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Former Peru president Alberto Fujimori has died in the capital Lima aged 86, his daughter has confirmed. Mr Fujimori’s decade-long presidency began with triumphs righting Peru’s economy and defeating a brutal insurgency only to end in a disgrace of autocratic excess that later sent him to prison. Governing with an increasingly authoritarian hand from 1990 to 2000, he was pardoned in December from his convictions for corruption and responsibility for the murder of 25 people. His daughter Keiko Fujimori said in July he was planning to run for Peru’s presidency for the fourth time in 2026. The former university president and mathematics professor was the consummate political outsider when he emerged from obscurity to win Peru’s 1990 election over writer Mario Vargas Llosa. Over a tumultuous political career, he repeatedly made risky, go-for-broke decisions that alternately earned him adoration and reproach. He took over a country ravaged by runaway inflation and guerrilla violence, mending the economy with bold actions including mass privatisations of state industries. Defeating fanatical Shining Path rebels took a little longer but also won him broad-based support. His presidency collapsed just as dramatically. After briefly shutting down Congress and elbowing himself into a controversial third term, he fled the country in disgrace in 2000 when leaked videotapes showed his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, bribing lawmakers.

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