National funerals will be reserved for the former leader, who passed away on Wednesday in Lima at the age of 86, leaving a country deeply divided over him. Mr. Fujimori will receive the “funeral honors due to a sitting president,” according to a decree signed by President Dina Boluarte.
“After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just gone to meet the Lord. We ask those who loved him to accompany us with a prayer for the eternal rest of his soul. Thank you for everything, Dad!” announced his children Keiko, Hiro, Sachie, and Kenji Fujimori.
Mr. Fujimori’s eldest daughter, Keiko, later announced that a wake would be held starting Thursday at the National Museum in Lima, specifying that her father’s burial would take place on Saturday.
“We will welcome anyone who wants to say goodbye to him in person,” she stated on X.
The Presidency of the Republic confirmed “the sad news,” extending its “sincere condolences to the family.” “May God have his soul and may he rest in peace,” concludes the presidential statement.
“We will coordinate with the family to know their wishes regarding the ex-president’s funeral,” said the chief of the cabinet.
The former leader, born in Japan, had been released in December by order of the Constitutional Court “for humanitarian reasons,” despite opposition from the Inter-American Court of Justice, after spending 16 years in a prison in eastern Lima.
He was serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity, including two massacres of civilians carried out by an army squad in the context of the fight against the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path in the early 1990s.
“He had to pay for what he did, but now that he is dead, what can we do… He did not serve his sentence,” said Juana Carrion, president of the Association of Relatives of Kidnapped, Detained, and Disappeared Persons in Peru.
The former president, nicknamed “El Chino” (the Chinese), who deeply divided the country, had been hospitalized several times in recent years. A malignant tumor had been diagnosed in May on his tongue, where he had a cancerous lesion for over 27 years. In 2018, Mr. Fujimori made public a diagnosis of lung tumor.
His health had rapidly deteriorated in recent days, as he had completed his mouth radiotherapy in August, sources close to the family told AFP.
A Catholic priest arrived on Wednesday afternoon at his home in the San Borja district of Lima, where he lived with his eldest daughter, Keiko Fujimori.
Following the announcement of his death, supporters of Mr. Fujimori paraded in front of his residence to pay tribute. Like Nancy Gonzalez, for whom the former president “put an end to terrorism, stabilized the economy.”
Mr. Fujimori was last seen in public on September 5, leaving a clinic in the Miraflores district where he had an MRI, as he himself revealed.
– “Authoritarian and populist” –
A proponent of neoliberalism, Alberto Fujimori was a “forerunner in Latin America of a style of politics,” political analyst Augusto Alvarez told AFP.
According to him, the former president, who burst onto the public scene with his unexpected electoral victory over writer Mario Vargas Llosa, a future Nobel Prize in Literature, promoted an “authoritarian and populist” model that has been replicated in many other countries, both by leftist and right-wing movements.
The former president leaves behind a mixed legacy in the country. For some, he is the man who boosted the country’s economic growth through his ultra-liberal policies and successfully fought the Shining Path (Maoist) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (Guevarist) guerrillas.
Others mainly remember the corruption scandals and his authoritarian methods that led to his condemnation.
His daughter Keiko Fujimori has taken up his political torch but has failed three times in the presidential runoff.
On July 14, the leader of the country’s main right-wing party announced that her father would run in the 2026 presidential election, not knowing if she could participate as she is facing money laundering charges, with the prosecution asking for 30 years in prison for her.
In early August, Peru approved a law declaring that crimes against humanity committed before 2002 were time-barred, which could have benefited Alberto Fujimori.
Approved despite a mid-June resolution from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights calling for the suspension of the legislative process, it will benefit hundreds of other officials accused of abuses during the internal conflict of the 1980s and 1990s that caused about 69,000 deaths and 21,000 disappearances.