Getting Out the Message From Tokyo, by Radio

When Carlos Raffo Arce hears the ping coming from his bedroom closet in the middle of the night, he knows in an instant who is trying to reach him. So he rouses himself out of bed, drags himself to a computer tucked between clothes racks and types back: “Yes, Senor Presidente. I am here.”

The man writing to Raffo from a laptop in Tokyo isn’t the president anymore, but to Raffo, this is only a temporary state of affairs. Someday soon, he believes, Alberto Fujimori will return to lead Peru again.

Raffo is the exiled president’s main spokesman in Peru, a frenetic, one-man propaganda machine working around the clock on behalf of the man known here -- despite his Japanese ancestry -- as “El Chino,” the Chinese guy.

“When I started working for him, my friends stopped calling me,” said Raffo, a 36-year-old former video producer. “I became like a leper. No one wanted to be seen with me. Now my old friends are starting to come back.”

Fujimori gracelessly abandoned the presidency four years ago. Mired in a corruption scandal surrounding his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, he boarded a plane to Asia for a putative trade mission and never came back. The Peruvian Congress declared him AWOL a week later. The government of Alejandro Toledo has been trying for years to have him extradited on an array of corruption charges.

But in South America, political fortunes can shift as quickly as a mountainside in an Andes avalanche. Toledo has become a widely unpopular leader, and Fujimori smells a comeback. That’s where Raffo comes in.

Every Saturday morning, Raffo brings audio messages from Fujimori to the Peruvian people on an hourlong radio show broadcast on dozens of stations nationwide.

Since launching the program in August, Raffo has helped create an alternate media universe in which the discredited Fujimori is portrayed as the only honest ruler in Peru’s recent history, despite the fact that a jail cell probably awaits him should he ever return.

“The Hour of the Chinese Guy!” Raffo boomed into a microphone in the Lima studios of Miraflores Radio one recent Saturday. Simultaneously, he cued the show’s theme song, an old Fujimori campaign ditty set to a tropical cumbia beat.

As “The Rhythm of the Chinese Guy” wailed from a speaker, Raffo popped a CD-ROM into a studio computer. An assistant had copied Fujimori’s speech onto the disc in the wee hours of the morning after receiving the MP3 recording in an e-mail from Tokyo.

“Fujimorism is growing as the government and the Congress continue to do nothing to improve the lives of the Peruvian people,” Fujimori told his listeners. “In the meantime, an old enemy advances, hidden thanks to the complicity of those who deny the enemy presence.”

Fujimori was referring to the Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla group that his government largely exterminated. Bands of armed men calling themselves the Shining Path have reappeared recently, staging small attacks in isolated regions of Peru. An army soldier died in one such attack last week.

“I am sure all of you remember as if it were yesterday the horrors of terrorism,” Fujimori continued, picking up the show’s central theme: With Peru spinning out of control, only the old warrior Fujimori can make things right.

In a certain sense, the program has made common cause with the sensationalist media of Lima. In recent months, the tabloids have filled page after page with the scandals of the Toledo government, big and small.

“Either we impeach Toledo or tolerate his ineptitude until 2006,” read one recent headline in the daily newspaper La Razon, referring to the next presidential elections.

Toledo’s approval rating in recent polls has sunk to single-digit levels. Many Peruvians long for a strong leader, even one with a record like Fujimori’s. As president, he suspended the Constitution and shut down Congress in 1992. And he has been charged with having squirreled away millions of ill-gotten gains in Japanese banks.

In a poll released last month, 21% of Peruvians said they would vote for Fujimori -- a close second behind the 23% support for another former president, Alan Garcia.

“Our country is on the brink of collapse. It is about to fall off a cliff,” said Raul Sulca, a pro-Fujimori activist who was Raffo’s guest on the show. “Our response to this is the swift return of our president, Alberto Fujimori. We must prepare the political ground for this.”

Allies such as Sulca join host Raffo on the show every week. But the highlight of the broadcast is the exiled president himself.

“This is his chance to speak directly to the people, to bury the myth that he doesn’t want to come back,” Raffo said in an interview.

Last month, Raffo took Fujimori to a rally in Huamanga, a provincial city in the Ayacucho region southeast of Lima. “He was on video,” Raffo explained, a speech recorded on a digital video camera in Tokyo and also available on Fujimori’s website, www.fujimori

alberto.com. Hundreds of peasants came to see the virtual Fujimori, all veterans of the “Self-Defense Committees” created to fight the Shining Path guerrillas in the 1980s.

Back in the studio, Raffo recounted the event to his listeners: “Here we are in Lima putting our muscle to work for Fujimorism. Meanwhile, over there in the city of Huamanga, we had a marvelous meeting which is still making sparks fly.... More than 400 leaders