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On April 5, 1992, almost two years after he was elected president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori dissolved parliament and seized dictatorial powers. The mastermind behind the conspiracy to overthrow democracy is Vladimiro Montesinos. For over two decades, Montesinos has operated from the shadows. Narco-lawyer, traitor, human rights violator, former soldier, spy, he has mesmerized Fujimori and used close links to drug trafficking organizations, and then to the CIA, to become not only the country's de facto drug czar, but perhaps the most powerful person in Peru.<BACK><OUTLINE><HOME>On the night of November 13, 1992, Lima was surrounded by a sort of fog of war. In the temporary panic accompanying that night's attempted coup, the shroud of intrigue and secrecy lifted for a few hours, and the truth began to emerge. In the seven months since President Fujimori staged his auto golpe, his self-coup, he had conducted extensive purges within the judiciary and the state apparatus, aggregated dictatorial power, and come increasingly under the sway of his personal Svengali Vladimiro Montesinos. Some in the military had had enough. That November night they planned a counter-coup to restore constitutional rule and unseat the dictator. The conspiracy was doomed to fail. Probably infiltrated, it may have been an elaborate sting designed to lure into the open and entrap those army officers opposed to Fujimori's armed seizure of dictatorial powers. But as often happens, the provocateurs lost temporary control of the operation just as they sprang the trap. When more officers than expected followed Gen. Jaime Salinas, the brave but unfortunate leader, the coup suddenly looked viable. Fujimori panicked. He fled the presidential palace and headed for army headquarters. But midway, he changed direction and rushed to the Japanese Embassy in Lima, seeking refuge.
With his whereabouts unknown, the regular system of communications broke down. Voices reached out across the night on cellular phones, while tape recorders hooked up to scanners recorded the conversations. Fujimori, his voice slightly distorted by anxiety but unmistakable in its nasal tone, was at one end of the line. A rapid fire high-pitched voice at the other end reassured him that he was sending men to reinforce the presidential escort. Fujimori gave directions on how to reach him.
As the tape recorders eavesdropped, the man with the high thin voice went into gear. He suggested actions to army commander-in-chief, General Nicol s de Bari Hermoza R!os, identifiable from his barking proclamations of allegiance to Fujimori. Hermoza immediately acceded and said: If we don't find him [coup leader Salinas] now, we'll detain him tomorrow. Why don't we detain him right now? asked the other. I have agents here....I'll have him detained, we'll take him out by force, Hermoza echoed enthusiastically. By force, by force.
Later, when several arrests had been made, they talked again. It seems we reacted fast, said Hermoza. Who gave you the information? I'll tell you later, answered the other. Then just before dawn, after the coup had fizzled and General Salinas had been captured in a shoot-out, the conversation resumed, for a little gloating. He [Salinas] is half crazy; he's out of focus, said Hermoza. He's all fucked up. He's dead, sentenced the other man. The other man, the one with the high-pitched voice, was promptly identified. It was Vladimiro Montesinos. While some people claimed he was the most powerful man in Peru after Fujimori, others asserted he was the real power, albeit behind the throne.
Several army officers detained that night at the National Intelligence Service's (SIN, Peru's equivalent of the CIA) headquarters experienced Montesinos' power in its most crude form. Montesinos and others hit Lt. Col. Enrique Aguilar del Alc zar in the face; later his hands were tied behind his back and he was hanged by his arms (a torture technique known in Peru as la pita or la colgada ) until pain compelled him to sign whatever they asked. Montesinos pricked Maj. Salvador Carmona (ret.) in his arms and legs with needles and had him strung up colgado. He hit Lt. Col. Marco Zarate and when the officer tried to hit back, Montesinos' bodyguards tied him to a chair and administered electric shocks until he signed the documents they presented. Maj. Csar C ceres, a former aide of Gen. Salinas, was thrown face down on a mattress. Two policemen caught his arms in a shoulder bar, and as a third sat on his waist and pounded on his back, Montesinos hit him in the face. Two days later, C ceras was hanged by his arms tied behind his back. I told them, he later wrote from prison, anything they wanted because I felt my arms were being yanked off my body.
Those who denounced the torture or criticized Montesinos or Hermoza were targeted: The homes of Gen. Lu!s Cisneros (ret.) and two other political leaders were bombed. Gen. Alberto Arciniega a counterinsurgency commander in the coca-carpeted Upper Huallaga Valley was sent into retirement and sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy.
QUEST FOR REVENGE, VICTORY AND POWER
They learned the hard lesson many already knew: Montesinos is a dangerous man to cross. He has much in common with the bizarrely brutal dictators of Latin American literature and history. But the reality of his life is less like a fictionally dramatic linear rise than a series of improbably melodramatic ups and downs. Montesinos went from an early experience of power to an enterprise in betrayal; from utter disgrace and pariah status to a quest for revenge, victory, and power.A sad and earnest child, Montesinos grew up in genteel poverty in Arequipa, a city in the south of Peru which was also home to the families of writer Mario Vargas Llosa and Shining Path leader Abimael Guzm n. The docile son of a family that prided itself on learning and culture, Vladimiro was a good student. He went into the army because his father thought a military career would offer stability. In 1966, he graduated with no particular distinction from officer's school in Lima and was posted back home as a sub-lieutenant.
He soon became engaged to a local heiress. After she gave him the loan he asked for, he dumped her and refused to return the money. Only on threat of prosecution did Montesinos' father scrape together the cash and pay the debt. Montesinos was developing his behavioral signature: Seduce, use, and betray. The pattern, first stamped on a hapless woman, would later be perpetrated on a much larger scale.
MAKING HIS MOVE
Although somewhat of a misfit in the rough, unsophisticated milieu of junior army officers, Montesinos soon demonstrated another characteristic behavior: He positioned himself close to power and the secrets it held. Indeed, that period was perhaps the only time in history when Peru had secrets worth keeping and therefore worth selling. It was an opportunity not lost on the ambitious young junior officer.In October 1968, Peru's armed forces had overthrown President Fernando Belaunde. Under the leadership of Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, Peru embarked on a program of leftist radical reforms which promptly put the military regime at loggerheads with the United States. Velasco expelled the U.S. military mission, *5 and in the early 1970s decided to buy Soviet weaponry to strengthen Peru's standing in the region. After Pinochet's coup in Chile, the Nixon administration got closer to Chile, while Velasco prepared for what he thought would be a showdown with Pinochet. Montesinos tested the winds and attached himself to Gen. Edgardo Mercado Jarr!n, with whom he shared origins in Arequipa, intellectual pretensions, and political ambitions. In January 1973, when Mercado became prime minister, minister of war, and commander-in-chief of the army, Montesinos became his personal aide and one of a small group of advisors. Some in this inner circle would remain part of the Montesinos story until the present: Of the two civilians, Rafael Merino is still a close associate, while Francisco Loayza became a bitter enemy; of the four military officers, Col. Sinesio Jarama later branded Montesinos a traitor.
