Vladimiro Montesinos

Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres (born May 20, 1945) was the long-standing head of Peru's intelligence service, Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), under President Alberto Fujimori. In 2000, secret videos were televised revealing him bribing an elected congressman to leave the opposition and join the Fujimorist side of Congress; the ensuing scandal caused Montesinos to flee the country, hastening the resignation of Fujimori. Subsequent investigations revealed Montesinos to be at the centre of a vast web of illegal activities, including embezzlement, graft, gunrunning, and drug trafficking, for which he is currently being tried.

Early years

Montesinos was a Peruvian politician. Montesinos was born in Arequipa. His parents were fervent communists who named him after Lenin. In 1965, as a military cadet, he studied at the US Army's School of the Americas.

In the early 1970s, during the leftist Military Government of General Juan Velasco, Montesinos became a captain of the army. In 1973, he was appointed aide to the army chief and prime minister, General Edgardo Mercado. In 1976, Montesinos was charged by My. Army Jose Fernandez Salvatteci with spying for the United States because he revealed a list of weapons that Peru bought from the Soviet Union. The investigation was terminated abruptly by General Mercado. After Velasco was deposed in 1975, Montesinos made a two-week visit to the United States, paid for by an American government grant. Upon his return to Lima, he was arrested for not having obtained formal permission for the trip from the government of Peru. During the investigation that followed, top-secret documents were found in his possession that he had photocopied and given to the American CIA.

The CIA connection

US State Department documents later declassified suggest why the CIA may have sought out Montesinos. At the time, Peru was the only left-wing regime in a continent dominated by right-wing governments, and the United States was locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Montesinos had information about a potential attack by the Peruvian generals, possibly backed by Cuban forces, against long-time rival Chile, then ruled by dictator Augusto Pinochet (allied with the US) in order to recover territories lost in the War of the Pacific. [1]

It was also discovered that Montesinos traveled to the US without authorization of the army command, and fraudulently created the military document required to travel. He furthermore visited several foreign institutions representing the Peruvian army, but without being authorized by it. The following year, Montesinos was tried in Peruvian tribunals and was dishonorably discharged and sentenced to military prison.

In February 1978 Montesinos was freed after serving two years of prison. At that time, his first cousin, the lawyer Sergio Cardenal Montesinos, gave him work at his law office and insisted Montesinos finish his law studies. In April of the same year, Montesinos registered in the San Marcos University (UNMSM). On July 24, only three months after registering, Montesinos was falsely awarded the title of lawyer by the university. The following month, using this fake title, he registered as lawyer in the Superior Court of Lima. Ten days later, he became a member of the Colegio de Abogados de Lima, the Lima lawyers' association. Montesinos soon became known as the lawyer for several major Colombian drug-traffickers in Peru.

In 1979, he signed as a guarantor of the rent contract for several offices and warehouses used by the Colombian Jaime Tamayo Tamayo, in which cocaine manufacturing labs were established and which were later raided by the police. In 1984, Montesinos sold classified information about Peru to the Ecuadorian Army. The information contained the complete listings of all weapons that Peru had purchased from the USSR.

The Fujimori years

Montesinos first came to public notice when he defended Fujimori, then an obscure candidate in the 1990 Peruvian presidential elections, against accusations of fraudulent real estate dealings. The paperwork in that case mysteriously disappeared and the charges were quietly dropped. After Fujimori won the election on July 28, 1990, Montesinos became his chief advisor and the effective head of the SIN.

Through his position, he came to have virtually unlimited power within Peru. By promoting his former classmates into top positions, Montesinos came to control the very Peruvian Armed Forces that had once kicked him out. During the course of the decade, he established a network of corruption that permeated media, business, political parties, and government. Toward the end of the Fujimori years, it was reported that Montesinos' tax records indicated he was making $600,000 a year, even though his official salary was $18,000.

