House arrest? Try to stop her

So how, exactly, do you become one of Latin America’s biggest TV stars when you’re forbidden to set foot outside your home? How do you become the tart-tongued savior of frustrated housewives and abused girlfriends from Burbank to Bogota -- and the scourge of their lyin’, cheatin’, wife-beatin’ menfolk -- when you’re not even allowed to go buy a pack of cigarettes?

If you’re Laura Bozzo, you do it with skin-tight jeans and brassy one-liners. You do it with 3-inch pumps and a nicotine-coarsened, machine-gun mezzo-soprano that makes you sound like a Spanish-speaking Lauren Bacall after one too many double espressos. You do it because you “have a debt with” your public, in Bozzo’s words, and because “poor people in Peru don’t get justice.” Or maybe, as the country’s legal authorities allege, you do it by selling out for bribes and spending some time in the hip pocket of one of the most feared and hated men in all of South America.

Bozzo has compared herself to Joan of Arc, and it’s true that some here consider her a heretic for flouting sacrosanct Latin American values. She’s a middle-aged divorcee who dresses like she’s 25. Her boyfriend, Cristian Zuarez, is a dashing would-be rock star some two dozen years her junior. She’s ambitious, smart and, to the chagrin of her supporters, relentlessly outspoken. “I’m not a prefabricated person,” Bozzo says. “I’m myself. I connect as a human being, not as a star, not as a diva. I hate that.”

In spite, or because, of these traits, the tall, rail-thin Bozzo, at age 53, bestrides the world of Spanish-language media like Martha Stewart before the fall. Her 6-year-old “Laura in America,” a Jerry Springer-like talk show in which long-suffering women and mostly unsavory men act out real-life mini morality plays, is the top-rated program on the NBC-owned, Spanish-language Telemundo network, where it airs twice a day, five days a week. It also appears in roughly a dozen Latin American countries, making Bozzo one of the hemisphere’s hottest media properties.

Like its English-language counterparts, “Laura in America” each day parades a different lineup of philanderers and cads, transvestites, incest victims and children with obscure medical ailments. With a tough-love style, Bozzo upbraids the guilty, urges the abused to leave their oppressors and seek help, and exposes her studio audience of working-class women (plus millions more watching at home) to subjects that are rarely seriously discussed or even acknowledged in conservative Peruvian society.

Executive producer Miguel Ferro says that between 12% and 15% of the show’s budget goes to provide psychological counseling, medical treatments, food stamps, educational scholarships and other assistance to people who appear on the show and their relatives. “What makes me [most] angry is to see children who’ve been abandoned. It makes me sick,” says Bozzo, wolfing down a lunch of chicken, salad and Inca Kola backstage before a recent taping.

Now Bozzo, who trained as a lawyer before becoming the Dr. Laura Schlesinger of Latin TV, is eyeing her next conquest. She’s been studying English for nine months and hopes she’ll soon be able to cross over into the Anglo-American entertainment universe. “I am very strong. I am a very optimistic person,” Bozzo says, testing out her new tongue. “I try to see the positive. I’m so happy to speak in English!”

There’s just one problem: Laura Bozzo may be on her way to jail.

According to Peruvian prosecutors, during the 1990s Bozzo used her program to tar opponents of Alberto Fujimori, the former president who ruled Peru with nearly dictatorial powers before scandals engulfed him in November 2000 and he fled, disgraced, into exile in Japan. Prosecutors contend that Bozzo received $3 million for impugning Fujimori’s political rivals on the air and have accused her of misappropriating public money. (An assistant to Peru’s attorney general, who is handling the charges against Bozzo, said the government could not comment on the case pending further legal developments.)

For the last 26 months, Bozzo has been under house arrest, confined to a small apartment built directly alongside a TV studio in a quiet residential neighborhood. Her comfortably but sparsely furnished digs include an office and a workout room equipped with dumbbells, weight machines and a heavy punching bag. She’s not permitted to leave the grounds or even to wander into the first-floor studio offices, where a team of researchers and production assistants bustles about assembling the raw materials for her show. Though Bozzo is a star throughout the Latin world, her show hasn’t aired in Peru since her arrest in 2002. Somewhat like the character Jim Carrey played in “The Truman Show,” she has become a virtual prisoner in her own made-for-TV environment.

Bozzo readily acknowledges that she supported Fujimori’s presidency, and she expresses particular admiration for the forceful -- some would say brutally autocratic -- methods he used to quell the violent anti-government uprising led by the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in the 1980s and ‘90s. Those were terrible years, Bozzo says, in which Peruvians awaited the next bombing attack or blackout with dread and bid loved ones goodbye every day wondering if they’d ever see them again.

