Peru President Heads for Controversial Win

LIMA, Peru — After one of Latin America’s strangest and most troubled election campaigns in recent years, Peruvians elected President Alberto Fujimori to an unprecedented third term Sunday, early results indicated, in a vote that was boycotted by his challenger and international monitors.

Riot police fired tear gas at tens of thousands of anti-Fujimori marchers who took to the streets here and in provincial cities. There were reports of several protesters wounded by police bullets in the provincial cities of Iquitos and Chimbote. Rioters vandalized government buildings and set fire to the telephone company building in the town of Huancayo.

There were also scattered late night incidents in Lima after a largely peaceful rally. An estimated 50,000 demonstrators packed a downtown plaza in the capital for the rally convened by challenger Alejandro Toledo, who had urged followers not to vote or to cast protest ballots.

With just over half the ballots counted, Fujimori had 50.3% of the vote and Toledo had 16.2%, but annulled ballots attributed to Toledo voters accounted for a notable 32.4%. Absenteeism was higher than usual, officials said, even though Peruvian law makes voting mandatory and subjects violators to fines.

The street clashes followed a bitter campaign that all but derailed when Fujimori defied election monitors who wanted him to push back the runoff to prevent allegations of fraud, which marred the first round of voting in April. Sunday’s vote opened a period of uncertainty and conflict with repercussions beyond the borders of this increasingly fragile democracy.

Toledo used the rally and an earlier visit to a dust-wreathed slum to launch his promised campaign of political resistance. As the Sunday night crowd roared, Toledo appealed to the staunchly pro-Fujimori military.

“Friends in the armed forces, I ask you tonight: Side with the motherland and not with Fujimori,” Toledo said.

Toledo, a Stanford-educated economist from an impoverished indigenous family, hopes civil disobedience at home combined with pressure from the United States and other nations will eventually propel him into power, ideally by forcing new elections.

“This is the start of the third round,” declared Toledo, 54, earlier Sunday. He said he will emulate the nonviolent tactics of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and former Philippine President Corazon Aquino.

The president, meanwhile, said he will show Peruvians and a disapproving international community that the elections were fair. But after a decade in which his victories against terrorism, inflation and poverty won international acclaim, this victory seemed lonely: It was overshadowed by criticism that Fujimori has become an authoritarian clinging to power at all costs.

Nonetheless, the 61-year-old president beamed as he cast his vote shortly before 9 a.m.

He wore a dark, double-breasted suit and his lucky yellow tie and triumphantly raised the hands of his voting-age daughters, Keiko and Sachi. And he put a positive spin on the day’s events.

“In contrast to previous elections, in which terrorism threatened and liberties and rights of citizens were infringed . . . this year we have had free and transparent elections with total guarantees,” Fujimori told reporters.

The protesters who denounced Fujimori in the rally in Plaza San Martin, however, provided an impressive outpouring of support for Toledo matching that of his anti-government rallies after the April vote.

“What Fujimori does in the future will surely hurt the nation,” said Carla Lecaro, 23, a sociology student who wore a Peruvian flag around her neck and carried a handkerchief dipped in vinegar to ward off tear gas. “The dictatorship has removed its mask.”

Fujimori’s candidacy was inherently divisive because Peru’s constitutional tribunal ruled in 1997 that a third term would be illegal. After ousting the judges who ruled against Fujimori, his legislative majority rammed through laws clearing the way for him to run.

The campaign this year was dogged by allegations that Fujimori used the tactics that human rights organizations and the U.S. State Department say are a recurring practice of his government: persecution of opponents, manipulation of the media and use of state resources for political benefit.

Nonetheless, some political analysts think Fujimori is still popular enough to have won a delayed election. They see the refusal to postpone the vote as the work of hard-liners in the president’s inner circle, especially intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos, and fear that the government will crack down on dissent.

The edginess in the Toledo camp was evident Sunday as the candidate, running mate Carlos Ferrero and a handful of advisors conferred on the patio of Toledo’s spacious home here in the Peruvian capital. Before talking strategy, the men reflexively pulled the batteries out of their cellular phones. Experience has taught them to assume the phones are bugged and that spies are everywhere.

Later, Toledo, his wife, Eliane Karp--a Belgian-born anthropologist who speaks Quechua and Hebrew as well as Spanish--and their daughter, Shantall, piled into a sport utility vehicle. They headed for El Agustino, a slum ringed by parched urban hills and covered with a pall of dust rising from the unpaved streets.

Toledo will need neighborhoods like El Agustino if his vision of sustaining a nationwide opposition movement has any chance. Toledo has strong support among the urban middle and lower-middle classes. Although his indigenous origins help Toledo in the countryside, Fujimori’s hands-on populism and public works projects make peasants the core of the government’s support.

Students and working people in the cities, therefore, are crucial to Toledo’s future. Greeted by an enthusiastic crowd and a contingent of counterdemonstrators, Toledo clambered onto an unsteady roof to give a short speech. He then ate a meal of rice and fish in a dingy communal soup kitchen run by neighborhood mothers.

“We thank you for standing up to Fujimori,” said Gladys Montano, a neighborhood leader. “You are the first candidate to do it.”

Fujimori has said he believes that the passions of the campaign will soon die down. And he said he does not expect reprisals from the Organization of American States, which at an emergency meeting Wednesday in Washington will consider a report from its election observers on the Peru crisis.