LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Hunger was the price Gloria Trio says she paid for resisting an
                   invitation to attend President Alberto Fujimori's birthday party.

                   Government agencies that provide food aid to Peru's poor majority allegedly bused in
                   many of the 12,000 people who attended. The celebration, broadcast live on Peru's
                   television networks from a park in a poverty-stricken Lima neighborhood last July, was
                   widely perceived as the unofficial kickoff of Fujimori's re-election campaign.

                   As the April 9 vote nears, human rights groups, international elections observers and
                   Fujimori's opponents have complained that the president is using food as a coercive
                   way of rallying political support behind his bid for a third term.

                   Trio was one of several grassroots leaders who complained publicly of threats that aid
                   for their community food kitchens would be cut off if they refused to recruit for the
                   July event. She says the government made good on its threat.

                   "In August, when we went to pick up our food, they said there was nothing for us,
                   that there would be no food because our community kitchen didn't exist," she said.

                   The monthly flow of government-supplied rice, lentil beans and cooking oil to Trio's
                   group resumed after an opposition congresswoman invited a television news crew to
                   the food kitchen, which Trio said had been feeding 200 people a day in the slums of
                   Lima's Villa El Salvador district since the late-1980s.

                   But Trio said the group's monthly government allotment of $145 _ which helped pay
                   for cooking fuel, meat and vegetables -- never resumed, and as a result, the kitchen
                   has gone into debt.

                   Manuel Vara, chief of the National Food Assistance Program and a congressional
                   candidate on Fujimori's slate, has repeatedly denied that the government has
                   threatened to cut donations and funding if pro-government election propaganda isn't
                   distributed with food aid.

                   Earlier this month, the opposition newspaper Liberacion published photos of the
                   agency's employees handing out food donated by the European Union along with
                   campaign material for both Fujimori and Vara.

                   "The government's programs are not used to conduct political proselytizing," Vara
                   responded.

                   But the government food agency was later forced to admit the incident had occurred,
                   and Fujimori announced he was firing the two government employees shown in the
                   film.

                   In the last decade, Fujimori's government has had success in combatting hunger and
                   malnutrition. About 37 percent of Peruvian children under 5 were chronically
                   malnourished a year into Fujimori's first term in 1991, compared to 26 percent today,
                   government statistics show.

                   But the number of Peruvians now dependent on handouts has given the government
                   political leverage over nearly half the population.

                   More than 42 percent of all Peruvian households receive government food aid,
                   according to a recent report by Coletta Youngers, a Peru specialist at the Washington
                   Office on Latin America, a U.S. human rights group.

                   In Peru's countryside, 65 percent of families depend on government food, she said.

                   "One of the big things right now is that people in the countryside fear that the vote is
                   not going to be secret and that if they don't vote for the government, that it will be
                   known and they will lose their food assistance," Youngers said.

                   Last month, an international delegation of election observers led by Bianca Jagger,
                   ex-wife of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, highlighted the use of public food
                   programs to coerce grassroots women's groups into supporting Fujimori's campaign.

                   Trio said two women had dropped off hundreds of Fujimori campaign posters,
                   calendars and matchbooks at her community kitchen, where a meal normally costs 30
                   cents and is free for street children.

                   "Here's the proof," she said, displaying the election propaganda. "A lot of mothers
                   have to give in to this pressure because their husbands have no work. If you take
                   away the little food they receive from these kitchens, what are they going to eat?"

                   Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.