The inauguration of right-wing politician Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of dictator Alberto Fujimori, as the president of Peru on 26 July will consolidate the deeply divided country’s democratic regression.
After weeks of reviewing contested ballots following the presidential run-off on 7 June, Peru’s National Electoral Jury has announced the final results: Fujimori won with a slender 0.3% lead over the left-wing candidate, Roberto Sánchez. In the first round on 12 April, Fujimori won 17% of the vote, to Sánchez’s 12%.
As the leader of the country’s most polarising political dynasty, 51-year-old Fujimori will enter office with both her father’s political capital and the resentment he left behind. Alberto Fujimori ruled Peru between 1990 and 2000, a decade in which he became a dictator, dissolved Congress and the judiciary, and deployed the military onto the streets. His regime committed numerous human rights violations in the fight against left-wing armed groups, and carried out a programme of forced sterilisations.
In a region where the suspension of constitutional guarantees is becoming the norm – as seen in El Salvador, Ecuador and Peru itself – there is a risk that the new government will orchestrate the definitive takeover of institutions in favour of private interests and impunity.
The challenge facing the president-elect will not only be to revive a stagnant economy, but also to convince a large section of the public, who are sceptical that anyone bearing her surname can act within the bounds of a liberal democracy.
In 2010, Fujimori’s father Alberto was sentenced to 25 years in prison for corruption and his role in the 1991 and 1992 massacres in Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, respectively, in which 25 people were murdered. The Constitutional Court ordered his release on humanitarian grounds due to health issues in 2023, and he died a free man the following year aged 86.
His daughter, Keiko Fujimori, has gradually become the leader of Fujimorismo and the principal defender of her father’s regime – and his innocence — since she was first elected in 2006. Now, she has won the presidency on her fourth attempt, after many years of co-governing in Congress with her party, Fuerza Popular. But unlike her father, who had monolithic control, she inherits a fragmented and exhausted country that has seen eight presidents come and go in barely a decade (Fujimori will become the ninth).
As President, Fujimori will likely consolidate a strategy that her party has been implementing in Congress. So-called ‘Fujimorism’, or Fujirismo, is a peculiar political phenomenon, yet one that is becoming increasingly common in Latin America: a mixture of right-wing populism, social conservatism, a disregard for human rights, and an unshakeable faith in the free market.
She supported the amnesty law of 2024, which declared that war crimes and crimes against humanity committed before July 2002 were time-barred, and another law that protects members of the military and police from being tried in civil courts.
Last year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights urged Peru to repeal the amnesty law, as it contravenes international law. Since then, tensions with the Inter-American Court have been mounting, and Peru has threatened to withdraw from the Inter-American Human Rights System. Fujimori expressed support for such a withdrawal, promising a supposed return, but without accepting the full jurisdiction of either the human rights conventions or the Court.
One of the crimes that would fall under the amnesty is Alberto Fujimori’s National Programme for Reproductive Health and Family Planning, which sterilised more than 272,000 women and 22,000 men between 1996 and 2000, according to official records. That policy constituted “a form of gender-based violence and intersectional discrimination, particularly against indigenous, rural and economically vulnerable women”, as determined in 2024 by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
For activist Victoria Vigo, a victim of the forced sterilisations of the 1990s, a Fujimori in government represents the return of a “racist and deeply oppressive” model of the state.
“Peru has become divided, and a country divided in this way is not going to have a particularly good or peaceful government,” Vigo told openDemocracy. Fujimori “will find it difficult to govern; she will start to conjure up ghosts where there are none and resort to oppression”.
Democratic dilution
According to Peruvian political scientist Alberto Vergara Panigua, despite their differences, Fujimori and Sánchez are two sides of the same coin. “They represent a well-known contemporary political model… the quest to erode the rule of law, particularism and, obviously, a very low level of commitment to democracy,” Vergara said.
In 2021, when she lost her third election attempt, Fujimori claimed she had been the victim of electoral fraud, although she did not provide any evidence. This year, ahead of the run-off, she cast doubt on whether she would recognise the results – distancing herself from the fraud narrative only when she took the lead in the recount.
Similarly, Sánchez claimed that the elections were not fair and refused to recognise Fujimori’s victory.
“It is essential to recognise that both candidates are products of the current political system. They are children of the status quo and, in many ways – with their own nuances – are bound to reproduce the status quo,” said Vergara, a lecturer, writer and researcher at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima.
Vergara would not be surprised if Fujimori were to govern with the total or partial suspension of constitutional guarantees.
