The prominent historian José Ragas said it is an offense to the country to grant this honor “to someone who fled, resigned from the presidency and used the State for personal ends.”
He recalled that Fujimori, who died last Wednesday, took advantage of an official trip in 2000 to flee to Japan, where he resigned from the presidency and obtained Japanese nationality.
“The state funeral is not a simple protocol ceremony: it is a public ritual of collective healing and a tribute from society to someone who held the highest office,” he argued. The Institute of Democracy and Human Rights of the Catholic University rejected in a statement the decision to pay state honors to the former president who died last Wednesday and declare three days of national mourning.
It is, it said, “one more blow against democracy and against human rights” and an inappropriate gesture for someone who destroyed the rule of law and established a regime that committed serious violations of human rights and organized a huge machinery of corruption and embezzlement. It is also, it added, “an insult to Peruvian society in general and a new offense to the victims of the serious crimes committed by the government of Alberto Fujimori.”
The international analyst Oscar Vidarte described as “a disgrace that the Peruvian State pays honors to someone convicted of human rights violations and corruption.”
The former center-right congressman Víctor Andrés Belaúnde commented that the family of the former governor should have given up state honors so that they could heal the wounds left by the decade of Fujimori’s government (1990-2000).
“A corrupt and murderous regime honoring another corrupt and murderous regime, nothing less was expected,” said the progressive New Peru Movement in an Internet message, in reference to the deaths of 50 civilians in protests against the rise, by succession, of Dina Boluarte to the Presidency.
For the journalistic portal Wayka, “while the Executive-Congress coalition presents honors to the dictator, historical memory and empathy with the victims of the Fujimori regime remain.”
The Flora Tristán Women’s Center invokes memory and justice to point out that “providing state honors to someone who has been sentenced for killings, kidnappings and corruption, violates the dignity of the victims and their families.”
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