By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
 

LIMA, Peru, Nov. 20 –– It was a foggy November night in 1992, and President Alberto Fujimori was terrified.

His agents had uncovered a plot by recently ousted generals, and a renegade captain with a crowbar and a high-powered rifle was inside the presidential palace.
Within inches of the president's bedroom--and Fujimori's life--the would-be assassin was seized by palace guards. Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, fled that
night to the one place in Lima where he felt truly safe: the Japanese Embassy.

Recalling that night eight years ago adds an odd logic to Fujimori's decision to send his resignation to the Peruvian Congress today by emissary from Japan.
Confronting the loss of his once ironclad grip on power in Peru, sources said, the former autocrat was panicky, confused and searching for a haven.

Fujimori arrived in Tokyo Friday. In an interview with the Spanish news agency EFE, Fujimori said he planned to stay in Japan indefinitely. With his resignation, what
little was left of Fujimori's power here at home crumbled.

Congress, taken over by the opposition last week for the first time in eight years, threatened to reject his resignation in a special session in which the opposition
promised to declare the presidency vacant because Fujimori is "morally unfit" to serve.

Ricardo Marquez, Fujimori's second vice president, was next in line to be president because Fujimori's first vice president had already resigned. This evening he gave
up his post as well, attacking Fujimori for "plunging the nation into crisis" by stepping down while abroad. Marquez's resignation appeared to pave the way for the
new opposition head of Congress, Valentin Paniagua, an elder statesman with a reputation for bipartisan cooperation, to act as interim president until elections are
held April 8.

As moving vans pulled up to the palace and Fujimori's daughter, Keiko Sofia Fujimori, removed the family's belongings, a stark and bitter end seemed at hand for the
10-year political drama of South America's longest-ruling leader.

Quickly slipping away was the long-held image of Fujimori as a bookish university rector turned brave Peruvian samurai who captured the world's attention by
crushing two guerrilla movements, licking hyperinflation and micromanaging public works programs to help the poor. Coming into focus instead was the image of a
desperate man on the run, reluctant to face a country in which he no longer enjoys total control.

"Fujimori has fascinated us precisely because he has been so difficult to understand--because he is Japanese but also Latin American, and the odd mixture makes him
so damned hard to predict," said Sally Bowen, author of "The Fujimori Files," a biography. "But perhaps what we are all learning now is that, besides the fact that his
fall came much faster than anyone imagined, this fascination with him made many people miss his darker side--especially the U.S. government, who supported his
now sullied administration for so many years.

"Yet even today, as we write his legacy, there will undoubtedly be two schools of thought," she said. "That of the poor of Peru--who may still remember him as the
best president the nation ever had--and everyone else, the urban dwellers, intellectuals, opposition politicians, who will see him as a man surrounded by corruption
and who destroyed democracy in Peru."

Fujimori's legacy--something the president often confided was important to what he called his Eastern sense of honor--seemed more in danger than ever. His cabinet
members said they are indignant at his decision to resign an ocean away. In addition, the Peruvian press reported that Fujimori may have used a brief stop in
Singapore on Friday to transfer up to $18 million to Japanese bank accounts. In the EFE interview, Fujimori denied the allegation.

"Fujimori must be investigated for the good of the country and for his own good," said Susana Higuchi, Fujimori's ex-wife. "He must come back. He cannot hide in
Japan. That is not the man I married. What changed him? Power and money, and Vladimiro Montesinos."

Fujimori, try as he might, could not separate himself from Montesinos, his widely hated former spy chief who was at the center of the fall from grace. In September,
Montesinos, the longtime power behind Fujimori and an associate of the CIA, was implicated in a bribery scandal and an arms-for-drugs deal with Colombian
guerrillas that rocked Fujimori's administration. This came only four months after Fujimori had won an unprecedented, and many say illegal, third term in office in
elections tainted by allegations of fraud.

Under public pressure, Fujimori set new elections for April and promised not to run. A new president would be inaugurated July 28--unless, Peruvians warned,
Fujimori had another surprise in mind. But now the president seems to have given up.

"I think it's this simple," said Fernando Rospigliosi, a political analyst in Lima. "Fujimori was elected because Peruvians rejected the normal political classes. They
wanted an outsider, and Fujimori was. But then he started the clampdown on society with Montesinos by his side, and the building of an authoritarian regime. And
now, his legacy has been so dirtied by Montesinos and his escape to Japan that he will simply go down in Peruvian history as another corrupt dictator."

Fujimori and Montesinos, especially during the second half of the 1990s, silenced the press, usurped the judicial system and launched espionage campaigns against
opponents. Fujimori gave birth to a new term in South America: the "democratic dictator."

"We can't lose sight of the fact that Fujimori is a great patriot who saved this country from terrorism and a tyrannical political class," said Absalon Vasquez, leader of
Vamos Vecino (Let's Go Neighbor), a party in what was once Fujimori's ruling coalition. "He made this decision to resign for the good of the country, to put an end
to the confrontation generated by the opposition."

The ambitious university rector and son of a modest Japanese-born shopkeeper came to power in 1990, donning ponchos and Indian hats and even mocking his own
Japanese heritage with slant-eyed campaign signs to court the Peruvian poor, many of them Indians. They were voters in whom his opponent--author and intellectual
Mario Vargas Llosa, considered a shoo-in for the post--had shown little interest. Vargas Llosa was loath even to shake their hands.

Fujimori delivered, but at a high cost to democracy. He temporarily closed Congress in his crusade to end guerrilla movements. After he had personally helped
capture the last of the Shining Path movement's leaders, Oscar Ramirez Durand, known as Comrade Feliciano, in July 1999, Fujimori said in an interview: "If it were
not for me, this country would be like Colombia, torn apart by civil war. But I have made the difference. I have done what it takes to make this country manageable."

It often seemed Fujimori was not the only one who believed that. In 1996, he crushed former U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar at the polls for a
second term. By then, he had also seized the international spotlight. It was not just for the odd reality of a man of Japanese decent nicknamed "El Chino"--the
Chinese--ruling one of Latin America's largest and most important nations. It was also for his handling of events such as the hostage-taking at the Japanese
ambassador's residence in Lima by leftist guerrillas in late 1996. Fujimori helped organize a textbook rescue that brought praise from President Clinton and other
world leaders. His confidence seemed contagious.

That appears to have changed. In a transcript of his official resignation, Fujimori seemed humble and lavished praise on Paniagua. Although he tried to remind the
nation of his achievements, he said he recognized "errors."

Fujimori also acknowledged that he was unable to reestablish the stability he had given Peru once his administration was stung by the two scandals in September that
forced him to call new elections.

According to a press report, Fujimori may have dual Japanese-Peruvian citizenship and would not need to apply for political asylum to stay in Tokyo, where his son
lives and his brother-in-law is Peru's ambassador.