Democracy Dies in Darkness

DON'T CRY FOR ME, PERU

THAT'S NO FIRST LADY, THAT'S MY WIFE, SAYS PRESIDENT

By

LIMA, PERU -- The eyes of Susana Higuchi shine wetly behind wire-rim glasses.

"I am a calm woman, but a little calmer than most," says the wife of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori -- a tiny, doll-like woman of 44, speaking, yes, calmly in her low and throaty voice. Like her husband, she's ethnically Japanese -- part of an insular, conservative minority that began arriving here at the turn of the century -- but it's clearly important to her to be seen as thoroughly Peruvian.

"I'm a little bit like the Arequipena women, the Tarmena, the Ayacuchana or the Tacnena, from different provinces of Peru," she says, the names rolling easily off her tongue, "who have a certain bravery that's a little more pronounced than some others. And I think it's because of a little ulcer I had for which they gave me a blood transfusion. So I think, I don't know, that I feel very Peruvian -- and with a taste for battle."

And what a battle it has become. In a sense, the classic immigrant success story has gone haywire with the sort of weird twist one finds in magical realist novels: The parents come in search of the proverbial pot of gold; the children meet, marry, start a family. She thrives as a construction and real estate entrepreneur and he becomes the most powerful man in the land.

And then they transform themselves into a horrifying public spectacle -- the War of the Fujimoris. Part soap opera and part opera bouffe, with sinister undertones of Latin American autocracy, it has been warming the waning weeks of the South American winter with rumors of political intrigue, infidelity and fear. Two weeks ago, in a remarkable televised address, he fired her as First Lady.

"If she didn't have the press by her side, she would be in the hospital," claims an intimate of Susana Higuchi's who asked not to be named.

"She's shooting at him where it hurts the most," says a close Peruvian observer of Fujimori who also insisted on anonymity. "Because, more than anything else, he loves being president."

All of which begs the cosmic question: Can this marriage be saved?

"La Show Susana," Lima's tabloids have dubbed the standoff.

For the 8 million residents of this fog-shrouded coastal city, who have weathered nearly 8,000 percent annual inflation, terrorist bombings, extreme poverty, dictatorships and numerous coups, it is yet another hurdle in Peru's uncertain struggle to become a respected modern democracy.

For the past month, Peru's First Couple have been slapping each other around like Saturday-night wrestlers, trading charges and insults and throwing this country of 22 million into an uproar.

She says he's a tyrant. He says she's unstable.

She vows to prove that he's surrounded by crooks and low-lifes. He says she's a blackmailer.

She says he's trying to blacken her reputation. He says she's being manipulated by people who are using her to get at him.

Meanwhile, she hurls charges of bribe-taking and corruption among various of her husband's ministers -- pointedly telling anyone who'll listen that her husband has violated his 1990 campaign pledge of government honesty -- and muses aloud about running for president herself in next April's elections. This could not be pleasing to her husband, who is already campaigning feverishly for another term.

"He got a taste of power, and he was hooked," says Peruvian journalist Luis Jochamowitz, author of the biography "Citizen Fujimori."

A little-known academic bureaucrat when he was elected president four years ago, embracing the popular nickname "El Chino," Fujimori has responded to his wife's behavior more with actions than words -- not surprising in a man who, in 1992, unilaterally dissolved the major institutions of Peruvian government in a "self-coup" that featured tanks and guns in the streets.

In July, after his wife mentioned her desire to be a candidate, he arranged for the 80-member Peruvian congress (of which he controls 60 seats) to pass new legislation banning close relatives of the president from seeking elective office. Their marital troubles debuted as a political dispute on Aug. 3, when she sent an open letter urging the congress to repeal the so-called "Susana Law." Then she moved out of the government palace, staying in the home of a friend.

According to a civil lawsuit she filed last Friday, claiming the president has been abusing her with "psychological and moral violence," Fujimori has since barred her from the presidential residence in the palace, refused to speak to her or allow their four teenage children to do so, cut off or tapped her telephones and blocked her from having visitors (stationing heavily armed soldiers in front of the First Lady's office and welding the outer doors shut). Although she initially claimed to be locked in and she is still denied visitors, she now comes and goes as she pleases. He absconded from the palace with three of their kids to live at the headquarters of, variously, the army and the National Intelligence Service.

What's more, he fired her from the job of First Lady in a televised "message to the nation" on Aug. 23.

"I have made in the past multiple concessions to my wife, understanding her unstable and malleable character," the president grimly told his countrymen, with the heavy Japanese accent he can't seem to get rid of, despite being born in working class Lima 56 years ago. "But one musn't give in to blackmail or intimidation." (Since his brief late-night address, the president has said little on the subject, spending most of his time on the road, far away from the gossip-ridden capital. His press secretary did not respond to an interview request.)

Not that Senora Susana, as she's known here, is making a lot of concessions herself.

"Yes!" she insists in her own accentless Spanish, when asked if she's still First Lady. "The president of the republic is still my husband."

But isn't all this a terrible embarrassment to her family and to her country?

"There is no embarrassment here, none at all," replies Higuchi, who prefers to use her maiden name. "On the contrary, I will continue fighting for the principles of citizenship for 22 million Peruvians." It's not clear what principles she's defending: her constitutional convictions, her personal ambitions, or her inalienable right to be mad as hell at her husband.

