IN THEIR FACE

• Share

Wearing blue jeans and a contemptuous look, Peru's President Alberto Fujimori swaggers into the dank cellblock of the Castro Castro Prison, a squalid penitentiary on Lima's outskirts that houses scores of captured rebels from the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). Seeing Fujimori, the Tupac prisoners spring angrily from the concrete beds inside their overcrowded cells. Fists raised, they hurl deafening Marxist choruses: "Fujimori, dictator, the people will defeat you!"

Fujimori hardly blinks; he is unfazed by the stench of sweat and sewage. He moves toward the cell bars, his face so close that the guerrillas would gladly put him in a choke hold if not for the armed guards, and suddenly he smiles at them. Strolling on through the cellblock, he sees an inmate weaving straw hats. "Those are good looking," the President says; "let me buy one." The inmate's reply is hardly Marxist: "Ten soles" ($4). He hands the hat through the bars, and Fujimori puts it on. "Pay the man," he tells an aide. "I don't want him to think I'm a cheat."

Across town, some 20 heavily armed Tupac Amaru militants still hold 74 hostages--including Fujimori's brother--inside the Japanese ambassador's residence, which they seized in a stunning raid on a gala cocktail party Dec. 17. Their main demand: the release of 450 comrades imprisoned in holes like Castro Castro. Turning to the reporters from Time he has taken into the prison, Fujimori waves his hand at the cells. "How do you expect me to negotiate with violent criminals like these? I can't let these people go. Never."

It was the President's most vivid rebuff yet of Tupac Amaru's demand. And given the guerrillas' own intransigence, it illustrated just how long Peru's hostage crisis could drag on. Since the well-being of the hostages keeps Fujimori from using his iron fist to rescue them, he decided last week to rely on his own steely resolve, settling into a tense staring match with Tupac Amaru.

But what the world outside thinks of Fujimori is beginning to concern him more. For three weeks he has bristled at suggestions that his reputation as terrorist buster and friend of the poor was at stake inside the Japanese residence as much as the lives of the hostages. In an interview with Time last week, his first face-to-face session with the press since the crisis began, Fujimori adamantly rejected political dialogue with Tupac Amaru, insisting that the group was "in extinction." And he seemed nettled by one criticism growing louder as a result of the crisis: that in his impressive but authoritarian crusade to end Peru's long night of guerrilla terrorism--especially the atrocities of the Maoist-inspired Shining Path--he has ended up exacerbating the poverty and human-rights abuses that helped spawn rebellion in the first place.

Peru's guerrillas "aren't guerrillas; they're terrorists," he insists. "They didn't emerge because of poverty, but as a consequence of ideology. That's why we had to get rid of them--so we could genuinely start fighting poverty, which we're now doing." He ends the hourlong session inside the ornate presidential palace by announcing he will show reporters what he means, "rather than talk about it all day."