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Alberto Ken
ya Fujimori (born in Lima, Peru on July 28, 1938), also known as or "Chino" by opponents, was President of Peru from July 28, 1990 to November 17, 2000.
Throughout his entire political career, Fujimori has been a controversial public figure.[1]Fujimori was credited by many with restoring macroeconomic stability to Peru after the turbulent presidency of Alan García Pérez (1985-1990) and bringing peace to the country after many years of political violence. However, he has been criticized for adopting an authoritarian leadership style,[2] particularly after his government dissolved the Peruvian Congress in April 5, 1992.
In late 2000, in the face of mounting scandal, criticism over human rights abuses (including a compulsory sterilization program[3]) and growing instability, he left Peru to attend an APEC summit in Brunei and then continued on to Japan, from where he resigned. His resignation was initially transmitted by fax machine and later officially via the Peruvian Embassy in Tokyo. However, the Congress of the Republic refused to accept his resignation and removed him from office. It then barred him from holding any elective office for 10 years.
In October 2005, he stated he would run in Peru's April 2006 presidential election, despite the 10-year ban.[4] His daughter and former First Lady Keiko Sofía officially registered him before the Peruvian National Electoral Jury on 6 January 2006, but he was officially disqualified on 10 January.[5]
After travelling to Chile, he was detained by Chilean authorities from November 7 2005 to May 1 2006, when he was released on condition that he remain in the country.[6] The Peruvian government formally requested his extradition on 3 January 2006.[7]
There is considerable controversy over Fujimori's birthplace. According to official government records, Fujimori was born on July 28, 1938 in Miraflores, a section of Lima. His parents, Naoichi Fujimori and Mutsue Inomoto de Fujimori, were natives of Kumamoto, Japan who immigrated to Peru in 1934. He holds dual Peruvian and Japanese citizenship, since his parents established Japanese citizenship for him through the Japanese Consulate.
However, in later years, many of Fujimori's political opponents charged that he had actually been born in Japan. Since Peru's constitution requires the president to have been born in Peru, this would have made Fujimori ineligible to be president. [8]In July 1997, for instance, the political magazine Caretas reported that his birth certificate may have been altered. Specifically, it claimed that Fujimori's original birthplace had been erased, and replaced with "Miraflores, Lima" in different handwriting. The birthplace was also reportedly altered on Fujimori's baptismal certificate. More seriously, Caretas alleged that when Fujimori's mother entered Peru in 1934, she declared having two children; Fujimori is the second of four children. [7]
Despite these allegations, as of 2007 no investigation has ever been opened into the issue.
Fujimori obtained his early education at the Colegio Nuestra Señora de la Merced, and La Rectora, and graduated high school from La gran unidad escolar Alfonso Ugarte in Lima. He went on to undergraduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina in 1957, graduating in 1961 first in his class as an agricultural engineer.
There he lectured in mathematics the following year. In 1964 he went on to study physics at the University of Strasbourg in France. On a Ford scholarship, Fujimori also attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee[9] in the United States, where he obtained his master's degree in mathematics in 1969. In 1974, he married Susana Higuchi, also of Japanese descent.
In recognition of his academic achievements, the sciences faculty of the Universidad Nacional Agraria offered Fujimori the deanship and in 1984 appointed him to the rectorship of the university, which he held until 1989.
In 1987, Fujimori also became president of the National Commission of Peruvian University Rectors (Asamblea Nacional de Rectores), a position which he held twice. He also hosted a TV show called "Concertando" from 1987 to 1989. It was aired by Peru's state-owned network Channel 7 (Peruvian National Television).
A dark horse candidate, Fujimori won the 1990 presidential election under the banner of the new party Cambio 90 ("cambio" meaning "change"), beating the world-renowned writer Mario Vargas Llosa in a surprising upset. He capitalized on profound disenchantment with previous president Alan García and his American Popular Revolutionary Alliance party. He also won the support of the poor, who had been frightened by Vargas Llosa's austerity proposals.
He also exploited the distrust of Vargas Llosa's identification with the existing Peruvian political establishment, and uncertainty about Vargas Llosa's plans for neoliberal economic reforms .
During the campaign, he was affectionately nicknamed el Chino (the Chinese). Most observers believe his Japanese descent benefited Fujimori, as much of the population of the country is of indigenous descent, and his ethnicity helped to set him apart from the Spanish-dominated political elites.
During his first term in office, Fujimori embarked upon tough and wide-ranging neoliberal reforms, known as Fujishock. This program bore little resemblance to Fujimori's campaign platform, and were in fact far more drastic than anything Vargas Llosa had proposed. Peru re-entered the global economy, from which it had become estranged during the García administration.
