Fujimori's self-coup and the defeat of the Shining Path

On April 5, 1992, Alberto Fujimori, elected in 1990, announced he was dissolving Congress and reorganizing the judiciary, with tanks in the streets of Lima. Five months later, on September 12, a police unit captured Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path, in a Lima house.¹²

Fujimori, an unknown agronomist, had won the presidency in 1990 against the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa during a collapse: hyperinflation in 1990 reached about 7,600 percent, and the Shining Path, which had begun its war in 1980 in the highlands of Ayacucho, was spreading to the cities. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission later estimated about 69,000 dead or disappeared in the conflict from 1980 to 2000, with the large majority of victims Quechua-speaking rural people. Both the guerrillas and the state forces committed atrocities. Fujimori's economic reforms stopped inflation, and Guzman's capture crippled the Shining Path. A new constitution in 1993 strengthened the presidency. His intelligence adviser Vladimiro Montesinos built a network of corruption, and Fujimori fled to Japan and resigned by fax in November 2000. He was convicted in 2009 for ordering killings by a military death squad and was sentenced to 25 years. He was released in December 2023 after a court decision on an earlier pardon, and he died in September 2024.¹³²