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Montesinos, Fujimori,
Toledo and Peru's
future
biography and
analysis
Article added on November
10, 2000
Vladimiro
Ilyich Montesinos is not only the former de facto chief of the Peruvian
intelligence, Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), he was the adviser and,
together with the military, the most important power base of President Alberto Fujimori.
So who is this man? Vladimir Montesinos was born 54 years ago in Arequipa. He grew up in a bourgeois
family, but his parents were communists and therefore named their son after
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. The young Montesinos went to the military academy in
Chorillos in the South of Peru's capital, Lima. General Mercado Jarrin made the
young artillery lieutenant his personal adjutant. In 1973, Jarrin became Prime
Minister and supreme commander of the armed forces. Montesinos suddenly had
access to classified information and that is when his obsessive chase for
compromising material, useful to blackmail all sorts of people, began. His greed
for power and money is legendary. At that time, he was an open admirer of
Libya's Khadhaffi. His career came to a halt when he faked the president's
signature and assigned himself an "official" mission to Washington.
Montesinos was dishonourably discharged from the army. He used his one-year
prison sentence to study law. He became a lawyer for people charged with tax fraud
and for drug dealers. He regularly released indiscretions on the professional
misconduct of representatives of the army and, therefore, was forced to a
short-time exile in Ecuador. On his return to Peru, he offered his services to
the SIN.
In 1990, as Fujimori
rose to power, Montesinos became the president's
adviser and mediator in his relations with the SIN and the army. A first
contact between the two men was established during the electoral campaign of
Fujimori when he was accused of having cheated on a property deal in order to
save taxes. The then directon of the Peruvian secret service advised Fujimori to
take Montesinos as his legal adviser. Afterwards, nobody talked about
the deal anymore. Montesinos is also said to have
made Fujimori's birth certificate disappear. Allegedly he was born in Japan -
the Peruvian president has to be born on Peruvian soil. But as with a lot in
Peruvian politics and especially regarding Montesinos and Fujimori, it is
difficult to separate rumors from facts.
Under the presidency of Fujimori, Montesinos
continuously enlarged the SIN's importance and shifted people of confidence into
key positions. 13 of the 18 highest ranking officers in the Peruvian army were
promoted to officers, like Montesinos, in 1966. The general responsible for the Lima
area, Luis Cuba, was his brother-in-law (he was only dismissed in October 2000).
Especially after Fujimori's "autogolpe" in 1992, allegedly inspired by
Montesinos, the SIN became, like the military, a state within the state. Montesinos is considered the architect of the successful war of
the army against the Maoist movement of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). But he
also collected compromising material on parliament members, journalists and
other members of the opposition (and also on Fujimori's followers). He
manipulated people, elections and media and, for his fight against the drug
lords, he was for years in close contact
with the CIA. There are rumors that Montesinos established the contact with the
CIA when he was an officer in the Peruvian army and that he sold state secrets
to the Americans. In early September 2000, a video film shown on television
showed Montesinos bribing an oppositional member of parliament. This meant the sudden end of his
career. Even Fujimori, who had protected Montesinos for years against all
accusations and allegations, "suspended" his advisor.
A few days ago, it became public
that Montesinos had hidden some $48 million in Swiss bank accounts, in the
foreign controlled banks Leumi Le-Israel ($32 million), Fibi Bank ($13,5
million) and Crédit Agricole Indosuez (2,1 million). The amount is too large to have come from Montesinos' legal activities in Peru. The money is suspected
to come from bribes from drug and arms dealers. Already in 1996, the
drug dealer Demetrio Chávez pretended that Montesinos had paid him
$50,000/month for not bothering him when his drug trade airplanes landed near a
military base in the Huallaga valley. Later, Chávez withdrew his statement, but
was said to have looked badly treated when making his statement. In 1997, the
Brazilian police published a report accusing Montesinos of being involved in a
drug deal. The Columbian drug lord Evaristo Porras
accused Fujimori's adviser. In 1978, Montesinos had been Porras'
lawyer. The Peruvian police had arrested him when he tried to smuggle 30 tons of
cocaine into Colombia. This is embarrassing not only for Fujimori, but also for
the United States. The American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) as well as the CIA worked
closely with Montesinos whom Fujimori had called his number one agent in
the war against the drug dealers. The Clinton administration never mentioned the
name of Montesinos in relation with human rights violations and electoral fraud
in Peru. As a result of all the scandals surrounding Montesinos, Fujimori's
political, social and military power base is eroding. But until today, no piece
of evidence has been presented that the president himself was corrupt. Anyway,
as long as he is in power, he enjoys immunity.
Is Alejandro Toledo the man
to lead the opposition? The 48-year old politician grew up in a poor "cholo"
family in Arequipa. He started as a shoe shining boy and became a respected
economist. The woman who shares his life is the Belgian anthropologist Eliane
Karp. Toledo's political career is very recent and his decision to withdraw from
the second round of the Peruvian presidential election, although not without
sense, backfired because the Organization of American States (OAS) did not have
the courage to condemn the manipulation of the electoral process in which
the opposition was, among other irregularities, almost banned from State media
coverage. Only after the video affair did the OAS put more pressure on Fujimori who
accepted that the parliamentary elections should be anticipated and held on
April 8, 2000. Toledo has not always been a master of the situation as leader of
the opposition and he is a populist - as most successful politicians in
countries with a huge uneducated population. More important for Peru's future is
the fact that Fujimori's adversaries are divided among themselves and reach from
the far left to the far right. In the past, neither the Socialist APRA nor the
bourgeois parties have had the confidence of the population. That was the main
reason why an outsider such as Fujimori could rise to power in 1990. Toledo, by
the way, came from nowhere like Fujimori and rose to the status of presidential
candidate of the opposition in 2000. This is another important sign on the wall
indicating that the Peruvian political and economic establishment has not
learned the lesson from 1990. The Peruvian crisis is above all a crisis of the
country's elite who are unable to govern, modernize the economy and society and
win the confidence of a majority of voters. Until the "video affair",
the country was divided between opposition and Fujimori, who even today has
strong support among the population, especially in the countryside. Peru has
important natural resources and, therefore, is a potentially rich country. But
it needs the leaders who are able to fructify it.
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Related books:
- Rei Kimura: Alberto Fujimori of Peru: The President Who Dared to
Dream. Beekman Pub, 1998, 184 p. Get
it from Amazon.com. As the title indicates, no masterpiece of
critical writing but more of an apology. Contains some useful information.
- Mario Vargas Llosa: A Fish in the Water: A Memoir. Farrar Straus
& Giroux, 1994, 532 p. Get
it from Amazon.com. The writer is the man who lost, at the last
moment, the presidential race against Fujimori in 1990. A useful book.
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