections on May 28 and ran in them as the only candidate. On July 28, 2000, the 179th anniversary of independence on which there was a second wave of disturbances in Lima that cased six deaths and large-scale destruction, Fujimori was sworn into office for his third term.

However, Fujimori would not finish out his third term. On September 14, an enormous scandal broke when the opposition Independent Moralizing Front disseminated a video in which a congressman who had recently switched parties to become a Fujimorista was seen receiving money from Vladimiro Montesinos, advisor to and collaborator with Fujimori since 1990.

Montesinos was secretly the head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) and the true brains of the operations against terrorism, crime, and narcotics trafficking. Public opinion saw Montesinos as the personification of corruption and grave violations of human rights.

On September 16, Fujimori announced the convocation of new elections in 2001. He promised to hand over power to whoever won them, as well as to deactivate the SIN. On September 24, Montesinos fled the country as a fugitive and arrived in Panama, where he requested asylum.

However, on October 23, a plane carrying Montesinos landed at a Peruvian military base after stopping off at an unknown location. This spectacular news raised the alarm in Peru, with the opposition asking what was hidden by this sudden turn of events. The opposition did not rule out the possibility that Fujimori had allowed Montesinos to return.

On November 14, Fujimori traveled to Brunei to participate in the Eighth APEC Summit, which took place on November 15 and 16. On November 18, Fujimori should have been in Panama to take part in the Tenth Ibero-American Summit, but instead he went to Japan and stayed there.

On November 20, Fujimori sent his letter of resignation to the Peruvian Congress, confirming rumors that his resignation was imminent. However, the next day the Congress declared the President “morally incapacitated” in order to remove him from office and strip him of the presidency, effective November 22.

On February 13, 2001, the National Prosecutor’s Office formally accused the former president of illicit enrichment and embezzlement of public funds. Six days later, the Investigatory Commission of the Congress approved of the same proceedings for the charges of dereliction of duty to uphold the Peruvian Constitution and laws, usurpation of functions, and abandoning public office.

On February 23, the Plenary of the Congress presented a constitutional accusation against Fujimori and banned him from holding public office for ten years. Five days later the National Prosecutor’s sent the corresponding denouncement to the Supreme Court.

Fujimori’s government was bad for Peru due to the autocratic way in which he ran the country, the corruption that he fomented, the human rights violations such as murders, forced disappearances, torture, and other crimes against humanity that took place and the economic setbacks that characterized his tenure as the leader of the country.