A2 · Elementary
11 min
latin american historypoliticselectionsdemocracy
The Name Peru Can't Quit
Lo que hereda una hija
Keiko Fujimori is sworn in as Peru's president, and with her returns one of the most loaded surnames in Latin American history. Fletcher and Octavio go three levels deep: who her father was, how he fell, and what this result says about the political memory of a country.
Keiko Fujimori jura como presidenta de Perú, y con ella vuelve uno de los apellidos más cargados de la historia latinoamericana. Fletcher y Octavio van tres niveles hacia abajo: quién fue su padre, cómo cayó, y qué dice este resultado sobre la memoria política de un país.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| golpe de estado | coup / coup d'état | En 1992, Alberto cierra el Congreso. Es un golpe de estado. |
| renuncia | resignation | Alberto envía su renuncia por fax desde Japón. |
| violencia | violence | En 1990, hay mucha violencia en Perú. |
| ganar | to win | Keiko gana las elecciones en junio de 2026. |
| de un golpe | all at once / in one blow | Los precios suben mucho. Todo cambia de un golpe. |
Keiko Fujimori took the oath of office in Lima yesterday, and I've been trying to explain to people around me why that single sentence carries as much weight as it does, and finding that you basically have to tell a thirty-year story before the present moment makes any sense.
Sí.
Yes.
Keiko es presidenta de Perú ahora.
Keiko is president of Peru now.
And the weight of that comes entirely from the name.
Fujimori.
Her father's name.
A name that, depending on who you ask in Peru, means salvation or catastrophe.
El padre es Alberto Fujimori.
The father is Alberto Fujimori.
Es muy importante en la historia de Perú.
He is very important in the history of Peru.
Alberto Fujimori, president from 1990 to 2000.
And to understand why his daughter winning in 2026 is such a big deal, you have to understand where Peru was when Alberto showed up.
En 1990, Perú tiene muchos problemas muy graves.
In 1990, Peru has many very serious problems.
Serious is an understatement.
The economy was in freefall.
Inflation hit 7,000 percent in 1990.
Seven thousand.
Not seven.
Seven thousand.
I covered hyperinflation in other contexts, and there's a particular kind of social collapse that comes with it that's hard to describe if you haven't seen it.
Y hay violencia también.
And there is violence too.
El grupo Sendero Luminoso mata a mucha gente.
The Shining Path group kills many people.
The Shining Path, for anyone who doesn't know, was a Maoist guerrilla movement, brutal even by the standards of other guerrilla movements of that era.
Car bombs in Lima.
Massacres in the highlands.
Thousands of civilians dead.
Peru in 1990 was a country in genuine crisis on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Alberto Fujimori gana las elecciones en 1990.
Alberto Fujimori wins the elections in 1990.
Gana contra Mario Vargas Llosa.
He wins against Mario Vargas Llosa.
Which is remarkable on its own.
Vargas Llosa, the novelist, the Nobel laureate, was the candidate the establishment expected to win.
Fujimori was a university rector with no political experience, the son of Japanese immigrants, an outsider in every possible sense.
And he won.
Los peruanos quieren un cambio muy grande.
Peruvians want a very big change.
Fujimori promete ese cambio.
Fujimori promises that change.
And he delivered change, though not quite the kind he'd promised.
His economic reforms, the so-called Fujishock, slashed subsidies overnight, slammed the brakes on money printing, and opened the economy to foreign investment.
It worked.
Inflation collapsed.
Growth returned.
And it was extraordinarily painful for ordinary people in the short term.
El Fujishock es muy duro.
The Fujishock is very hard.
Los precios suben mucho en un día.
Prices rise a lot in one day.
Right, and this is where the story gets morally complicated, which is what makes it interesting.
Because then, in April 1992, Fujimori did something that no elected president in the modern Americas had done in quite that way.
He shut down Congress.
Sí.
Yes.
Alberto cierra el Congreso.
Alberto closes Congress.
También cierra los tribunales.
He also closes the courts.
It has a name, what he did.
The autogolpe.
The self-coup.
He dissolved the institutions that were supposed to check his power, suspended the constitution, and governed by decree.
And here's the part that still makes my head spin: he was enormously popular for doing it.
Es un golpe de estado.
It is a coup.
Pero muchos peruanos están de acuerdo con él.
But many Peruvians agree with him.
Because Congress was seen as corrupt and obstructionist, and people were exhausted and scared.
When your city is getting bombed, democratic proceduralism feels like a luxury you can't afford.
That's always how it starts.
Y en septiembre de 1992, la policía captura a Abimael Guzmán.
And in September 1992, the police capture Abimael Guzmán.
Guzmán.
The founder and absolute leader of the Shining Path.
Captured in a Lima safe house above a dance studio, if I remember correctly.
His capture effectively broke the back of the insurgency.
And Fujimori got the credit.
His approval numbers went through the roof.
Guzmán es el jefe de Sendero Luminoso.
Guzmán is the leader of the Shining Path.
Es un hombre muy peligroso.
He is a very dangerous man.
So by the mid-nineties you have this figure who has, by most measurable standards, saved the Peruvian economy and ended a guerrilla war.
And he did it by dismantling democracy to do it.
That's the Faustian bargain at the center of fujimorismo, and it's never been resolved.
Pero en 2000, hay un escándalo muy grande.
But in 2000, there is a very big scandal.
Todo cambia.
Everything changes.
The Vladivideos.
Named after Vladimiro Montesinos, his intelligence chief and fixer.
Hidden camera footage starts leaking showing Montesinos bribing congressmen, judges, media owners, military officers.
