Before watching The Fall of Fujimori at the Film Forum tonight with Andie and Katie, I knew nothing about Alberto Fujimori, the president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. It’s a tale equally strange, violent, funny and cautionary.
Fujimori looks like a man born to lose a Peruvian presidential election. He was born in the country, but of Japanese parents, and appears especially goofy campaigning in the billowy, colorful dress of certain Peruvian native groups. But we see him canvassing hard in the jungle countryside and the poorest neighborhoods in Lima, puttering around in his preferred campaign vehicle, a wagon hauled by a tractor. He’s welcomed as an outsider and greeted affectionately as “El Chino,” the Chinaman.
He wins, and although I don’t recall the movie noting this point, his opponent in 1990 is Mario Vargas Llosa. A popular novelist, running for president! Against whom appears to be some Japanese guy!
Peru had only a decade earlier become democratic after a dozen years of military rule. Fujimori’s first term drastically improves an economy hampered by staggering inflation and curtails the guerrilla activity of the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).
To give himself more power in dealing with terrorism, he enacts an “auto-coup” takeover of his own government in 1992. He rewrites the constitution, alters the judiciary and enacts antiterrorism laws and punishments that border on terrorism themselves. We see suspects cuffed and dumped in car trunks, people arrested after terror attacks who say they were only walking down the street, minding their own business. (Let’s not encourage our own president to watch this movie; he doesn’t need any more brainstorms in this respect.)
Throughout the latter part of Fujimori’s presidency, it’s whispered that his national intelligence director, Vladimiro Montesinos, who features one of the worst comb-overs you’ll ever see, is secretly appointing death squads against suspected terrorists or putting them up in squalid prisons.
During his hectic second term, Fujimori divorces his wife, Susana. While she is still living in the presidential palace, and indeed still having dinner with him, she becomes a publicly vocal opponent of him and his administration and announces plans to challenge him for the presidency. She doesn’t succeed and in her place, Fujimori appoints his oldest daughter as First Lady.
Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path known as “Presidente Gonzalo,” is captured under Fujimori’s watch. In one of the movie’s more surreal moments, the president has Guzmán clad in a black-and-white horizontally striped jumpsuit, something he admits he did because he saw it in a movie. Then he has Guzmán placed in a huge walk-in cage draped with a tarp that’s slowly removed to reveal the angry, pacing prisoner for an assembled crowd to gawk at and photograph.
In December 1996, MRTA militants seize the Japanese embassy, holding several hundred hostages, in part to protest prison conditions and Fujimori’s authoritarian rule. The standoff goes on for more than four months before Fujimori orchestrates a swift, brutal retaliation. All but one of the hostages survives; all of the insurgents are killed. We see Fujimori observing the corpses and passing over them to inspect the embassy’s structural damage.
In the spring of 2000, Fujimori is elected for an unprecedented third term using his argument that his first term didn’t count because of his own self-instated coup. By later that year, scandals involving Montesinos have been proven: he’s caught bribing officials in an endless procession of secretly recorded videotapes. He’s sentenced to a prison he ordered built, the same one housing Guzmán.
Soon thereafter, during a planned flight to Brunei, Fujimori’s plane changes course to deposit him in Japan, a move he apparently makes without telling his family, including his First Lady-daughter, whom he leaves alone in the Presidential Palace with her dogs. From Japan, Fujimori faxes-in his resignation as president. He’s been living there ever since and if he ever leaves, he’s likely to be arrested; he’s wanted by Interpol for assault, forgery, fraud, kidnapping, hostage taking, murder and organized crime.
The movie omits some key political points, foremost what Peru’s relations with the U.S. government were like during Fujimori’s reign. I seem to recall, for instance, wrangling over the degree of U.S. involvement in what was then Peru’s super-booming cocaine trade. Oddly, the movie also doesn’t mention what happened after Fujimori’s self-imposed exile. What happened was this: Alejandro Toledo was elected in the spring of 2001. His presidency has since been hampered by allegations of corruption.
And I thought politics in the U.S. were problematic.