Like any good politician, Toledo understands the power of symbols. And for millions of dirt-poor Peruvians, the hawk-nosed 55-year-old academic is himself a compelling symbol of what a bright and hardworking nobody can accomplish in one of the most racist and class-conscious societies in Latin America. Polls at the weekend predicted he would handily carry Sunday’s election and that he’s poised to win a runoff in May. If he does, “El cholo,” as he is popularily known, will become the first man of primarily Indian ancestry to be democratically elected president of Peru. “That enormous rupture with tradition would represent an enormous responsibility for me,” he told NEWSWEEK last week (following story). “Some people must be gritting their teeth, [but] they have to accept me.”
Many Peruvians have. Sunday’s voting was set to be Peru’s first free and fair national election in more than a decade. No small achievement, given that only eight months ago the country was a thinly disguised dictatorship ruled by President Alberto Fujimori and his longtime partner in tyranny, the ruthless spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos. Fujimori had rigged last year’s election to fend off a surprisingly stiff challenge from Toledo, a relatively obscure politician who had run a distant third in the 1995 presidential election. And with the opposition reduced to demoralized impotence, the Fujimori-Montesinos juggernaut seemed assured of ruling Peru for another five years.
Then it all fell apart for Fujimori within a matter of weeks. A video surfaced in September that showed Montesinos bribing a congressman from Toledo’s own party; that triggered a seismic chain of events that culminated in Fujimori’s abrupt resignation as president two months later. Today the former head of state languishes in self-imposed exile in his parents’ Japanese homeland (box). Montesinos is a fugitive from Peruvian justice who disappeared in October and was last spotted in December in Venezuela, where he underwent plastic surgery to alter his nose and eyelids to disguise his face.
In the months since the disgraced president faxed in his resignation from Tokyo, Peruvians have been treated to other secretly taped videos that show television magnates, an opposition congressman and a judge happily accepting stacks of banknotes from Montesinos and his bagmen. Last week the country was rocked anew by a “Vladivideo” showing top generals and admirals signing a document that contained trumped-up charges of espionage and illegal arms dealing against an anti-Fujimori television-station owner.
If Peru’s recent past was dominated by Fujimori, the foreseeable future is likely to fall into Toledo’s hands. Pre-election polls last week indicated he should easily defeat either of his likely contenders, former president Alan Garcia and Congresswoman Lourdes Flores, in a runoff. His improbable rise to fame reads like a Horatio Alger parable. As a teenager who grew up in the grimy port of Chimbote, Toledo won a soccer scholarship from the University of San Francisco and earned his bachelor’s degree in economics in 1970. He went on to Stanford, where he obtained a doctorate in economics and met Eliane Karp, a red-haired anthropology student who was born in Paris and spent much of her adolescence on a kibbutz in northern Israel. The two married a year later. After finishing his Ph.D. in 1976, Toledo landed a series of plum assignments as a consultant to the United Nations, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. In 1981 he moved back to Peru to accept a senior post in the Labor Ministry, and by the late 1980s he was being touted as a possible cabinet minister. The folksy technocrat’s political prospects looked bright.
Not so his personal life. During the recent campaign, a fair number of skeletons tumbled from the front runner’s closet. The respected news-magazine Caretas published a cover story last month alleging that Toledo had cavorted with prostitutes and later tested positive for cocaine and barbiturates in October 1998. Toledo cried foul, insisting that he had been kidnapped and drugged by Montesinos’s henchmen. He also accused the magazine’s European-descended editor of waging a racially motivated smear campaign against him.
But the article revived lingering questions about the candidate’s character. According to two former U.S. Embassy officials who knew the Toledos in the 1980s, their storybook marriage foundered. Eliane left Toledo and their 6-year-old daughter, Chantal, in 1987, amid claims of wife-beating. Karp returned to Lima 10 years later after the couple reconciled, and Toledo has limited his comments on the subject to a demurely worded acknowledgment of past “marital frictions.”
Critics say his professional credentials for governing Peru are also suspect. Over the years he has advised three presidents–including, at one point, Fujimori–on managing Peru’s foreign debt. But most recently, his main source of income has been his job as a professor at a third-rate business school. He has never been elected to public office or run a major government agency. “There are some people in the private sector who consider Toledo to be a mediocre economist who has never held any position of importance anywhere,” notes one prominent foreign businessman in Lima.
He can hardly be reassured by the noises candidate Toledo has been making. As the race entered the homestretch last week, he was sounding more and more like a populist demagogue. In last year’s campaign against Fujimori, he prided himself on his indigenous roots but avoided overtly playing the race card. This time around, Toledo regularly donned Indian folk dress and invoked the memory of the 15th-century Inca Emperor Pachacutec–even though he speaks better English than he does Quechua, the country’s chief Indian language. A year ago he wooed voters with a promise of more jobs and issued a qualified endorsement of Fujimori’s mainly free-market economic policies. These days, he’s promising to raise public-sector salaries, cut taxes and check the budget deficit–all at once. That kind of smoke-and-mirrors talk has some economists worried. “He won’t be able to deliver on a lot of his campaign promises,” warns economics professor Alejandro Indacochea. “That will create serious problems because he has raised expectations so high, and anything could happen here.”
Toledo’s life story inevitably invites comparisons to another morally flawed politician: former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Like Clinton, Toledo is married to a high-powered professional woman whose personality and sometimes blunt opinions have alienated as many voters as she has helped win over. (Karp made headlines at a campaign rally last month when she uttered a pejorative slang term for the affluent, fair-skinned elites of Lima society.) But like Clinton, the resilient Toledo has survived the barrage of damaging revelations about his private life, and many voters seem quite prepared to overlook his peccadilloes. “He’s acquired the skin of a rhinoceros,” says Lima pollster Manuel Torrado, “and the bullets no longer penetrate him.”
Toledo’s main qualifications for the presidency boil down to his unflinching leadership of the movement to restore democracy in Peru. And for many ordinary Peruvians, that is reason enough to back him. “I liked his manliness and courage,” said Maria Antonieta de Davila, a 40-year-old public-relations manager from Arequipa. “We were so full of filth and corruption, and he wants to make Peru worthy of respect.”
If he does scale the summit of power, Toledo faces a difficult five-year term as president. Less than half of the country’s workers have full-time jobs, and investment flows have dried up since Fujimori’s decline and fall began in September. Polls predicted that Toledo’s Peru Posible party would fall well short of obtaining a majority of seats in the 120-member Congress, and his allies in the legislative branch will have to cut backroom deals with other parties to forge a governing coalition. Given the country’s history of coups and autocrats, democracy is at best a fragile flower in Peru. “The elections have been clean, but Peruvian democracy is very frail,” says Rafael Roncagliolo, of the independent election-monitoring organization Transparencia. “The governability of the country is under threat.”
Toledo is about to make history. If he can steer Peru out of its economic crisis and curb rampant corruption, the onetime shoeshine boy could go down as one of his country’s greatest presidents. But if he falters, he may join the ranks of Fujimori and his discredited predecessors–men best remembered for defrauding the people who believed in them.
