At 85 years old, after a decade and a half behind bars for crimes against human rights, Alberto Fujimori has determined to establish himself as a content creator. Since the beginning of March, when he announced his foray into social networks, he has garnered 161,000 followers on Tiktok, 449,000 posts with almost three million views. He also keeps active his Facebook and Twitter accounts, where he was an intermittent user. And recently he launched his own website under the label of “the president who changed Peru.”
Political analysts wonder if the Peruvian-Japanese – whom the population calls “Chinese” – who governed the country in the nineties, is campaigning with a view to 2026 or if in any case he intends to be the media springboard that his daughter Keiko he needs to come to power after three failed attempts where he lost by a head. Although a law was enacted a few years ago that prevents those convicted of corruption from running for elected office, the Constitutional Court left the door ajar months ago by declaring the impediments unconstitutional for those who have already served their sentence. Fujimori served 16 of the 25 years to which he was sentenced. He was released last December, precisely by an order from the TC – in contempt of the Inter-American Court -, based on a presidential pardon granted in 2017 for “humanitarian reasons.”
From the emaciated old man who left the Barbadillo prison next to an oxygen tank to the influencer who walks through shopping centers and takes photos with his followers, there is an abysmal change. For better or worse, Fujimori has never stopped being the great influencer of Peruvian politics. And as such he is in search of new audiences. Young people who were still crawling when he occupied the Palace or who had not even been born. Of all his audiovisual pieces, the most controversial are those that he has baptized as “video memories”, clips of four minutes on average where he has proposed to vindicate his image.
In the first chapter of a saga that so far has five installments, the former autocrat maintains that he is not a murderer, that he only defended the people and that his only fault is having defeated terrorism. In one of the rooms of his daughter Keiko’s house, where he lives, the patriarch says in front of the camera: “Terrorism and its allies distorted history: they turned Sendero (Luminoso) and the MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) into victims and the Peruvian State as a murderer.”
For the lawyer and political scientist Juan de la Puente, the phrase is false, since there is no judicial or political process that indicates that the State was a murderer. “What has been pointed out is that there was a systematic practice of violating human rights during the period of violence. There has been no effort made by political groups to turn Sendero into a victim. On the contrary, after Fujimori fell, the processes against terrorism continued,” he says. The political scientist José Alejandro Godoy, for his part, makes a between-the-lines reading of the fact that Fujimori has resorted to the term allies. “There what he means is that human rights organizations and investigative journalism that brought to light the events linked to the Colina paramilitary group are allies of terrorism. It is a dichotomy in which anyone who criticizes his government is not only an enemy, but an accomplice of terrorist groups.”
In that initial video, Fujimori assures that there is not a single piece of evidence against him and that he was unjustly convicted under the theory of control of the fact, basically for being the head of a government accused of being a criminal. “Here what Fujimori seeks is to confuse a public that does not necessarily know the terms of criminal responsibility. The fact domain theory implies that there is a set of people who are the intellectual authors of an event who dominate an organization and are the ones who give the orders or the operators. Fujimori did not fire a gun, but he was aware of the Colina Group’s crimes and was the only one who could prevent them. That conclusion was reached after an accumulation of evidence in a process that lasted 162 hearings,” explains Godoy, author of The last dictator a book that dissects his decade. The Colina Group murdered and disappeared 49 people under suspicion of being subversives.
A sadly famous event is the end of his mandate, when in November 2000, two months after the broadcast of the first ‘vladivideo’ – a set of bribes paid by his main advisor and trusted man, Vladimiro Montesinos -, Fujimori resigned. the presidency from Japan via fax. He dedicates a chapter to the incident, where he justifies himself by alleging an “operation underway to remove him,” but that his plans were always to return to Peru to defend himself personally. And that is why he took a plane to Chile five years later, in 2005, to “achieve legal protection” that would allow him to reach Peru with a limited number of trials.
Juan de la Puente refutes his version: “It is a big lie that he wanted to be held accountable. He opposed the extradition process when he landed in Chile. Let us also remember that he ran for the Japanese Senate. Someone who intends to return to give explanations is not going to run or want to lead a political life in another country. It is, clearly, an attempt to rewrite the history of his government, now with his voice and his image, insisting on a personalistic story, where he seeks to remain as the ‘author of the reconstruction of the country and the fight against terrorism’ when the context was much more complex.”
In another of his videos, Fujimori claims to be the intellectual author of the operation Chavin who rescued 72 hostages in the residence of the Japanese ambassador in 1997. “It appeared to me in a dream,” he says about the tunnels that allowed the surprise entry of the military to shoot down the members of the MRTA and free the captives. Dream that he has turned into a book called Chavín de Huantar: the dreamed rescue. However, this is a version that has not been confirmed by the senior officers who participated in the operation. In a report for the newspaper El Comercio, Colonel José Williams Zapata says that “it was the product of conversations with more than one person.” The former General Commander of the Army, César Astudillo Salcedo—who led a rescue team—, in his book Chavín de Huantar, the legacy, does not mention him as the one who raised the idea in its 269 pages. It says rather: “Although Fujimori was the most visible actor during the 126 days that the takeover of the Japanese embassy lasted, and the result was his political merit, the greatest was the commandos themselves and, therefore, our Armed Forces.”
In the most recent installment of his video memoirs, Alberto Fujimori highlights that if the main terrorist leaders, such as Abimael Guzmán or Víctor Polay Campos, had not been captured, the country would probably have had to accept a peace agreement with the subversive groups. Along these lines he ranted against the head of state of Colombia, Gustavo Petro. “Let’s just look at what our brother people of Colombia are experiencing today. The president today in Colombia was an M-19 guerrilla. In other words, Fujimori once again highlights that thanks to his management the subversives are not occupying a seat in Congress or inhabiting the Palace.
Currently, Fujimori is being prosecuted for a pending trial: the Pativilca massacre, in which six people were cruelly tortured and murdered in 1992 when they were accused of being terrorists. He also builds videos of him to defend the case. This Monday will mark five months since he was released from prison. Now without a nasal cannula and without an oxygen cylinder, Fujimori continues to establish himself as a tiktoker.
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