Peru's former president Fujimori back in jail

Just over a year after receiving a presidential pardon on humanitarian grounds, Peru's disgraced ex-president Alberto Fujimori was sent back to prison.

Fujimori, 80, who has been hospitalized several times during his prison sentence for cancer and heart problems, was released from a private clinic after a four-month stand-off as medical examinations showed him to be fit enough to return to prison.

In October, Peru's supreme court ruled in favor of an appeal by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CIDH) to deny the Christmas eve 2017 pardon for Fujimori, who had served 12 years of a 25-year prison sentence for human rights abuses and embezzlement.

Dozens of Fujimori supporters blocked the street and battled police in a bid to prevent them from entering the clinic, where Fujimori had been kept since October 3.

"The end of my life is near," Fujimori wrote via Twitter. "I am convinced that history's judgment will be fairer than the judgment of political enemies."

The imprisonment of Fujimori, which comes as four other Peruvian ex-presidents face corruption investigations, underscores both the rapidly-changing political scenario and the waning fortunes of the Fujimori dynasty.

His daughter, opposition leader Keiko Fujimori, has been in prison since November awaiting trial on money laundering charges. Her brother Kenji, meanwhile, was stripped of his congressional seat last year on accusations he brokered his father's pardon with then-president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was later forced to resign.

Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) was widely credited with ending terrorism and hyperinflation, privatizing Peru's bankrupt state companies, creating private pension funds and capital markets and attracting billions of dollars in foreign investment to industries including mining, hydrocarbons and telecommunications during his presidency.

But his mandate ended amidst charges of waging a dirty war and the embezzlement of billions of dollars by his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos, who is also serving a 25 year prison sentence. Emblematic cases included killings of civilians by paramilitary death squads in Lima's Barrios Altos district and La Cantuta University.