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Do you wonder why, seeking a unprecedented third term which he originally thought he would win easily, as the April 9 election got close Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori thought it necessary to put in motion a widespread, multi-front fraud? Because his main adversary, Alejandro Toledo was about to eat his lunch. He was increasingly getting support from the very same voters Fujimori depended on—Peru’s Indian population.
Although ethnically Japanese —there were even rumors that he was born in Japan—, by appealing to Peru’s Indians and the poor, which are to a great extent one and the same, Fujimori won for the first time in 1990 by a 60 percent majority against novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran on a centrist platform and was suspected of having ties to the moneyed elite. Having delivered on some of his promises (he reduced the country’s punishing inflation rate, managed to stabilize its economy somewhat and stopped the depredations of the Shining Path, an organization of Maoist guerrillas, and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which mostly preyed on rural populations), Fujimori won a resounding victory in his bid for reelection in 1995.
In an increasingly authoritarian style—he reformed Congress and the courts to suit his desires and instituted a system of informal but effective media censorship—which gained the approval of his supporters, Fujimori manipulated the nation’s constitution so that he could seek a third term. As he would be running against a fragmented opposition—there were several presidential candidates—most analysts expected Fujimori to win easily. It was not to be.
Even though local independent groups as well as the Organization of American States, and U.S. and European observers charged the Fujimori government smothered the opposition with unfair practices in the runup to the election and committed widespread fraud at the polls, Fujimori fell short of an outright win in the first round ballot when the pressure of foreign opinion, in which the United States played a key role, discouraged him from tampering further with the vote-count process.
As the U.S. Congress raised the possibility of economic sanctions, Washington ratcheted up its rhetoric. Finally, State Department spokesman James Rubin warned against Fujimori winning in the first round. “If that were to happen, and thus there would be convincing proof of fraud, in our view, this would pose a substantial challenge to restoring the credibility of the government in Peru,” he said.
The U.S. attitude was welcome by Toledo’s supporters in Peru, but Francisco Tudela, who resigned as Peru’s ambassador to the United Nations to be Fujimori’s running mate, criticized the U.S. threat. `”The greatest harm done to Peru has been the U.S. intervention that has demanded an electoral result without waiting for an official count,” he said.
Failing by a razor-thin margin to earn the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff, the man whose third term looked assured for months is now boxed in a corner ahead of the May 28 runoff by a candidate whose basic support comes from the same Indians who overwhelmingly backed Fujimori twice in ten years.
His rival, Alejandro Toledo, is a most unlikely candidate. The 54-year-old son of Andean peasants, with the indigenous looks to prove it, Toledo graduated from Harvard and is a former World Bank economist. Throughout the campaign he became increasingly idolized by Peru’s Indian majority, ending up with 40 percent of the vote.
For most of his Peruvian supporters, Alejandro Toledo dresses in casual shirts and jeans, promising jobs and education in messages garnished with measured doses of street slang. For bankers and international lenders, the economist-turned-candidate dons a suit and tie and eloquently describes, in educated Spanish and near-perfect English, how he will toe a tough fiscal line—a market-based economy but with a human face.
Fujimori has said the government had no intention of sabotaging Toledo’s campaign during the runoff, despite concerns by international monitors about smear attacks and dirty tricks against Fujimori’s election opponents during the first round. The 61-year-old president joked about being blamed when anything goes wrong, and said it has become a habit for opponents to point to him or his government’s intelligence apparatus for “every problem that Peru has.”
But he turned serious when he discussed his opponent. He called Toledo an irresponsible populist for his promises to cut taxes and raise wages, and a demagogue who has frightened Peruvians with his fiery rhetoric. He said Toledo’s spending promises would cause a deficit equivalent to 10 percent of the gross domestic product and hurl Peru back into the economic chaos of the late 1980s.
When Fujimori took office in 1990, inflation had reached 7,750 percent. He quickly imposed harsh austerity measures that doused the inflationary fires. Last year inflation was 3.7 percent. But only half the Peruvians in the labor force have steady work, and Toledo has cut into Fujimori’s support among the poor with promises to create hundreds of thousands of jobs by reducing taxes to boost business investment. He also has pledged large pay increases for police, teachers and other government workers.
Even though Toledo will be getting additional support from the other opposition groups and chances are that, under the watchful eye of the United States, the runoff on May 28 will be reasonably fair, its outcome is far from being clear. President Fujimori may have been stripped of his aura of invincibility but not of his reputation as a master in a crisis, as he has proved in the ten years he has been in power.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio_campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com