Spurred on by the IMF, Fujimori started an extensive process of privatization, selling off hundreds of state-owned enterprises. Fujishock restored macroeconomic stability to the economy and generated a brief economic upturn in the mid-1990s. His administration made sweeping changes to national laws to encourage foreign investment in extractive oil, gas and mining sectors. To be more friendly to foreign investors, the legislation gave new powers to “the competent sectoral authority,” or agencies that oversee mining and oil projects, to determine on a case-by-case basis emissions limits, toxic waste disposal procedures and other concerns, which had previously been set by specific guidelines under environmental law. It also lifted prohibitions on developing energy and other projects that exploit non-renewable resources in protected areas, such as national parks, in the Andean highlands and the Amazon region. In Amazonia, which represents roughly 60% of Peruvian national territory, Fujimori's neoliberal policies have been seen by his critics as having devastating results for the area's indigenous communities and the region's eco-systems.[10]
During Fujimori's first term in office, APRA and Vargas Llosa's party, FREDEMO remained in control of both chambers of Congress (the Chamber of Deputies and Senate), hampering his ability to enact his programs. Fujimori also found it difficult to combat the threat posed by the Maoist guerrilla organization Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso, see below).
In response to the political deadlock, Fujimori, with the support of the military, carried out a so-called self-coup (in Spanish: autogolpe; called Fuji-coup, or fujigolpe in Peru) — that is, a coup d'état against his own government, on April 5 1992. He shut the Congress, suspended the constitution, and purged the judiciary.[11] Some have claimed that there was little initial domestic resistance to the auto-coup; in fact, it was welcomed.
Fujimori claimed that the presidential coup was necessary to break with the deeply-entrenched interests that were hindering him from rescuing Peru from the chaotic state in which García had left it.[12] Barry Levitt has noted that, “Fujimori was able to dictate the solution to a crisis of democracy that his own autogolpe had spawned, partly because the coup was broadly supported by domestic public opinion.”[13]
International reaction to Fujimori's coup was swift:
The coup appeared to threaten the economic recovery strategy of reinsertion, and complicated the process of clearing arrears with the IMF.
Even before the coup, relations with the United States had been strained because of Fujimori's reluctance to sign an accord that would increase U.S. and Peruvian military efforts in eradicating coca fields. Nevertheless, Fujimori eventually signed the accord in May 1991, in order to get desperately needed aid and military assistance with the war against armed insurgents.
Two weeks after the self-coup, the George H.W. Bush administration changed its position and officially recognized Fujimori as the legitimate leader of Peru. On November 6 1992, Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs Bernard Aronson told the US Congress: The international community and respected human rights organizations must focus the spotlight of world attention on the threat which Shining Path poses... Latin America has seen violence and terror, but none like this. Make no mistake; if Shining Path were to take power, we would see genocide.
Using this opportunity (since FREDEMO was dissolved and APRA's leader, Alan García, was exiled to Colombia), Fujimori proceeded to legitimize his position. He called elections for a Democratic Constitutional Congress that would serve as a legislature and a constituent assembly. While the APRA and Popular Action attempted to boycott this, the Popular Christian Party and many left-leaning parties participated in this election. His supporters won a majority in this body, and drafted a new constitution in 1993. A referendum was scheduled, and the coup and the Constitution of 1993 were approved by a narrow margin of between four and five percent.
Later in the year, on November 13, there was a failed military coup. Fujimori, alerted by then relatively-unknown Captain Vladimiro Montesinos, sought temporary refuge in the Japanese embassy.
In 1994, Fujimori separated from his wife Susana Higuchi (also of Japanese descent) in a noisy, public divorce; and formally stripped her of the title First Lady in August 1994. He thereupon appointed their elder daughter First Lady.
Higuchi publicly denounced Fujimori as a "tyrant" and claimed that his administration was corrupt. They formally divorced in 1995.
The 1993 Constitution allowed Fujimori to run for a second term, and in April 1995, at the height of his popularity, Fujimori easily won reelection with almost two-thirds of the vote. His major opponent, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, won only 22 percent of the vote. His supporters won control of the legislature. One of the first acts of the new congress was declaring an amnesty for all members of the Peruvian military or police accused or convicted of human rights abuses between 1980 and 1995. As Steve Ellner wrote in his commentary on the contrasting forms of the populism of Hugo Chávez and Alberto Fujimori, Fujimori adopted a common strategy among dictators in Latin America: he “extolled ambitious national projects…and stressed the role of technology and private investments.”.[17]
During his second term, Fujimori signed a peace agreement with Ecuador over a border dispute that had simmered for more than a century. The treaty allowed the two countries to obtain international funds for developing the border region. Fujimori also settled unresolved issues with Chile, Peru's southern neighbor, still outstanding since the Treaty of Lima of 1929.
