Among the myriad new possibilities opening up for American Jewish women these days, there’s none quite as dizzying as the possibility facing Eliane Karp in the coming weeks. She just might become first lady of Peru, the third-largest country in South America.
Karp’s husband, the mild-mannered economics professor Alejandro Toledo, is an unlikely insurgent seeking to topple Peru’s iron-fisted ruler, President Alberto Fujimori. Following a disputed first-round ballot April 9, the rivals were supposed to meet in a May 28 runoff. That’s looking pretty iffy, though.
International monitors want the vote postponed, charging government fraud. Fujimori refuses. Toledo now says he’s boycotting the vote and taking his case to the streets.
Karp, an anthropologist and rural development expert, is widely viewed as the fire beneath her scholarly husband.
“She’s had a significant role in Toledo’s emergence as a major contender against Fujimori,” says journalist and Latin America expert Douglas Payne.
A naturalized U.S. citizen, Karp grew up in Paris, where she was active in the leftist Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair. She went to a kibbutz after high school, earned a bachelor’s degree at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, then went for a master’s at Stanford University, where she married Toledo in 1979.
Since then, except for stints in Washington and Tel Aviv, she’s steadily worked among the Peruvian Indians, mastering their languages and becoming a local hero.
For Karp, Judaism is central to her identity. She visits Israel frequently, saw to it that her 17-year-old daughter Shantall speaks Hebrew and attends Lima’s small Conservative congregation. But, she says, “for the first time in my life I’m not really involved in the Jewish community.”
Her Judaism is straight from the kibbutz teachings of her youth.
“My vision of Judaism, although it is not religious, is one of enlightenment and justice,” she says. “This is how I was brought up.”
Opposition to Fujimori follows naturally, she says. “My commitment as a Jew and a human being is to fight against dictatorship and injustice wherever it exists.”
Not everyone considers Fujimori a dictator. First elected as a reformer in 1990, he suspended the constitution in 1992 to crush Peru’s Marxist insurgencies. The crackdown won him popular support.
But he never eased up. He insists he’s Peru’s last defense against communism. Controlling the press, suppressing dissent, showing contempt for legal niceties — his current bid for a third term isn’t even constitutional — he’s widely regarded as one of the Western Hemisphere’s most autocratic dictators.
“Every dictator makes the same argument, ‘After me comes chaos,'” says neoconservative scholar Elliott Abrams, who headed Latin America policy in the Reagan administration. “That was Pinochet’s line. Fujimori makes the same argument. It isn’t true. I would argue that the greatest threat to stability in Peru right now is Fujimori.”
Peru’s 3,000 Jews, like much of its middle class, don’t necessarily agree.
“People in the community are very, very afraid — not so much of Toledo, but of the change that might follow if he’s elected,” says Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, a Conservative rabbi. “They’re looking to their own interests. The last item on the community’s agenda is whether Fujimori is democratic or not.”
As for Karp, many admire her — but can’t forgive her marriage to a non-Jew.
Some Jews are as political as Karp. Ephraim Goldemberg, a longtime community leader, is Fujimori’s finance minister.
Also, the Winter family controls TV Channel 2, Fujimori’s main mouthpiece. “Every day they spit out more lies about my husband and me,” says Karp.
How the Winters took over Channel 2 is one of the uglier episodes in the Fujimori presidency. The station was founded by Baruch Ivcher, an Israeli who settled in Peru in 1970.
As Fujimori cracked down, Channel 2 dogged him with hard-hitting coverage of corruption and human rights abuses.
Fujimori and his generals responded with savage attacks. They accused “the Jew Ivcher” of spying for Israel and selling arms to Ecuador. In May 1997, he fled to Miami.
“If I’d waited another day they would have tried me for treason and put me before a firing squad,” he says.
The government promptly revoked his citizenship and seized his assets. Channel 2 was handed to the Winters, minority shareholders.
For foreign policymakers, the persecution of Ivcher, Peru’s leading press baron, epitomizes Fujimori’s heavyhandedness.
Peruvian Jews have scarcely spoken up. “They finally produced a letter asking the government very politely to give Ivcher back his citizenship,” says Bronstein.
Karp is outraged: “I come from a family of Zionist fighters who fought the Nazis in the Second World War. This is the first time in my life that I’ve seen Jews serve dictators and dictatorship.”