Political repression

Montesinos is widely suspected of threatening or harassing Fujimori's political opponents. Evidence shows he supervised a death squad known as the Grupo Colina, part of the National Intelligence Service, which was thought to have been responsible for the La Cantuta massacre, in which nine students and a professor disappeared from La Cantuta university on July 18, 1992. Four officers who were tortured after plotting a coup d'état against Fujimori in November 1992 later stated that Montesinos took an active part in torturing them.

On March 16, 1998, former Peruvian Army Intelligence Agent Luisa Zanatta accused Montesinos of ordering illegal wiretaps of leading politicians and journalists. Zanatta also said that army intelligence agents killed fellow agent Mariella Barreto Riofano because she gave a magazine information about human rights violations and where bodies from the La Cantuta massacre were buried.

Shortly before Barreto was killed, she told Zanatta that she was part of the Grupo Colina death squad responsible for the La Cantuta massacre. Barreto's body was found by a roadside on March 29, 1997. The body showed evidence that Barreto was tortured before she was decapitated and her hands and feet cut off.

Control of the media

During the Fujimori years, Montesinos gained extensive control of the media in Peru. By the end of 1999, Montesinos had editorial control over TV Channels 2, 4, 5, 9, and 13. TV Channel 7 was already state-owned. One of the country's two cable channels, Channel 10 had been secretly purchased by the armed forces. That left just one independent station in Peru: Channel N, a twenty-four-hour cable news outlet that reached barely 5% of the population.

In April 1997, Baruch Ivcher's Frecuencia Latina Channel 2 broadcast allegations by Peruvian Army Intelligence agent Leonor La Rosa that she was tortured by intelligence agents (later brought into question or proved false [2],[3]). On July 14 1997, Ivcher, who was born in Israel, was legally stripped of his Peruvian nationality and in September control of his station was handed to minority shareholders more sympathetic to the government. In response, former United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar said, "Peru is no longer a democracy. We are now a country headed by an authoritarian regime."

2000 Elections

Main article: Peruvian national election, 2000

During the controversial 2000 election, a journalist claimed to have a videotape of Montesinos bribing election officials to fix the vote. He also claimed that he was kidnapped by secret police agents, who sawed his arm to the bone in an attempt to extract the tape from him. In view of such tactics, the Clinton administration threatened briefly not to recognize Fujimori's victory. It backed off from this threat, however, pursuing a policy of pressuring the government to clean up its image, in part by ousting Montesinos.

US policy was aimed at preserving these "achievements" of the Fujimori regime, while doing away with some of its "excesses." Continuing political unrest in Peru would have represented a serious problem as operations against the FARC in Colombia got under way. Peru was needed as a base of operations and a backstop against guerrillas based in Colombia's south, not far from the Peruvian border. [4]

Drug Traffic

A declassified DEA document dated August 27, 1996, shows U.S. authorities were aware of allegations that Montesinos and the chairman of Peru's joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Nicolás Hermoza Ríos (also later jailed), were taking protection money from drug traffickers. [5]

Despite evidence that Montesinos was in business with Colombian narcotraffickers, the CIA paid Montesinos's organization $1 million a year for 10 years to fight drug trafficking.

Montesinos was also accused by Demetrio Chávez Peñaherrera, known as "El Vaticano", of being a protector of drug trafficers. In a drug trafficking trial on August 16, 1996, Chávez Peñaherrera stated that he had bribed members of the Peruvian Armed Forces and had also paid Montesinos, as the effective chief of the Peruvian Intelligence Service (SIN) to be able to operate freely in Campanilla, a jungle area of the Huallaga region.

The recording showed that members of the army had let his organization operate freely in the Huallaga region, in exchange for bribes. During certain appearances in the court, Chávez appeared drugged and maybe tortured. After sentencing, while in prison, Chávez talked to the press and revealed that Montesinos mentioned to him at one point that he "did some work" with Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellín Cartel.

Montesinos was paid US$50,000 a month during 1991 and 1992. [6] As proof, in the trial were presented recordings of radio communications between drug trafficers of Chávez's organization and members of the Armed Forces.

