Peru Elections

Amid extraordinary international pressure and nationwide street protests, officials announced Wednesday that President Alberto Fujimori has been forced into a runoff with challenger Alejandro Toledo, according to near-final vote totals in Peru's troubled presidential election. The 10-year incumbent failed to win the 50%-plus-one necessary to win outright, according to Jose Portillo, the beleaguered head of the federal election agency. With 97.

President Alberto Fujimori moved ever closer to outright victory Tuesday in the increasingly tense aftermath of Peru's presidential election, defying international pressure for a runoff vote and warnings of nationwide protests from challenger Alejandro Toledo. By evening, the government's suspiciously slow vote count gave Fujimori 49.79% of the vote and Toledo 40.39%, leaving the president barely more than two-tenths of a percentage point from triumph with 90% of the vote counted.

A delayed vote count in Peru's presidential election worsened the country's political crisis Monday, with President Alberto Fujimori apparently close to an outright victory that would allow him to avoid a runoff against challenger Alejandro Toledo. International concern about allegations of foul play, however, prompted the U.S. ambassador to declare support for Peruvian election monitors who say that a first-round victory by Fujimori would be the result of fraud.

The remarkable journey of candidate Alejandro Toledo to today's high-stakes presidential election has taken him from the bleak Andean highlands to Stanford and back again. Toledo proudly calls himself a cholo--a Peruvian of indigenous descent. He comes from a peasant family of 16 children and, like so many industrious Peruvians from the provinces, migrated to a coastal city and worked as a street vendor.

Is Peru a democracy? The short answer is yes, according to Jorge Santistevan, Peru's widely respected human rights ombudsman. But many Peruvians disagree. Especially presidential candidates who accuse the nation's intelligence service of hounding them with egg-throwing goon squads, lurid tabloid newspaper attacks and mysterious power outages that kill microphones during speeches.

The stately palace where Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori has ruled for the past decade seems tranquil, but lately the man behind its well-guarded walls has been besieged by critics. Fujimori is under fire from political rivals, international election monitors and human rights advocates over allegations that he is using espionage and fraud in his bid for reelection April 9.

Alberto Fujimori, Peru's ironfisted president, announced Monday that he will run again in next year's elections, despite claims by opponents that the constitution bans him from holding a third consecutive term. "I have decided to register my candidacy," Fujimori, 61, said during a nine-minute taped, televised address to the nation. "It is not that we think we are indispensable," but reelection in April is the only way to assure that the reforms begun will continue, Fujimori said.

President Alberto Fujimori, harvesting the fruit of his anti-inflation and anti-terrorist successes, won reelection Sunday by an overwhelming margin over former U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, according to unofficial returns. The independent poll-watching organization Transparencia and the Apoyo and CPI polling firms, projecting from their own nationwide sampling of votes, gave Fujimori 64%.

An aborted conspiracy to falsify presidential and congressional election returns raised fears Saturday of fraud in today's nationwide balloting. Presidential candidate Javier Perez de Cuellar charged Saturday that President Alberto Fujimori was responsible for the "reelection fraud," in which 500 vote tally sheets were filled out in advance. Officials said most of the approximately 100,000 presidential votes on the sheets were for Fujimori.

Three years after he seized dictatorial powers in a military-backed "self coup" against an opposition Congress, President Alberto Fujimori is asking voters to give him a second five-year term in office. Fujimori, 56, is the favored candidate in Sunday's presidential balloting, but there is widespread doubt about whether he will win a first-round victory or be forced into a runoff vote. Top challenger Javier Perez de Cuellar, the former U.N.