SOUTH AMERICA : Real-Life Presidential Soap Has Peruvians in a Lather

A marital soap opera unfolding at Lima’s presidential palace has Peruvians spellbound and tuned to their television sets.

Unlike the popular imported soaps from Brazil and Venezuela, grist of Peruvian prime-time television, this one is real and made in Peru: a running dispute between President Alberto Fujimori and his estranged wife, Susana Higuchi.

And it has upstaged Fujimori’s main rival for next year’s presidential elections, Javier Perez de Cuellar, 74. The former United Nations secretary general has found his efforts to test Peru’s political waters stymied as the drama of “Susana andAlberto” hogs the spotlight.

Higuchi triggered the row in early August when she accused members of the Fujimori administration of corruption. She also moved out of the palace to protest an electoral law--quickly dubbed the “Susana law”--that bans the president’s close relatives from running for president or Congress in the April, 1995, elections. Higuchi has said she is considering a run for the presidency.

When the first lady returned to the palace 10 days later, she found that her husband had moved out, to the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service. He has stayed there since, along with their four children.

On Aug. 23, a stern-faced Fujimori, 56, used prime-time television to announce that he was stripping Higuchi of her duties as first lady because of her “incomprehensible” criticism of the government and her apparent presidential aspirations.

“From now on, Mrs. Higuchi can carry out her political activities in open opposition to the government when and where she pleases, like any citizen, but not as first lady,” he said.

Fujimori lamented that “intimate family problems” had become “headlines in the newspapers” and said he had made many concessions to his wife’s “unstable and easily impressionable personality,” but that the climate of instability had forced him to act. Late last week, TV viewers tuned in to hear that Higuchi had been locked into the palace--the doors leading from her offices to a side street at the sprawling downtown presidential headquarters had been welded shut, and water and electricity were temporarily cut off.

By Saturday the doors had been unwelded, which Higuchi sees as a sign of possible reconciliation with her husband. “I have faith that this will be worked out,” she said in a telephone interview.

Higuchi, 44, insisted that she still loves her husband. “Our differences are merely political, not marital,” she said.

Palace watchers say the Fujimoris’ marriage began to sour in 1990, when Fujimori took office. The first outward signs of trouble appeared when Higuchi accused her in-laws of trafficking in used clothing donated by Japan, keeping the best for themselves and handing out “rags” to the poor.

The case was quickly hushed up and then eclipsed by Fujimori’s 1992 coup. In what Higuchi said was her “husband’s decision,” she was kept away from the press until June of this year. Then, in a television interview she asked her husband to “tone down” authoritarian tendencies and accused him of ignoring the plight of Peru’s 12 million poor. “He sees the Peru of ribbon-cutting ceremonies and pretty things,” she said. “I see the Peru of need and misery.”