<BACK><OUTLINE><HOME>A Peruvian
quagmire of drugs
and death squads
New York Times criticizes US Drug Czar for endorsing Peruvian narco-militarist:
Why would the US anti-drug czar lend his endorsement to a drug-connected Peruvian intelligence chief?
(11-25-96) The New York Times critized the US Drug Czar for endorsing a Peruvian governement intelligence chief who has ties to drug cartels and has been accused of setting up death squads.
However, Vladimiro Montesinos, is a long time CIA asset and US policy in Peru has been to relegate cocaine production to the back burner while United States anti-drug aid is devoted to crushing a left wing rebellion."Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the nation's drug czar, has a good record on human rights issues. But on a recent visit to Peru he seemed to give his endorsement to Vladimiro Montesinos, the de facto head of Peruvian intelligence. Mr. Montesinos used to work as a lawyer for drug traffickers. American and Peruvian human rights groups accuse him of setting up death squads, and the Peruvian Congress has tried to investigate charges that he protected drug traffickers."
"General McCaffrey's comments were front-page news in Peru, where they were taken as support for the popular theory that Mr. Montesinos enjoys Washington's protection. This perception has boosted his power and helped him to block the Congressional investigations. General McCaffrey lost an important opportunity to distance the American Government from Mr. Montesinos."
BACKGROUND ON VLADIMIRO MONTESINOS NOT INCLUDED BY NEW YORK TIMES.
Following the April 1992 coup, the U.S. announced the suspension of its Congressionally approved $320 million in financial and military payments to the Peruvian government. This is considered only a temporary measure. But meanwhile, the use of the narcotics traffic to finance the Peruvian government's war seems to have become institutionalized as official (though secret) U.S. policy.
The man who engineered the coup, sometimes referred to as Fujimori's Rasputin, is Vladimiro Montesinos. The Madrid daily "La Vanguardia" called him "the second most powerful man in Peru, after the president." (11/05/92) This may turn out to be an underestimation.
Montesinos was an Army artillery captain and aide to one of Peru's leading generals when he was recruited by the CIA, according to Peruvian Army Major Jose Fernandez Slavatecci, in his autobiography "Yo Acuso (I accuse)". At that time Peru was under a military government that had bought weapons from the USSR. Slavatecci claims that in the 1970s Montesinos met regularly with U.S. intelligence officials working out of the U.S. Embassy. "La Vanguardia" says that Montesinos was sacked from the Army at the end of the decade, when the Peruvian Ambassador happened to spot him at the Pentagon in Washington, where he had traveled on a phony passport.
After a few years in exile to avoid a prison sentence on treason charges as a U.S. spy, Montesinos returned to Peru in 1983. He worked as a lawyer for drug kingpins until 1990, when he successfully intervened to squash tax evasion charges made against presidential candidate Fujimori. He became unofficial "national security advisor" when Fujimori took office. (Officially, his only post is Fujimori's personal lawyer.)
According to Gustavo Gorriti, considered Peru's most internationally prominent journalist, Montesinos had been under investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for "his connection to the most important Peruvian drug cartel in the 1980s, the Rodriguez-Lopez organization, and also links to some Colombian traffickers." (Interview in "New York Review of Books", 5/25/92)
Maximo San Roman, formerly Fujimori's vice president, who was removed by the coup along with the parliament, said that with the ascension of Montesinos "I fear that my country will fall into the hands of the Mafia." (Spain's "El Pais" 5/22/92)
Similar charges were made by Fujimori's main 1990 electoral opponent, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. The accusation that Fujimori is connected to the highest echelons of narcotics traffic have been repeated in the press the last few months by, among others, the Peruvian-born international economist Hernando de Soto, who is allied with the U.S. Republican Party. De Soto had negotiated the pact under which the
Peruvian government was enlisted in Washington's "war on drugs," and was considered Montesinos' main rival for Fujimori's ear. ("El Pais", 2/1/92) All of these men are now in exile.Before Fujimori took office, Montesinos had been banned from ever setting a foot again on a Peruvian military installation. Now he hand-picked the Armed Forces Joint Command. Montesinos also chose his new Chief of Staff, General Jose Valdivia, who had been accused of covering up the Armed Forces massacre of 28 peasants at a wedding in the Ayacucho village of Cayara in 1988. (A dozen witnesses in that case were murdered-see Simon Strong's "Sendero Luminose" for another account of that affair.)
Even more importantly, it was at that point that Montesinos renewed his relationship with the CIA, if, indeed, it had ever been interrupted. Gorriti says that in addition to reorganizing the Armed Forces and putting "men who owed him favors" in key positions, "in late 1990, Montesinos also began close cooperation with the CIA, and in 1991 the National Intelligence Service he controlled began to organize a secret ant-drug outfit with funding, training and equipment provided by the CIA." The "Miami Herald" (5/30/92) indicates that the CIA invited Montesinos to return to Washington for talks. After that he began to receive secret funding from the CIA and to send men to the U.S. for intelligence training. Gorriti describes Montesinos' National Intelligence Service as a kind of autonomous force answerable only to the U.S.
"As far as I know," Gorriti continues, "the secret intelligence unit never carried out anti-drug operations. It was used for other things, such as my arrest." According to Gorriti, in one of the first actions taken after the coup, "army intelligence officers had ransacked archives in the judiciary and in the prosecutor's offices mainly to get hold of all the cases in which Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's closest advisor, was involved as a lawyer for drug traffickers and perhaps other documents that Fujimori does not want the public to know."
"La Vanguardia" quotes Peruvian Senator Cesar Barrera as saying they were searching to "destroy evidence that Montesinos maintains close relations with the CIA despite the fact that the CIA knew he was protecting drug traffickers." One factor that precipitated the coup ahead of the date that had been set, apparently, was the public "Fujigate" scandal, when Fujimori's wife, Susana, accused his government of corruption. A few days later the coup shut down the newspapers and TV stations that covered the story. Gorriti and his personal computer (with its data) were seized by the Army and held until the Spanish government intervened to get the Peruvian correspondent for "El Pais" out of the country.
All the data on his hard disk were erased. (4/7/92) At the moment of the coup, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs Bernard Aronson was present in Lima. A few weeks earlier Aronson had issued a strong statement urging all possible aid to Fujimori "to avoid a holocaust comparable to Hitler's gas chambers or Pol Pot's death camps."
Such a statement, "El Observador's" correspondent implies, amounted to giving Fujimori carte blanche. The U.S.'s Ambassador to Peru is Anthony Quainton, former head "anti-terrorist" specialist in the U.S. State Department and U.S. Ambassador in Managua during the CIA's terrorist bombings and sabotage campaign against the Sandinista government (Holly Sklar, "Washington's War on Nicaragua", quoted in the Fall 1992 issue of the U.S. magazine "Covert Action".).
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