It was staggering in scope.
The whole system, on tape.
El asesor de Fujimori compra votos y jueces en videos secretos.
Fujimori's adviser buys votes and judges in secret videos.
And Fujimori's response was extraordinary.
He flew to Brunei for an APEC summit, then diverted to Japan, his parents' homeland, where he had citizenship.
And from Tokyo, he announced he was resigning.
Alberto sale de Perú y va a Japón.
Alberto leaves Peru and goes to Japan.
Renuncia por fax.
He resigns by fax.
By fax.
Congress rejected the resignation and voted to remove him instead, so the record would show he was sacked, not that he quit.
He stayed in Japan for five years.
Then, in 2005, in what history will record as a spectacular miscalculation, he flew to Chile, apparently planning to re-enter Peruvian politics, and was immediately arrested.
En 2009, un tribunal lo condena.
In 2009, a court convicts him.
Va a la cárcel en Perú.
He goes to prison in Peru.
Twenty-five years for human rights abuses, specifically for the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres, where his government's death squads killed dozens of people they suspected of being Shining Path sympathizers.
Civilians.
Including students.
He was also convicted separately for corruption.
It was one of the most significant convictions of a sitting or former president in Latin American history.
Keiko tiene dieciséis años cuando su padre es presidente.
Keiko is sixteen years old when her father is president.
Ella vive en el palacio.
She lives in the palace.
She was essentially the First Lady after her parents divorced.
Grew up inside that presidency.
And then spent the rest of her life trying to return to it.
Three presidential runs: 2011, 2016, 2021.
She lost all three in second-round runoffs.
By margins so thin that the last one, against Pedro Castillo, was disputed for weeks.
Keiko pierde tres elecciones.
Keiko loses three elections.
Pero ahora gana.
But now she wins.
Ahora es presidenta.
Now she is president.
And she had her own serious legal troubles in between.
Accusations of laundering campaign donations, including money allegedly tied to the Odebrecht construction corruption scandal that swept across almost every Latin American government in the 2010s.
She spent time under pre-trial detention.
And then her father died in 2024, after a presidential pardon, and now here she is.
Alberto muere en 2024.
Alberto dies in 2024.
Keiko gana las elecciones en junio de 2026.
Keiko wins the elections in June 2026.
There's a way of reading this that's almost Shakespearean.
A daughter who spent her entire adult life reaching for her father's legacy, who couldn't get there while he was alive, and who finally crosses the threshold only after he's gone.
Muchos peruanos recuerdan el orden de los años noventa.
Many Peruvians remember the order of the nineties.
Para ellos, Fujimori es bueno.
For them, Fujimori is good.
And this is what's genuinely hard to sit with.
Because the people voting for her aren't wrong about the facts of that period.
Inflation did collapse.
The Shining Path was broken.
For a lot of Peruvians, especially older voters outside Lima, those are real things that happened in their lives and they don't disappear because of what else happened.
Pero otros peruanos no olvidan las masacres.
But other Peruvians do not forget the massacres.
No olvidan la corrupción.
They do not forget the corruption.
And that's where Peru is.
A country with two completely coherent readings of the same period of history, and they keep showing up on opposite sides of every election.
The Reuters story today mentioned Latin America's rightward tilt, and Keiko fits that pattern.
But I think the Fujimori story is older and stranger than any regional political wave.
Perú tiene muchos presidentes en los últimos veinte años.
Peru has many presidents in the last twenty years.
Hay mucha inestabilidad.
There is much instability.
Six presidents in about seven years at one point.
One died by suicide when police came to arrest him.
One fled to Mexico.
One went to prison.
And people look back at the nineties and think, whatever else was wrong, at least the trains ran.
That's a dangerous nostalgia, but it's not an irrational one.
I caught myself almost sympathizing with the logic of it, and then I remembered the La Cantuta students.
Exacto.
Exactly.
El orden no es siempre bueno.
Order is not always good.
Depende de quién paga el precio.
It depends on who pays the price.
Well said.
And the question Keiko's presidency now poses to Peru is whether she can govern differently from the template she grew up inside, or whether the patterns come with the name.
I don't think anyone knows the answer to that yet.
Peru's institutions are watching.
Oye, Fletcher.
Hey, Fletcher.
Antes dices «golpe de estado».
Before you say 'golpe de estado.' Do you understand that expression well?
¿Entiendes bien esa expresión?
Golpe de estado.
Literally, blow of state.
Coup.
Though I'll admit I've always found it interesting that the Spanish goes for the physical image: a blow, a strike, something sudden and violent.
It's more vivid than just saying coup.
Sí.
Yes.
«Golpe» significa «blow» en inglés.
'Golpe' means 'blow' in English.
También dices «de un golpe».
You also say 'de un golpe.' It means 'all at once.'
Significa «all at once».
De un golpe.
All at once.
I like that.
You can hear the same root: something sudden, something that changes everything in a single instant.
It's almost poetic.
Which is a strange thing to say about a word that keeps showing up in catastrophes.
Sí.
Yes.
Y el Fujishock es también un golpe, en ese sentido.
And the Fujishock is also a golpe, in that sense.
Todo cambia de golpe.
Everything changes all at once.
Everything changes de un golpe.
That is actually the whole episode in four words.
Alright, Octavio.
Next time we talk I want to hear your thoughts on whether Keiko's first hundred days do anything to answer the question we just raised.
I suspect they will not disappoint in terms of drama.
Perú nunca decepciona.
Peru never disappoints.
Eso es seguro.
That is certain.