Fujimori’s First Security Pledge: The Same Military Model Her Predecessors Already Tried

LIMA, PERU — In her first address to the nation as Peru’s president, Keiko Fujimori laid out a security policy built on a model her country has already been running for years — with results that, by the government's own recent data, have yet to show a real reduction in crime.

First Announcement

Speaking to Congress on July 28 immediately after being sworn in, Fujimori declared citizen security and El Niño mitigation as her government’s two immediate “national emergency fronts.”

On security, she committed to a specific operational framework:

“During states of emergency, the Armed Forces will temporarily assume leadership of security operations and control of internal order, in close coordination with the National Police,” she said, until state authority is fully restored in affected territories and “each neighborhood, each highway, and each public space” is returned to Peruvian families.

She paired that pledge with a broader package: a national, interconnected video-surveillance system, artificial intelligence platforms to anticipate and map crime, modern communications tools, and dedicated command centers to speed up the state’s response to criminal activity.

Fujimori also announced flagrancy units and a deep prison reform effort, aimed at stopping penitentiaries from continuing to function as operational headquarters for criminal organizations.

Fujimori was explicit that the campaign would not target common street crime alone, saying her government would go after the organizations financing extortion, contract killing, drug trafficking, and illegal mining, “from their leadership down to their economic structures.”

A Model Already in Use

What Fujimori described is not a new tool. Peru has operated under this same basic approach — transferring operational control of designated emergency zones from police to the armed forces — continuously since 2023, spanning the governments of Dina Boluarte, José Jerí, and outgoing interim President José María Balcázar.

According to La República’s reporting, that three-year run of military-led states of emergency has not corresponded with a reduction in crime.

Peru’s own Interior Ministry data shows 425,239 police complaints filed between January and June of this year alone, including 87,057 for theft, 25,283 for robbery, 18,726 for fraud, and 10,671 for extortion — a rate of roughly 60 extortion complaints every day, or one every 24 minutes.

This is the same underlying dynamic behind the rolling states of emergency we’ve covered in Pisco province, which entered its second such declaration this year in July, citing homicides and extortion overwhelming local police resources despite an earlier emergency already having been in place since January.

The Case For & Against Repeating It

Supporters of the approach argue that Peru’s security crisis — its worst since the internal armed conflict of 1980-2000 — requires the state to use every constitutional tool available, and that consistent application, backed by the new surveillance and intelligence infrastructure Fujimori has promised, could finally produce results where a less-resourced version of the same model has not.

Fujimori has also proposed raids in high-crime areas, expulsions of undocumented migrants, and specialized courts as part of the broader package.

Critics, including retirees interviewed by El Mercurio’s Ecuador edition who lived through her father Alberto Fujimori’s presidency, worry the approach risks repeating the authoritarian excesses of that era — Alberto Fujimori is remembered both for defeating the Shining Path insurgency and for shutting down Congress with military backing, later being convicted of human rights violations.

“It’s going to be a replica of the father,” 80-year-old retiree César Fuentes told the outlet, expressing concern that anti-crime strategies could tip into abuse.

A New Peru?

Fujimori has framed her presidency around what she called an “irreversible countdown” of 1,826 days — the full length of her five-year term.

Whether continuing the same military-led emergency model that has already run for three years under three different governments produces different results this time will likely hinge less on the policy itself than on whether the surveillance, AI, and prison reforms she’s promised actually get built out — infrastructure that, as of her inauguration, exists only as a pledge rather than an operating system.