Peru mourns former strongman Alberto Fujimori

Peru began three days of national mourning and a state funeral service for former President Alberto Fujimori on Thursday, despite his complicated legacy as an increasingly authoritarian ruler between 1990 and 2000. 

The former president died of cancer in the capital, Lima, on Wednesday. He was granted a pardon on humanitarian grounds last December and was freed from prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses and corruption. 

Three days of mourning 

Fujimori's coffin was taken to the Ministry of Culture on Thursday, where it will lie in state until Saturday, allowing members of the public to pay their respects. 

Riot police and a group of around 50 supporters surrounded the hearse as it moved through the streets of Lima. 

Fujimori's daughter Keiko, who has run for the presidency unsuccessfully three times herself, followed the coffin into the ministry with his son Kenji. They were met there by President Dina Boluarte. 

Flags will be flown at half-staff on public buildings for three days after the government's decision published on Thursday to grant a funeral as it would for a sitting president. 

Complicated legacy decades on

Fujimori has a mixed legacy in Peru 34 years after coming to power in 1990. 

He took over a country ravaged by runaway inflation and guerilla violence, ushered in rapid economic improvement with bold actions like privatizing several state industries. He also defeated communist Shining Path rebels and for a time enjoyed broad-based support. 

But his political career ended in disgrace and at first self-imposed exile, and then prison. 

Leaked videotapes emerged, soon after he shut down Congress and awarded himself a controversial third term in 2000, showing his spy chief bribing lawmakers. Fujimori fled to Japan, where his parents hailed from, and famously faxed in his resignation. 

He was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison over the death squad killings of 25 people while his government was fighting the Shining Path and other leftist rebels. He also faced wide-ranging corruption allegations. 

The legal wranglings continued in the years that followed, but last December he was granted a humanitarian pardon and allowed to leave prison. 

Cancer in his tongue had spread to his lungs and Fujimori walked out of prison wearing a face mask and receiving supplemental oxygen. 

He had last been seen in public on September 4, leaving a hospital appointment in a wheelchair. Asked whether he still planned, as his daughter Keiko had said, to compete for the presidency in 2026, he said: "We'll see, we'll see." 

msh/rc (AFP, Reuters)