Montesinos would buy books for the general, suggest quotes for his speeches, and hint that he was destined with proper help to be South America's Clausewitz. Montesinos soon became indispensable. Alfred Stepan, then working for the Rand Corporation on the subject of the Peruvian military, and later a professor at Columbia University, met Montesinos in Peru. He remembers him as someone who would pop up at odd hours....I never saw him in uniform. This young man presented himself as a military intellectual...and he had read a lot of the stuff....There was no question that he was unusual....He didn't even appear to have an office. I have never met anyone like him in my research...an active duty who acts very much as a free agent.
As a free agent, he kept himself busy. While his boss, Gen. Mercado, was negotiating weapons acquisitions with the Soviets, Montesinos had the run of his office, drafting Mercado's speeches, flattering the general, making extensive use of the photocopy machine, and going through the office safe. Even after it was discovered that he had removed a document, Montesinos retained that access. Years later, Mercado would say that Montesinos came to his office, eyes brimming with tears, and confessed he had taken the document only out of intellectual curiosity.
There is little doubt that Montesinos was snooping. In fact, with the increasing level of Byzantine intrigues among opposing factions, everyone was trying to spy on everyone else. Then intelligence agents began to get information that the presidential weekly agenda was arriving at the U.S. Embassy almost as soon as it was approved by Velasco. Suspicion fell on Montesinos. According to former army intelligence chief Rafael C"rdova, even before entering Mercado's office, Montesinos had been a paid agent of army intelligence. That role was bad enough, but spying for a foreign power was unprecedented and treasonous. Some junior officers tailed him and became convinced he was trafficking in top-secret documents, mainly to U.S. intelligence officials. *8 Years later, in 1990, Col. C"rdova, then-chief of army intelligence, charged that in the 1970s Montesinos had peddled Peru's complete list of Soviet weaponry, the list of new weapons acquisitions, Velasco's weekly agendas, and contingency plans for war with Pinochet's Chile.
Horacio Verbitsky, a leading Argentine journalist and author who sought refuge in Peru after receiving death threats from right-wing terrorists in Argentina, saw Montesinos often. He had, says Verbitsky, this safe box on the wall in his home where he kept all manner of very secret documents....Once he opened the box, took some documents out and showed them to me....[They] had something to do with the strategic equilibrium with Chile. Means, weaponry, something like that. I was very surprised to see the documents and very surprised that he would show them to me. To Verbitsky, Montesinos was a strange individual. He came to the center of power while still very young, he says. He was a seducer, who at the same time awakened mistrust in all of us who knew him. We used to ask each other: `To what service does he belong?'
MONTESINOS' FIRST COUP PLOT
It was during these politically charged years, that Montesinos became involved in his first presidential coup plot. In mid-1973, he tried to persuade Gen. Mercado to overthrow the physically and politically vulnerable president. While Velasco was still hospitalized after an aneurysm and leg amputation, Mercado organized a discreet meeting in his house with Rafael Merino, Col. Sinesio Jarama, and Capt. Montesinos to discuss ousting Velasco. Several alternatives were proposed, mostly by Montesinos, but Mercado hesitated, and the meeting ended inconclusively. Soon after, the pro-Velasco forces organized a rally in front of the hospital. When Cuban ambassador Antonio N#$ez Jimnez marched prominently in front and prodded Mercado into declaring his support for the ailing president, the coup project fizzled on the spot.Velasco, however, was losing his grip. Military radicals and moderates and their civilian collaborators conspired against each other, and as provocateurs shifted from side to side, Montesinos continued to plot. He approached Julio Cotler, one of Peru's top social scientists, who had written about being disenchanted with the military reform process. The captain claimed he belonged to a group of young military officers who were appalled at the betrayal of revolutionary principles. These young Turks were taking matters into their own hands and planning to kill the corrupt gen- erals in the high command. Would Professor Cotler lend his intellectual support? Cotler threw him out of his office.
Years later Cotler saw Montesinos, already out of the army, sitting in on one of his classes. At the end, he came to say hello. Cotler, a very direct man, asked him, Do you remember when I threw you out of my office? Yes, Montesinos remembered. And tell me, asked Cotler, how could you think I could fall into such a transparent provocation? Montesinos smiled, Ah! Dr. Cotler, you wouldn't believe how many fell!
CAST FROM THE INNER CIRCLE OF POWER
When Mercado retired in 1975, his protege Montesinos, asked to be transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture where he became an advisor to the minister, Gen. Enrique Gallegos Venero, one of the young radical colonels behind the Velasco coup in 1968. And there, too, he continued to conspire, trying to play all sides.Montesinos befriended several foreign journalists. One of them was married to a man with access to reliable information. Montesinos would occasionally give her a ride in his big American car from the Ministry to Military Region II's headquarters the stronghold of the radical officers to deliver documents taken from the ministry. He would try to get information from me he couldn't get from my husband, she said. He had those marvelous speakers in his car with a collection of Bach cassettes....He would leave me in his car, listening to the most marvelous things, while he went to do his thing. She remembers him as intellectually appealing: He knew how to fish things up, and where...but physically, he looked like a manipulator; he was very intelligent, but you could never trust him. The moderates who ousted Velasco and came to power in August 1975 with Gen. Francisco Morales Berm#dez also mistrusted Montesinos. They knew he had spied on the radicals, and they harbored misgivings about him. In mid-1976, the new commander-in-chief of the army, Gen. Guillermo Arbul#, ordered Montesinos transferred to El Algarrobo, a remote garrison near the Ecuador border.
Suddenly, after three heady years as a key source of information and misinformation with access to the top levels of power, Montesinos became an ordinary captain in a desolate backwater posting. He grew reckless.
TO DISGRACE AND PRISON
On August 27, after only two days at El Algarrobo, he requested sick leave, returned to Lima, stole a blank army travel form, falsified it, and went to the U.S. Embassy. There he received an official invitation to the U.S., which had either been on hold or was instantly arranged. On September 5, 1976, he illegally flew out of Lima as an official guest of the U.S. government. Once in Washington, however, his stay was far from clandestine. Officially and inaccurately presented as aide to Prime Minister Gen. Guillermo Arbul#, he met with, among others, Luigi Einaudi, then at the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, and CIA Office of Current Intelligence officer, Robert Hawkins. He also spoke with an official Cuba hand about visiting Cuba, as personal guest of Ra#l Castro, and met with several academics both in Washington and Connecticut. When he gave a talk at the Inter-American Defense College, a Peruvian general spotted him and cabled Lima.On his return to Peru on September 21, 1976, Montesinos was immediately arrested, his house was searched, and his safe found and opened. After army counterintelligence looked inside, the search intensified and even the floor boards of his house were lifted up. A week later, a military tribunal cashiered him out of the army and ordered him confined to a military prison and guarded round-the-clock.