The 1995 election was the turning point in Fujimori's career. Peruvians now began to be more concerned about freedom of speech and the press. However, before he was sworn in for a second term, Fujimori stripped two universities of their autonomy and reshuffled the national electoral board. According to a poll by the Peruvian Research and Marketing Company conducted in 1997, 40.6% of Lima residents considered President Fujimori a dictator.[18][19][20]
In addition to the nature of democracy under Fujimori, people increasingly started paying closer attention to the growing number of allegations involving Fujimori and his chief of the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, which finally led to his resignation in 2000. According to a 2004 World Bank Publication[21] there was, “well-documented abuse of power by Montesinos, Fujimori's close associate- [which] led to a steady and systematic undermining of the rule of law…”
The 1993 constitution limits presidents to two terms. However, Fujimori began efforts to circumvent the two-term limit almost as soon as he won reelection in 1995. Not long after he took office for a second term, Fujimori's supporters in Congress passed a law of "authentic interpretation" which effectively allowed him to run for another term in 2000. A 1998 effort to repeal this law by "referendum" failed. [22] Predictably, in late 1999, Fujimori announced that he would run for a third term. The Peruvian electoral bodies, stacked with Fujimori supporters, accepted his argument that the two-term restriction didn't apply to him since it was enacted while he was still in office.[23]
Exit polls showed Fujimori well short of the 50% required to avoid an electoral runoff. However, the first official results showed him with 49.6% of the vote, just short of outright victory. Eventually, Fujimori was credited with 49.89%--20,000 votes short of avoiding a runoff. There were reports of numerous irregularities. For instance, soldiers reportedly prevented people from voting, and Fujimori campaign officials inserted votes into the electoral system's computer from an Internet cafe.
His primary opponent, Alejandro Toledo, called for his supporters to spoil their ballots in the runoff by writing "No to fraud!" on them (voting is mandatory in Peru). International observers pulled out of the country after Fujimori refused to delay the runoff.
In the runoff, Fujimori won with just over 51% of the vote. While votes for Toledo declined from 40.24% of the valid votes cast in the first round to 25.67% of the valid votes in the second round, invalid votes jumped from 2.25% in of the total votes cast in the first round to 29.93% of total votes in the second round. That such a large percentage of votes were thrown out as invalid shows that many Peruvians took Toledo's advice and deliberately spoiled their ballots.
Even though Fujimori had won with only a bare majority, overwhelming evidence of fraud led to daily protests in front of the presidential palace. As a conciliatory measure, he nominated former opposition candidate Federico Salas as the new prime minister. However, the opposition parties in parliament failed to support this measure and continued with their protests. Toledo campaigned vigorously to have the election annulled, but the corruption scandal then emerging around Vladimiro Montesinos, who was the director of Peru's National Intelligence Service (SIN), did his work for him.
The scandal exploded into full force when on the evening of September 14, 2000; the cable TV station Canal N broadcast a video of Montesinos appearing to give a bribe of US$15,000 to opposition congressman Alberto Kouri for his defection to Fujimori's Perú 2000 party. This video was presented by Fernando Olivera, leader of the FIM (Independent Moralising Front), who purchased it from one of Montesinos's closest allies (nicknamed by the Peruvian press as El Patriota).
Fujimori's support virtually collapsed, and on November 10, Fujimori won approval from Congress to hold elections on April 8, 2001--in which he would not be a candidate. On November 13, Fujimori left Peru for a visit to Brunei to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. On November 16, Valentín Paniagua took over as president of Congress after the pro-Fujimori leadership lost a vote of confidence. On November 17, Fujimori travelled from Brunei to Tokyo, from where he submitted his resignation as president by fax. Congress refused to accept his resignation, instead voting 62-9 to remove Fujimori from office on the grounds that he was "morally disabled."
On November 19, government ministers presented their resignations en bloc. Since Fujimori's first vice president, Francisco Tudela, had broken with Fujimori and resigned a few days earlier, Second Vice President Ricardo Márquez then claimed the presidency, but Congress refused to recognize him since he was an ardent Fujimori loyalist. Márquez resigned two days later. Paniagua was next in line, and became interim president to oversee the April elections.
In 2002, a report commissioned by the ultra-conservative Catholic Health Minister Fernando Carbone suggest that Fujimori had pressured 200,000 indigenous people in rural areas into being sterilized from 1996 to 2000. The report suggested that Fujimori might be guilty of genocide under international law. Despite that, the ad-hoc commission of the Peruvian Congress presided over by Dr Chavez Chuchon, dismissed this accusation due to insuffient evidence in 2003.[3]
When Fujimori came to power, large parts of Peru were dominated by the insurgent Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (SL or "Shining Path"), and the Marxist-Leninist group Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). According to some estimates, by the early 1990s, more than sixty percent of the country was under the control of the insurgents, in territories known as "zonas liberadas" (liberated zones), where inhabitants lived under the rule of these groups and paid them taxes. When Shining Path arrived in Lima, it organized so-called paros armados, work stoppages (strikes) which were enforced by killings and other forms of violence. They had infiltrated the national universities. Two previous governments, those of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (AP), and Alan García (APRA), first ignored and minimized the Shining Path, then launched an unsuccessful military campaign to eradicate it, undermining public faith in the state and an exodus of elites.
