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Susana Higuchi is a member of the
Peruvian
Congress. She was elected in 2001, representing the Frente
Independiente Moralizador (FIM) party. Higuchi was born in Peru of
Japanese descent and was formerly married to
Alberto Fujimori, who was
president of Peru from 1990 until November 2000, when he fled to
Japan as allegations of far-reaching
corruption in his administration began to emerge.
Higuchi married Fujimori in 1974 and divorced him in
1998. She has four children with him.
As
First Lady during her husband's presidency, Higuchi was one of the
first people in Peru to uncover and reveal her husband's criminal
misdealings. 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 publically 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 First Lady
in her place. 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, but 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, publicly displaying the cigarette burns on her back.
Fujimori has 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. (Moxibustion, however, does not leave scars.)
In July, 2001, she revealed that in July 1990, shortly before coming to
power, her ex-husband received a donation of US$12 million from Japanese
citizens destined for poor children in Peru, but he deposited it in a
private bank account with the
Bank of Tokyo in
Tokyo.
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