The U.S. Embassy responded meekly to Peru's strong protest to Montesinos' clandestine invitation: It regretted the concern caused the Government of Peru by the invitation extended to a military officer....The Embassy agrees with the Ministry's suggestion that in the future the Foreign Ministry should be informed of such invitations extended to members of the Armed Forces of Peru. Montesinos' legal situation worsened. After reviewing the file, the military prosecutor, General Alberto Vargas Ruiz de Somocurcio, recommended that the charge include treason to the fatherland, which carried a mandatory death sentence. Within memory, no army officer had been convicted of that crime.
Montesinos' cousin, Sergio Cardenal, took charge of the defense. I could talk with him only with an officer present throughout the interview. He was held in a room surrounded by soldiers at all times. In the end, General Vargas dropped the high treason charge: A conviction would have caused enormous embarrassment and destroyed Mercado Jarr!n's good reputation in the army. Nonetheless, many, including former army intelligence chief Rafael C"rdova and General Jarama, consider Montesinos a traitor. I believe, said Jarama, he did betray his fatherland. On May 31, 1977, he was convicted of falsehood and desertion of command, formally expelled from the army, and sentenced to one year in jail. He would emerge a disgraced civilian.
LAWYER FOR DRUG ORGANIZATIONS
Any possibility of a military career gone, Montesinos used his jail time to study law. Soon after he was freed, he graduated and briefly became partners with his cousin, Sergio Cardenal. After a few months, he began to prosper.Montesinos saw that there were two main money-making crimes: fiscal fraud and cocaine trafficking, and he carved out a practice that took advantage of both. At each step of the judicial process, corrupt police, prosecutors, judges, and jailers competed to extract the maximum in bribes and kickbacks. Montesinos integrated the process. He got police to identify the best cases and tailor their reports with the prosecution and trial in mind, built a network of allies and informants inside key institutions, and identified corrupt police and judges.
Within a few years, Montesinos became a sought-after legal and administrative strategist for drug traffickers, providing services that went far beyond the practice of law. He rented homes for Colombian traffickers, advised accessories of traffickers when to go into hiding, managed the disappearance of files of fugitive Colombian traffickers to prevent extradition requests, and in at least one case, produced falsified documents to buttress his defense of a cocaine dealer. (He lost that case thanks to a dogged prosecutor, who, years later, was one of the first people sacked in Fujimori's post-coup purge.) He also maintained contacts in the army, and through them was able to procure useful intelligence about high-ranking army officers whom he smeared in a column he anonymously wrote for a now defunct Lima tabloid. The high command was enraged and in 1983 ordered its prosecutor, General Abraham Talavera, to revive the 1976 high treason accusation. For the second time, Montesinos was identified, disgraced, a fugitive. He fled the country to Ecuador and then to Argentina. Rid of the nuisance, the army's command lost interest. Talavera complained bitterly, to no avail.
This time, however, Montesinos had his share of allies. While he was abroad, colleagues in corruption rallied on his behalf. In mid-1984, the Supreme Military Council, by then staffed with some lawyers who worked on the side for Montesinos, exonerated him of all charges. He returned quietly to Lima and resumed his work. For the army, however, even by their loosened standards, he remained a pariah. In July 1985, then-army commander-in-chief, Guillermo Monz"n, upgraded an order banning Montesinos from any army installation.
DEFENDING CORRUPT POLICE
For the drug mafia, on the other hand, Montesinos' handle on the system made him almost indispensable. There are major differences in the way corruption, including cocaine trafficking, works in Peru and Colombia. In Colombia, traffickers try to keep the state at arm's length. In Peru, they try to infiltrate it. Thus, media exposure has tremendous power to force the healthier parts of the state to act. In July 1985, the biggest Peruvian narcotics trafficking organization was uncovered, in part because of an accidental cocaine lab explosion, and to a large extent through investigations by Peru's leading news magazine, Caretas. They revealed that Reynaldo Rodr!guez L"pez's drug organization had thoroughly infiltrated the state, especially the police. Sparked by the media revelations, the public outcry was immediate. The energetic attorney general, Csar Elejalde, put the full resources of his organization behind the investigation, which was led by smiling but tough police general, Ra#l Ch vez. A year later, in 1986, with fugitive Rodr!guez L"pez arrested and in jail, they felt close to the Mafia's core.But Montesinos had taken charge of the defense of the more important corrupt police generals and soon it became known that he coordinated the defense strategy of the organization as a whole. In July 1986, he had Gen. Ch vez sued in a military court because of this investigation, accusing him of insulting a superior officer. The military court, to everyone's astonishment, accepted the argument and opened trial proceedings against Ch vez and his key subordinates. It took a strong journalistic campaign to shame the military judges into stopping the trial. But a barrage of judicial accusations, 14 in all, accepted by corrupt judges, slowed down Ch vez's investigation. He, his top lieutenants and their relatives received threatening phone calls. Ch vez even had a running shoot-out with members of a band of killers for hire. He walked everywhere with a sub-machine gun ready at his side.
In 1987, before the investigation could be completed, Attorney General Elejalde was succeeded by Hugo Denegri. It soon became evident he had an unofficial but key advisor. Cautiously keeping a low profile, Vladimiro Montesinos was back again. In Denegri, he found an individual occupying a position that was well beyond his capabilities, but not beyond his ambitions for power.
Denegri sabotaged Gen. Ch vez's investigation at once. In February 1987, he replaced all the prosecutors and put two of Montesinos' close friends in charge of the case. They essentially killed the investigation and accused Ch vez, of all things, of drug trafficking. To no avail, both Ch vez and Elejalde denounced Montesinos' role and his unseemly and close connection with Denegri. By 1988, many of the important members of the drug trafficking organization were guaranteed impunity. Montesinos now had the run of the attorney general's office, and that fact alone tremendously strengthened his position in the police and the judiciary.
Still, the armed forces remained forbidden territory for him. That year, however, an opening presented itself.
Fixing the Coverup on the Cayara Massacre
In May 1988, a Shining Path unit ambushed an army convoy in Cayara district in the southern part of Ayacucho province, the cradle of the guerrilla insurgency. By this time, the Maoist insurgents influenced significant areas in the Andes and upper jungle while at the same time gradually increasing activity in the cities. In the Cayara attack, they killed four soldiers and wounded 14 others. General Jos Valdivia, an artillery officer nicknamed el Mariscalito, the Little Marshal, ordered patrols to converge on the area and mete out punishment. On May 14, seven patrols entered the town of Cayara and wreaked havoc. Inside the church, where cowering townspeople had taken refuge, they separated the men from women and children and killed five men on the spot.One of the other patrols that had fanned out into the surrounding countryside intercepted a group of peasants. They again separated the men and began a hasty interrogation-torture session, which escalated into mass murder as 24 peasants were clubbed, axed, or knifed to death. Three survived.
