JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Alberto Fujimori has died. In the 1990s, he was the authoritarian leader of Peru who was elected to the presidency, ruled with an iron fist, fled the country and eventually landed in prison for human rights crimes. He was 86 years old. Julio Carrion is a professor of Latin American politics at the University of Delaware and has edited a book on Alberto Fujimori. He joins us now. Welcome to the program.
JULIO CARRION: Thank you for the invitation.
SUMMERS: I just want to start by asking you to tell us a bit about how Fujimori is thought of today in Peru.
CARRION: Oh, he is a polarizing figure, no doubt. His daughter ran for the presidency three times. Two of the last times, she was very close to winning the runoff. I'm sure his passing will produce a wave of sympathy, and some judgments will be probably softer today than they could have been, let's say, 10 years ago. But, certainly, there is no consensus in Peru about whether his legacy is primarily positive or negative.
SUMMERS: Now, Fujimori was a math professor, the son of working-class Japanese immigrants. What can you tell us about how and why he entered politics?
CARRION: Peru at the end of the '80s was a country in severe crisis - economic crisis, security crisis. There was a sense of despair. It was both hyperinflation, insecurity produced by this brutal group named Shining Path, and it was a young democracy. So the rise of Fujimori was surprising. He rose dramatically in the polls. And, most important, he was promising the opposite of what the main contender was promising. The main contender was Mario Varga Llosa, a well-known Nobel Prize novelist, and he was proposing that the only way to fix Peru's economy was by adopting harsh market reforms. And Fujimori ran against that. The irony, of course, is that he ended up implementing the very policies that he ran against.
SUMMERS: So Fujimori runs for office. He wins in this runoff, and then he takes office. But what is it that led him - this very popular figure - to take a sort of dictatorial path with his presidency?
CARRION: Part of the reason why many Peruvians have a positive view of his legacy is because they feel that, to be able to accomplish what he did, which was to stabilize the economy and to defeat the insurgency of Shining Path, it was needed to end Peru's democracy. And I certainly do not agree with that view. Fujimori made this argument that he needed to be a dictator to be able to deliver what he eventually delivered, and that is a fallacy. However, many Peruvians bought that argument.
SUMMERS: Fujimori went into exile after a decade in power, but he still wound up in prison. Tell us - how did that happen?
CARRION: That is probably a Netflix series in the making.
SUMMERS: Ah.
CARRION: He went to Japan. And in Japan, he announced that he had been a Japanese citizen all along, which immediately prevented him from being extradited to Peru. I guess Fujimori got tired or bored or confident. In 2005, he traveled to Chile as a way to prepare his comeback to Peru and run for the 2006 elections. He was eventually extradited to Peru. He was condemned to serve for severe human rights violations and corruption. So that's a sad legacy of Peruvian presidents coming back to the country to serve for their crimes while in office.
SUMMERS: Julio Carrion, scholar of Peruvian politics and professor at the University of Delaware, thank you so much.
CARRION: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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