Montesinos’s mistake was that he bugged his own office. A hidden camera caught him giving $15,000 to an opposition lawmaker as an apparent bribe. The Moralizing Front–one of whose leaders is Fujimori’s embittered ex-wife–got hold of the videotape and released it two weeks ago. Already under fire for apparently rigging last spring’s presidential election, Fujimori abruptly announced he would dismantle the SIN, resign his own office and call elections “as soon as possible.” Then the transition came to a jarring halt. Fujimori, 62, said he would stay in power until his successor is inaugurated–10 months from now. And he hinted that he might run for president again in 2006. “I’ve got a little surprise for you about what I’m going to do,” he said last week at a news conference. If his own candidate wins the presidential election planned for next March, Fujimori would become the power behind the throne–and possibly his successor’s successor.
For days, Fujimori failed to formally fire Montesinos. Instead, the intelligence chief dropped out of sight; rumors variously had him plotting a coup with his friends in the Army and negotiating his own departure into exile. Panama refused to take him in, but apparently Brazil was a possibility. A senior U.S. official said talks were underway with potential host countries–“big, Portuguese-speaking countries on the same continent,” he said coyly. Late last week the government finally agreed with opposition figures on a plan to strip Montesinos of his official functions.
Meanwhile, opposition leaders dithered on the politics of the crisis. A call for a united front came from Alejandro Toledo, the Stanford-trained economist who finished second in the first round of the voting last April and then dropped out of the runoff against Fujimori, accusing the president of cheating. But other party leaders rejected Toledo’s plea. One opinion poll showed Toledo had no greater support than Fernando Olivera, the Moralizing Front leader who actually released the videotape. A divided opposition would give the next election to the candidate of Fujimori’s party–who, by the end of last week, still had not been chosen from a field of yes-men.
Can Fujimori run Peru without Montesinos at his side? “El Doctor” (as lawyers are called in Peru) was the president’s most valuable fixer. Among other duties, he made it his business to collect dirt about the tax evasions, embezzlements and love affairs of Peru’s economic and political elite. He may even have dug up some dark secret about Fujimori. Montesinos ingratiated himself with Fujimori during the 1990 election campaign when he helped quash a government investigation into allegations of tax fraud on the sale of property belonging to the candidate and his wife, Susana. Some Peruvians wondered whether Montesinos might have acquired, at some point, documents proving that Fujimori altered his own birth records to conceal the fact that he was born in Japan, rather than Peru. Fujimori and his mother have always denied that charge–which, if proven, would have disqualified him from the presidency of Peru.
After Fujimori won the 1990 election, Montesinos quietly established himself as the new president’s key aide on security matters. He helped organize the brutal but successful military campaign against the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas. In 1993 an Army general, Rodolfo Robles, accused the SIN of forming antiterrorist death squads that were used to murder slum-dwellers in Lima in 1991 and a university professor and nine of his students a year later. Robles, who was dishonorably discharged soon after he criticized Montesinos, claimed the intelligence chief was one of the “intellectual authors” of the killings. The government denied the charge.
Montesinos got on a lot better with most of the other generals. One of them is his brother-in-law, Luis Cubas Portal, who currently commands the military region around Lima, which puts him in the best position to launch a coup. In 1992, with the backing of the military, Fujimori launched a “self-coup”–in effect, suspending his own democratically elected government. Congress and the courts were dissolved in order, Fujimori said, to campaign more effectively against terrorism, hyperinflation and corruption. Montesinos was widely regarded as one of the authors of the coup, and while democracy was in limbo, he expanded his own powers.
Montesinos also took charge of the government’s campaign against drug trafficking, where he sometimes made himself useful to the U.S. antinarcotics effort. But in 1996, a convicted drug lord, Demetrio Chavez Penaherrera, testified he had paid Montesinos $50,000 a month for more than a year in exchange for information about upcoming drug raids by security forces. Again, the government denied the charge, and no action was taken against Montesinos. By 1998, his role in the war on drugs was so discredited that Barry McCaffrey, the White House director of drug policy, said publicly he wanted nothing to do with him.
An even more serious gap in Montesinos’s Teflon coating opened in mid-April. He and Fujimori held an unprecedented joint news conference to claim credit for uncovering an arms-smuggling conspiracy. They said the ring was led by two former Peruvian Army lieutenants, who purchased Kalashnikov assault rifles in Jordan and then smuggled them to leftist rebels in neighboring Colombia. But U.S., Colombian and Jordanian officials publicly contradicted Montesinos’s version of events. They said high-ranking Peruvian officers on active duty obtained the weapons, telling Jordanian officials the rifles were intended for their own armed forces. Opposition parties charged that Montesinos and some of his friends in the military had been running guns to the Colombian guerrillas themselves.
