Alberto Fujimori
Alberto Fujimori was President of Peru from 1990 to 2000, defeated both hyperinflation and the Shining Path insurgency, and was later imprisoned for authorising death squads. Born in Lima in 1938 to Japanese immigrants who had arrived four years earlier, he trained as an agricultural engineer, studied mathematics in France and the United States, and became rector of the National Agrarian University. He entered the 1990 election as an unknown with no party machine, and beat the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Peru then had inflation above seven thousand per cent and an insurgency that had killed tens of thousands. He applied severe austerity — Fujishock — which ended hyperinflation at heavy social cost, privatised state industries and reopened Peru to foreign investment. In September 1992 the police intelligence unit captured Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader, in a Lima apartment, effectively breaking the movement. In April 1992 he had dissolved congress and the courts with military backing, the autogolpe or self-coup, and ruled by decree while rewriting the constitution. His intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos ran a system of bribery and blackmail across the media, judiciary and legislature. The Colina Group, an army death squad, murdered fifteen people including an eight-year-old at Barrios Altos in 1991 and nine students and a professor at La Cantuta in 1992. A programme of forced sterilisations affected upward of two hundred thousand mostly indigenous women. Videos of Montesinos bribing a congressman surfaced in 2000, and Fujimori fled to Japan and resigned by fax. Extradited from Chile in 2007, he was sentenced to twenty-five years. He was released on humanitarian grounds in 2023 and died in 2024.
- Lived: 1938 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Peruvian
- Roles: head_of_state, dictator