“We lived in a permanent state of impotence,” Bozzo says. “He was the best president for Peru because he eliminated terrorism. The people remember him with affection.” She dismisses the contention of human rights groups that the Fujimori administration’s countermeasures were nearly as devastating for Peru as Shining Path’s atrocities. “The human rights organizations were only defending the terrorists,” she sniffs. “They weren’t defending the rights of the soldiers and the victims.”

Bozzo also acknowledges that once on her program she blew a kiss to Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s shadowy former domestic security czar, who is now in prison. During his reign as national enforcer, Montesinos allegedly kept a number of Peruvian judges, journalists and public officials on his payroll, buying favors and using his enormous power apparatus to intimidate or make disappear Fujimori critics and foes.

Bozzo denies the charges against her -- “I didn’t get one dollar from this,” she says -- and maintains that Peru’s present government has been spinning its wheels on the case while failing to bring it to trial. She believes the real reason she’s being prosecuted is that she broke the news on her show that Peru’s current president and former Fujimori rival, Alejandro Toledo, had fathered a daughter out of wedlock, setting tongues clucking across Latin America.

Telemundo executives have faith that Bozzo will be vindicated. The network and its corporate parent, General Electric, recently completed a $2.5-million upgrade of the studio, and are looking to add more Latin American markets to the show’s growing list.

“It’s all smoke,” says producer Ferro of the charges against Bozzo. “We in Telemundo fully believe in Laura because we believe justice will be done.... She’s been sentenced without going to trial. She’s already lost two years of her life.”

Ferro argues that Bozzo’s on-air endorsement of Fujimori is no different from Jay Leno allowing his friend Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to talk politics on NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” “You cannot send Jay Leno to prison,” Ferro says. “The fact is that Laura has a very strong personality. She speaks out before she thinks. And she doesn’t care. And for a public person that can get you in trouble.”

Eventful day in the studio

Trouble or no, the talk show must go on, and Bozzo clearly thrives on the emotional twists and cathartic denouements that her program provides. So does her audience, whose members get parting gifts -- bags of pasta and rice -- in return for cheering Bozzo’s alternately sympathetic and withering observations and mixing it up with the studio guests. Ferro says they tape 220 shows a year, all of them “100% truth.”

At one recent taping, a male transsexual was being reunited with his wife and daughter, whom he’d abandoned six years earlier. “It’s incredible, this story,” Bozzo told her audience during the lead-in. Start to finish, the segment was vintage “Laura”: the father’s penitent confessions, his estranged wife’s tearful pleas, surprise lovers of various genders coming to blows until a posse of black-clad security guards intervened and, finally, a throat-tightening reunion in which the 12-year-old daughter kissed and made up with her sobbing daddy. All the while, a production assistant goosed the audience along, orchestrating oohs and aahs.

But this was no ordinary taping. After the show wrapped, several audience members presented Bozzo with bouquets marking her birthday and a lighted cake was brought on stage while Bozzo hugged her eldest daughter, Victoria, 22, a student at Pepperdine University. “She [Bozzo] always helps other people,” said Delores Lezama, 60, who has watched the show for five years and was making her fourth studio trip. Later, Ferro confessed that the segment had been an especially moving one for the backstage crew. “I was crying like crazy in the console room. Sometimes I couldn’t even call the shots.”

Off-camera -- but still on

Minutes later, Bozzo is back in her apartment, receiving well-wishers, fielding phone calls and preparing for an afternoon press conference in her living room, surrounded by huge floral arrangements. It’s her third birthday in captivity, and as reporters and photographers swarm around her, Bozzo uses the occasion to press her case.

“Am I here because I blew a kiss to Montesinos?” she asks rhetorically. “For me, the most important thing is to get back my liberty.”

Taking a break in her office, Bozzo says that in her younger days she was “a rebel,” always questioning the rules, “always in trouble,” suffering from anorexia nervosa and aware that as a blond, light-skinned woman of Italian extraction she was treated differently from her black or Asian Peruvian friends. She was thrown out of private college, she says, and later became inspired to work for women’s rights.

Peru’s is “a really macho society,” Bozzo says, where the police are more likely to make trouble for an abused woman than to go after her husband. In her office is a glass case filled with books, pictures and other memorabilia dedicated to her personal heroine, Eva Peron, the controversial former Argentine first lady who rose to fame and power but never lost her common touch.

“When my mom went in television, the only people were, like, white people,” says Bozzo’s daughter Victoria. Though her mother is a white person too, Victoria continues, “she doesn’t act like one, she doesn’t behave like one. She goes around hugging every single person.”

Bozzo’s personal assistant comes in bearing coffee and cigarettes. Bozzo is on the phone, going off on the Peruvian government while Ferro, sitting nearby, gestures in mock exasperation: “No politics! No politics!” he stage-whispers frantically.

It’s a losing cause. But don’t cry for Laura Bozzo. Not yet, anyway.