In the course of his two terms in office, Fujimori was credited by some Peruvians for ending the fifteen-year reign of terror of Sendero Luminoso and the arrest of their leader, Abimael Guzmán. As part of his anti-insurgency or anti-terror efforts, Fujimori granted the military broad powers to arrest suspected insurgents and to try them in secret military courts with few legal rights under internationally accepted standards of human rights law. Fujimori's justification given for this abridgement of the basic guarantee of open trials where the accused can face the accuser was that under previous governments, the judiciary was too afraid to charge alleged insurgents, and were legitimately afraid of insurgent reprisal against them or their families. At the same time, Fujimori's government armed rural Peruvians to form groups known as rondas campesinas ("peasant patrols").
Insurgent activity declined from 1992 onwards, and Fujimori took credit for this development, claiming that his campaign had largely eliminated the insurgent threat. After the auto-coup, the intelligence work of the DINCOTE (National Counter-Terrorism Directorate) led to the capture of the leaders from SL and MRTA, including SL leader Guzmán.
Critics charge that to achieve the defeat of Sendero Luminoso in various towns and cities, the Peruvian military indulged in widespread human rights abuses, and that the vast majority of the victims were poor highland campesinos caught in the crossfire between military and the insurgents. The final report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published on 28 August 2003, revealed that while the majority of the atrocities committed between 1980 and 1995 were the work of the Shining Path, the Peruvian armed forces were also guilty of having destroyed villages and having murdered campesinos, whom they suspected of supporting the insurgents. According to the report, the great percentage of deaths caused by the armed forces occurred during the Belaunde and Garcia governments. During the Fujimori period the numbers decreased, with a shift in tactics away from general butchery and toward isolating support for the insurgents, with Army engineers building rural roads and schools.
The 1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis, was a major national and international crisis that shaped Fujimori's second term. The hostage crisis began on December 17, 1996, when fourteen Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) militants seized the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima during a party, taking hostage some four hundred diplomats, government officials, and other dignitaries; the action was partly in protest of prison conditions in Peru. During the protracted four-month stand-off, the Emerretistas gradually freed all but 72 of their hostages. The government rejected the militants' demand to release imprisoned MRTA members and prepared in secret an elaborate plan to storm the residence, while gaining time by negotiating with the hostage-takers.
On April 22, 1997, a team of 140 military commandos, given the name "Chavín de Huantar", raided the building to free the hostages. One hostage, two military commandos, and all of the 14, primarily teenage MRTA insurgents, including their leader, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini were killed in the military operation.[24] President Fujimori visited the Japanese ambassador's residence to inspect the scene and speak to the former hostages. Images of Fujimori taken during the last minutes of the military operation, surrounded by some of the liberated dignitaries and soldiers, and walking among the fallen bodies of the insurgents were shown on television. The successful conclusion of the four-month-long standoff was used by Fujimori and his supporters to bolster his image as being "tough on terrorism". In an interview published in the Japan Times Fujimori has said that he was under the impression that he had obtained Japan's "endorsement" in using lethal force to conclude the hostage crisis at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima in April 1997. According to the Japan Times’ essay, Fujimori and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto issued a joint declaration from Toronto, Canada, prior to the assault that stated, "It is essential to secure the physical and mental health of the hostages.”[25]
Several organizations disagree with Fujimori's method during the fight against Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA. According to Amnesty International, "the widespread and systematic nature of human rights violations committed during the government of former head of state Alberto Fujimori (1990 - 2000) in Peru constitute crimes against humanity under international law.".[26] Fujimori's presumptive association with death squads is currently being studied by the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, after the court accepted the case of "Cantuta vs Perú".[27]
The 1991 Barrios Altos massacre by members of the death squad Grupo Colina, made up of members of the Peruvian Armed Forces, was one of the crime cited in the request for his extradition submitted by the Peruvian government to Japan in 2003.