That night, the place swarming with soldiers, a wounded man was apprehended, along with an 80-year-old woman. They were never seen again. Four days later, Gen. Valdivia flew in a helicopter to Cayara and ordered the population to gather. He read a list of alleged Shining Path sympathizers and asked those named to step forward. None did. Later that day, however, three on the list were captured by a military patrol. Soon after being seen alive on May 20, their corpses were found.
News of the killings arrived in Lima, and the outcry was immediate. Although Peru had become one of the more notorious human rights violators in the world, press freedom and democratic institutions made it possible to investigate and sometimes to prosecute those responsible for the more blatant atrocities. In Lima, a Senate commission was appointed to investigate the massacre; and in Ayacucho, prosecutor Carlos Escobar began collecting damaging evidence on Valdivia. He was encouraged by acting Attorney General Manuel Catacora, standing in for Denegri, who was on a trip to Europe.
Valdivia was panicking. Every time he tried to erase traces of the crimes, he entangled himself further. He got into a macabre race of burying and disinterring corpses, trying to keep ahead of the prosecutor's investigation. At that point, the army high command stepped in to help with the coverup. We didn't want yet another general disgraced, said a former high ranking military officer, so we sent two generals from the second military region to tidy things up.
But Escobar's investigation had gone too far for a conventional whitewash to work. Despite the obvious personal danger, Escobar had witnesses, cohesive written testimony, and plans to dig deeper. For the military, Escobar had become the problem. At that point, Montesinos began to advise artillery officer Valdivia. Attorney General Denegri was summoned from Rome, and in July 1988, Montesinos, Denegri, and two staffers met in a Lima restaurant to plan the removal of Escobar from the case and engineer impunity for Gen. Valdivia.
At Montesinos' prodding, Denegri set up a meeting on army grounds with the defense minister, Gen. Enrique L"pez Alb#jar, to propose a solution. It was agreed he would bring along an unnamed advisor. It was Montesinos. He was stopped at the gate where his photograph was on display, high and visible, with instructions to bar his access to any military installation. L"pez Alb#jar was informed, and agonized over what to do. Also on hand was his own advisor, Gen. Talavera, the man who had accused Montesinos of high treason. But the stakes were too high, and he let Montesinos in.
Talavera didn't open his mouth during the lunch, but Montesinos was in a genial mood. Rather than discuss tactical details of the coverup to follow, the meeting was simply a first step in a collaboration, and in yet another comeback for Montesinos. The coverup was direct and brutal. Although the badly harassed Escobar managed to submit a report in November 1988 accusing Valdivia and demanding that he should be brought to trial, he was ordered to hand over all information and was removed from the case. Then, Montesinos surreptitiously took the Cayara file containing Escobar's reports from the prosecutors' office and delivered it to officers of Valdivia's staff, who copied it, made some changes, and planned their actions.
In December 1988, three witnesses essential to the case were assassinated by hooded men at a highway roadblock. Another witness managed to survive a while longer. Martha Cris"stomo Garc!a was assassinated in Ayacucho in September 1989. A little earlier, a prosecutor almost as ductile as his boss conducted a new review and closed the case. Prosecutor Escobar, who was persistently followed and threatened, asked the U.S. government for asylum. Valdivia's military career continued its ascent, thoroughly influenced by and indebted to Montesinos.
A MATCH MADE IN HELL
Montesinos' next move was to reestablish contact with the intelligence services. His old friends Rafael Merino and Francisco Loayza worked at the National Intelligence Service, as a senior analyst and a part-time analyst respectively. Both persuaded intelligence chief General Edwin D!az that Montesinos could be of use.And indeed, at the end of 1989, Montesinos presented the reluctant D!az with his ticket back into the fold: detailed files from the attorney general's office on all people ever accused of subversive acts and on most victims of human rights abuses; seven or eight thousand of them.
Almost every day, Montesinos, now a collaborator on the SIN's payroll, arrived at the intelligence agency offices carrying packages of files, which were promptly computerized.
He was back on the inside and finally positioned to access the highest power if he could pick the right person to back. As elections to replace discredited President Alan Garc!a approached, few people in Peru doubted that writer Mario Vargas Llosa would win. At SIN, both Merino and Loayza were moonlighting as advisors to the Vargas Llosa camp.
Then, among the also-rans in the 1990 elections, an obscure candidate showed a modest increase in the polls. Alberto Fujimori, a gray academic, compensated for an un- remarkable intellect with an uncommon craftiness. Although he aimed at a Senate seat, he ran his own presidential ballot to achieve better name recognition. When he finished a surprising second, a run-off between him and Vargas Llosa was scheduled. President Garc!a directed SIN to cooperate with the candidate. Almost immediately, Fujimori needed the kind of help the intelligence agency could provide. Investigations revealed that the candidate had a plethora of embarrassing problems. The Garc!a government had given him a farm previously expropriated in the name of agrarian reform. And, more seriously, the candidate of Honesty, Technology, and Work was revealed as pertinaciously fraudulent in underpaying his taxes and undervaluing sales in the real estate business that he operated with his wife. After compiling a file, a congress deputy formally asked the attorney general to open criminal charges against the candidate.
When Fujimori's camp despaired of finding a clean way out, General D!az ordered Montesinos to help the afflicted candidate. In a short time, more than one witness was persuaded to modify his testimony and the files were fixed by subservient prosecutors. Then, sanitized documents in hand, Montesinos went to the worried Fujimori to tell him that he no longer had a problem but a solution. The effects of that visit endure to this day.
According to a National Intelligence Service source, the sanitized documents "were given to Montesinos. It was a nice work....We looked for effect. We knew that Fujimori would be worried to death, consulting over the problem; and suddenly Vladimiro would appear with the solution which would instantly save his political life. Could the SIN begin this relationship on better footing?" Fujimori and his wife Susana were more than impressed and saw Montesinos, not SIN, as their savior. Montesinos, one can safely assume, was not unhappy with the credit, and the debt it implied. Yet, as Fujimori's political fortunes skyrocketed, he remained frightened and insecure. He became increasingly dependent on the clandestine resources that General D!az and Montesinos could provide. D!az offered not only his own secret polls, but also wiretapping transcriptions and updated intelligence. But it was Montesinos who, after accompanying D!az on most of his visits, would return later alone; a nighttime semi-clandestine visitor to Fujimori's, or his sister's, home.
