LIMA, Peru — On the campaign trail for a third term, Alberto Fujimori didn't blink when the rocks began flying last week. Nor when the world community began hurling criticism.
While addressing a crowd in Arequipa on Monday evening, the 61-year-old president kept right up with his stump speech even as dozens of angry demonstrators let loose with stones, sticks and tomatoes.
"Fujimori! The people repudiate you!" they shouted, the flying debris bouncing harmlessly off the shields of riot police protecting Fujimori in Peru's second city, 480 miles southeast of Lima.
Fujimori kept right on talking, unflinching and unflappable under the barrage of opposition to his plans to defy international opinion and hold what many consider a flawed runoff election Sunday.
Never mind that his challenger Alejandro Toledo has cried fraud and will boycott the vote. Or that the world community, led by the United States, has threatened possible international isolation for failing to delay the vote in order to assure a free and fair election.
Fujimori has stood up to big odds before.
When he swept to a surprise victory in Peru's presidential elections a decade ago, the former university rector took iron-fisted control of a country many had written off as ungovernable.
Maoist guerrillas had driven the police and army units from wide swaths of the countryside. Car bombs rocked the capital almost daily. Annual inflation was running at more than 3,000 percent. There were widespread shortages of basic foodstuffs like rice and cooking oil.
Few people gave Fujimori much chance of lasting more than six months in power.
Today the guerrillas have been reduced to a mere band of marauders. Inflation last year was 3.7 percent.
Fujimori has installed a healthy free-market economy and cracked down on cocaine trafficking.
But he has done it all at a price — with authoritarian measures that have stifled opposition and raised serious doubts about the fairness of Sunday's elections. A third, five-year term would defy a constitutional prohibition on three straight terms in office.
Fujimori used the campaign to carry a message to the voters that he is indispensable, that without him Peru will fall into chaos again.
"Power fascinates me," he has said on more than one occasion over the years.
It is one of the few revealing statements he has made about himself.
A workaholic loner, this son of poor Japanese immigrants said once that the only institution he trusted was the National Intelligence Service, the spy agency that helps him control Peru.
The divorced father of four grown children, Fujimori is described by associates as self-assured, calculating, pragmatic, unsentimental, a man who lives for his work — and whose work is making Peru run smoothly.