Alberto Fujimori

Alberto Fujimori (1998)

Alberto Kenya Fujimori or Alberto Fujimori Fujimori ( Japanese 藤森 謙 也 Fujimori Ken'ya ; born July 28, 1938 in Lima ) is a Japanese-Peruvian politician who was President of Peru from July 28, 1990 to November 17, 2000 . He was removed from office in absentia for corruption and human rights violations by Congress and sentenced to a decade-long prison term after several years of exile in Japan.

Life

According to official information, Alberto Fujimori was born in Lima to Japanese parents who moved to Peru in 1934. It is believed that his actual country of birth is Japan, but this would have thwarted a presidential candidacy, as one must be born in Peru to be president. His parents were cotton pickers . He studied agricultural engineering at the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Molina from 1957 to 1961 and received his doctorate . After a short teaching activity, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Strasbourg from 1964 . From 1970 he studied at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and obtained a further degree with the Master of Science .

Back in Peru, he became dean of the Faculty of Science at La Molina University and rector of the university in 1984 . Fujimori served twice as President of the Peruvian National Commission of University Rectors.

Rise to President

Fujimori became known to a wider audience through a television broadcast. After initially being close to the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) of President Alan García Pérez , he joined the newly founded protest party Cambio 90 in 1989 , which rejected President García's policies. In the 1990 presidential elections, Fujimori ran under the motto “honestidad, tecnología, trabajo” (honesty, technology, work) as a blatant outsider. Although he received little attention from the media, he profited from dissatisfaction with traditional political currents and the discredited political class in Peru and surprisingly won 30.7% of the votes in the first round of the election. For the runoff election, he ran against the clear favorite, the writer Mario Vargas Llosa , who ran as a candidate for a center-right movement. After the left's parties clearly opposed Vargas Llosa, Fujimori won a landslide victory with 56.5% of the vote and became president.

Presidency

When Fujimori took office, Peru was marked by an economic crisis and hyperinflation . In addition, extremist groups, in particular the Maoist Sendero Luminoso , terrorized large parts of the country through attacks.

Contrary to his promises made during the election campaign, Fujimori carried out "shock therapy" with the aim of stabilizing inflation and prices while largely liberalizing the markets and privatizing previously state-owned companies. The state apparatus was significantly reduced in size, which led to an increase in the unemployment rate and undeclared work . The old currency Inti was exchanged for Nuevo Sol at a ratio of 1: 1,000,000 . As a result of this policy, Peru was able to defeat inflation and achieve economic growth of well over 5% every year until the recession in 1998; In 1994 Peru showed the greatest economic growth in its history with 12.3%.

Sham democracy

Fujimori's party did not have a majority in Congress. After repeated disputes between the President and Parliament, he dissolved Congress on April 5, 1992 without notice and suspended the constitutional rights of the judiciary. The dissolution of the two-chamber system is known in common parlance in Peru as autogolpe (self- putsch ). With toleration and sometimes with the support of the military , Fujimori set up a "government of emergency and national restructuring". Not least because of international pressure, Fujimori had to call elections for a constituent assembly (Asamblea Constituyente) that same year . In 1993 it passed a new constitution. However, the results of a referendum have not been officially confirmed. There is a suspicion that the constitution never corresponded to the majority will of the population. The unicameral system (Cámara de Diputados) was established in the new constitution . A second legislative chamber (Cámara de Senadores) provided for in the old constitution has been deleted without replacement. The decentralization that had been driven forward until 1990 was stopped and the regional parliaments dissolved. They were replaced by provisional regional administrations appointed by the central government.

Alberto Fujimori and his daughter Keiko on the evening of the 1995 presidential election

His "anti-subversive" policy achieved important successes, including the widespread smashing of the guerrilla / terrorist organizations and the arrest of their leaders, but this through numerous human rights violations against the partisans and the civilian population. In the 1995 presidential elections, the former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar ran against Fujimori, but Fujimori won the election with 62% of the vote.