Maximo San Roman, Fujimori's running mate who later became president of the Senate, remembers the visits before the runoff. He came at night, close to eleven, and went straight to the house of Fujimori's sister, where Fujimori would be waiting alone. The almost nightly assignations cemented a symbiotic relationship between the paranoid outlook of the candidate and the conspiratorial feedback of the intriguer.
After Fujimori's sweeping victory, Montesinos convinced Fujimori that his life was in danger, and persuaded him to move to the C!rculo Militar, the army officer's social club, which was guarded by army troops. It was a calculated gamble Montesinos won when, as Fujimori's personal advisor, he was granted open access to the army facilities from which he had been banned in disgrace. Those few who openly opposed Montesinos' reinstatement into the ranks of the respectable incurred substantial risk. Montesinos convinced the elected president of a web of plots to unseat or kill him. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, Fujimori accepted Montesinos' enemies as his own.
MONTESINOS PLAYS MEPHISTO
On July 28, 1990, when Fujimori became the president of Peru, Montesinos instigated the purges of those mutual enemies. One of them, army intelligence chief Colonel Rafael C"rdova, for whom Montesinos' growing influence was an abomination, was peremptorily sacked from the position and sent into retirement. The new Minister of the Interior found himself with a list of close to 100 police officials to dismiss, including those who had investigated Rodr!guez L"pez, the drug-deputy del Pomar, and one of the most efficient anti-drug operatives among the police, General Juan Z rate Gambini.People linked to Montesinos were named to crucial posts in the army, the police, and the interior and justice ministries. General Valdivia (who had been saved by Montesinos in connection with the Cayara massacre) was named head of the crucial Military Region II. He dedicated himself, along with Montesinos, to fine-tuning plans for the self-coup that would finally be executed in 1992.
Montesinos' next step in consolidating power was to neutralize those elements in the army which had thwarted his ambitions in the past. The best instrument for controlling the army was the intelligence services which he promptly upgraded. Their growth was largely inward, as increased resources were allocated for spying on army officers. Under the heavy hand of new army intelligence chief and Montesinos artillery buddy, Col. Alberto Pinto C rdenas, intimidation reached previously unknown proportions.
Some tried to forestall Montesinos' influence. Vice-president and president of the Senate San Rom n warned Fujimori to get rid of that character, that the relationship could be harmful to him. But although Fujimori refused to dismiss Montesinos, he tried to keep their dealings semi-clandestine. This secrecy gave Fujimori (and, as it would turn out, also gave the CIA) a certain level of plausible deniability. And Montesinos turned secrecy into a source of strength: He literally became a man of the shadows; he could touch almost anyone from there, but no one could touch him.
Late at night, he would go straight to Fujimori's bedroom at the presidential palace. The president's military aides would see Montesinos, usually dressed in an overcoat uncommon in Lima going through the metal doors which Fujimori had installed in his private quarters. There, Fujimori's paranoia would be deliciously thrilled and policy would be made. From September to October 1990, Montesinos sat in on most meetings between the minister of defense and the joint chiefs of staff as Fujimori's personal representative. After a couple of unsubtle messages, the commanders-in-chief would patiently wait for the doctor, and then stand as he entered the room.
Gen. D!az, realizing too late he had been used, was prodded to resign. His replacement, Brigadier Gen. Julio Salazar Monroe, who had managed to stay in active service despite consistently substandard performance, was the perfect straw man: He was clever enough to understand he was just a figurehead, yet not bright enough to get bored and quit. Montesinos' two closest associates at the time were Rafael Merino, the brains; and Pinto C rdenas, the fangs.
By the end of 1990, no one dared openly contest Montesinos' authority in the armed forces or even less so in the police. Both he and Fujimori played the deniability game. Up to June 1991, Fujimori said that Montesinos was simply his lawyer, not a government official. Only in March 1992, after continuous grilling by the media, did he have to admit that Montesinos worked for SIN.
STRENGTHENING LINKS WITH THE CIA
As Montesinos reinforced his position, he also strengthened his relationship with the CIA. This link solidified the CIA's comeback in Peru. After Velasco had expelled the U.S. Military Mission and cut off the CIA's local antennae in the late 1960s, the Company's contacts with the Peruvian security forces were considerably weakened. Paradoxically, it was during the rhetorically anti-American Alan Garc!a regime that ties tightened again. Garc!a's right-hand man, Agust!n Mantilla, forged close working relations with the Agency, and was a guest at their Langley headquarters.Now in prison (he was arrested in the April 5 coup), Mantilla admitted that he had been aware of an intense relationship between Montesinos and the CIA, from the very beginning of Fujimori's regime, and even before. [Montesinos] regularly saw the chief of station in Lima, but he was also invited to CIA's headquarters, and he was in Langley at that time. Let's say that I am aware of an intimate relationship since 1990.
Many at the U.S. Embassy, especially those connected with the drug war, were unhappy over that collaboration and distanced themselves off-the-record: If a person offers you information, you always take it, no matter how disreputable the source. And if people offer you information which consistently turns out to be true, you take it consistently....[Montesinos] has insisted on talking only with one man, and he sees him sometimes two weeks apart. That man was the station chief in Lima, who, in the words of another U.S. diplomat was bamboozled by Montesinos. At any rate, by 1990, Montesinos, for all his drug and human rights baggage, was a prized and protected asset of the CIA.
By April 1991, because of that protection, he felt secure enough to move in and take control of the Peruvian side of the drug war. It was a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house; but secrecy and the CIA's help silenced objections.
Montesinos used his position to push the Lima office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from its lead role and to replace it with the CIA. Since 1985, when the DEA had supplied important information to Gen. Ch vez on the Rodr!guez L"pez drug organization which Montesinos was then defending, the ex-drug lawyer had feared and loathed the DEA. Right on cue, in 1991, Fujimori publicly attacked the DEA, first in the Upper Huallaga, and then at the San An-tonio presidential drug summit.
In September 1991, Montesinos had commandeered almost all the Peruvian side of the U.S.-Peru joint anti-drug programs. That month in a shocking surprise to the DEA and the State Department's Narcotics Assistance Unit (NAU) a SIN anti-drug arm was created and became an independent directorate. The outfit's creation wasn't even discussed, much less decided in Peru. It was decided in Washington through inter-agency meetings, in which the State Department's voice apparently didn't count much, says a former Lima-based drug warrior.
Some DEA and NAU personnel were enraged. Aside from issues of turf, the idea of Montesinos in charge of the Peruvian side of the drug war was a macabre irony. Many with long experience and good intelligence sources in Lima feared a sickening replay of the Noriega story. They held informal meetings and drafted a cable. It was never sent. Where is the proof? they were asked. You know what they mean here by proof, says the same source, a smoking gun.
