Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori died at age 86, yesterday. He was lauded for improving the country’s economic situation during his time in office, and quelled brutal armed insurgencies, but his administration was marred by significant human rights violations and corruption.
Fujimori carried out a self-coup in 1992, he shut down Congress and governed by fiat for a time. He fled the country to Japan in 2000, after a television channel broadcast a videotape showing his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, trying to bribe a congressman.
He resigned via fax from Tokyo and then unsuccessfully campaigned for a Japanese senatorial seat.
In 2009, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering two massacres carried out by the army death squad Grupo Colina. He was the only Peruvian president to have been convicted and jailed for human rights crimes.
Fujimorismo remains a highly relevant political force in Peruvian politics, and two of his children, Keiko and Kenji, are influential politicians who persistently fought for their father to be pardoned and released from jail.
Peru’s government declared three days of national mourning and decreed that flags be flown at half-mast in public and military buildings as Fujimori, who governed Peru throughout the 1990s, lies in state in the Museum of the Nation until the burial on Saturday.
(New York Times, Guardian, Associated Press, Reuters)
Chile
Chilean President Gabriel Boric marked the anniversary of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende with a promise to push for the repeal of an iron-clad amnesty that has for years precluded prosecutions of crimes against humanity committed by members of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, reports the Associated Press.
Regional Relations
The U.S. Biden administration sanctioned 16 Venezuelan judges, election officials and other allies of Nicolás Maduro today for their role in suppressing the presidential election results last month, reports the Miami Herald.
Spain’s Congress voted to recognize Edmundo González, the opposition leader who appears to have won Venezuela’s July’s election by a landslide, as the South American nation’s president-elect. Venezuela’s Maduro administration is proposing to cut ties with Spain in response, reports Bloomberg. (See also Associated Press.)
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele will visit Argentina in two weeks, where he will meet with President Javier Milei. The two governments signed a security related cooperation agreement in June. (La Nación, Ámbito)
El Salvador
Bukele’s crackdown on crime has been hugely controversial, built on systematic human rights violations — but it has also greatly reduced violence in the country, reports CNN. New data from US Customs and Border Protection reveals a surprising trend: fewer Salvadorans are now heading north.
Argentina
Argentina’s Milei administration succeeded in thwarting an effort to overturn a veto of legislation that would have increased social security spending, reports Bloomberg.
Argentina's monthly inflation rate came in at 4.2% in August, defying analyst predictions of an ongoing slowdown. Inflation in the 12 months through August reached 236.7%, still the highest level recorded in the world, reports Reuters.
Brazil
Climate change has been exacerbated by deforestation in Brazil, which is undergoing a massive drought. “Even in a country that has grown increasingly inured to the damage wrought by drought … recent scenes of privation and struggle have been startling,” reports the Washington Post.
The balance of power in Rio de Janeiro may be shifting from paramilitary militias to one of the city’s oldest criminal groups, the prison-gang Red Command (Comando Vermelho), reports InSight Crime.
Haiti
Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced that his country would send 24 soldiers and police officers to Haiti this week to boost a 400-strong Kenya-led international security force that has struggled to make progress against the country’s armed gangs, now in control of more than 85% of Port-au-Prince. (Miami Herald, Associated Press)
But Holness cautioned that the multinational force was only an initial step in finding a solution for Haiti’s crises, and that it would need to be complemented by other initiatives to have the chance of being successful. (See today’s Just Caribbean Updates.)
Ongoing violence in Haiti is putting the education of over 100,000 displaced children in the south at risk, UNICEF warned yesterday.
Mexico
Mexicans’ takes on the judicial reform bill that was approved by Congress this month are complex: “In interviews with The New York Times, Mexicans expressed a range of concerns and aspirations for the measure. Some worried about the end of judicial independence, while others celebrated the chance to vote in the people responsible for distributing justice. Many more were indifferent to the overhaul, unclear on exactly what to expect from the change.”
Colombia
The Colombian Senate's economics committee threw out the Petro administration’s proposed 2025 budget, arguing that government efforts to raise enough funds to meet budget needs are unrealistic, reports Reuters.
Histories
Dr. Francisco Lopera, a groundbreaking Colombian Alzheimer’s researcher, died this week at age 73. “It is one thing to build a research cohort in a disease population, launch a hunt for an Alzheimer’s gene, start a bank of autopsy brains, conduct long-term studies in mutation carriers to understand the evolution of their disease and investigate therapies that might prevent or stall it. It is quite another thing to do all this with little money, in a country struggling with wave after wave of political and drug violence,” writes Jennie Erin Smith in the New York Times.
A new genetic study of Rapa Nui residents counters the “ecocide” theory of Easter Island’s population, popularized by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book. (Financial Times)