The success of the operation in the Japanese embassy hostage crisis was tainted by subsequent revelations that at least three and possibly eight of the insurgents had been summarily executed by the commandos after surrendering. In 2002, the case was taken up by public prosecutors, but the Peruvian Supreme Court ruled that the military tribunals had jurisdiction. A military court later absolved them of guilt, and the "Chavín de Huantar" soldiers led the 2004 military parade. In response, in 2003 MRTA family members lodged a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights accusing the Peruvian state of human rights violations, namely that the MRTA insurgents had been denied the "right to life, the right to judicial guarantees and the right to judicial protection". The IACHR accepted the case and is currently studying it.[28] The current Peruvian Minister of Justice, Maria Zavala, has recently stated that the latest verdict by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights(IACHR) supports the Peruvian government's efforts to extradite Fujimori from Chile. Though the IACHR verdict does not directly implicate Fujimori, it does fault the Peruvian government for its complicity in the 1992 murders of nine students and one faculty member from Cantuta University.[29] Ironically, the current Peruvian government and the mayority of the populiation have rejected both rulings of the IACHR [30][31]
After submitting his resignation initially by fax and later in hard copy, Fujimori remained in self-imposed exile in Japan [20], where his citizenship as foreign-born Japanese was confirmed because his parents had registered him with the Japanese consular authorities in Peru as an infant, and he had not given it up under the 1985 citizenship law revision. Several senior Japanese politicians have supported Fujimori, partly because of what they consider his decisive action in ending the 1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis.[32]
Former President Alejandro Toledo led the case against Fujimori's alleged crimes during his regime. He arranged meetings with the Supreme Court, tax authorities, and other powers in Peru in order to "coordinate the joint efforts to bring the criminal Fujimori from Japan". His vehemence in this matter had crossed the border of the Peruvian law: forcing the judiciary and legislative system to keep guilty sentences without hearing Fujimori's defense (see "Political Peruvian Constitution" 1993); not providing Fujimori with a lawyer in absence of representation; and expelling pro-Fujimori congressmen from the parliament without proof of the accusations against them. This last was later reversed by the judiciary.[33]
Some examples of the attempts by the former Toledo administration were:
At the same time, the Strategic Finance and International Co-operation Unit (UFEC) of the office of the Special Prosecutor for Corruption Offences (Procuraduría Ad Hoc Anticorrupción, established in the early days of the Toledo administration to examine irregularities under the previous regime) released a report in which it calculated the illicit gains that Fujimori or some of his followers amounted to USD $2 billion. UFEC claims that this money was removed from the country illegally, using methods that are currently under investigation. Walter Hoflich, head of the UFEC unit, said that $174 million have already been recovered, but that this sum represents less than a tenth of those illegal earnings. Most of this money is related to Vladimiro Montesinos' entangled web of corruption. The Office of the Prosecutor reports that it has located an additional $59 million deposited in banks in the United States, Switzerland, and Grand Cayman, which it has failed to repatriate. Despite this effective action against corruption, there is no direct evidence compromising Fujimori. A specialized US company (Kroll), hired by the Peruvian government has failed to prove the accusation against Fujimori, after years of investigations. The UFEC's figure of two billion dollars is considerably higher than that arrived at by Transparency International, an NGO that studies corruption. In its "Global Corruption Report 2004", Transparency International listed Fujimori as leading the seventh most corrupt government of the past two decades, estimating that the corruption may have embezzled USD $600 million in funds.[35][36]
Undaunted by the accusations and the judicial proceedings underway against him, which, citing Toledo's involvement, he dismissed as "politically motivated", Fujimori, working from Japan, has established a new political party in Peru, Sí Cumple to participate in the 2006 presidential elections. However, in February 2004 the Constitutional Court dismissed the possibility of Fujimori participating in those elections, noting that the ex-president was barred by Congress from holding office for ten years. The decision was regarded as unconstitutional by Fujimori supporters such as ex-congress members Luz Salgado, Marta Chávez, and Fernán Altuve, who argued it was a "political" maneuver, and that the only body with authority to determine the matter is the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE). Magdalena Chu, head of the Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales (ONPE), has also declared that the JNE is the only authority which can decide on the admissibility of Fujimori's candidacy. Others however, such as Heriberto Benítez of Frente Independiente Moralizador (FIM) say the decision is "complementary" to the Congress's ten-year prohibition. In the opinion of ex-president Valentín Paniagua, the Constitutional Court finding is binding and "no further debate is possible".[37][38]
Fujimori's new political party Sí Cumple, created at the beginning of 2003, has been receiving more than 10% in many country-level polls,, contending with APRA for the second place slot, far behind Unidad Nacional. The general secretary is Carlos Orellana, Fujimori's former press advisor during his presidency. In addition, there are several other parties under the Fujimorismo umbrella such as Cambio 90, Nueva Mayoría, and Fuerza Perú. All of them have been certified to participate in the 2006 elections. However, Fujimori has declared that the only "official" Fujimorismo party that will participate in the next presidential elections is Sí Cumple.
