By Anthony Faiola
                  Washington Post Foreign Service

                  TARAPOTO, Peru—On a drizzly afternoon in this remote jungle city, a
                  euphoric President Alberto Fujimori dashed from his just-landed plane to a
                  massive float draped in red and white bunting, the colors of the Peruvian
                  flag. With an international storm brewing against him, Fujimori seemed
                  drunk on political combat--and the cheers only heightened his intoxication.

                  The crowd swayed to "The Dance of the Chinaman," his tropical-rhythm
                  campaign tune that blared over loudspeakers. "And they say we don't have
                  democracy in Peru? Just look at that crowd, all of them free to vote!"
                  Fujimori said in his trademark Asian-accented Spanish. "Perhaps what the
                  world doesn't understand is how a man who has been president for 10
                  years can still be so loved."

                  And loathed. Moments later, people with Fujimori-as-Hitler signs
                  appeared. They had painted tiny mustaches on Fujimori's campaign
                  posters, and tossed rocks deflected by his bodyguards. "Assassin,
                  assassin!" they cried. "The dictatorship must fall!"

                  Somewhere in the gray area between dictator and democrat lies Fujimori,
                  Latin America's most complex and controversial modern leader. The myth
                  of "El Chino"--the only man of Japanese descent to become president
                  outside Japan, but who embraces a nickname that renders him
                  Chinese--grows a bit larger today as Peruvians cast their ballots in what
                  has essentially become a one-man runoff.

                  By going ahead with the election, already condemned by many
                  governments as illegitimate, Fujimori is running the risk of domestic unrest
                  and perhaps turning Peru into the newest pariah state. The Organization of
                  American States, the United States, the European Union and a large swath
                  of Peruvians have all vowed to reject the outcome as invalid. At least some
                  international sanctions and internal turmoil are likely as a result.

                  The opposition candidate, Alejandro Toledo, has boycotted the runoff,
                  saying that conditions for a fair race do not exist and that Peru's
                  vote-counting computer system is vulnerable to high-tech fraud. Despite a
                  Herculean effort by the OAS and Washington to force Fujimori to delay
                  the race in order to verify that election computers will provide an accurate
                  count, the man who faced down two powerful guerrilla movements during
                  his first two five-year terms refused to blink.

                  So it is Fujimori against the world--and Fujimori likes the odds.

                  "We are aware that we are on the right path, and this will have to be
                  understood by the international community," Fujimori said over the course
                  of three interviews last week. "For us, there is no fear that they could apply
                  [heavy] sanctions. . . . We will get through this in a few days."

                  By his enemies, Fujimori has been called a dictator. But what scares more
                  objective observers is the fact that he is not. These elections have
                  generated enormous international concern because Fujimori, a once
                  bookish university professor, has created a disturbing new form of
                  government that could represent the 21st-century evolution of authoritarian
                  rule in Latin America.

                  Unlike in Chile during the rule of Augusto Pinochet, Peruvians can call
                  Fujimori a Hitler without being jailed or shot. Want a Congress? He has
                  one. Judicial system? But of course. But many say there are only two real
                  branches of government in Peru: Fujimori's chief of intelligence, Vladimiro
                  Montesinos, and Fujimori himself.

                  But Fujimori has one other democratic trapping that is hard to argue with:
                  public support. Although high-profile anti-Fujimori demonstrations have
                  been organized by the opposition, independent polls nevertheless show the
                  president running comfortably ahead of Toledo.

                  "We have the democracy that we choose in Peru," insisted Maria Minares,
                  a university student at the rally here in Tarapoto, 400 miles north of Lima.
                  One of her uncles was butchered by rebels before Fujimori quashed them.
                  "Other politicians promise, but they never deliver. Fujimori gives results,
                  roads, schools and peace."

                  Yet his harshest critics assert that Fujimori's support is based on a
                  propaganda machine. Most Peruvian television stations, for instance, have
                  been strong-armed into pro-government positions by threats of tax liens or
                  pulling government advertising. Wiretapping, espionage and other forms of
                  intimidation also help Fujimori rule.

                  "Fujimori is one of the most dangerous men alive," said Eliane Karp,
                  Toledo's French-born wife and one of his closest advisers. "Not only will
                  he destroy Peru with his lust for power, but he will become a new model
                  for a frightening kind of modern dictatorship that in the future will be
                  difficult if not impossible to stop."

                  But many say Fujimori is more complex than that, an enigma wrapped in a
                  sushi roll covered in salsa. The 61-year-old leader, who claims to have an
                  Asian perspective on life but whom confidants describe as the most Latin
                  American man they have ever met, is a split personality.

                  There is the "good Fuji": the U.S.-educated engineer who micromanaged
                  rescue efforts during massive flooding in 1998, the Peruvian samurai who
                  darkened the once mighty Shining Path guerrillas, and the comic who
                  delights the poor by poking fun at his own ethnicity with slant-eyed face
                  masks and a quirky campaign song.

                  And then, there is the "bad Fuji."

                  From his Lima hospital bed, Fabian Salazar, a representative for a
                  company owned by Baruch Ivcher, a former television station owner
                  driven out of the country by the government, claimed National Intelligence
                  Service agents discovered he had videotapes of Montesinos conversing
                  with Peruvian election officials about rigging votes. They destroyed his
                  tapes, he said, then tortured him for hours, leaving bone-deep gashes on
                  his wrists after trying to saw off his hands.

                  "The [intelligence service] has hit squads that are trained to torture and
                  kill," said Salazar. "This is not the first time something like this has
                  happened in Peru, and it won't be the last."

                  Susana Higuchi, Fujimori's ex-wife whom he tossed out of the presidential
                  palace in 1994--and then used his influence with the courts to get out of
                  paying millions of dollars he allegedly owed her--once described her
                  husband as a "monster" at a Mother's Day celebration.

                  Since the beginning of his political career, Fujimori has enjoyed astounding
                  chemistry with Peru's poor. They responded to this quirky but shrewd man
                  who became the first elected president outside the country's elite class of
                  rich whites. The rector of a university, he upset famed writer Mario Vargas
                  Llosa in 1990. In 1995, after briefly dissolving Congress to fight rebels
                  with a free hand, Fujimori crushed former U.N. secretary general Javier
                  Perez de Cuellar at the polls.

                  But in this campaign, he faced his toughest challenger--Toledo, a shoeshine
                  boy who rose to become an official at the World Bank and who struck a
                  chord in mostly dark-skinned Peru by using his Indian ethnicity.

                  In the first round of voting on April 9, in which an excruciatingly slow count
                  raised fears of fraud, international pressure for a second round mounted
                  and Fujimori eventually fell fractions short of the majority needed for an
                  outright win. Foreign support poured Toledo's way.

                  But Toledo has since proven to be erratic and prone to exaggeration.
                  Despite evidence to the contrary, he continues to claim he won the first
                  round and was robbed by fraud. This week, the OAS sought to work out
                  a compromise for a 10-day delay of the runoff to check the disputed
                  election computers, but negotiations failed in part because Toledo refused
                  the deal.

                  In Lima's Presidential Palace, meanwhile, Fujimori bristles at the suggestion
                  that he needs fraud to win. "The international community believes that the
                  only way to prove democracy exists in Peru is for the opposition to win,"
                  Fujimori said. "There is a lack of understanding about my popularity."

                  Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin in Lima contributed to this report.