To oyster him in a cage and in a striped suit was to display the prey as a hunter’s trophy. Behind bars and dressed as a prisoner, Abimael Guzmán was the very image of defeat. The great winner in that 1992 postcard was Alberto Kenya Fujimori.
All of Peru applauded the capture and humiliating display of the leader of the Shining Path, the lunatic and bloodthirsty guerrilla group that devastated the country in the 1980s.
Abimael Guzmán was inspired by the Cambodian Maoist leader Pol Pot and his genocidal army, the Khemer Rouge. In just ten years, the senderistas had perpetrated 23 thousand attacks, causing 25 thousand deaths, 6 thousand disappearances and up to 600 thousand forced displacements, in addition to material losses of more than 21 billion dollars.
The postcard of the Philosophy professor who created and led the Shining Path in a cage and wearing a striped suit is the precursor to the videos in which Nayib Bukele, Fujimori’s best disciple, shows a crowd of almost naked and chained men, fulfilling a choreography of totalitarian features in monumental Salvadoran prisons.
The first example of the “anti-system” broke out in Peru in 1990 and then multiplied to all corners of the planet. Fujimori ended up fleeing to Japan and subsequently caught and imprisoned for crimes against humanity in Peru. But at that point, the anti-system model was emerging in great powers and emerging countries.
The American Donald Trump, the Filipino Rodrigo Duterte and the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro among others, had as antecedents the ethnic Japanese who became president of Peru defeating no less than a literary celebrity: Mario Vargas Llosa. His effectiveness in obtaining brilliant successes, acting from the antipodes of the traditional political class, gave him another victorious portrait, although darker and more controversial than the previous one: he was the hunter portrayed with his foot on his dead prey.
The body was in the middle of the stairs. The president climbed up those bloody steps. In the photo next to the riddled body of Commander Cerpa Cartolini, Fujimori only needed to put his foot on the corpse and hold a smoking gun.
That image portrayed in depth the agricultural engineer who went from the deanship of a faculty of agricultural sciences to the presidency of Peru. He had no scruples when it came to exercising power and showing it.
The corpse of the guerrilla leader was the message: that happens to those like Néstor Cerpa Cartolini who challenge the power of “the Chinese,” as Peruvians call the first son of Japanese to become president. The photo that portrayed him with his prey marked the victory over fourteen commandos of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) who had assaulted the residence of the Japanese ambassador and taken the diplomats, businessmen and high officials who were attending the celebration hostage. of Emperor Akihito’s birthday, in December 1996.
Having put an end to the Shining Path and the MRTA, crowning his counterinsurgency success with the lethal Operation Chavín de Huantar, which liberated the residence of the Japanese ambassador while saving the hostages, was Fujimori’s main source of popularity. That Peruvian president who came to power through democratic means but in 1992 closed Congress and became an autocrat, was the precedent that seems to inspire Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran president who, acting above the Law, crushed the maras, very powerful gangs. drug traffickers who became an occupying force in the Central American country.
The price that Peru paid for Fujimori’s “successes” were the massacres of La Cantuta and Barrios Altos, committed by the clandestine Grupo Colina, among many other crimes that included espionage and extortion of leaders of all orders as well as corruption. on a large scale, the application of torture in prisons and kidnappings of journalists and businessmen.
There were other totalitarian aberrations, such as the order of forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of indigenous women.
“El Chino” was the effective head of a criminal regime. His last outrage was the attempted fraud in the election that he lost to Alejandro Toledo. But that the relatives of the victims of terrorism and the guerrillas, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Peruvians who felt threatened and had their freedoms curtailed by the violence of those armed organizations, defend it is totally understandable.
The humanitarian pardon that Pedro Pablo Kuczinski granted him and for which he lost the presidency in 2017, was due to that president’s agreement with Kenji, the son of the autocrat imprisoned for his crimes against humanity. Kuczinski asked instead that Fujimorism let him govern, ceasing all boycott and sabotage actions that he applied from Congress, blocking government initiatives.
The pardon was suspended due to objection in court, but finally the constitutional court declared its validity, ending fourteen years of imprisonment for a 25-year sentence. The debate over whether the court that freed him acted right or wrong will divide libraries for decades.
However, a categorical reason is what led the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) to reject the ruling of the Peruvian judicial forum that removed the former president from prison. What is beyond discussion are, paradoxically, the reasons why so many Peruvians defend a character whose actions also fully justify the contempt that an immense percentage of the Peruvian population feels for him.
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