The divisive former president, who ruled from 1990 to 2000 and is now 85, has been released from prison on compassionate grounds.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who was serving a 25-year prison sentence for human rights abuses during his decade-long rule in the 1990s, has been freed after the country’s highest court reinstated a controversial 2017 pardon.
Fujimori, 85, was released from Lima’s Barbadillo prison on Wednesday, a day after the court ruled to reinstate the pardon on humanitarian grounds, despite criticism from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court) and the victims’ families.
Fujimori spent 16 years in prison after his extradition from Chile in 2007.
Crowds of supporters gathered outside the prison, where Fujimori was greeted by his two children – Keiko, a three-time failed presidential candidate, and Kenji, a businessman – before they were taken away in a gray truck.
“It is time to end this injustice against Fujimori, because it is thanks to him that our country stands on its feet,” Catalina Ponce, a Fujimori supporter who was waiting outside the prison, said earlier in the day.
Fujimori, who is of Japanese descent and led the country from 1990 to 2000, has divided Peruvians like few other former leaders.
Supporters believe he saved Peru from the armed Shining Path group and economic collapse.
But his critics say he abused democracy and committed atrocities during his government’s battle against Shining Path.
The former president was convicted in 2009 of ordering the killing of 25 people in 1991 and 1992, but was pardoned in December 2017 by former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.
The amnesty had been repeatedly overturned or suspended by lower courts after pressure from the Inter-American Court and the families of the victims, until this week’s ruling by the Constitutional Court.
Shortly after the order was issued, the President of the Inter-American Court asked Peru to suspend the pardon until it had “all the necessary elements” to analyze whether the conditions had been met.
Fujimori was impeached in November 2000 on grounds of “moral incompetence” and charged with corruption, one day after he fled to Japan, where his parents are from, and resigned via fax. He then went to Chile, where he was eventually extradited.
These days, he suffers from recurring respiratory and nervous system problems, high blood pressure, and has also suffered from tongue cancer.
Tuesday’s ruling reinstating the pardon cannot be appealed, but Fujimori also faces other legal problems.
He has pleaded guilty to bribing lawmakers and spying on rivals while in power, and has also been investigated for the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of poor people, most of them indigenous women, during his last four years in power.
An estimated 270,000 Peruvians, many of them indigenous people who did not speak Spanish, underwent surgery to have their fallopian tubes tied as part of a family planning program implemented under Fujimori.
In 2021, a judge ruled that Fujimori could not, at that time, be prosecuted in the case on technical legal grounds.
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