On the afternoon of November 6, 2005, Fujimori arrived, without prior notice, in Santiago, Chile, on a private aircraft, having flown via Tijuana, Mexico, from Tokyo; the flight passed through Peruvian airspace on its path from Mexico to Chile. There were numerous firings over alleged negligence in the handling of the Fujimori flight to Chile. [39]As investigations continued, two Chilean and four Mexican immigration officers were dismissed for failing to notify superiors of Fujimori's stop at the time of his arrival. A Peruvian Interpol chief was also fired for negligence on the night when former President Alberto Fujimori flew over Peru on his way to Chile. Colonel Carlos Medel, head of Interpol in Lima, apparently ordered his staff to switch off the 24-hour Interpol warning system from late November 5 to early November 6 when Fujimori happened to fly over Peruvian air space on his way from Mexico to Chile.
Mexican officials have commented Fujimori was not arrested in Mexico since there was no judicial order for his arrest. Chilean officials issued similar statements, reiterating that Chilean courts must process international arrest warrants to make them valid.
Peru's former president, Alejandro Toledo, after learning of the arrival of Fujimori in Chile, called for an “urgent meeting” in the governmental palace. Toledo called Chile's foreign minister, Ignacio Walker, and requested the detention of Fujimori; then, a few hours later, Fujimori was detained, without resistance, at his hotel on an arrest warrant issued by a Chilean judge, who was told by Chile's Supreme Court to consider Lima's request for Fujimori's pre-trial detention, as part of the extradition process.[40] Fujimori was then transferred to the School of Investigations, Chile's investigative police academy, where he spent the night and was notified of the reasons for his arrest. There he made a petition to be granted provisional freedom during the extradition proceedings, but it was denied. Later in the day, he was transferred to the School of Gendarmerie, a training academy for corrections officers, where he was detained until May of 2006.
The decision whether or not to extradite Fujimori was delegated by the Chilean government to the Supreme Court, following precedent dating to a 1932 extradition treaty between the two nations. As outlined in the extradition treaty, the Chilean Court will base its decision on whether there is sufficient evidence against Fujimori – not necessarily enough to convict him of the charges, but sufficient to justify (from a Chilean legal point of view) the indictments he now faces. This has meant that Peruvian prosecutors have tried to demonstrate that the crimes for which Fujimori has been charged in Peru are just as severe in Chile. [41]
Peru, which had sixty days following Fujimori's detention to issue an extradition request, sent a high-level delegation to Chile, led by Interior Minister Rómulo Pizarro and a top prosecutor; this action, together with the fact that president Toledo said, on television, that “he personally will welcome Fujimori at the airport and conduct him to the jail,” defined the situation as a political prosecution, according to many analysts. By some estimates, it could take six months or more for the extradition request to be heard and for Fujimori to exhaust his appeals. Meanwhile, the government of Japan is asking for "fair treatment" of Alberto Fujimori, due to the Japanese citizenship he holds (in addition to his Peruvian citizenship); Peru's government considered this as “unacceptable interference” with the Fujimori extradition case.
On May 18, 2006 Fujimori was granted bail (set at US$2,830) by the Chilean Supreme Court. He left the School of Gendarmerie where he was arrested for more than six months and whisked away to a house () rented for him by his family in the upscale Las Condes neighborhood of the Chilean capital. Because he was granted provisional freedom, he cannot leave Chile. There are fears among some Peruvians that he may escape from the country. Orlando Álvarez, the Supreme Court Justice in charge of the extradition process, said that "not before one month" he will issue a ruling on the Peruvian government's petition. This ruling may be appealed by the Peruvian State and Fujimori's defense.[42]
Fujimori arrived at a time of tense relations between Chile and Peru, after Peru's Congress passed a law the previous week in an attempt to reclaim sea territory from Chile. Chilean foreign minister, Ignacio Walker, said Fujimori's action demonstrated "a very imprudent, very irresponsible attitude, considering this is the most difficult week we have had with Peru in the last decade." In a media statement, Fujimori said that he would stay in Chile temporarily while launching his candidacy for Peruvian president in the April, 2006 elections. Cesar Nakasaki, Alberto Fujimori's lawyer, in a Television interview said Chile, because of its Judiciary reputation, was chosen as a preliminary step before travelling on to Peru; other analysts speculated that Fujimori chose Chile for its proximity to Peru and for the fact that extraditions from Chile to Peru have proved difficult in recent years.