"She's clearly frustrated about something," says the anonymous Peruvian observer.

Her life has become a perpetual press conference in which she daily blasts her spouse of the last 20 years. Holding forth in the second-floor office of a defunct grade school she owns in suburban Lima, she works herself up to a rhetorical flourish.

"The last thing I will lose is hope," she says.

The people of Lima are at once repelled and riveted by the brawl. They can't stop talking about it.

"The problems of their marriage should be kept inside their house, not be spread all over the media, and hurt the image of Peru around the world," says Jennifer Chavez, 18, who sells women's shoes in the fashionable Miraflores neighborhood. "This sort of thing happens in all marriages. We Peruvians are always fighting with each other and then making up."

"My sympathies are with President Fujimori a thousand percent," says first-generation Peruvian John Stenning, 69, a wealthy executive with Backus & Johnson, the country's largest brewery, and the son of a British banker and a Peruvian socialite. "His wife, unfortunately, must be suffering from some sort of nervous depression. He must want to strangle her. I, for one, would acquit him if he did."

"What's going on in the house of Senora Higuchi is what's going on with many women in this country, whether rich or poor, famous or unknown," says thirtyish feminist lawyer Violeta Bermudez, who's been giving the president's wife moral support and legal advice, and considers her a symbol of abused Peruvian womanhood. "She's married to the most powerful person in Peru, but her own resources are very little. It's important for her to know -- and for other woman like her who are suffering the same realities -- that we are going to offer support."

"I think the whole thing is idiotic and I think it's tasteless, and you can quote me on that," says fortyish congress member Francisco Tudela, whose minority Renovation Party is closely allied with Fujimori's New Majority/Change 90 Party. "I think the real problem is jealousy, and that the lady could be looking for subtle ways of revenge," he adds, referring to widespread rumors, frequently headline fodder in Lima's tabloids, that Fujimori has had extramarital affairs.

"She must be very hurt about something," says the anonymous Peruvian observer. "You know, this is a very machista country, and women don't have any power. But one of the things they can do, if they feel they've been injured, is go out and say horrible things about their husbands, and then, sometime later, reconcile with them. It's an accepted part of the culture."

This is not the first time that Higuchi has made trouble for her husband. In early 1992, she publicly accused the wife of her husband's brother Santiago, among other Fujimori relatives with whom she is said not to get along, of personally profiting from the sale of secondhand clothes donated to Peru by the Japanese. Fujimori's opponents in congress had already begun to investigate Higuchi's charges when the president simply dissolved the congress, along with the judiciary, in his April 1992 coup.

After that, according to Higuchi's intimates, she was held a virtual prisoner in the palace for nearly two years, her public appearances as First Lady tightly controlled. These friends say Higuchi at one time believed that her husband was trying to poison her, using pesticides in her bedroom air conditioner (the First Couple has slept separately for several years). She has also reported, her friends say, that Fujimori recently announced to her and their children that if he isn't reelected to another five-year term as president, he will commit hara-kiri.

"Look, sir -- personal things I prefer to keep personal," she says, refusing to comment on the anecdote, but not denying it either. "What is private is private."

She also refuses to address stories that in early August she moved into the home of her friend and former secretary, Rene Odria, the daughter-in-law of Generalissimo Manuel Odria, the late Peruvian president, because her parents and sister shut their doors in her face. Out of fear, her friends say.

Odria, for her part, has been terrified in recent weeks by telephoned death threats, while somebody tried to break into her house, unmarked cars have been following her, and her 26-year-old son, Julio, carries stuffed in his belt an Austrian semiautomatic Glock pistol. Americas Watch, a human rights group, has taken up Odria's case, and last week sent a sharp letter to Fujimori demanding that she be protected.

Peru may call itself a democracy, but it is widely assumed in Lima -- where more than a few were jailed during previous regimes -- that the intelligence service and the army are tapping phones and bugging homes of Fujimori's foes and members of the opposition press.

Higuchi says she is not afraid for herself. Indeed, as the wife of the maximum leader, she still gets around town in a bulletproof BMW with a rifle-toting security detail trailing behind. But she has voiced fears for her children, with whom she says she hasn't communicated in a month. (The eldest, Alberto, attends school in the United States.) "They're living in the National Intelligence Service, which is an institution of espionage, and I believe it's difficult to make contact with them there," she says.

Are they in danger there?

"No. In that sense they would be in more danger if they were with me. But, yes, they are in emotional danger."

Their mother may be important to them, "but their father has a lot of power," she says.

What she wants, she says, is a conversation with her husband, hoping to get back together with him. Divorce, she adds, is out of the question.

"I have very profound religious convictions, and according to the Catholic religion, there is no divorce," she says. "The most one can do is separation. ... This is nothing more than a political discrepancy that I think should be resolved through mediating a dialogue. Since all democracy should begin at home."

Any last words? she's asked. She responds with a flight of poetic speech-making -- the sort of thing one expects to hear declaimed from a balcony.

"There is no remedy or medicine that you can buy in a drugstore. The major remedy is time and patience. I have not lost hope that I will recover my family, my peace, but I will continue fighting for my principles until the last. I am a Peruvian woman and, after all is said and done, I should demonstrate it, with nobility, with high purpose and with valor. And, finally, I believe that the truth may tarry, but it will come."