In the name of the father

Newly sworn-in Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori at the military parade marking the country's 250th Independence Day in Lima, July 29, 2026.

Keiko Fujimori is stubborn. In three consecutive presidential elections in Peru, she made it to the runoff, but was then defeated by the respective male opponent. In 2011 his name was Ollanta Humala, he was followed by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2016 and in 2021 it was finally the village teacher Pedro Castillo who won a narrow victory in the presidential election. Now Keiko Fujimori has done it on the fourth attempt. On July 28th she was sworn in and was allowed to move in where she had already lived with her father Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s: in the Palacio de Pizarro, the presidential palace in the old town of Lima.

In the past ten years, Keiko Fujimori has already been one of the most influential representatives in the Peruvian Congress, where as chairwoman she controlled the majority or led a majority coalition with her Fuerza Popular party for a long time. “So not much will change,” suspects Carlos Herz, a sociologist from Lima. He knows the south of Peru particularly well and is aware of the discontent that Fujimori's election victory caused there.

Under Alberto Fujimori, 325,000 people were forcibly sterilized as part of a racist anti-poverty program.

Fujimori's opponent, the left-wing Roberto Sánchez, won in 16 of the country's 24 departments. Most of these 16 departments are located in the rural south, including Puno, Cusco and Arequipa. The rejection of Fujimori is particularly strong there. No wonder, because the twenty-year dirty civil war with numerous massacres of the civilian population killed a disproportionate number of rural residents, and in the second decade of the war, from 1990 to 2000, Alberto Fujimori ruled. Under Alberto Fujimori, a racist anti-poverty program also forcibly sterilized 325,000 people - the vast majority of them Quechua-speaking women, quite a few of them illiterate.

“Your election is bad news for the victims of the civil war and those forced to sterilize,” believes lawyer Ana María Vidal. She represents several clients in this matter and fears that the new government could put pressure on the judiciary to rule against the plaintiffs.

María Elena Carbajal is the president of the Lima and Callao Section of the Association of Peruvian Women Affected by Sterilization. The local association includes more than 300 forcibly sterilized women and 22 men who are fighting for an official apology and reparation - so far largely unsuccessfully, despite support from international organizations such as the United Nations and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Keiko Fujimori has repeatedly considered leaving the legal system of the Organization of American States (OAS), Carbajal reports. Judgments by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) would then no longer be relevant to Peru, which the newly sworn-in president would welcome.

Fujimori wanted to protect her father - until his death in September 2024 - from further proceedings, but also a number of military officers who were responsible for human rights violations in the civil war. This ensures good relations with the military and police, which could become as untouchable in Peru under Keiko Fujimori, as her predecessor Dina Boluarte (2022-2025) had already striven for. On August 13, 2025, this signed an amnesty law that guaranteed comprehensive impunity for state law enforcement officers who were accused of human rights violations.

In addition, it is already foreseeable that environmental protection will be further weakened under Fujimori. The government announced that it would approve 240 projects this year that serve to extract raw materials or explore mining opportunities. This is also why María Elena Foronda Farro is concerned about Fujimori's presidency. She was a member of Congress for the left-wing Frente Amplio from 2016 to 2021 and heads the environmental organization Natura; She received the Goldman Environmental Prize for her ecological commitment.

Foronda reports that under the new government, environmental assessments will hardly be necessary in order to extract raw materials on a large scale and to penetrate further into the Amazon region. She fears that Fujimori could push forward a whole series of new laws that would give the military and police additional leverage in enforcing the interests of mining companies against small farmers and the rural population and make them subject to military justice in cases of human rights violations.

Nevertheless, Fujimori promises to advocate for more social equality and to increase the minimum wage. Social inequality is more pronounced in no Latin American country than in Peru.

That's how it was under Alberto Fujimori. This makes Foronda Farro very worried, after all, Peru is "a country where people die every year in environmental conflicts," warns Foronda Farro.

Nevertheless, Fujimori promises to advocate for more social equality and to increase the minimum wage. Social inequality is more pronounced in no Latin American country than in Peru. These are new sounds for the politician, who has several corruption trials behind her and is not known for having anything left for the poor.

In many regions of the country, they are affected by the El Niño climate phenomenon, the effects of which are affecting agriculture. According to climate scientists, the problem will worsen. This is already noticeable with coffee. “We harvested 40 to 50 percent less this year,” says Pedro Rodríguez Pariona, chairman of the coffee cooperative ACPC from the town of Pichanaqui in the central Peruvian tropical mountain rainforest. The surrounding region is one of the important coffee growing regions and the farmers are hoping for support from the new government. “It will quickly become clear whether Keiko Fujimori is also thinking about small farmers or just about large agricultural companies,” says Rodríguez. The latter would be typical of the new president, who maintains good contacts with large business owners across the country.

But that too can change. The government in Lima is currently making headlines mainly due to disagreement between various ministries. The Ministry of Justice wants to take control of the “Museum of Remembrance,” which documents the period of the civil war and for which the Ministry of Culture has previously been responsible. This is just an indication of the contradictions within the new government, which has taken over a lot of staff from the previous governments. According to Carlos Herz, this is a sign that no far-reaching political innovations are to be expected in Peru.