Most recently, the Chilean judge overseeing the extradition proceedings of former President Fujimori refused to accept new evidence regarding 10 corruption and two human rights charges, which according to the BBC News’ Dan Collyns “would have prolonged the case by several months.”[43]
According to Fujii Takahiko, one of the Japanese financiers who have covered some of Fujimori's expenses after the Chilean courts granted him conditional freedom last May, “Peru's ex-president Alberto Fujimori is calmly waiting for the decision of the Chilean Supreme Court because he has the assurance that he will not be extradited.” It was reported that Fujii covered the cost of renting the house in which Fujimori currently resides in the up-scale Santiago neighborhood of Las Condes, while a cadre of businessmen and Japanese friends cover his living expenses. Fujii, a car exporter by trade, reported that Alberto Fujimori has largely forgotten his knowledge of the Japanese language.[44]
On November 22, 2006, it was reported that the Peruvian government has issued a new arrest warrant for Fujimori, alleging that he ordered the death of 20 members of Sendero Luminoso in 1992. Fujimori has denied the charge.[45]
On January 11, 2007 Chile's supreme court rejected a motion for an additional investigation filed by lawyers for Fujimori whom Peru is still seeking to extradite. This new ruling coincides with the Peruvian government’s anger over the recent Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruling that found Peru guilty of crimes committed during former President Fujimori’s regime. [46] The Peruvian government has expressed concerns that Fujimori may try and escape from Chile. [36] Although Fujimori has been on parole, with stipulations banning him from leaving Chile, during the end of January 2007, he traveled to a beach resort aboard a private airplane. [47]. On February 1, 2007 Reuters reported that the Peruvian government's final report on Fujimori's extradition includes additional evidence supporting the former president’s links to human rights abuses. In the words of Carlos Briceno, Peru's special corruption prosecutor, "We've practically finished the report, in which there is irrefutable proof [against Fujimori]," For his part, former president Fujimori denies the human rights and embezzlement charges. Following the conclusion of the investigative phase of the extradition case last month, the presiding Chilean Judge Orlando Alvarez is currently reviewing evidence. Judge Alvarez will be provided with a report from Fujimori's defense attorneys, in addition to one issued by the Peruvian state. Briceno expects Alvarez to issue a ruling by May.[37]
On February 8, 2007 the Peruvian government filed a formal request with the United States for the extradition of ex-president Alberto Fujimori’s younger brother, Pedro Fujimori. According to the head of the Peruvian Justice Ministry's Unit for Extraditions, Omar Chehade, Pedro Fujimori is charged with corruption associated with reception of illegal donations for a NGO, Apenkai, founded at the outset of Fujimori’s first term in office. Chehade reported to Reuters that Pedro Fujimori oversaw Japanese donations to the Peruvian government, and that he allegedly siphoned off as much as 30 million dollars into his own personal bank accounts in the U.S.. Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the Fujimorista party, Congressman Carlos Raffo, denied the charges calling them unsubstantiated, and noted that there are no signs of corruption on the part of Pedro Fujimori. [48][38]
Martha Chavez was the Si Cumple's Candidate for the 2006 presidential elections. Keiko Fujimori—Alberto Fujimori's daughter—was the Fujimori party's candidate for the Peruvian congress. The results of the voting was a shocking surprise for the Fujimori's enemies; while Martha Chavez got about 7.43% of the votes for the presidency (former president Valentin Paniagua got 5.75%) Keiko Fujimori got the highest vote count in Lima (and in the whole country) with 602,869 votes. The Si Cumple party won 13 seats in the new Peruvian congress.[49]
Some of Si Cumple's members occupy powerful positions in the resulting Peruvian congress, such as Luisa Maria Cuculiza, who is the vice president of congress, Rolando Souza—formerly Fujimori's lawyer—now president of the International Affairs Committee, and Santiago Fujimori—Fujimori's brother—now president of the Energy Committee. Furthermore, Keiko Fujimori is president of the Peruvian-Chilean Friendship Commission.
Fujimori remains a controversial figure in Peru. He is credited by many Peruvians for bringing stability to the country after the violence and hyperinflation of the García years. While it is generally agreed that the "Fujishock" brought short/middle-term macroeconomic stability, the long-term social impact of Fujimori's free market economic policies is still hotly debated.
High growth during Fujimori's first term petered out during his second term. "El Niño" phenomena had a tremendous impact in the Peruvian economy during the late 1990s.[50] Nevertheless, total GDP growth between 1992 and 2001, inclusive, was 44.60%, that is, 3.76% per annum; total GDP per capita growth between 1991 and 2001, inclusive, was 30.78%, that is, 2.47% per annum.[51] Also, studies by INEI, the national statistics bureau[52] show that the number of Peruvians living in poverty increased dramatically (from 41.6% to 55%) during Alan García's term, but they actually decreased somewhat (from 55% to 54%) during Fujimori's term. Furthermore, FAO reported Peru reduced undernourishment by about 29% from 1990-92 to 1997-99.[53]
Peru was reinserted in the global economic system and attracted foreign investment. The sell-off of state-owned enterprises led to improvements in some service industries, notably local telephony, mobile telephony and Internet. For example, before privatization, a consumer or business would need to wait up to 10 years to get a local telephone line installed from the monopolistic state-run telephone company, at a cost of $607 for a residential line.[54][55]A couple of years after privatization, the wait was reduced to just a few days. Peru's Physical land based telephone network had a dramatic increase in telephone penetration from 2.9% in 1993 to 5.9% in 1996 and 6.2% in 2000,[56] and a dramatic decrease in the wait for a telephone line. Average wait went from 70 months in 1993 (before privatization) to 2 months in 1996 (after privatization)[57]Privatization also generated foreign investment in export-oriented activities such as mining and energy extraction, notably the Camisea gas project, as well as investment in tourism and agroexport activities.