THE FOX GETS CONTROL OF THE CHICKEN COOP
When some DEA agents tried to probe deeper into Montesinos' ties with traffickers, they ran into a bureaucratic stone wall. A frustrated embassy official explained U.S. government reluctance to examine Montesinos' connections with drug traffickers: If you have a son, are you going to be looking for his defects?This disingenuousness was replicated in Washington. On June 18, 1992, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) wrote to Assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs Bernard Aronson: What has Montesinos' relationship been to the U.S. intelligence community, and are we not running the same risk with him in terms of the seriousness of our commitment in anti-narcotics activities that we ran with Reagan-era pal Manuel Noriega? The answer, signed on August 7 by Janet G. Mullins, then in charge of Legislative Affairs, was evasive. We do not have regular diplomatic contact with [Montesinos] and are therefore limited in what we can say. There are reports that he wields great influence with President Fujimori and with the Peruvian military. Others dispute these reports. A U.S. congressional source who investigated the matter concluded that the CIA has a relationship with him. He is a very valuable asset....This should be of great concern to us.
The new anti-drug outfit did not, of course, catch traffickers or cocaine. Its members, trained and equipped by the CIA, were used for many other purposes, such as routine human rights violations and the overthrow of democracy in the April 5 coup. In the end, the unit functioned much as a similar one did in Haiti where intelligence service anti-drug units formed and trained by the CIA ended up cosponsoring the coup that overthrew Aristide;and another in Venezuela where intelligence units trafficked drugs on their own account.
TRYING TO TAME THE COURTS AND MEDIA
As Montesinos consolidated his hold on power, the threat of media exposure constrained his ability to act. Reporting by Caretaswas particularly worrisome. Through telephone wiretapping and spying, Montesinos discovered that the magazine's editor, Enrique Zileri, was working on another expos. On June 6, 1991, Montesinos sent one of his associates, former journalist V!ctor Riveros, to offer a deal in his name: He would feed Zileri a steady flow of first-rate intelligence, and in return, Caretas would not touch Montesinos.When Zileri turned the deal down, Montesinos launched a lawsuit charging that the magazine had terribly offended him by nicknaming him Rasputin. This was the second lawsuit that Montesinos brought against Caretas. Despite the flimsiness of the charges and Caretas' extensive evidence, Montesinos now had control of the courts and was able to easily win the case. After the self-coup, those judges supportive of Montesinos were rewarded; the few who had remained independent were purged. Ombudsman Guillermo Cabala told Sam Dillon, then with the Miami Herald, that Montesinos had fired him out of personal vengeance. After this purge, the judiciary is going to be completely submissive to the executive, and by that I mean Vladimiro Montesinos, Cabala said.
Montesinos' judicial victory against Caretas boosted his intimidation capability enormously. As author Rebecca West wrote in The New Meaning of Treason: The traitor can change the community into a desert haunted by fear..., and fear was Montesinos' currency. With it he had bought direct control of the national and army intelligence services, complete with their dirty tricks and assassination teams.
A DESERT HAUNTED BY FEAR
It was a resource he did not shrink from using. On the night of November 3, 1991, a group of men armed with silencer-equipped submachine guns broke into a pollada, a chicken barbecue in the Barrios Altos district, a poor, crowded neighborhood in central Lima. Although they were less than 30 meters from the police intelligence directorate's headquarters and no more than 50 meters from another police precinct, the hooded men parked their four-wheel vehicles just outside the entrance and burst into the grim multi-family building. They rounded up everyone the light of soul, the drunk, the stunned children had some lie on the floor, almost on top of each other, and began shooting at the mass of human flesh.Counterpoint to the blasting music, one survivor remembered the silenced shots sounding like popcorn. In less than a minute, 15 people, including an eight-year-old child, had been killed in the small room. Four survived with critical wounds. *47 What remained is what you have after people are massacred in small places. Blood reaches far and high, slaughterhouse smells remain for days, bodies seem compressed one against the other.
Despite a half-hearted effort to pin blame on the Shining Path, the signatures were clear. The house had been under army intelligence surveillance since early that year. The killers all used the army's assassination weapon of choice, a silencer-equipped H & K submachine gun. They disregarded the close proximity of the police. (In fact, a troop transport, filled with soldiers, drove in front of the two police units as the assassination was taking place and left the area immediately afterwards.) And finally, the death-squad vehicles had license plates. Somebody jotted down the numbers: One was assigned to the office of Santiago Fujimori, the president's brother; the other to the office of David Mej!a, the vice-minister of the interior. The police reported that the vehicles had been stolen.
The massacre was as brutally inept as the one at Cayara, only this one happened in central Lima. The outraged congress appointed a commission of inquiry, but as the prosecutor Pablo Livia was preparing to do ballistic tests with weapons belonging to army intelligence, he was taken off the case and purged after the April 5 coup.
CROSSING THE RUBICON
Why the massacre? That two or three people at the barbecue were believed to be Shining Path sympathizers, and the penchant for brutality shared by Pinto C rdenas and Montesinos could have provided enough justification. It is also possible that the killing was a bridge-burning operation to push the doubtful or reluctant within Fujimori's entourage down the road to a coup d'tat.Many members of Fujimori's entourage had come to realize that they had much to lose under a law-abiding, democratic regime. The only way to guarantee impunity was to complete the plunge into illegality. In the months that followed, several reliable military sources leaked names of the death-squad members and details of the action. In late 1992, Vice President M ximo San Rom n distributed intelligence notes clandestinely sent to him by dissident agents. The papers described in detail how the massacre had been planned and executed; they pointed to Montesinos as ordering the operation. One week later, Si newsweekly ran a story, based on confidential sources, which identified the participants and the chain of command all the way to Montesinos.
After his self-coup, on receiving a request from figurehead SIN Director Julio Salazar, Fujimori promoted all the officers who had been identified as participants in the mass-murder.
With the pollada affair setting the public agenda, Montesinos and Fujimori secretly concentrated on planning the self-coup. It is now clear that, by early 1990, one of the things they had agreed on was the eventual overthrow of democracy. As the Peru Report, with well-placed sources in Peru's intelligence establishment, wrote soon after the April coup, the coup structure was also in place almost from the start of Mr. Fujimori's period in July 1990.... The objective of the coup was to seize dictatorial power and discard laws that restricted him under democratic procedure.
Only Montesinos, Fujimori, and their most immediate accomplices Peru's real chain of command were in the know. General Valdivia, for whom toppling democracy meant impunity for the Cayara massacre, was in charge of the military side. The air force and navy commanders-in-chief were kept in the dark until the eve of the coup. According to most sources, the self-coup had been planned for 1993, but a number of factors pushed up the schedule. Most problematic was the increasingly assertive parliament, which had, for instance, rejected the promotion of two close Montesinos associates, Brig. Gen. Julio Salazar Monroe and Col. Enrique Causso.
