Karp, now visiting the United States with her husband, President Alejandro Toledo, has been dogged by criticisms that she is thin-skinned, she lied about a lucrative bank consultant job and even that she dresses like an aging flower child.

Last week she fanned the fires by accusing opponents of trying to torpedo a constitutional reform project sponsored by Toledo's party. She charged they may even be promoting a coup against Toledo, who took office in July 2001 as the first democratically elected Indian president.

"To the medieval spirits who have risen up and tell the first lady, 'Why don't you stay in the palace and drink tea and stop causing trouble?', I say I have never taken tea, much less in the palace," she said.

Her comments were ready fodder for opponents and news commentators. El Comercio, Peru's biggest newspaper, editorialized that she is contributing to political instability and reminded her that she "is not the president."

When Toledo and his wife flew to the United States on Tuesday for a week of official activities, Lima newspapers noted that Karp arrived separately at the airport, making her husband and several of his ministers wait inside the presidential plane for 10 minutes.

For some, the flak smacks of sexism.

"When women are fighters, they are criticized more," said legislator Anel Townsend, noting that she herself faced resistance during an unsuccessful bid for the congressional presidency this year. "Women should have the same rights as men to debate ideas."

Karp, 47, who first came to Peru in the late 1970s to study Indian communities while working on a Ph.D. at Stanford University, accompanied Toledo into office with ambitious plans to address social inequality and the needs of Peru's poor.

She wowed the marginalized Indian and mixed-race majority during her husband's campaign. While many Peruvians related to Toledo's facial features and childhood poverty, it was the pale-skinned, red-haired Karp's ability to speak the Indian language of Quechua that drew cheers at rallies.

But Karp's campaigning raised eyebrows at times in Lima, the seat of Peru's elite.

At one rally in the Andean city of Huaraz, Karp declared that the "apus" — the mountain gods of Peru's ancient Indian cultures — had spoken and that Toledo's election would break a "curse of 500 years" of oppression.

"Listen well," she taunted Lima's "little white" rich people. "My cholo is untainted and sacred." By cholo, she meant her husband, using the Peruvian word for mestizos.

After Toledo took office, Karp maintained a low profile, heading an unpaid government commission on Indian and African-Peruvian affairs and applying for Peruvian citizenship. She also quietly expanded her "first lady office" from a personal secretary to a staff of 20.

She was thrust into the spotlight in August when an opposition newspaper revealed she was earning $10,000 a month as an agricultural projects consultant to Peru's second-largest bank.

Although the salary is normal for high-level bank advisers, in impoverished Peru the news struck a nerve — it takes teachers and police officers four years to make that amount.

The president, who said her bank contract was legal, made a national address to blast criticism of his wife as a "low blow" and demanded Peruvians "let her work."

News media raised questions about Karp's honesty by resurrecting interviews in which she repeatedly said that for the first time in her marriage she did not have her own income.

"It's a serious issue of self-esteem for me," she told one newspaper in January.

News shows also ran clips of Karp lashing out at critics of the government. In one, she compared protesters who blocked roads to the Cuzco airport to the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center.

As talk about the bank job cooled, Karp traveled to Chile with her husband, only to draw barbs from Chilean newspapers about her dressing style, which often consists of bold-colored suits accessorized with earrings and oversized necklaces bearing pre-Columbian motifs.

"Her hair looking like she came straight from bed, without a drop of makeup, walking slovenly with her hands in the pockets of her white overcoat, Eliane Karp was not exactly the symbol of glamour," the newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias jabbed.

Gustavo Gorriti, a Peruvian author and journalist who advised the Toledo campaign, said Karp needs to recognize that gibes come with public life.