By the end of the decade, Peru's international currency reserves were built up from nearly zero at the end of García's term in office to almost USD $10 billion. Fujimori also left a smaller state bureaucracy and reduced government expenses (in contrast to a past where each party in power added to the bureaucracy in government ministries and state-run companies), independent and technical-minded administration of public entities like SUNAT, a large number of new schools (not only in Lima but in the small towns of Peru), more roads and highways, and new and upgraded communications infrastructure. These improvement led to the revival of tourism, agroexport, and fisheries.[58][59]
Detractors have observed Fujimori was able to encourage large-scale mining projects with foreign corporations and push through mining-friendly legislation laws because the post auto-coup political picture greatly facilitated the process.
Some analysts state that some of the GDP growth during the Fujimori years reflects a greater rate of extraction of non-renewable resources by transnational companies; these companies were attracted by Fujimori by means of near-zero royalties, and, by the same fact, little of the extracted wealth has stayed in the country.[60][61][62][63] Peru's mining legislation, they claim, has served as a role model for other countries that wish to become more mining-friendly.[64]
Fujimori's privatization program also remains shrouded in controversy. A congressional investigation in 2002, led by opposition congressman Javier Diez Canseco, stated that of the USD $9 billion raised through the privatisations of hundreds of state-owned enterprises, only a small fraction of this income ever benefitted the Peruvian people.
Some scholars, such as the political analyst C. Kenney claim that Fujimori's government became a "dictatorship" after the auto-coup,[65] one that was permeated by a network of corruption organized by his associate Montesinos, who now faces dozens of charges that range from embezzlement to drug trafficking to murder (Montesinos is currently on trial in Lima).[66][67][68] Fujimori's style of government has also been described as "populist authoritarianism". Numerous governments,[69] and national and international human rights organizations, such as APRODEH and Amnesty International, have called for the extradition of Fujimori to face pending charges of corruption and crimes against humanity.
Nevertheless, Fujimori still enjoys a measure of support within Peru: a poll conducted in Lima in February 2005 gave him a 17% popularity rating (former President Toledo, at the same time, was averaging an approval rating of around 8%).[70] A poll conducted in March 2005 by the Instituto de Desarrollo e Investigación de Ciencias Económicas (IDICE) indicated that 12.1% of the respondents intended to vote for Fujimori in the 2006 presidential election.[71] A poll conducted on November 25, 2005 by the Universidad de Lima indicated a high approval (45.6%) rating of the Fujimori period between 1990-2000, attributed to his counter-insurgency efforts (53%).[72]
According to a more recent Universidad de Lima survey, Fujimory still retains public support, ranking fifth in personal popularity in contrast to other political figures. Popular approval for his decade long presidency (1990-2000) has reportedly grown (from 31.5% in 2002 to 49.5% in May, 2007). Despite accusations of corruption and human rights violations, nearly half of the individuals interviewed in the survey approved of Fujimori’s presidential regime. [73] In the same poll, a large majority of people in the nation’s capital feel that Fujimori should face criminal charges in Peru: 82.6 % of respondents in Lima and the port of Callao believe that the former president should be extradited from Chile to stand trial in Peru.[74]
The financial, Lima-based newspaper Perú 21 ran an editorial noting that even though the Universidad de Lima poll results indicate that 4 out of every 5 interviewed believe that Fujimori is guilty of some of the charges against him, he still enjoys at least 30% of popular support and enough approval to reestablish his political career.[75]
Critics of former President Fujimori have faced reprisals. The Peruvian judicial system has moved against journalists who have attempted to expose Fujimori’s crimes. For instance, on August 15, 2006, Lima’s public prosecutor recommended an eight-year jail term for Mauricio Aguirre Corvalán, the former presenter of TV Channel 4’s show “Cuarto Poder”, for, “disclosing state secrets.” The accused journalist had televised a video in September 2003 of former President Alberto Fujimori, which he made when he was in office in 1998. The former President’s son used the video during his father’s re-election campaign in 2000, and said to have permitted the media to use it as well. Aguirre Corvalán was eventually cleared of the charges against him in October 2006: his prosecution violated the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Declaration of Principle on Freedom of Expression, which Peru has formally ratified. [76]
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