Susana Higuchi

Susana Shizuko Higuchi Miyagawa (born 26 April 1950) is a Japanese Peruvian politician and engineer, better known as the former wife of President Alberto Fujimori. A member of theCongress for two terms from 2000 to 2006, she was elected as a member of the Frente Independiente Moralizador (FIM), (Independent Moralizing Front), a reformist political party allied with then president Alejandro Toledo, in both the 2000 and 2001 general elections.

Life and career

Higuchi was born in Peru of Japanese descent. She was formerly married to Alberto Fujimori, who was president of Peru from 1990 until November 2000, when he resigned from office and fled to Japan as allegations of far-reaching corruption in his administration began to emerge. She married Fujimori in 1974 and divorced him in 1994. They have four children: Keiko Sofía, Hiro Alberto, Sachi Marcela and Kenji Gerardo.

As First Lady during her husband's presidency, Higuchi was one of the first people in Peru to allege criminal misdoings on the part of her husband. As early as 1992, she denounced several of her Fujimori in-laws for corruption in connection with the sale of used clothing donated by Japan. In 1994, she publicly condemned her husband as a tyrant and his government as corrupt. Fujimori reacted by formally stripping her of the title First Lady in August 1994, appointing their elder daughter Keiko First Lady in her place. The couple divorced in 1994.

Higuchi thereupon established her own political party, the Harmony 21st century, and announced her intention to enter politics as a candidate for mayor of Lima in the 1995 elections. In December 1994 the Harmony party was ruled ineligible because it failed to muster the required number of signatures to qualify as a legitimate political party.

Because of her outspokenness, Higuchi was subjected to repeated efforts to silence her. In 2001, she told investigators probing the corruption of the Fujimori years that she had been tortured "five hundred times" by the intelligence services of the Peruvian Army.^[1] Fujimori denied that Higuchi had been tortured. He said the scars on her back and neck were not from torture but from a traditional Japanese herbal treatment called moxibustion she underwent to help her stop smoking and for back troubles.

In July 2001, she alleged that in 1990, shortly before coming to power, her ex-husband received a donation of US$12.5 million from Japanese citizens destined for poor children in Peru, but he deposited it in a private bank account in Japan.^[2]

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