(CNN Spanish) – The biographies of the major protagonists of one of the darkest and most violent chapters in the recent history of Peru were intertwined again this Wednesday, with the death of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who died on exactly the same date, but 2024, that Abimael Guzmán, the bloodthirsty leader of the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso who put the Peruvian government in check for several years with his armed struggle until his capture in 1992.
Fujimori, an agronomist, son of Japanese immigrants, surprised as an outsider and won the elections in 1990 with the promise of stabilizing a country plagued by hyperinflation and internal armed conflict.
By then, Sendero Luminoso, founded by Guzmán, a university professor of philosophy, had already been a subversive group for a decade, with massacres and the murder of thousands of civilians, many of them peasants, as well as police and military personnel. The attacks had moved from the countryside to the cities, with attacks on the electrical grid that left a frightened society crying out for peace in the dark. Guzmán, known in his ranks under the alias of Presidente Gonzalo, was synonymous with horror.
By 1992, the terrorist group considered that it was in a stage of “strategic balance” against the Armed Forces. Attacks were frequent in the precarious neighborhoods on the outskirts of Lima. There was no further trace of Guzmán, who had developed a cult of personality in his ranks.
For his part, Fujimori, without a strong bench in Congress, had received some legislative powers, but he did not obtain the approval of all his neoliberal economic policies of austerity and demanded more tools for the anti-subversive fight.
The president, protected in the context of chaos, staged a self-coup in April 1992: he dissolved Congress, took tanks to the streets and arrested opponents, a maneuver known as “Fujimorazo.”
Far from achieving calm, one of the worst attacks in Lima occurred in July: the explosion of a car bomb in the Miraflores district that left 25 dead and more than 250 injured.
But the balm arrived in September. Guzmán was captured in an operation by the Special Intelligence Group of the National Police, in a home in a residential area of Lima. There he was detained without a shot next to the leadership of his organization. Since then the group, with a pronounced vertical structure, has fallen apart.
The country was a party. As reported The CommerceFujimori found out about the capture when he was on a trip in the province of Iquitos. In any case, he could celebrate the fulfillment of his promise that by 1995 he would have freed Peru from the Shining Path, made in an interview with The Country.
Later, he exhibited him like a caged animal, wearing a striped suit, walking and shouting proclamations.
But the road to capture was not easy, much less peaceful.
While Guzmán used terror in his attempt to seize power, Fujimori appealed to state terrorism to keep the country in his grip.
Before the operation that culminated in the capture of Guzmán, the massacres of La Cantuta occurred in Lima (in July 1992, with a university professor and nine students kidnapped and disappeared) and Barrios Altos (occurred in November 1991, with 15 murders, including a child), carried out by Grupo Colina, a clandestine Army squad. Fujimori would be sentenced decades later to 25 years in prison for aggravated homicide and injuries as the direct perpetrator of these massacres. He was never tried for the Pativilca massacre, also at the hands of the paramilitary group.
Once the great objective against terrorism was achieved and the economy was stabilized, Fujimori enjoyed broad support. He won the 1995 elections with 64% of the vote, more than 40 points ahead of the second candidate, and his party won more than half of the seats in Congress. What could have been a path of redemption after state violence and the self-coup became an authoritarian drift marked by corruption and other crimes.
Between 1995 and 2000, his government carried out a family planning policy in rural areas in which, according to human rights groups, thousands of women suffered forced sterilizations, but the case was never prosecuted.
His candidacy for a third term unleashed criticism from his opponents, who claimed that he could not run. But Justice and the Legislature gave it the green light after an interpretation of the Constitution.
Accusations of corruption accompanied him from beginning to end of his administration. In his first term, his then wife, Susana Higuchi, reported that her family was selling donated clothing. In his last days as president, he granted US$15 million in compensation to his outgoing advisor Vladimiro Montesinos, protagonist of the “vladivideos” that triggered the fall of the Government, by showing cash payments to opponents to go over to the ruling party. . Fujimori was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for “intentional embezzlement and ideological falsehood” for this illegal delivery to Montesinos and the Justice Department also condemned him in 2015 for the diversion of military funds to buy editorial lines from sensationalist newspapers, in which attacked the opposition, but then the Supreme Court annulled the sentence.
In November 2000 he resigned from the presidency from abroad, but Congress rejected his letter and removed him from office.
If Fujimori, with his economic and constitutional reforms, modernized the country, with a legacy that includes one of the most stable macroeconomies in South America, he also undermined the democratic system with notoriously palpable effects in the succession of six leaders between 2018 and 2022.
Guzmán never showed regret for his bloody takeover of the State by force. Neither did Fujimori for his crimes, even after spending years in prison and getting a pardon.
Anti-terrorist prosecutor Milko Ruiz he told the Andina agency In 2019, of the 3,702 million soles (about US$977 million) that was imposed on the Senderista leadership as civil reparation, the State had collected just over US$150,000 and seven properties had been seized.
In the case of Fujimori, he owed the State 51 million soles (US$13.5 million) and never paid any of it, according to stated to RPP the State Attorney General, Javier Pacheco.
Both died at the age of 86. Guzmán’s remains were cremated and scattered in a reserved place, to avoid public disorder. For his part, Fujimori is fired with funeral honors on a new anniversary of the capture of the terrorist leader, being visited by his numerous supporters, and will be buried in a private cemetery.
