April 12, 2000

Charging Fraud, Peru Challenger Demands Runoff

LIMA, Peru, April 11 -- President Alberto K. Fujimori's principal opponent, Alejandro Toledo, insisted today on a runoff election after monitors challenged the first round.

And Mr. Toledo said he would take part in a second round only if the electoral agencies were revamped. President Fujimori stands at the brink of winning the first round, according to the official results.

In Washington, Joe Lockhart, a White House spokesman, said today that the United States would raise "serious questions" if Peru did not hold a second round of voting.

"We expect there will be a runoff, and I think serious questions will be raised if the vote count indicated something otherwise," he said.

With 90.8 percent of the official vote count complete, the central election authority reported this evening that Mr. Fujimori had won 49.8 per to Mr. Toledo's 40.4 percent. A candidate needs 50 percent plus one vote to avert a runoff.

The latest count actually showed a slight decrease in Mr. Fujimori's percentage from earlier tallies, but it could climb again as ballots come in from remote jungle and Andean villages where the president has strong support among Indian voters. International election observers also say that election controls were least stringent in such areas.

The government said final results would be made public Wednesday.

Mr. Fujimori, who is running for a third five-year term, has denied that anything but minimal irregularities took place and said he would resist suggestions by the Clinton administration, several European governments and Peru's congressionally appointed ombudsman that a second round vote be held.

"They have to accept the will of the Peruvian people," Mr. Fujimori told reporters Monday night.

Mr. Toledo replaced the faded jeans and red bandanna he has worn the last few days with a dark suit and tie. But by nightfall, as crowds were swelling in Lima and across the country, he was back in casual clothes, and his rhetoric heated up.

"There is no tank or missile that can silence the voice of the people," he told the crowd from the balcony of a Lima hotel.

"We are not afraid of the government!"

Then Eliane Karp, Mr. Toledo's Belgian-born naturalized American wife, came to the microphone and said: "I am with my husband. We will not move if the tanks roll. We are not afraid."

The Organization of American States and several Peruvian and international election monitoring and polling groups have reported that quick counts of sample vote tally sheets on Sunday night indicated that Mr. Fujimori fell at least two percentage points short of a majority.

Several polls of people leaving the voting sites actually had Mr. Toledo, a business school professor, ahead.

The head of the Organization of American States observation team has criticized long delays in the delivery of ballots and tally sheets to computer centers, and said monitors could not determine where the counts were taking place.

There were also reports that on some ballots the names of rivals to Mr. Fujimori were waxed over so that only his name could be marked, that some ballots had been printed without Mr. Toledo's photograph, and that some were pre-marked.

In 1995, election authorities completed their count by midnight of election day and released total unofficial results the next day. In that election Mr. Fujimori vanquished several opponents with almost two-thirds of the official count. This year, Peruvian election officials said they would deliver a reliable total count, if not the absolutely official count, within 24 hours of the balloting.

A senior State Department official said he did not think the slight decrease in Mr. Fujimori's vote percentage necessarily meant that the government was shifting toward favoring a second-round vote after all. "We're doing a lot of work but I don't know if it is doing any good or not," the official said.

Today Mr. Toledo, 54, said he would lead peaceful demonstrations across Peru. But he also reached out to the military, asking it not to take part in election fraud. Saying that "we need a change of chef and waiters" among election authorities, he also demanded the equal access to television networks that he had been denied in the first-round campaign.

Mr. Toledo's calls for protests came as tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Lima, Iquitos, Arequipa and several other cities, blocking traffic, honking car horns and picketing government facilities.

The police stepped up patrols of the cities with armored trucks mounted with water canon. Army and police units around the presidential palace were reinforced.

"I am going to invoke the pride of the Peruvian armed forces so that they resist the pressures they are now under to block the will of the people," Mr. Toledo told a throng of thousands of people who gathered in downtown Lima this afternoon,

Standing beside five other opposition candidates, he added, "I call on all Peru to mobilize peacefully so they will hear our voices."

Mr. Toledo provocatively suggested that there was a growing level of discontent over the election process in the armed forces, which remain a political force in Peru.

"All I know I can't reveal," he said. Then directing his remarks to the armed forces, he said: "I am asking that they not be pressured to continue breaking the rules. I ask that they not participate more in the polarization among Peruvians."

A restructuring of the military command late last year put allies of Mr. Fujimori's intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, in all the top assignments in the defense ministry and in regional headquarters. But many junior officers, spurred on by retired senior officers, are said to be upset with the way the election was handled and the way promotions in the military now depend on political connections to Mr. Fujimori.

Leading a chorus of criticism by former officers has been Peru's last military dictator, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who ruled in the late 1970's. In an interview with the newspaper El Comercio, published today, he was quoted as saying: "This is the most fraudulent and aberrant election process in our national history. Toledo was really the winner."

Through the campaign, Mr. Toledo appealed for support among the army and police, promising to raise salaries and give soldiers the right to vote. Aides to Mr. Toledo said he was in contact with influential officers in the army, but they did not disclose the content of the discussions.

Mr. Toledo has never held high office. His party, Peru Posible, is little more than a civic group and does not have a strong organization.

But in his surprising surge in the final weeks of the campaign, he connected with working-class urban voters, millions of whom are of mixed Indian and Latino ancestry like him.

He attracted large crowds in the campaign, even though he did not have the money to offer supporters food or transportation as is customary in Latin America.

The son of a bricklayer and fishmonger, he shined shoes as a boy and won scholarships that enabled him to earn two master's degrees and a doctorate in the United States. He has promised to be "the president of the poor" even while offering a centrist platform.

Mr. Toledo has been criticized for leading tens of thousands of people on the presidential palace Sunday night when only early results were counted. Protesters set bonfires and some businesses were vandalized.