Fujimori: Study in Solitude of Power at the Top

It was close to midnight in the cavernous presidential palace. Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was talking about his leadership style.

He chuckled dismissively about a poll ranking the power of his advisors. In reality, he said, his son Kenji had as much influence as a Cabinet minister on matters such as protecting an endangered crocodile in northern Peru or making peace with Ecuador.

“He constantly comes to my office; he has that facility to enter my office,” Fujimori said. “He is a fanatical ecologist. He brings me a proposal to save the crocodile in Tumbes. We went up there together. He says we should create a sanctuary. . . . On the Peru-Ecuador issue, I listened to his perspective as a young man, which is different than that of a soldier.”

But in the end, the president declared, “the man who makes the decisions is Alberto Fujimori.”

That conversation took place in April, days before the election that began his seven-month slide into political oblivion. Fujimori’s words displayed his human, accessible and strangely appealing side.

You could imagine the workaholic president listening with a smile as his 19-year-old son--Fujimori takes pride in his four children--counseled him on matters of state. And you had to acknowledge in the end that Fujimori did not shirk hard decisions.

Fujimori’s confidence in his instincts was as profound as his mistrust of almost everyone else’s. He handled people and problems one on one. He put himself on the front line, inviting acclaim if he triumphed and humiliation if he failed.

Then there was the other Fujimori: distant, secret, cold. The man who stood over corpses of guerrillas for the cameras. The man who banished his wife and brother in favor of his scheming spy chief. The man who disappointed his staunchest admirers last week when he took refuge in Japan.

“I have no precise plans for the near future except to explain . . . a decision that for some has caused sadness or indignation or a sensation that I have abandoned them,” Fujimori, 62, said in a fax to a Spanish news agency.

To explain his unlikely rise and sad fall, literature may hold more answers than books of history or politics. Fujimori is a case study in the solitude of power.

Authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia and Octavio Paz of Mexico have described how solitude haunts the Latin American dictator, the general, the political boss. His power is based on force, not dialogue or institutions. To conquer, he must remain closed and remote. He may do good works, but his rule is inescapably illegitimate. And lonely.

Fujimori’s solitary power also had to do with his origins as an outsider: a son of lower-middle class Japanese immigrants among a wealthy, European-dominated elite; an agronomist more comfortable with numbers than words, with tractors and crops than Lima’s well-read and witty ruling class.

A telling portrait of Fujimori on the threshold of power comes from the candidate who lost to him in 1990. In a 1994 memoir entitled “A Fish in the Water,” acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa recounts a meeting with his rival after voters forced them into a runoff race. Because Fujimori was the overwhelming favorite, Vargas Llosa went to him with an offer to bow out.

The scene was an unassuming house flanked by a garage and a gas station. Fujimori opened the front door himself; in Lima’s polite society, servants receive visitors.

And Vargas Llosa was “surprised to discover, in this modest neighborhood, enclosed by high walls, a Japanese garden with miniature trees . . . small wooden bridges and lanterns, and an elegant residence with Asian furnishing. I felt as if I were in a Chinese restaurant or a traditional home in Kyoto or Osaka, not Lima.”

No one was visible in the house except Fujimori. He poured two whiskeys. He confided that “he made all his important decisions in the most complete solitude, not even discussing them with his wife,” according to the book.

The two candidates did not work out an agreement. Fujimori won the runoff decisively by capitalizing on his underdog status. He appealed to the vast majority of Peruvians who were indigenous, black or of mixed race, the peasants and desperately poor who regarded Lima, the capital, as a haughty colonial outpost.

Although Fujimori was justifiably proud of his shoestring electoral surprise, the story already had a dark side. Outgoing President Alan Garcia despised Vargas Llosa. In the runoff, the Garcia forces backed Fujimori with resources and espionage provided by the National Intelligence Service, or SIN. The key operative was Vladimiro Montesinos, a SIN agent with ties to the drug underworld, who later became Fujimori’s spy chief and gray eminence.

Why did Fujimori cast his lot with Montesinos? They shared a profound wariness, and a penchant for intrigue, according to many accounts.

In addition, Fujimori did not have a real party, just an improvised movement. Over time he created a new political class of former outsiders, especially Peruvians of Asian descent and women whom his rivals mocked as “geishas,” though his female legislative leaders defended him like Gurkhas.

But the muscle came from the security forces, which had retained power since their dictatorship of the 1970s. Fujimori, a former university dean, clicked with the armed forces like a born soldier.

Fujimori treated the presidency as if it were a military campaign. He drove himself with battlefield discipline, sleeping a few hours before dawn, catnapping aboard planes and helicopters. He was imperious but austere.

“I’ll ask him if he needs something, if I should straighten the cabin, make the bed,” a flight attendant on the presidential jet once said during a trip to a flood-torn region. “He doesn’t even answer--he just raises his hand to say no. And he does it himself.”

