ASSOCIATED PRESS
LIMA — Susana Higuchi, the ex-wife of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, died Wednesday at age 73, her daughter, right-wing politician Keiko Fujimori, confirmed.
“After a tough fight against cancer, our mother, Susana Higuchi, has just left to meet God,” Keiko Fujimori said on her Twitter account.
Higuchi, a civil engineer who was first lady between 1990 and 1994, had been hospitalized since November in an intensive care ward with respiratory problems, according to her family.
She publicly denounced in 1992 her then husband’s family for selling clothes donated by Japan for poor Peruvians. Two years later, she accused her husband of torturing her and causing damage to her mental health.
In 1995, a judge approved the divorce. The position of first lady was assumed by the couple’s eldest daughter, Keiko, at the age of 19.
The former first lady became an opposition legislator in 2000. From 2001 to 2006 she belonged to a party called the Independent Moralizing Front.
Higuchi and Alberto Fujimori — now 83 years old and serving a 25-year prison sentence for murders during his tenure (1990-2000) — had four children.