Even if that’s true, victory for Fujimori and his supporters in the presidential and congressional elections on April 9 is still far from ensured. For the first time in his spectacularly successful career as a politician, Fujimori faces a serious challenger: Alejandro Toledo, 52, the director of a business school in Lima. With the dark skin and Indian features of a rural cholo, Toledo is as far from the urban, Spanish-descended mainstream as Fujimori himself. In the past two weeks, Toledo has soared in the polls. Fujimori still holds a substantial lead, ranging from 10 to 18 points in various surveys. But the latest poll conducted by Apoyo, a respected market-research firm in Lima, found that only 37 percent of voters were prepared to back Fujimori in a field of nine presidential candidates.
If the president fails to win a majority in the first round of balloting, he would be forced into a two-candidate runoff, presumably against Toledo. And Toledo, who finished a distant third in the 1995 presidential race, appears to have momentum this time. According to the Apoyo poll, his support has more than doubled in the past month, rising from 10 percent to more than 25 percent.
To ensure his re-election, Fujimori had been counting on his status as Peru’s savior–and on the assistance of the sinister National Intelligence Service, which routinely undermines potential rivals with disinformation campaigns. In the early stages of the presidential race, opposition candidates were blown out of the sky like so many clay pigeons. The widely respected mayor of Lima was derided in the pro-Fujimori press for his “porky” physical build and supposedly kinky tastes in the bedroom. The former head of Peru’s social-security system was accused of kidnapping after he manhandled and tried to arrest a government watchdog who was tailing him. Smears were also aimed at Toledo, embellishing on some marital difficulties. But Toledo brushed off the personal attacks by Fujimori supporters. “They’ve screwed themselves,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I’m a stubborn, rebellious Indian, and they’re not going to distract me.”
Toledo is a onetime shoeshine boy who became a Stanford-trained economist and World Bank official. One of 16 children born to a hardworking peasant, he moved to northern California as a teenager to attend high school and received an academic scholarship from the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco. When the grant money ran out after his freshman year, Toledo played his way onto the varsity soccer team and stayed in school with an athletic scholarship. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and went on to Stanford for a doctorate.
At Stanford, Toledo dated Eliane Karp, the red-haired daughter of Belgian Jews who was born in Paris and moved to a kibbutz in northern Israel at the age of 16. She met Toledo within weeks of her arrival at Stanford in the fall of 1978 to pursue her doctorate in anthropology, and though he was 11 years her senior, they fell in love almost instantly. A dashing, multicultural couple long before diversity became a buzzword, they married a year later. Eliane was barely into her mid-20s when she and Toledo moved to Peru in 1981, and over the ensuing seven years, she worked as a development consultant in the Andean hinterland for the U.S. Agency for International Development and for other international aid organizations.
During the last three weeks, Karp, now 41, has emerged as a secret weapon in her husband’s campaign. She reads an average of four books a week, works 10 hours a day at a banking job in Lima and speaks seven languages fluently. One of those is Quechua, the country’s predominant Indian language. During a recent TV talk show featuring the wives of four opposition candidates, she proved to be the only one who had mastered the ancient tongue. “I am more Peruvian in my tastes and knowledge than Peruvian women themselves,” Karp said in an interview at the couple’s suburban Lima home last week. “I have spent many years of my life learning about Peru, and I chose to leave my family and my own culture behind to follow Alejandro.”
Her husband has turned out to be a much more formidable candidate than anyone imagined. When he announced his second run for the presidency, the conventional wisdom in Lima was that no politician with his skin color and unmistakably Indian features could win in a society as notoriously racist as Peru’s. But Toledo soon abandoned the self-made-man routine that turned off so many voters five years ago. Instead, he presented himself as a centrist, promising to preserve most of Fujimori’s free-market economic policies and continue the Army’s relentless offensive against the vestiges of the Shining Path guerrilla army. But he also pledged to give Peru a more democratic style of governance, and he pounded away at the Achilles’ heel of the incumbent administration: chronic unemployment that has further deepened the already yawning gap between the haves and have-nots. “People don’t have jobs,” Toledo says. “Sure, this government has made some notable achievements, but people are poorer now than they were before, and they’re becoming disenchanted.”
Raul Mendoza agrees. The 25-year-old native of Cuzco supported Fujimori in 1995. But Mendoza lost his job in a Lima factory last year and now spends his days behind the steering wheel of a rusting Toyota taxi. “Fujimori had his 10 years in power, and I want him out,” he says curtly. “He’s a dictator, and he’s telling so many lies.”
Toledo has also been aided by the excesses of the Fujimori electoral machine. The country’s leading newspaper, El Comercio, caused a sensation in early March with a story revealing how senior officials of the government body in charge of organizing and administering the election helped forge 1 million signatures on behalf of a new pro-Fujimori political faction that was seeking to register itself in time for the April ballot. The newspaper’s expose followed a report issued jointly by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the Carter Center that called the electoral process “flawed.” Among other things, it cited the opposition candidates’ complete lack of access to the country’s broadcast TV networks. Last week a new NDI/Carter Center report said the election was beset by “polarization, anxiety and uncertainties.”
The odds facing Toledo are still daunting. Fujimori may not win a majority of votes in the first round, but his overall approval rating hovers in the mid-50s, and he retains a fervent following at the grass roots. So far, he has tried to remain above the fray, presenting his trips around the country as part of his job, not campaign events. Last week, in Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire that was conquered by the Spaniards in 1535, Fujimori inspected some public-works sites and gave an apparently unplanned speech to a roaring crowd of supporters. Wearing a white hard-hat, a multicolored sash and an Indian poncho, he told his audience: “[Our] children will have a great future because all of us are working with sacrifice and effort to improve our communities. Peru will become a powerful country, a country that will stand out all over the world.”
Behind the scenes, however, there are signs of turmoil in the Fujimori camp. Last week one of his top supporters publicly urged him to abandon restraint and hit the campaign trail. Fujimori demurred, but he did send out cabinet ministers to highlight his accomplishments and inaugurate new government-built facilities. The message has reached its intended audience. As Fujimori drove through the streets of Cuzco, a loyal cholo in his early 30s shouted above the din: “On to the year 2010!”–in effect, urging the president to re-interpret the Constitution one more time and run for a fourth term five years from now.
The outcome of the first-round voting is difficult to predict. A pre-Fujimori election law prohibits the release of poll results in the two weeks before the actual balloting. Many Peruvians doubt that either leading candidate will win an outright majority on April 9. If Fujimori bounces back and wins on the first try, the result will be widely perceived as a fraud, despite elaborate safeguards against wholesale cheating. If he staggers to a victory in the second round, his mandate will be weak, and his party may well lose its majority in the Peruvian Congress. And if Toledo is inaugurated next July 28, the country will enter completely uncharted territory. “It’s hard to see a positive outcome to this election,” says a foreign businessman in Lima. Whatever happens, the heyday of Alberto Fujimori seems to be over.
