By JUAN FORERO
 
LIMA, Peru — This should be the golden era of justice in Peru, with President Alejandro Toledo's government carrying out its promise to pursue corrupt officials in what is considered the most far-reaching and aggressive anticorruption investigation in Latin American history.

Ministers, legislators, judges and other powerful figures — some 1,400 people in all — face charges. A sinister system of state corruption, arms running and drug trafficking has been exposed. Among those charged is former President Alberto K. Fujimori, whose 10 years in power are viewed by many as having been a quasi-dictatorship steeped in crime.

Mr. Toledo, who came into office in 2001, should be basking in glory. Instead, his own integrity has been tarnished by a string of peccadilloes and scandals. The most serious arose in January with accusations that a former adviser, César Almeyda, had conspired with an army general to try to bribe judges.

Opinion surveys indicate that Mr. Toledo is widely seen these days as incompetent, disorganized and untrustworthy. His approval ratings stand at 10 percent.

Though Mr. Toledo had a rare mandate to root out corruption when he took office, his government ignored a voluminous report and plan issued by the interim government that preceded him, said former officials and political analysts. The report was issued to great fanfare by President Valentín Paniagua, who served for eight months after Mr. Fujimori went into exile.

"What happened to that anticorruption plan can be described in one word — nothing," said Diego Garcia-Sayán, the justice minister in Mr. Paniagua's government and the foreign minister during Mr. Toledo's first year in office.

Even what the government considers its crowning achievement in the fight on corruption — dismantling the mammoth criminal network run by Mr. Fujimori's spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos — has lagged in Peru's byzantine judicial system.

Trials and investigations by a special team of prosecutors and judges are moving at a glacial pace, with only 33 defendants convicted so far. Nearly 1,100 defendants remain free, including powerful politicians and newspaper owners. With their high-priced lawyers, they continue to stir up conflict and accusations against Mr. Toledo and his allies.

"There's been a constant campaign against the system and the special investigators," said Luis Vargas Valdivia, the chief prosecutor in the Fujimori-Montesinos cases. "What do they want? To discredit. To show we are all corrupt."

Mr. Vargas and his team have scored important successes, according to rights officials and leading judicial experts in Peru. They have won convictions on charges against people seen as crucial figures during the Fujimori years: Congressman Ernesto Gamarra; Justice Alejandro Rodríguez of the Supreme Court; Blanca Nélida Colán, who was attorney general; and Gen. José Villanueva, a former armed forces chief.

The government has recovered $150 million that had been squirreled away in foreign banks by Mr. Montesinos and his allies and is working to retrieve $82 million more, said Walter Hoflich, who leads the effort. It is also prodding Japan to extradite Mr. Fujimori, who has been living there since he resigned in 2000.

Mr. Montesinos, who is in custody, is on trial in one of the most important cases, charged with operating a complex gun-running scheme that delivered 10,000 Jordanian rifles to Colombian rebels.

But the caseload is enormous and growing. Prosecuting the hundreds of Fujimori-era criminals and seeking an estimated $2 billion in ill-gotten gains fall to just 17 lawyers with a $1.1 million annual budget.

There are 155 cases already, each one, on average, with 22,000 pages of legal transcripts. Much of the evidence must be pursued beyond Peru's borders. The lawyers have only two assistants and work in cramped offices in a converted trailer.

"You can carry out this fight for a time, but you get tired," Mr. Vargas said. "The great number of enemies and obstacles you encounter can wipe you out."

Political analysts say the government has been hampered by a weak criminal justice system. It should have grouped the cases, they say, instead of trying dozens of complex individual crimes one at a time.

"Instead of one or two cases, with many counts, they have 60-some cases with Montesinos alone," said Gustavo Gorriti, a journalist. "The judicial system was not prepared to investigate a criminal enterprise like Montesinos. It is a system built to judge chicken thieves or fraud cases."

But with Mr. Toledo facing continuing social protests, he has largely stopped publicly focusing on the anticorruption efforts.

"There is no initiative and no priorities," said Ernesto de la Jara, director of the Institute of Legal Defense, which monitors government practices. "And it does not want to get to the bottom of corruption because that would require it to be completely open about itself."

But for César Pantoja, one of Mr. Vargas's lead lawyers, the grueling work continues. He and his team of five lawyers are putting together cases against 400 more defendants, about 60 cases in all.

But the real paperwork is stored in the chambers of a special team of judges who handle the cases. One of the most important involves the Colina group, said to have been a government-run death squad. On a recent day, some of the paperwork for that investigation — a desk-sized mountain — sat next to a clerk. The rest was stuffed in a closet. Mr. Pantoja had 100,000 pages to sift through.

"The judge has to read it, and we have to read it all, too," he said with a nervous sigh. "You can see the magnitude of it all."