On December 17, 1996, fifteen members of the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) stormed the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima during a reception and held numerous important people hostage. Of the 483 hostages, over 200 people, mostly women, were released that same evening. The hostage-takers demanded the release of all imprisoned Túpac Amaru members, in particular MRTA chief Victor Polay and his deputy Peter Cárdenas Schulte . During the four-month occupation, the rebels repeatedly released hostages. On April 22, 1997, the army stormed the Japanese ambassador's residence and bloody ended the hostage situation. All the hostage takers were killed. A hostage and two soldiers were also killed; 71 hostages were freed.

Although the Peruvian constitution actually stipulated a maximum of two terms of office for a president, Fujimori announced a new candidacy in 1998. A new law with an "authentic interpretation of the constitution" has been passed. The bill passed Congress without much discussion, not least because of the majority in Congress. The law allowed Fujimori a third term of office because the 1990 election could not be counted because it was not based on the 1993 constitution that is now in force.

Members of the congressional opposition filed a complaint with the constitutional court (tribunal constitucional) . The court intended to declare the law incompatible with the constitution. Fujimori then dismissed three constitutional judges. The President of the Constitutional Court resigned from his position out of solidarity. Since the judge posts were not filled, the court was unable to act, because the majority required for a court decision could no longer be achieved with only three active judges. As a result, student and trade union protests began, which subsided after a few weeks, as it was not possible to integrate these social forces into political parties or to convert them.

Crisis and resignation

Fujimori won the April 28, 2000 elections, but there was a wave of fraud allegations. One of the opposition leaders, Alejandro Toledo , initially unsuccessfully called for the elections to be canceled. But a few months later the so-called Montesinos scandal shook the government. On September 14, a video was shown on television in which Vladimiro Montesinos , one of Fujimori's most important advisors and companions, gave opposition MP Alberto Kouri a bribe of US $ 15,000 for his transfer to the presidential party. The pressure on Fujimori became so strong that he announced new elections for 2001 on September 16, for which he no longer ran.

Fujimori traveled to Asia for a meeting in his capacity as President. After its completion, however, he did not travel back to Peru, but on to Japan. In parliament, the opposition succeeded in having him declared incapable of office. Fujimori announced his resignation in a fax, and the new President of Parliament, Valentín Paniagua Corazao, took over the president's duties on a temporary basis. Fujimori has been wanted with an international arrest warrant for his human rights violations and other allegations. Because of his Japanese parents, he was granted Japanese citizenship on December 12, 2000. This protected him from deportation to Peru in Japan . When he entered Chile on November 7, 2005, however, Fujimori was arrested in Santiago on account of the existing international arrest warrant .

On June 8, 2007, Fujimori was placed under house arrest by the Supreme Court in Santiago de Chile so that he could not evade a possible deportation to Peru. On June 28, 2007, Shizuka Kamei , chairman of the New People's Party (PNP) announced that Fujimori would be a candidate for the upper house election in Japan on July 29th . On July 11, 2007, Orlando Álvarez , a judge at the Chilean Supreme Court, refused to extradite Fujimori on the grounds that the charges made were inconclusive. On September 21, 2007, the Chilean Supreme Court decided to extradite Fujimori after all, which happened the next day. He was in prison the headquarters of the special police Dinoes detained. Among other things, he was accused of being responsible for two massacres of Maoist rebels (see: Sendero Luminoso ) with a total of 25 deaths. The indictment includes another five points, including corruption and torture.

Legal proceedings

Alberto Fujimori during the trial (2008)

The start of the trial was originally scheduled for November 26, 2007, but was later postponed to December 10, 2007 at the request of the defense. On the first day of the trial, Fujimori described himself as "innocent" and "... do not accept the charges made by the prosecution". Due to Fujimori's health problems, the process was interrupted and postponed on the first day of the trial. On December 11, 2007, the court sentenced him to six years' imprisonment and a fine of US $ 92,000 for ordering a break-in and theft for ordering a house search without the required permission of a prosecutor shortly before his fall. On April 7, 2009, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for deploying death squads . The appeal requested by him was rejected on January 3, 2010, whereby the judgment became final.

