Alberto Fujimori's children announced on Wednesday that their father had died in Peru's capital, Lima, aged 86.

Fujimori's decade-long term of office saw him win popularity by steering the economy onto a better path and quelling a violent insurgency.

However, his increasing autocratic rule and ruthless tolerance for the Peruvian security forces' human rights abuses saw him reviled by many.

"After a long battle with cancer, our father, Alberto Fujimori, has just departed to meet the Lord," his children Keiko, Hiro, Sachie and Kenji Fujimori wrote on the social media platform X.

Why was Fujimori a divisive figure?

Fujimori, who led Peru from 1990 to 2000, was the son of Japanese migrants and shot to prominence in politics after a career as a university president and mathematics professor.

Under Fujimori's predecessor, Alan García, Peru was seen to be in "economic and political chaos" and the Peruvian armed forces had mulled a coup.

However, the victory of political outsider Fujimori in 1990 made this less urgent and the new president implemented much of the military's neoliberal and authoritarian agenda.

While in office, he ordered a largely successful crackdown on the notorious left-wing Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrillas — a feat for which he was lauded by many. He gave free rein to the military and hardline spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos to virtually wipe out the left-wing insurgency.

He is also seen to have rescued the economy from a period of hyperinflation, privatizing state industries and slashing public spending.

In 1992, he dissolved Congress and the judiciary and assumed full legislative and judicial powers with the backing of his military handlers. Public approval of the Fujimori leadership was said to have jumped significantly in the wake of the "self-coup."

However, many despised him for allowing a litany of human rights violations, as well as the neoliberal economics that he championed.

The Fujimori administration was implicated in numerous cases of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and torture. In addition, tens of thousands of indigenous women — seen as an obstacle to development — were forcibly sterilized. 

Human rights advocates also condemned Fujimori for pushing through a general amnesty law forgiving human rights abuses by security forces in Peru's 1980 to 1995 "anti-subversive" campaign.

How did it all go wrong for him?

He amended the constitution to run for, and win, a third election in 2000. However, a corruption scandal soon followed as videos emerged of trusted ally Montesinos handing out cash to bribe politicians.

Fujimori fled to exile in Japan and famously resigned via fax from Tokyo, before unsuccessfully campaigning for a Japanese senatorial seat.

He was arrested during a layover in Chile and, in 2007, extradited to Peru where charges awaited. Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2009 over massacres committed by army death squads in 1991 and 1992.

He was granted a presidential pardon in 2017, which was subsequently revoked by the Supreme Court.

Fujimori — also convicted on several corruption charges — was released on humanitarian grounds last December, two-thirds of the way through his sentence, after the country's Constitutional Court  reinstated the 2017 pardon. 

Fujimori's daughter Keiko — herself a former presidential candidate — in July said her father planned to run for Peru's presidency for the fourth time in 2026.

rc/rm (Reuters, AP)