“I wouldn’t even use the phrase ‘she might go down that path’. She’s already there, because she has supported all the human rights violations of the last three or four years in Peru, such as the killings [of 50 protesters under the presidency of] Dina Boluarte, and her parliamentary group has passed the amnesty law, following the worst authoritarian tradition in Latin America, and another law that has the effect of relaxing civilian control over abuses by the security forces.
She used to do this from within the legislature, and now she will do so from within the executive.”
During the campaign, Keiko Fujimori presented herself as the only one capable of saving Peru from the abyss of ‘left-wing radicalism’, an argument that resonated in Lima, a capital fearful of economic instability. Her platform promised to restore ‘order’ under a ‘heavy-handed’ doctrine inspired by the punitive models currently gaining ground in the region.
But this renewed Fujimorism is grappling with an identity crisis. On the one hand, it takes credit for the country’s macroeconomic stability – the so-called Peruvian ‘miracle’ based on a resource-dependent economy centred on mining and agro-exports, with very low levels of inflation, fiscal deficit and public debt. On the other hand, it refuses to take responsibility for the systematic human rights violations and corruption that characterised Alberto Fujimori’s regime and led to its collapse in 2000.
It is this duality that is setting off alarm bells. This is not about the risk of a military coup, such as those that were rife in the region in the last century, but rather an internal erosion of institutions through the legal use of the state apparatus.
Vergara and the political scientist Rodrigo Barrenechea observed in an article published in 2023 that Peru’s politics are relevant for understanding events in other countries. While the academic world assumes that democracies die due to the concentration of power, Vergara and his colleagues say the case of Peru reveals “that democracies can deteriorate for the opposite reason: the dilution of power”.
Peru not only had eight presidents in a decade, but also held elections featuring 35 presidential candidates, approval ratings for Congress and the presidency among the lowest in the region amidst widespread public apathy towards politics. In the final stretch of the last election campaign, eight out of ten people said they did not know how to vote, according to a poll by Datum Internacional for the newspaper El Comercio.
Vergara pointed out that “we must not forget that in Peru, the main objective of politicians is to survive; they all know that politics is highly unstable, subject to sudden changes of direction triggered by minor scandals and shifts in public opinion.” In this context, “if it suits them to align themselves with Trump and sacrifice whatever it takes, they will do so; with Trump, as with anyone else.”
Keiko Fujimori, for her part, has aligned herself with Trump’s immigration policy and supported the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of former President Nicolás Maduro. Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated her on her victory.
The victims of Fujimorismo
Vigo, the human rights activist, was forcibly sterilised in 1996, whilst she was pregnant with her third child and had an emergency caesarean section.
“Right in the middle of Fujimori’s government, when I had the misfortune of falling victim to this family planning policy,” she said, “They delivered a premature baby, who died, and then they sterilised me, but they didn’t inform me or ask my consent, and they didn’t record it in my medical records. I only found out because I overheard the doctors.”
Vigo said the doctor never told her what he was going to do, but claimed he was “following orders from above.”
For Vigo, it was “a racist and colonialist policy, because this so-called family planning was only applied to one sector – the poorest areas and Quechua-speaking people” that was supported, in part by funds from USAID.
Through a university project investigating forced sterilisations, Vigo realised that her case was one among thousands. After years of legal proceedings, she managed to win her case and secure financial compensation. That is how her life as an activist began.
As an activist, Vigo said, she has suffered threats and attacks including being labelled a terrorist. Originally from the northern town of Piura, Vigo now lives in Canada. “I received threats online, but later they turned into physical threats,” she said.
Fujimori as President, and an amnesty law falling into place, could herald a new era of impunity and revisionism. Trials for holding those accountable for the crimes committed during her father’s regime will likely stall, even as the new government will amplify narratives that downplay state violence and undermine the historical memory of those years in public education and civil society.
Vigo also fears for her children and for her fellow members of the Association of Women Survivors of Sterilisations in Peru, which she helped to found.
“They tell me: ‘We’re scared, Victoria, because now there might be problems with our families.’ I have to be careful now because they’re at risk. I understand them because my family has been under a lot of pressure in Peru up to now. My daughter tells me: ‘Mum, what’s happening is absolutely terrible’,” she said.
Vigo hopes to continue speaking out against the setbacks in human rights in her country from Canada. “Something I told the Canadian government was that the fact I am seeking asylum here, because I do not feel safe in my country, is because I want to keep helping; I will carry on from here and they will not silence me.”
Dacil Lanza is a journalist specialising in international politics, currently working for France 24 in Spanish. She contributes and has contributed to media outlets such as the Italian daily Il Manifesto, the magazine Nueva Sociedad and Cenital, amongst others. In Argentina, she worked for the Télam news agency and El Destape. She has reported from Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Spain, as well as from countries in the Middle East, including Israel, Palestine and Egypt.
