President of the Republic (1992–1995)

Elections were held, and this time Fujimori's party received a majority in the "Democratic Constitutional Congress" that for the rest of his mandate would replace the parliament. A number of opposition parties took part as well, while others decided to boycott the elections.

Using this opportunity (since FREDEMO was dissolved and APRA's leader, Alan García, was exiled to Colombia), Fujimori proceeded to legitimise his position. A referendum was scheduled, and a majority of Peruvians agreed with his actions: The coup and the Constitution of 1993 were approved by a narrow margin of between four and five percent.

Fujimori dissolved the Congress and called elections for a new body named the "Democratic Constitutional Congress" (Congreso Constituyente Democrático), setting off the Peruvian Constitutional Crisis of 1992.

Later in the year, on November 13, there was a failed military coup. Fujimori, alerted by then relatively-unknown Captain Vladimiro Montesinos, sought temporary refuge in the Japanese Embassy.

In 1994, Fujimori separated from his wife Susana Higuchi (also of Japanese descent) in a noisy, public divorce; and he formally stripped her of the title First Lady in August, 1994. He thereupon appointed their elder daughter First Lady.

Higuchi publicly denounced Fujimori as a "tyrant", and claimed that his administration was corrupt. She claimed that important donations made by Japanese foundations had been appropriated by her former husband, and also accused of corruption several members of the Fujimori family.

After her divorce, she became a harsh critic of Fujimori's administration. Her attempt to run for president was unsuccesful; as Peruvian law bans presidential spouses from running.

President of the Republic (1995–2000)

In April 1995, at the height of his popularity, Fujimori was re-elected in a landslide victory over Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations. His independent party won control of the legislature. One of the first acts of the new congress was declaring an amnesty for all members of the Peruvian military or police accused or convicted of human rights abuses between 1980 and 1995.

During his second term, Fujimori signed a peace agreement with Ecuador over a border dispute that had simmered for more than a century. The treaty allowed the two countries to obtain international funds for developing the border region. Fujimori also settled unresolved issues with Chile, Peru's southern neighbor, still outstanding since the Treaty of Ancón of 1883.

However, his re-election was the turning point in Fujimori's career. After several years of economic stability and less terrorism, Peruvians now began to turn to other concerns, such as human rights, freedom of the press, and the quality of democracy; they also started paying closer attention to the growing number of allegations involving Fujimori and his chief of the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, which finally led to his resignation in 2000.

President of the Republic (2000)

Despite the questionable constitutionality of his right to a third term of office, Fujimori declared his candidacy for the 2000 elections. He was declared winner of the May 28 election, amidst a flurry of accusations of irregularities. As a conciliatory measure, he nominated former opposition candidate Federico Salas as the new prime minister, leaving most of the Fujimorista hardliners of his previous administration away from the Council of Ministers. However, the opposition parties in parliament failed to support this measure and continued with most of their protests.

The main opposition leader, Alejandro Toledo, campaigned vigorously to have the election annulled, but the corruption scandal then emerging around Vladimiro Montesinos, who was the director of Peru's National Intelligence Service (SIN), did his work for him.

The scandal exploded into full force when on the evening of September 14, 2000, the cable TV station Canal N broadcast a video of Montesinos appearing to give a bribe of US$15,000 to opposition congressman Alberto Kouri for his defection to Fujimori's Perú 2000 party. The allegations severely compromised Fujimori, who announced a new election on 16 September, in which he declared he would not participate. This video was presented by Fernando Olivera, leader of the FIM (Independent Moralising Front), who purchased it from one of Montesinos's closest allies (nicknamed by the Peruvian press as El Patriota).

On November 10, Fujimori won approval from Congress to hold elections on April 8, 2001. On November 13, Fujimori left Peru for a visit to Brunei to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. On November 16, Valentín Paniagua took over as president of Congress after the pro-Fujimori leadership lost a vote of confidence. On November 17, Fujimori travelled from Brunei to Tokyo, from where he submitted his resignation as president by fax. On November 19, government ministers presented their resignations en bloc, and on November 21 Paniagua became interim president to oversee the April elections, and the Congress effectively accepted Fujimori's resignation by declaring him "morally unfit" to govern. Anti-terrorism

When Fujimori came to power, large parts of Peru were dominated by the insurgent Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (SL or "Shining Path"), and the Marxist-Leninist group Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). According to some estimates, by the early 1990's, more than sixty percent of the country was under the control of the insurgents, in territories known as "zonas liberadas" (liberated zones), where inhabitants lived under the rule of these groups and paid them taxes. When Shining Path arrived in Lima, it organized so-called paros armados, work stoppages (strikes) which were enforced by killings and other forms of violence. They had infiltrated the national universities. Two previous governments, those of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (AP), and Alan García (APRA), first ignored and minimized the Shining Path, then launched an unsuccessful military campaign to eradicate it, undermining public faith in the state and an exodus of elites.