He also mentioned that the ex-president of the Armed Forces Joined Command, retired general Nicolás de Bari Hermoza, and the ex-President Alberto Fujimori, had both complete knowledge of the illicit acts of Montesinos.

Downfall

Frequently, Montesinos secretly videotaped himself bribing individuals in his office, and he made thousands of such tapes, incriminating politicians, officials and military officers and, in all probability, Fujimori himself. His downfall appears to have been precipitated by the discovery of a major arms shipment, airlifted from Jordan via Peru, to the FARC insurgent guerrillas in southern Colombia negotiated by guerrilla leader Tomás Medina Caracas.

Montesinos claimed all the credit for uncovering the arms smuggling, which involved upwards of 10,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles. Jordan, however, rejected the Peruvian version, insisting the shipments were legitimate government-to-government deals. Evidence emerged which pointed to Montesinos having orchestrated the gun-running operation rather than dismantling it. A senior Peruvian general was found to have participated in the deal, and another principal participant was a government contractor who has signed at least eleven deals with the regime, most of them to provide supplies to the Peruvian military.

According to one report, a group of military officers angered by Montesinos's apparent role in the arms deal broke into his offices and stole the video that was subsequently broadcast. Because of this deal, Montesinos lost the support of the US, which attached high strategic importance to crushing the FARC. Montesinos turned from being an asset to a liability.

The Vladi-videos

On the evening of September 14, 2000, Peruvian cable TV station Canal N broadcast a video of Montesinos appearing to give a bribe of $15,000 to opposition congressman Alberto Kouri for his defection to President Alberto Fujimori's Perú 2000 party. The video, sold to the Peruvian opposition party FIM (Independent Moralising Front), was the first of many of his tapes to become public. The video caused Fujimori's remaining support to collapse, and immediately he announced the dissolution of the intelligence service and new elections--in which he would not run. Shortly thereafter, Montesinos fled to Venezuela, while Fujimori fled to Japan shortly after to avoid Peruvian justice.

In subsequent months, some of the most infamous "vladi-videos" were released. In one, owners of Channel 2 are offered USD $500,000 a month to ban appearances of the political opposition on their channel. Another shows Channel 4 owners getting $1.5 million a month for similar cooperation. Others show Montesinos counting out $350,000 in cash to Channel 5's proprietor and the owner of Channel 9 receiving $50,000 to cancel an investigative series called SIN censura ("Uncensored"). In June 2001, the Venezuelan government arrested Montesinos in Caracas and extradited him back to Peru, where he is facing several trials.

Trial

Currently, Montesinos is imprisoned at the Callao maximum-security prison naval base (which was built under his orders during the 1990s) and is facing sixty-three charges that range from drug trafficking to murder. The lengthy series of court cases in Lima to which he is being tried is revealing the scale of the corruption during the Fujimori administration.

One notable example is the 1998 purchase of three second-hand MiG-29 fighter planes from Belarus, for which the Peruvian Government is thought to have paid USD $300 million, though the actual cost of the planes is said to have been only around $100 million. Following subsequent international investigations involving the sale, the government of Italy issued an arrest warrant for Yevgeny Ananyev, former general director of the government-owned company Rosvooruzhenie. Ananyev has been accused of money laundering with Montesinos by diverting $18 million through Swiss and Italian banks after overseeing the sale of the jet fighters via Belarus. [7]

Montesinos has been found guilty of embezzlement, illegally assuming his post as intelligence chief, abuse of power, influence peddling and bribing TV stations. Those carry sentences of between five and fifteen years, but Peruvian prison sentences are served concurrently, so prosecutors continue to pursue him on additional charges. He has also been found not guilty on two specific charges of corruption and conspiracy related to the mayor of Callao who he was alleged to have helped evade drug trafficking charges.

