LIMA, Peru (AP) -- When Alberto Fujimori swept to a surprise victory in Peru's presidential elections a decade ago, he took control of a country many people thought was 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, a university rector, 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. Record amounts of foreign investment have poured into Peru.

Fujimori, now 62 and dubbed "The Emperor'' for his bulldozer style of governing, turned Peru into the most stable country in the Andean region. He installed a healthy free-market economy and cracked down on cocaine trafficking.

"Not even my detractors would fail to recognize fundamental achievements which I will not enumerate. You know what they are,'' the small, bespectacled Fujimori said in his nationwide television address Saturday when he announced his decision to call new elections and not participate.

But he did it all at a price -- with authoritarian measures that violated the constitution and laws of his own making, stifled opposition and raised serious doubts about the fairness of this year's presidential elections.

Fujimori risked turning Peru into a pariah state by going ahead with the May presidential runoff after Alejandro Toledo pulled out, accusing him of planning to rig the vote.

It was Fujimori against the world -- Fujimori's kind of odds. Over the years he has shown himself to be shrewd, patient and calculating, a high-stakes gambler.

He won an unprecedented third term, but now four months later he has been forced to call the new election and bow out of the race by allegations that his intelligence chief had bribed an opposition legislator to back the government.

"I am a democrat elected by the people who respects the principles of a democratic system,'' he said in an interview this year with The Associated Press. "But I have a particular governing style that puts great emphasis on efficiency.''

But efficiency, for Fujimori, also translated into a disregard for the checks and balances of democracy.

In 1992, he temporarily shut down Congress and the Supreme Court, accusing them of sabotaging his efforts to defeat leftist guerrillas who had nearly driven his predecessor to his knees. Within months, Fujimori's anti-terrorist police captured the rebels' ringleaders and political violence dropped dramatically.

In 1995, he was swept back into a second term by grateful voters. He won praise for his firmness when in April 1997 his forces stormed the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima to free 72 hostages held for four months by leftist rebels. One hostage and all 14 guerrillas were killed in the raid.

He still boasts strong popularity: One poll last week gave him a 42 percent approval rate.

"Power fascinates me,'' he has said on more than one occasion over the years.

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 helped him control Peru.

Former associates describe him as self-assured, calculating, pragmatic, unsentimental, a man who lives for his work -- and whose work is making Peru run smoothly.

"In Latin America, I am a special case,'' he said once in a late-night interview with The AP after everyone else had gone to sleep in the neoclassic Government Palace. "I have had a special formation within an Oriental environment of discipline and perseverance.''

A former mathematics professor, Fujimori said he views political rivals as pieces on a giant chessboard to be outmaneuvered with cool detachment and knocked off the table.

But he also relied on a "sixth sense'' to warn him of danger and sometimes consults fortunetellers. He said one soothsayer told him years ago that one day he would be president of Peru.

"He is an incredibly cold, astute man,'' said Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos, who served as an economic adviser to him in the early years of his government.

Fujimori is divorced and his four children are grown.

"When I look at him, I see a man wrapped in a Shakespearean tragedy,'' Ortiz de Zevallos said. "I think he is a very solitary man, who most likely spends his Saturdays and Sundays with a pair of military aides wandering through the halls of a building called the Government Palace.''