Word: fujimori
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...effort succeeds, it could seriously damage Uribe's impressive legacy. Critics are already painting him as a conservative counterpart to Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's left-wing President who was first elected 11 years ago and has vowed to rule until 2021. Others see parallels with Alberto Fujimori, who took on his country's guerrilla groups and used his popularity to gain a third presidential term in 2000. But Fujimori quickly fell from grace and was forced to resign. Last month, a Peruvian court convicted him of mass murder and kidnapping and sentenced him to 25 years in prison...
...Although the more than 80 witnesses and 500 documents submitted to the tribunal offered no smoking-gun evidence of direct orders to the Colina Group death squad by Fujimori, Judge Cesar San Martin concluded there was "no question" that Fujimori had sanctioned the killings during massacres in 1991 and '92 as well as the '92 kidnappings of journalist Gustavo Goritti and businessman Samuel Dyer. "There is never a written order to forcibly disappear and kill someone," says Cromwell Castillo, whose son Ernesto Paez was killed in 1990. "[But] the circumstances have demonstrated that Fujimori not only knew but sanctioned...
...tragic irony is that it was Fujimori's attention to detail that helped make him one of Latin America's most popular leaders of the late 20th century. The son of Japanese immigrants, he emerged out of left field to win the 1990 election and take over a country of 28 million people that was adrift and under siege by Marxist guerrillas. Its annual inflation rate was near 7,600%, and insurgents had three quarters of the country under a state of emergency. Fujimori quickly tackled the hyperinflation, and in 1992 his security forces arrested Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman...
...Fujimori's success, however, was based on reclaiming the image of the populist caudillo, or strongman on horseback, just as the continent was ridding itself of the legacy of dictators who had turned disappear into a verb when dealing with their political opponents. He shut down Peru's Congress and judiciary in 1992; he created an "emergency" government that gave him and his spooky security chief (Vladimiro Montesinos, who himself was convicted in 2002 on a variety of corruption and human rights abuse charges) autocratic powers; and he rewrote the constitution to allow himself to be re-elected...
...gravity of those "mistakes" eventually began to drag Fujimori down. In 2000 he ran for a third term, but by then news of atrocities such as those committed by the Colina Group had begun to surface, and his victory was marred by allegations of electoral fraud. Four months into his third term, Fujimori fled into exile in Japan, after a $1 billion corruption and embezzlement scandal involving Montesinos and other close advisers had unraveled his government. He returned to South America in 2005, hoping, incredibly, to take part in Peru's 2006 presidential race, but he was arrested in Chile...