On July 20, 2009, Fujimori was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for corruption. In 2000, he paid his adviser Vladimiro Montesinos the equivalent of around eleven million euros from the defense budget and declared this as “compensation”. In relation to the allegation of having ordered compulsory sterilization, the public prosecutor Marco Guzmán confirmed on January 24, 2014 that he would not bring any charges due to a lack of evidence, but left it open that new charges can be brought at any time if new evidence is found.

On February 22, 2017, the Chilean Supreme Court granted an expanded extradition request that Peru had filed in December 2015. Fujimori is held responsible for six murders by the Colina death squad in 1992 and is due to be tried again for murder.

Pardon and revocation of pardon

On December 24, 2017, 79-year-old Fujimori was pardoned by Peru's President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and released early from prison. Fujimori was considered to have a heart condition and had been hospitalized several times. A medical examination revealed that he had an advanced, incurable disease. On October 3, 2018, Peru's Supreme Court lifted Fujimori's pardon and ordered his arrest. A week later, the Fujimori-dominated parliament passed a law according to which generous electronic surveillance would be sufficient for elderly prisoners instead of staying in prison. With full sentence, Fujimori would not be released until he was 93 years old.

With regard to the pardon, there was speculation that Kuczynski, who opposed an absolute parliamentary majority for the Fujimori party, would have reached an agreement with the Fujimori family. On December 20, 2017, Kuczynski survived, contrary to expectations, an impeachment procedure in parliament that was co-initiated by Keiko Fujimori. Ten opposition MPs abstained from voting, including Fujimori's son Kenji , who, like Keiko, belongs to the Fuerza Popular party. Kenji Fujimori later thanked Kuczynski via Twitter for his “noble and grand gesture”. Thousands of people protested against the pardon.

family

In 1974 he married Susana Higuchi , who founded her own political party in 1994 and divorced him in 1998. There were four children from their marriage: Keiko , Hiro, Sashi and Kenji . His daughter Keiko also became a politician and was a presidential candidate in both the 2011 and 2016 elections in Peru . On April 6, 2006, he married his second wife, the Japanese hotelier Satomi Kataoka ( 片 岡 都 美 ).

literature

• Huhle, Rainer (Ed.): Fujimori's Peru - a “new type of democracy”? Institute for Ibero-American Customers Hamburg, 1995

Web links

Commons : Alberto Fujimori  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Fujimori's former website ( Memento of July 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (Spanish)
• Report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Spanish, English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry at the Peruvian Electoral Commission
2. ↑ Carol Stokes, Susan. Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies . 2001, page 163.
3. ↑ GDP growth (annual%) | Data | Table. In: data.worldbank.org. Retrieved April 25, 2016 . 
4. ↑ Fujimori is being shipped to Peru
5. ↑ Torture allegations against Fujimori ( Memento of May 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
6. ↑ Peru postpones Fujimori human rights trial at defense's request
7. ^ Peru's Fujimori goes on trial for murder, kidnapping
8. ↑ Fujimori sentenced to six years in prison
9. ↑ Fujimori convicted
10. ↑ focus.de: Peru: 25 years imprisonment for ex-President Fujimori (accessed April 7, 2009)
11. ↑ n-tv.de: 25 years for Peru's ex-president - Fujimori has to be behind bars (accessed on January 3, 2010)
12. ↑ Fujimori arrested again
13. ↑ [1]
14. ↑ [2]
15. ↑ Martín Hidalgo Bustamante: Alberto Fujimori: Chile accedió a ampliar su extradición. In: ElComercio.pe , February 22, 2017 (Spanish).
16. ↑ Tjerk Brühwiller: Fujimori should go back to prison. In: FAZ.net . October 3, 2018, accessed October 13, 2018 . 
17. ↑ Alberto Fujimori; Pleno del Congreso aprobó proyecto para excarcelar a adultos mayores , rpp, 11 October 2018
18. ↑ ^{a b} "Peru's ex-president Fujimori pardoned" . tagesschau.de. Accessed December 25, 2017.
19. ↑ Fujimori: New clashes after Peru ex-president is pardoned , BBC, December 26, 2017
20. ↑ Fujimori y Satomi Kataoka se casan en ausencia en Tokyo. In: terra. Retrieved April 6, 2006, March 16, 2010 (Spanish).