Earlier this month U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and President Clinton’s national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, met with Fujimori at the United Nations and “gave him hell,” as a senior administration official puts it. Without mentioning Montesinos by name, they asked Fujimori to cooperate with the Organization of American States, which had criticized the presidential vote as unfair and called for Montesinos’s dismissal. The OAS, once a paper tiger, has begun to grow some teeth now that democracy has swept Latin America. “People might feel it’s OK to have the U.S. mad at them, but they don’t feel it’s OK to have the whole continent mad at them,” says the American official.
Though he didn’t know it yet, bigger trouble was brewing for Montesinos at home. After the elections last spring, Fujimori’s party, Peru 2000, was left with only 53 of the 120 seats in Congress. It needed a majority to formally install Fujimori as president for a third term. At least eight opposition congressmen had to be coaxed into the pro-Fujimori caucus, and soon Toledo and his supporters were telling about colleagues who had allegedly been offered five-figure bribes to switch sides.
On May 5, Montesinos met in his office with a legislator named Alberto Kouri, a member of Toledo’s party, Peru Posible. As usual, Montesinos had the meeting taped, presumably to acquire evidence that would compromise the congressman. Montesinos positioned himself to give the hidden camera a full view of the apparent bribery payment that was about to take place.
In the videotape that was eventually shown on television, Montesinos is heard telling the legislator: “I don’t want a bare majority. I want a majority of 70, 75.” He produces a form letter, apparently promising that Kouri will change sides, and urges his visitor to sign it. Kouri balks, complaining that the letter is undated. “How much, how much?” Montesinos asks, removing a wad of U.S. currency from his pocket. “Here is 10 [thousand],” he says. Kouri replies: “No, we spoke of 15, 20.” Pulling out another stack of bills, Montesinos says: “Ten plus five–15.” He clinches the deal, and Kouri signs a letter apparently committing him to support Fujimori. (Kouri later admitted taking the money, but he said it was a loan to pay for the distribution of food to the needy.)
Montesinos’s vault may be full of such videotapes. But this one got away. Early last month, Luis Iberico, a former investigative reporter who now holds a seat in Congress as a member of the Moralizing Front, learned about the existence of the Kouri tape. He won’t say how he heard about it or who had it, but over a six-week period he negotiated the release of the video. Local press reports suggest the source may have been a disgruntled naval officer working at SIN headquarters. Once Iberico obtained the tape, strange things began to happen to him and Olivera, his party’s leader. On the morning of Sept. 14, the day the video was broadcast by an independent cable-TV station, their cellular telephones went dead almost simultaneously. At lunchtime, threatening calls were received on their home phones. Later Olivera said the tape had been given to his party by “a patriot” who now had a government bounty on his head. “Even to this day, he is risking his life,” said Olivera, “because he knows the methods they use to take reprisals.”
After the tape was broadcast by an independent cable station, another Moralizing Front legislator spoke up–Fujimori’s ex-wife. “I hope this reaches el senor presidente,” said Susana Higuchi. Her marriage began to fall apart soon after Fujimori won the 1990 election. She went public with some of her grievances at an early stage, accusing his regime of rampant corruption. She said the intelligence chief had accumulated a “very great deal of power” behind the scenes, warning: “Montesinos is not good for Peru, and he should be feared. His astuteness is dangerous to other people.” Finally she and Fujimori were divorced in 1994, after he had her phones tapped and locked her out of their home, the National Palace. Last week Higuchi told a news conference her party had other incriminating videotapes. But she said, “We do not plan to release the other videos, because there would be chaos.”
Few Peruvians were surprised by the apparent bribe to Kouri. But seeing it on television was still a shock–“political pornography,” said magazine editor Enrique Zileri. Once Fujimori announced his plan to resign, the question was whether Montesinos would go quietly–or try to stir up a coup. After four days of silence, the high command came down on Fujimori’s side, saying it supported his decision to call new elections and phase out the SIN.
That gave Fujimori a shot at arranging his own future. “I’m not saying goodbye yet,” he announced in an address to the nation. “I am fully functional.” But after a turbulent decade, the partnership with Montesinos was clearly finished. “All that remains is the division of their common property,” joked Iberico. That included 10 years’ worth of dirty secrets stored up by Montesinos. More tales from his crypt may yet come back to haunt Peru.