At any rate, by late March, Fujimori was sleeping less at the government palace, and more at army headquarters, where his closest companions were Montesinos, Pinto C rdenas, and Valdivia. There, they prepared the coup.
On April 5, 1992, General Valdivia, closely watched by Pinto C rdenas, executed the successful coup. Democracy and the rule of law were finally overthrown after 12 immensely difficult years, betrayed from the inside. Dozens of people, including the author, who had criticized the government, were rounded up during the window of impunity which the early hours of a coup usually open. In some cases, such as those of former President Alan Garc!a (who managed to escape) and former Interior Minister Agust!n Mantilla, the government tried to use those arrests to rouse popular support and justify the coup. In other instances, the arrests were naked examples of a gangster regime in action, bent on revenge. When Montesinos and Fujimori arrested this writer, they miscalculated; they had not foreseen the strong international protest which forced my release.
They also misjudged the integrity of some. Vice President San Rom n denounced the coup, broke with Fujimori, and was proclaimed the legitimate president of Peru by the dissolved parliament, assembled for the occasion. The nomination had only moral value, but it demanded no small amount of courage. A month later, interviewed by an Organization of American States (OAS) mission in Lima to negotiate a way out of the coup, San Rom n warned that if a return to democracy was not accomplished soon, the country would be handed over to drug traffickers. Any dialogue with Fujimori had only one condition: Montesinos' dismissal. He is the president in the shadows, San Rom n told the mission. The true ruler of Peru is Montesinos, and Fujimori is only a facade. Retired army general, Sinesio Jarama, expressed the same point with soldierly directness, I think that Montesinos...finally found his puppet.
THE OBLIVION COMMANDOS
Puppeteer or ventriloquist, there he was, Montesinos, the paradigmatic pariah, finally in the center of power, unhampered by accountability. It had been a long road to power, and now power was needed to erase the path dirty and dangerous with the traces of old crimes. So the first post-coup operatives were directed to unleash amnesia.Between April 5 and 10, while Fujimori continued to insist he had carried out the coup to end economic recession, fight drugs, and defeat the Shining Path, scores of uniformed soldiers and plainclothes military intelligence agents did the real work. By night, they entered the offices and central archives of the Palacio de Justicia, Peru's judiciary center, and the Fiscal!a de la Naci"n, the attorney general's building. Soon, the buildings echoed with the dull thud of weighty files thrown from shelves and drawers. The oblivion commandos worked through two days and nights. In order to save themselves the bother of carrying the documents down narrow flights of stairs, soldiers and spies threw the papers from a balcony into military pick-up trucks parked below. When the sacking ended and before the judicial purge began one-third of the nearly 30,000 files of active judicial cases in Peru had been removed. The buildings remained empty for days, surrounded by a ring of soldiers.
Gone were hundreds of files useful for blackmail or slander; gone were files concerning lawsuits around Fujimori and his family; and gone were all the files, not previously removed, on Montesinos. This paper purge was, in fact, one of the main reasons for the coup a coverup coup, where not only bothersome individuals, but history itself was purged.
A few days later, a more relaxed Fujimori sat at a military headquarters watching TV. On the screen was his new spokesman, Foreign Minister Augusto Blacker, an ambitious economist whose servility would soon be repaid with dismissal from the cabinet. He was explaining to the foreign press that the government of emergency and national reconstruction would last in its extra-constitutional role for 18 to 20 months. Fujimori smirked and turned to people surrounding him, among them Montesinos' close associate, Rafael Merino, He must have meant 18 years, not 18 months! Some weeks later, as Fujimori was lulling the OAS general assembly with promises of a prompt return to democracy, military intelligence agents were busily distributing a leaflet in Lima: Under a picture of the dictator, the title said it all: Fujimori: President for life of Peru.
The folded leaflet, signed by an ad-hoc New Dawn Movement, was as close as Montesinos ever came to delivering his own political manifesto. "So, [Fujimori] used force and this is supposedly an evil thing because it is illegal? What did they want! ...Is it not true that in the origin of all modern states, might always preceded right? Political freedom is only a relative idea....With an audacious coup, Pisistratus took the citadel and prepared Pericles's century. Brutus violated the constitution, expelled the Tarquin, and founded, through knifings, a republic whose greatness is the most magnificent spectacle ever witnessed in the universe....When did the kingdoms of Spain, France, and Germany become powerful? Wasn't it with the likes of Leon I, Jules II, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon? Men all with a terrible fist, leaning more on their swords' pommels than on their countries' constitutions...and if we need contemporary examples, we'll find plenty of them: Spain, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Chile, etc. They are now happy and prosperous democracies, only thanks to previous authoritarian regimes."
To graft that happiness to Peru's future, it continued, we need to centralize authority and command, but mostly, we need a continuity in power, or, what is the same, a president for life.
TO THE VICTOR
All that was left was for Montesinos to savor in public the fruits of the victory he had engineered, by necessity, in secret. The moment came some weeks into the dictatorship. Brushing aside the rejection of the already closed legislature, Fujimori promoted Salazar Monroe to full general and Colonel Causso to brigadier general. After the open ceremony at army headquarters, all the generals, one by one, walked the line to where Montesinos, the only man in civilian clothes, stood, and paid their respects to the man who counted, the godfather. This was victory.A few still resisted and spoke out from Caretas and other magazines, to the main political parties, to M ximo San Rom n, who reiterated his worry that the country is falling into the hands of a Mafia. But acknowledgment of Montesinos' influence ran beyond the fawning line of generals at the ceremony. Former enemies who had spoken openly against him would now become wet with fright if he, or Pinto, or even Merino addressed a pointed, or passing, remark mentioning them, their property, their families. All the generals now had to hide their terror behind enthusiastic allegiance and servile obeisance. As Sir John Harrington wrote long ago:
"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
The U.S. administration, initially flustered, shrugged off the violation of democracy with mumblings about realpolitik and legitimized the coup. Fujimori was the name of the game, the only game in town, the same old our son-of-a-bitch game.
