LIMA, Peru (AP) — Riot police fired bullets in the air and tear gas canisters into crowds of anti-government demonstrators Friday as pitched street battles marred the inauguration of President Alberto Fujimori to an unprecedented third term.
At least four people, including a foreign journalist, were injured as clashes erupted in downtown Lima ahead of the swearing-in ceremony in which Fujimori was embarking on five more years in power.
Paul Vanotti, identified by his press credential as a reporter with Cox News Network, was taken away in an ambulance with his head bloodied. Shots were heard fired in the air during the melee.
Television footage showed black-uniformed troopers chasing demonstrators down a broad avenue wafting with tear gas. Witnesses said shots were heard and that police fired the tear gas canisters directly into a crowd and hundreds fled from the clashes.
There was no immediate report on the number of injuries. But television showed injured demonstrators being carried away, while others waved flags defiantly and played cat-and-mouse games with police. They then set tire fires in the streets, black smoke lofting overhead.
The violence came as Fujimori defied raucous protests at home and growing isolation abroad to embark on an unprecedented third term after a tainted re-election victory.
An estimated 80,000 Fujimori opponents staged the biggest protest of his decade in power, an overnight street rally, then regrouped early Friday, the violence ensuing shortly afterward.
Fujimori, wearing a dark suit decorated with the red-and-white presidential sash, reviewed a military honor guard blocks away behind police cordons. He then headed to a cathedral mass to be followed by his swearing-in ceremony in the nearby Congress.
Riot police with gas masks and brandishing tear gas launchers — part of an estimated 40,000-strong security force — had cordoned off much of downtown Lima, backed by armored carries.
"Democracy, yes! Dictatorship, no!" the throng chanted, taking up a slogan shouted in the night when the demonstrators rallied outside the Palace of Justice, lofting a red banner emblazoned with the word "DEMOCRACIA."
Alejandro Toledo, who forced Fujimori into a second round and then boycotted the May 28 final ballot after crying fraud, had vowed to discredit Friday's inauguration by marching tens of thousands of people in an outpouring of "peaceful resistance."
"We come here to say: 'No to the dictatorship!" the opposition leader said in a fiery speech Thursday night kicking off the protests. "We are going to rescue liberty and democracy from the clutches of the dictator."
"Mr. Fujimori: Peruvians who love their country will not allow you to remain five more years in power!"
He said Peruvians had mobilized from across the country and praised them for joining the protest dubbed the "March of the Four Suyos" — an allusion to the four corners of the ancient Incan empire.
"This march will not end until the dictatorship falls!" he vowed.
For days, demonstrators had seeped into Lima aboard trucks and buses from the countryside, sleeping in open-air tent camps and eating from communal stewpots. Toledo organizers had vowed to put at least 200,000 people into the streets, which would be the largest in more than two decades. But by late Thursday, he mustered barely a fraction of that.
A Stanford-educated economist, Toledo, 54, said democracy meant meeting unrequited demands for social and economic change in this South American country of 26 million — creating jobs and helping the poor.
In the crowd, one toddler held up a crudely penciled portrait of Fujimori attached to the body of a rat. Other people carried flaming torches, the rainbow-colored flag of the Inca empire, even a makeshift black coffin meant to symbolize democracy's demise.
"Nobody here voted for Mr. Fujimori. His was a fraudulent victory and we demand a new vote," said demonstrator Rosario Sanchez.
Fujimori, whose autocratic style is seen by critics as a throwback to the Latin American dictatorships of old, had ordered as many as 40,000 police on alert, tear gas launchers at the ready.
He had warned he would not permit "outbreaks against public order."
International monitors have said the May 28 election did not meet minimum standards of fairness, and they refused to lend it legitimacy by overseeing it.
In what critics here interpreted as a snub to Fujimori, only two Latin American presidents accepted invitations to Friday's swearing-in, compared to nine at his second inaugural in 1995.
Toledo charged that Fujimori, a bespectacled former university rector first elected in 1990, has carried this South American country into a personal dictatorship with another five-year term.
Fujimori had wide popular support in 1992 when he suspended the constitution and shuttered Congress, saying strong action was necessary to carry out free-market economic reforms and defeat the bloody Maoist Shining Path insurgency. Three years later, he was re-elected by a landslide.
In recent years, however, Fujimori's popularity has sagged, as his economic policies failed to provide jobs and the fading threat of leftist rebels ceased to justify his disregard for democratic checks and balances.