IN THEIR FACE

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...