In the course of his two terms in office, Fujimori was credited by many Peruvians for ending the fifteen-year reign of terror of Sendero Luminoso and the arrest of their leader, Abimael Guzmán. As part of his anti-terrorism efforts, Fujimori granted the military broad powers to arrest suspected terrorists and to try them in secret military courts with few legal rights. The justification given for this abridgement of the usual guarantees of open trials was that under previous governments, the judiciary was too afraid to charge captured terrorists; afraid of terrorist reprisal against them or their families. At the same time, he armed rural Peruvians to form the groups known as rondas campesinas ("peasant patrols"), to which part of the success of the fight against terrorism was attributed.

Insurgent activity declined from 1992 onwards, and Fujimori took credit for this development, claiming that his campaign had largely eliminated the terrorist threat. After the auto-coup, the intelligence work of the DINCOTE (National Counter-Terrorism Directorate) led to the capture of terrorist leaders from SL and MRTA, including SL leader Guzmán.

Critics charge that to achieve the defeat of terrorist cells in various towns and cities, the Peruvian military indulged in widespread human rights abuses, and that the vast majority of the victims were poor highland campesinos caught in the crossfire between military and the insurgents. The final report of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published on 28 August 2003, revealed that while the majority of the atrocities committed between 1980 and 1995 were the work of the Shining Path, the Peruvian armed forces were also guilty of having destroyed villages and having murdered campesinos, whom they suspected of supporting the insurgents. According to the report, the great percentage of deaths caused by the armed forces occurred during the Belaunde and Garcia governments. During the Fujimori period the numbers decreased, with a shift in tactics away from general butchery and toward isolating support for the terrorists, with Army engineers building rural roads and schools.

The 1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis, the major event of Fujimori's second term, was one of the last major episodes of terrorism. It began on December 17, 1996, when fourteen Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) militants seized the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima during a party, taking hostage some four hundred diplomats, government officials, and other dignitaries; the action was partly in protest of prison conditions in Peru. During the protracted four-month stand-off, the Emerretistas gradually freed all but 72 of their hostages. The government rejected the militants' demand to release imprisoned MRTA members and prepared in secret an elaborate plan to storm the residence, while gaining time by negotiating with the hostage-takers.

On April 22, 1997, a team of 140 military commandos, given the name "Chavín de Huantar", raided the building to free the hostages. Two commandos, one hostage, and all fourteen of the insurgents died in the assault. President Fujimori visited the ambassador's residence to inspect the scene and speak to the former hostages. Images of Fujimori taken during the last minutes of the military operation, surrounded by some of the liberated dignitaries and soldiers, and walking among the bodies of the insurgents were shown on television. The successful conclusion of the four-month-long standoff was used to bolster his image as being tough on terrorism.

However, the success of the operation was tainted by subsequent revelations that at least three and possibly eight of the insurgents had been summarily executed by the commandos after surrendering. In 2002, the case was taken up by public prosecutors, but the Peruvian Supreme Court ruled that the military tribunals had jurisdiction. A military court later absolved them of guilt, and the "Chavín de Huantar" soldiers led the 2004 military parade. In response, in 2003 MRTA family members lodged a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights accusing the Peruvian state of human rights violations, namely that the MRTA insurgents had been denied the "right to life, the right to judicial guarantees and the right to judicial protection". The IACHR accepted the case and is currently studying it. 

In exile

After submitting his resignation initially by fax and later in hard copy, Fujimori remained in self-imposed exile in Japan, where his citizenship as foreign-born Japanese was confirmed because his parents had registered him with the Japanese consular authorities in Peru as an infant, and he had not given it up under the 1985 citizenship law revision. Several senior Japanese politicians have supported Fujimori, partly because of what they consider his decisive action in ending the 1997 Japanese embassy crisis. 

President Alejandro Toledo has, from the beginning of his presidency, taken up the case against Fujimori as his own. He arranged meetings with the Supreme Court, tax authorities, and other powers in Peru in order to "coordinate the joint efforts to bring the criminal Fujimori from Japan". His vehemence in this matter had crossed the border of the Peruvian law: forcing the judiciary and legislative system to keep guilty sentences without hearing Fujimori's defense (see "Political Peruvian Constitution" 1993); not providing Fujimori with a lawyer in absence of representation; and expelling pro-Fujimori congressmen from the parliament without proof of the accusations against them. This last was later reversed by the judiciary.