In 1999, I was young and doing an internship, much to my chagrin, at a blatantly pro-Fujimori newspaper, when the newspaper’s director and owner crashed his car into a truck while following closely behind the convoy accompanying Alberto Fujimori to the airport for an official trip. He died instantly, and the newspaper also closed down immediately, leaving a hundred journalists out on the street. He literally killed himself for following Fujimori. At that time, I didn’t know for sure how many deaths his government had brought, but what I was sure of was that as long as this country followed the former dictator’s designs, we would end up in ruins.
Alberto Fujimori has died as many of us did not want to see him dead: in freedom. At 86 years old he had become a star of Tik Tok and from there he tried to beat the reel rewrite the history of Peru. In that story he was a hero and not the leader of a gang. He died when he still had nine years left of his sentence to serve in his already famous golden prison. He died pardoned on humanitarian grounds, as treacherous as that sounds when applied to a human rights violator and pardoner of mercenaries.
The last time he was seen on the streets of Lima he was walking through a shopping centre giving statements to the media, such as one in which he claimed that Dina Boluarte, the current dictator president, would govern until 2026 due to an agreement between her and her party. And because he wanted to. Today Boluarte, whom we will remember because during her mandate the most famous prisoner in Peru was pardoned, has decreed three, not one, not two, three days of national mourning and a state funeral to thank her for the deference.
During his years in prison, audio recordings kept coming out in which he was still acting as if he were governing the country behind bars. In the last weeks of his life, his daughter and political heir Keiko Fujimori had announced that Alberto would be Fujimorism’s card in the next elections. We were already preparing to go out into the street with the sign that says “I can’t believe it’s 2024 and I’m still marching against Fujimori,” when rumors of his death began to spread. He mocked Peru so much that for years we couldn’t believe he was going to die soon, even though he tried by all means to convince justice of this in order to evade it. Finally he died. Fujimori was old, sick, and mortal. What we don’t know is whether Fujimorism was too.
His real legacy is a country that is still governed by the Constitution and the Fujimorist values of anti-politics. An economy for those at the top and against those at the bottom, the misgovernment and social decomposition that Peru is experiencing today are the consequences of the decades of Fujimorization of institutions. It was he who founded the mafia of civil and military public officials linked to large companies that still today control the State for their illicit purposes. The verb “to Fujimorize” has remained active despite the fact that almost 35 years have passed since his first government. It has to do with a strategy drawn up long ago to deactivate social and political movements, and neutralize popular struggles and organization. His tactic was to treat all resistance as terrorist, reviving the ghost of Shining Path, defeated in 1992, to suit himself, and to exercise justified repressive violence. With its contribution to the Green Plan to exterminate indigenous people as an anti-terrorist strategy or with the forced sterilization of thousands of rural women, Fujimorism demonstrated all its racism and profound contempt for the indigenous peoples of Peru. If Boluarte was able to order with absolute impunity the open fire against protesters in the southern Andes a year ago, it was in part because Fujimorism made the criminalization of peasants a discourse and state policy.
History will remember his sudden entry into the front line of politics when, in the 1990 elections, as the unknown rector of a local university, he snatched the presidency from the then liberal candidate Mario Vargas Llosa, thus inaugurating the figure of the politician. outsider and pragmatic, in opposition to the “traditional parties”, conservative and immobile, of which, for example, Donald Trump himself was a reflection. Also going down in history is the reconversion after a self-coup of his government into one of the most corrupt dictatorships on the continent, corruption also embodied in his already sadly famous advisor Vladimiro Montesinos, a former military man and megalomaniac lawyer to whom Fujimori delegated the country, putting him in charge of the dirty work of his government through the then National Intelligence Service. Together, with their identical ties and their complicit smiles, they were responsible for crimes against humanity, torture, striped suits and inhuman prisons, disappearances and massacres. The duo bought politicians with wads of cash and the editorial lines of the media, “chichando”, devalorizing, corrupting everything in their path. The television face of the regime was the ineffable Laura Bozzo. Many of his infamies and crimes were portrayed in the thousands of (Vladi) videos that Montesinos secretly recorded. The tapes in which Fujimori appeared were removed by him in a suitcase from his advisor’s house and then deleted when he found himself cornered.
Even so, thanks to the tireless struggle of the relatives of his victims, accused by his party of “self-kidnapping,” and to the anti-Fujimori movement, the regime fell and he did not escape prison. There were years of boasting about justice and reparation. I will never forget when a set of keys was found among the bones found in a gray sandbank, I will never forget how a mother had to open the door of her house with those keys and find out at that moment that her son, a young university student, would never again enter through that door. He would never again hear the wind of his panpipe because Fujimori had ordered him kidnapped, tortured, murdered, dynamited, buried, disappeared. These are also the verbs to talk about Fujimori. Every Christmas that Fujimori spent with his children, a mother spent it without her son, murdered along with 14 people in a country house. He was eight years old and according to his murderers he was a terrorist. He never asked for forgiveness, not from her or from anyone. But at least he was in prison, until he wasn’t. In each of the demonstrations against the impunity of his acts and previous attempts at pardon, we shouted that we were the children or grandchildren of those whom Fujimori could not make disappear. By shouting “Fujimori never again,” Keiko’s triumph was prevented up to three times. But not the long shadow of that family over the destiny of the country.
From the first years of his government he applied a ruthless neoliberal economic policy, first of all shockafter privatizations, which led Peru to an almost unprecedented polarization in which large national and transnational companies cemented a State cannibalized and subsidiary to large capitals. Fujimori auctioned off our resources, gave away territory to extractive companies and encouraged a culture against social and labor rights that added, years after his governments, to the general necropolitics and reached its climax in the pandemic with thousands of deaths without health care. Those who oppose this model, those who march and demonstrate have been persecuted in successive governments through increasingly repressive decrees. The famous “terruqueo” in Peru has to do directly with that: Everything that is not liberal dogma is terrorism. Fujimori invented it.
Furthermore, the large-scale corruption of “Fujimorism” infected public institutions to such an extent that even today they remain partially taken over by mafias established during his mandate. Fujimori leaves behind a political party, Fuerza Popular, led by his own daughter, which has prolonged the criminal practices that are the trademark of the party in recent years and which, given its inability to regain power through the ballot box, has boycotted democratic governments when it has not directly co-governed with the most harmful ones in an unbearable continuism.
However, the most serious aspect of Fujimori’s “historical legacy” is that, after the capture of Abimael Guzmán in 1992—an event that the dictator always claimed responsibility for, although there is evidence that the police officers who carried out the operation acted independently of the Executive—and the de facto defeat of Sendero Luminoso, far from combating the deep state of inequality that the terrorist group’s appearance in the country provoked, it increased it exponentially. Thus, Fujimori will go down in history not as he would have liked, that is, as the “president who finished off Sendero Luminoso,” but as the dictator who, like other Peruvian presidents, let another opportunity pass to destroy its field of cultivation.
He left receiving a lifetime pension and owing 15 million dollars to the Peruvian State for corruption crimes in a territory inhabited by ten million poor people.
In all these years that he was in prison and after the pardon, I have thought several times about the servile owner of a newspaper’s car crashing in his effort to reach the dictator, about all those who fell by the wayside and those who survived, those who paid for their sins and those who did not. That he did not die while serving his sentence could plunge us into despair, but perhaps it is time for anti-Fujimorism to stop being just an ethical position and move towards the truly mobilizing and transformative actions that this broken country in permanent collapse urgently demands.
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