Montesinos was sentenced in September 2006 to a twenty-year prison term for his direct involvement in an illegal arms deal aimed at providing 10,000 assault weapons to Colombian rebels. Tribunal judges made their ruling based on evidence that placed Montesinos, at the center of an intricate web of negotiations designed to transport assault rifles from Jordan to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. [8].

In August 2004, U.S. officials returned to Peru $20 million in funds embezzled by Montesinos that had been deposited in U.S. banks by two men working for him. Prime Minister Carlos Ferrero and other prosecutors believe that the total amount embezzeled by Montesinos during his tenure at the National Intelligence Service surpasses one billion dollars, most of which was deposited in foreign banks.

In October 2004 Wilmer Yarleque Ordinola, 44, an alleged member of Montesino's Colina group death squad was apprehended in Virginia, US. He stands accused in 26 of the 7,260 deaths or disappearances attributed to the Colina Group. He was found guilty of immigration fraud and as of October 2004 was in the custody of the U.S. Marshals office in Alexandria, facing extradition to Peru. [9] The suspect was able to persuade the judge to grant him a writ of habeas corpus, but the US Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed that decision [10]

Jorge Baca Campodonico, former Peruvian Economy Minister (1998-1999) during the Fujimori administration, may now be extradited from Argentina following the Argentine Supreme Court’s recent decision to reject honoring his diplomatic immunity, a request made years ago. In Peru Baca Campodonico currently faces charges of fraud for his alleged illicit association with Vladimiro Montesinos.

Montesinos is currently on trial for alleged extra-judicial killings of the MRTA hostage-takers during the 1997 Japanese embassy siege. In addition to Montesinos, the former chief of the armed forces, Nicolas de Bari Hermoza, and retired Colonel Roberto Huaman are also accused of ordering the extra-judicial execution of the 14 rebels following the commando raid in April to free the more than 70 diplomats who had been held hostage for more than four months in the Japanese embassy. The Peruvian special forces’ recapture resulted in the deaths of one hostage, two commandos and all of the MRTA rebels. The former Japanese political attaché Hidetaka Ogura, one of the hostages freed from the Embassy, has stated that he saw up to at least three of the MRTA rebels captured alive. If convicted, Montesinos and the 2 former military officers face up to 20 years in prison.

External links

• "Army Played 'A Key Role' In Departure Of Fujimori, Intelligence Service Scandals Rankled Peruvian Military" (Washington Post September 18, 2000)
• "Bribes, Lies, and Videotape in Peru" (Business Week February 2, 2001)
• "CIA Gave $10 Million to Peru's Ex-Spymaster" (July 3, 2001)
• Declassified United States NSA documents about Montesinos
• Profile of Vladimiro Montesinos (desaparecidos.org)
• "How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru" (by John McMillan and Pablo Zoido, March 2004)
• "Montesinos, Fujimori, Toledo and Peru's future"
• "Peru, the disintegration of the Fujimori regime" (World Socialist website)
• "The Betrayal of Peru's Democracy: Montesinos as Fujimori's Svengali" (Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1994)
• "'The Doctor' Divided U.S. Officials, CIA Defended Peruvian Against Human-Rights Accusations" (Washington Post, September 22, 2000)
• Montesinos: The end of the road (BBC News, 24 June, 2001)
• "The Meaning of Montesinos"
• "The Spy who would rule Peru"
• "Videomania" (the Economist, February 8 2001)
• "Borron y Manchas Nuevas: Documentos de inteligencia norteamericanos sobre Montesinos" (Caretas) (in Spanish)
• "Montesinos's Web", PBS FRONTLINE/World October 2005. View streaming video of recordings secretly made by former Peruvian intelligence chief Vladimir Montesinos of the CIA station chief, a Peruvian Supreme Court judge and a high-ranking executive of a major U.S. mining company, the documentary itself, as well as Web exclusive features, interview transcripts, FOIA documents and a "gallery of players" involved in the protracted legal dispute over Yanacocha, one of the richest gold mines in the world.