MONTESINOS PUBLICLY LINKED TO HUMAN RIGHTS CRIMES
Even then, at the beginning of 1993, Vladimiro Montesinos' name and the extent of his power, however shadowy, were open secrets. Then in April and May, two extraordinary revelations surrounding yet another horrific human rights violation forced them irrevocably into the public glare. On July 18, 1992, a professor and nine students from the Enrique Guzm n y Valle teachers' college (La Cantuta) had been abducted by armed men and never again seen alive. Although pressure from press, human rights groups, and family members kept the case itself from dying, it languished with hundreds of other human rights violations in a purgatory of official denials and neglect.Then, at the beginning of April 1993, Henry Pease, an opposition congressmember, read a document signed Sleeping Lion. Members of this clandestine group of active duty officers were disgusted by the politics of disappearance and assassination. They detailed the crime of La Cantuta: The Colina death squad kidnapped the ten, murdered them, and then hurriedly buried, disinterred, and reburied the bodies. The document named the death squad members, beginning with its operational chief, Major Santiago Mart!n Rivas,and revealed that it operated under orders from the de facto head of the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, and army chief Hermoza. According to Sleeping Lion, the Colina group had carried out various other murders in addition to those at La Cantuta, including the November 1991 urban massacre at the barbecue in the Barrios Altos section of Lima. (This crime had also been independently linked back to Montesinos almost from the moment it took place.)
The painstakingly detailed Sleeping Lion document forced the constituent assembly to create an investigative commission. After testifying before it on April 20, 1993, Gen. Hermoza verbally attacked the opposition members on the commission and accused them of collusion with terrorism. The next day, tank units began parading through the streets of Lima in an open demonstration of power. The assembly backed off.
It was into this tinderbox of repression and fear that Gen. Rodolfo Robles a man who clearly had privileged access to information threw a lighted torch. On May 6, 1993, the well-respected commander of the army's academic centers, the third man from the top of the Peruvian army hierarchy, made a gesture without precedent in the history of his institution. As he was about to be kicked upstairs to the institutional oblivion of a Washington posting and his sons trans- ferred to the guerrilla zones, Robles went to the U.S. Embassy, where he was joined by his family, and asked for asylum.
At a hastily called news conference, his wife read an eight-page handwritten letter from her husband which expressed the profound emotion of a decision made at high personal cost. The general, it announced, was leaving the institution to which I have dedicated 37 years of my life, from the age of 16, in order to denounce
"an intolerable degradation for a soldier and for a man, which is related to the systematic violation of the human rights of the Peruvian population on the part of a group of thugs who, under the orders of the ex-army captain Vladimiro Montesinos Montesinos [sic] and the servile approval of EP [Peruvian Army] General Nicol s de Bari Hermoza Rios, the unworthy commanding general of the EP, are committing crimes that are unjustly smearing all of the glorious Peruvian army."A few weeks later, from his exile in Buenos Aires, Robles added, surprisingly, the name of his principal source: Gen. Willy Chirinos, who, for a short time some weeks after the La Cantuta kidnapping, had been the director of army intelligence. According to Robles, Chirinos had tried to deactivate the Colinas death squad, but was first thwarted and then fired by Montesinos."[I] denounce the following before my people: The crime of La Cantuta, in which a professor and ten [sic] students of this university were victimized, was committed by a special intelligence detachment that operates under the direct orders of the presidential advisor and virtual chief of the SIN, Vladimiro Montesinos Montesinos [sic], and whose activity is coordinated with the Army Intelligence Service (SIE) and with the Intelligence Directorate (DINTE) of the army, but is approved and always known by the commanding general of the army. "
The effect of his asylum request and denunciations was explosive. With this act of defiance, Robles transformed a grimly routine disappearance case into what Americas Watch Investigator for the Andean Region, Robin Kirk, called, the most important human rights case since the beginning of the internal war in Peru in 1980, not because of the number of corpses or the gravity of the affair, but because it is the case where the relationship to the executive is the clearest....In the other cases, they came to [identify the responsibility] of the commanding officer. In La Cantuta, it was politics at the highest level.
DIGGING UP THE EVIDENCE
Still the Fujimori administration stonewalled. On July 8, 1993, however, almost a year after the kidnappings, and three months after Robles' denunciation, the independent magazine Si received a map pinpointing a clandestine grave in the Cieneguilla district adjacent to Lima, allegedly containing the remains of some of the victims of La Cantuta.Now the coverup began in earnest. Refusing to investigate, Fujimori-appointee, Attorney General Blanca Nlida Col n, threatened the editor of Si with prosecution. At the same time, the anti-terrorist police produced detainees who, it claimed, were Shining Path members who had delivered the map to Si as part of an elaborate propaganda hoax. (The man charged with concocting the map was held for a year despite a complete lack of evidence. Eventually the regime was forced to release him, but not to acknowledge the injustice.)
But in the end, the dead spoke. In the common grave at Cieneguilla among the half-burned human remains was a key chain with four keys. Raida C"ndor, mother of Armando, one of the disappeared students, recognized it as her son's.
Rumors were rife that the police and justice officials would attempt to alter the keys, despite their having been photographed by the press. Finally, growing national and international pressure forced the justice official in charge of the case to test the keys. They fit and also unlocked the door to the coverup. In a relatively short time, other graves containing the remains of the disappeared were discovered. Fujimori announced in an interview with the New York Times that some army officers were under arrest. Then, in a hurried process with a military tribunal, the death squad members were sentenced to various prison terms. *57 The army itself, however, continued day by day to centralize under Hermoza's command, *58 and the intelligence services remained under the control of the now very notorious but still unofficial Vladimiro Montesinos.
THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
The climate of intimidation has begun to lose its oppressive capacity. In October 1993, a constitutional referendum organized by Fujimori to legitimize his regime ended with the democratic opposition gaining a healthy 47 percent of the vote.Since then, the independent press has continued to reinvigorate itself and Fujimori's position has been further eroded. Even surveys conducted by pollsters close to the regime now give a clear lead to a man who, at this point, looks likely to become the opposition candidate former U.N. Secretary General Javier Prez de Cullar. International pressure has forced the regime to back down from its previous hardline agenda and assume the unconvincing image of a kinder, gentler Fujimori.
Montesinos himself has had some failures to lament. He tried to steal credit for the capture of the Shining Path leader Abimael Guzm n. In fact, the anti-terrorist police, commanded by Gen. Antonio Ketin Vidal, tracked down and arrested the elusive guerrilla leader. After Ket!n informed the press of this feat, Montesinos was so furious, he promptly engineered Ketin's removal.
Then, Montesinos' plan to pull a psywar victory backfired. He met often with Guzm n in his cell and persuaded him, by means unknown, to write letters to Fujimori asking for peace negotiations. The first two letters were timed for release just before the October 1993 referendum on the constitution. The move turned out to be totally counterproductive for Fujimori. It not only helped the opposition, but also harmed the army's counterinsurgency strategy. Guzm n's call for negotiations was seen as capitulation. It distanced him from the largely reorganized Shining Path leadership and energized the guerrilla attacks.
Fiascos and setbacks aside, both Fujimori and Montesinos are still firmly entrenched. It remains to be seen whether, if Fujimori is defeated at the 1995 election, they will surrender power peaceably. If history is any guide, there is reason for worry. Fujimori and his Svengali might once again trample legality and democracy as they did in 1992.