Holy Toledo!(Alejandro Toledo)(Column)

His name was Andres, and for a fleeting moment last week the 12-year- old bootblack took center stage in Alejandro Toledo's quest for the presidency of Peru. Midway through his stump speech at a rally in the southern city of Arequipa, Toledo presented the dark-skinned street waif and his shabby shoeshine box to a crowd of cheering supporters as a poignant reminder of his own humble origins. "I once shined shoes and sold lottery tickets," recalled Toledo--one of 16 siblings--who rose from the impoverished Andean hamlet of Cabana to become a Stanford- trained economist. "This boy should be at home playing and studying because he, too, has the right to become a doctor, an architect or an engineer. Education is freedom, education is power."

Like any good politician, Toledo understands the power of symbols. And for millions of dirt-poor Peruvians, the hawk-nosed 55-year-old academic is himself a compelling symbol of what a bright and hardworking nobody can accomplish in one of the most racist and class- conscious societies in Latin America. Polls at the weekend predicted he would handily carry Sunday's election and that he's poised to win a runoff in May. If he does, "El cholo," as he is popularily known, will become the first man of primarily Indian ancestry to be democratically elected president of Peru. "That enormous rupture with tradition would represent an enormous responsibility for me," he told NEWSWEEK last week (following story). "Some people must be gritting their teeth, [but] they have to accept me."

Many Peruvians have. Sunday's voting was set to be Peru's first free and fair national election in more than a decade. No small achievement, given that only eight months ago the country was a thinly disguised dictatorship ruled by President Alberto Fujimori and his longtime partner in tyranny, the ruthless spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos. Fujimori had rigged last year's election to fend off a surprisingly stiff challenge from Toledo, a relatively obscure politician who had run a distant third in the 1995 presidential election. And with the opposition reduced to demoralized impotence, the Fujimori-Montesinos juggernaut seemed assured of ruling Peru for another five years.

Then it all fell apart for Fujimori within a matter of weeks. A video surfaced in September that showed Montesinos bribing a congressman from Toledo's own party; that triggered a seismic chain of events that culminated in Fujimori's abrupt resignation as president two months later. Today the former head of state languishes in self-imposed exile in his parents' Japanese homeland (box). Montesinos is a fugitive from Peruvian justice who disappeared in October and was last spotted in December in Venezuela, where he underwent plastic surgery to alter his nose and eyelids to disguise his face.

In the months since the disgraced president faxed in his resignation from Tokyo, Peruvians have been treated to other secretly taped videos that show television magnates, an opposition congressman and a judge happily accepting stacks of banknotes from Montesinos and his bagmen. Last week the country was rocked anew by a "Vladivideo" showing top generals and admirals signing a document that contained trumped-up charges of espionage and illegal arms dealing against an anti-Fujimori television-station owner.

If Peru's recent past was dominated by Fujimori, the foreseeable future is likely to fall into Toledo's hands. Pre-election polls last week indicated he should easily defeat either of his likely contenders, former president Alan Garcia and Congresswoman Lourdes Flores, in a runoff. His improbable rise to fame reads like a Horatio Alger parable. As a teenager who grew up in the grimy port of Chimbote, Toledo won a soccer scholarship from the University of San Francisco and earned his bachelor's degree in economics in 1970. He went on to Stanford, where he obtained a doctorate in economics and met Eliane Karp, a red-haired anthropology student who was born in Paris and spent much of her adolescence on a kibbutz in northern Israel. The two married a year later. After finishing his Ph.D. in 1976, Toledo landed a series of plum assignments as a consultant to the United Nations, the Inter- American Development Bank and the World Bank. In 1981 he moved back to Peru to accept a senior post in the Labor Ministry, and by the late 1980s he was being touted as a possible cabinet minister. The folksy technocrat's political prospects looked bright.

Not so his personal life. During the recent campaign, a fair number of skeletons tumbled from the front runner's closet. The respected news- magazine Caretas published a cover story last month alleging that Toledo had cavorted with prostitutes and later tested positive for cocaine and barbiturates in ...