His entourage consisted almost entirely of military men. Montesinos organized the president’s security detail in order to monitor and control him. But Fujimori broke the spy chief’s hold and converted his bodyguards and aides into a protective phalanx, according to well-informed Peruvians.

“He must have been the only president in Latin America who didn’t have a secretary,” said Peruvian sociologist Raul Gonzalez. “Everyone in that circle was military and totally loyal.”

Fujimori functioned best when he had an enemy to crush: hyperinflation, terrorists, drug lords, corrupt politicians.

Fujimori’s Populism Won Many Admirers

Like no previous president, the restless Fujimori patrolled Peru by helicopter, jeep, boat. He swooped into desolate villages. He donned peasant hats and costumes, ate their humble food, slept in their huts. He brought schools, roads, electric lines, and told the people that this was democracy in action.

His two-fisted populism won respect and a curious familiarity. People greeted him by shouting the nickname for Asians: “Chino!”

“They trust me,” Fujimori said gravely during the interview in April. “In the past, someone who lived in the highlands, the Andes, didn’t feel they had the same rights as a middle-class Peruvian. They simply felt totally left out.”

Peru’s poverty rate has not changed much in 10 years, remaining at roughly half the population. But indicators show that the lives of the poorest Peruvians, a downtrodden 15% or so, improved considerably. There was a catch: Critics alleged that the regime manipulated food distribution programs for political purposes.

And the model of politics-as-war established by his temporary armed shutdown of Congress in 1992 grew uglier during his second term. The enemies were now Supreme Court justices, television stations, rival politicians. Montesinos’ influence increased dangerously after the ouster in 1997 of armed forces chief Gen. Nicolas Hermoza.

Still, Fujimori’s style caused many to give him the benefit of the doubt. He had brought order to a chaotic society. Admirers said Peru needed an iron hand; critics found that an insulting excuse.

It also seemed tempting to accept a good cop/bad cop picture of the president as a hostage, or at least a reluctant partner, of Montesinos. Their relationship is one of the great mysteries of Peru.

Montesinos Served as ‘Lightning Rod’

Dennis Jett, U.S. ambassador here between 1996 and 1999, felt that Fujimori was very much in control.

“He used Montesinos as a lightning rod to take the criticism,” Jett said. “I think he used Montesinos because Montesinos was good at what he did, whether it was bribery, spying, orchestrating military promotions, co-opting judges.”

Skulduggery aside, Fujimori relied on the SIN and the military for the business of running Peru. His daily intelligence briefings covered events ranging from the conversations of dissidents to the collapse of a church tower in a provincial town, according to Gonzalez.

The dominance of the security forces pushed the regime to the line between democracy and dictatorship. Fujimori’s run for a third term this year resulted in elections condemned by the international community, isolating him as never before. His relationship with Montesinos deteriorated as the spy chief reportedly overruled moderate advisors who wanted to heed foreign observers and delay the troubled runoff election in May.

When Fujimori broke with Montesinos in September, he lost his eyes and ears, his sense of direction. The president was cut off from the military, almost alone. He tried to fill the vacuum with his guards, who found themselves acting as a makeshift spy service, according to Gonzalez and press reports.

The president, according to critics, desperately needed to destroy the spy chief before Montesinos destroyed him, either with compromising information or a military coup. Hence the extraordinary images last month of Fujimori and machine-gun toting commandos striding into military bases and supermarkets to hunt Montesinos and arrest his loyalists.

The fugitive became an obsession that derailed the government.

“Fujimori was not just fearful but angry,” said journalist Gustavo Gorriti. “Everything about that breakup was intense and painful. This is what happens in authoritarian regimes that grow suddenly decrepit and senile.”

Indeed, when Fujimori talked about discovering Montesinos’ power network and bank accounts, he sounded as if he were discussing another country, not the one he had micro-managed for a decade.

His self-exile is another mystery. The timing seems the calculation of a chess player assessing the endgame. He departed Peru as legislators prepared to oust his ally, Martha Hildebrandt, as president of Congress. Fujimori needed congressional approval to travel; legislators say he feared that the opposition would freeze him in Peru until his term ended in July, when he would lose immunity from prosecution.

That presumes Fujimori has something to hide. Unlike the Latin American presidents who have flaunted luxury with piratical swagger, Fujimori showed few signs of wealth.

But many Peruvians find it hard to believe that Fujimori did not benefit from the lucrative corruption attributed to the high-living Montesinos and his generals.

If those allegations are false, Fujimori might dream of salvaging his place in history. If a special prosecutor investigating him turns up flagrant corruption, Fujimori could find that he has exchanged the solitude of the second-generation outsider for that of the disgraced exile. He could come full circle to the year he replaced former President Garcia, who later went into exile.

“Faced with the national scandal, men who were elected for their merits have fled like vulgar criminals,” Fujimori said in a speech upon taking office in 1990. “Our government will be implacable in the fight against corruption. The state will cease to be a place in which great fortunes are amassed in the shelter of power.”