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Vladimiro Montesinos

Vladimiro Montesinos

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vladimiro Ilyich Montesinos Torres (born May 20, 1945) was the long-standing head of Peru'sintelligence service, Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), under President Alberto Fujimori. In 2000, secret videos, which he had recorded, were televised that showed his bribing an elected congressman to leave the opposition and join the Fujimorist side of Congress. The ensuing scandal caused Montesinos to flee the country and hastened 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. He has been tried, convicted and sentenced for numerous charges. Montesinos had strong connections with the CIA, the United States international intelligence Agency, and was said to have received some $10 million from the agency for his government's anti-terrorist activities.[1]

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[edit]Early years and education

Vladimiros Montesinos was born in the city of Arequipa, the capital of the Arequipa Region in southern Peru. His parents, who were of Greek descent and communists, named him after Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union.

In 1965, Montesinos graduated as a military cadet at the US Army's School of the Americas inPanama. A year later, he graduated from the Military School of Chorrillos, in Lima, Peru.

[edit]Career

By the early 1970s, during the leftist military junta of General Juan Velasco, Montesinos became a captain in the Peruvian army. By 1973, he had been appointed to the role of aide to General Edgardo Mercado Jarrín, who served as both Prime Minister and Chief of the Armed Forces, .

[edit]1976 spying scandal

In 1976, Major Jose Fernandez Salvatteci of the Military Intelligence Service (Spanish: Servicio de Inteligencia del Ejército (SIE) charged Montesinos with the crimes of spying and treason, accusing him of delivering military documents to the United States embassy in Lima. The documents included a list of weapons which Peru had purchased from the Soviet Union. Jarrin ordered the charges dropped.

That same year, Montesinos went on a two-week trip to Washington, D.C., paid for by the United States (US) government. Upon returning to Lima, he was arrested for having failed to obtain formal government permission to make the trip. The subsequent investigation revealed that top-secret documents had been found in his possession, and that he had photographed them and taken copies to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Montesinos had travelled to the U.S. without authorization from army command, and had forged military documents to allow him to complete the trip without being detained. He visited several foreign institutions as an official representative of the Peruvian army, also without authorization. Montesinos was dishonorably discharged from the military and sentenced to a year in military prison. This was a far less severe sentence than the customarydeath penalty that was the punishment for traitors during the military regime.

Years later, declassified US State Department documents revealed the reason for the CIA's interest in Montesinos. In the 1970s, Peru was governed by the only left-wing regime in South America, a continent dominated by right-wing governments. Locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and fearing its influence in the region, as well as that of the Communist government of Cuba, the US was seeking information about activities in Peru. Montesinos knew about a potential attack against Peru's southern long-time rival, Chile, then ruled by dictator Augusto Pinochet, an ally of the U.S. The operation, to be backed by the Cuban military, had the objective of recovering the territory Peru had lost after the War of the Pacific.[2]

[edit]After military life

In February 1978, Montesinos was freed after two years in jail. He was given work by his cousin Sergio Cardenal Montesinos, a lawyer who persuaded him to pursue a degree in law. In April of the same year, Montesinos applied to the National University of San Marcos in Lima. He received his law diploma only three months later, through fraudulent means. Book No. 24 of the University of San Marcos Office of Records, where Montesino's graduation would be noted, has disappeared from the Office.[citation needed] Montesino's undergraduate thesis and other materials related to his academic record have never been produced.[citation needed]

On August 15, 1978, Montesinos used his degree to register as a lawyer with the Superior Court of Lima. Ten days later, on August 25, 1978, he became a member of the Lima bar association. He became notorious for representing a number of Colombian and Peruvian members of the illegal drug trade, as well as police officers accused of being involved in drug trafficking. Between 1978 and 1979, he represented Colombian drug lords Evaristo "Papá Doc" Porras Ardila and Jaime Tamayo. In addition, he acted as guarantor on Tamayo's lease of several offices and warehouses used to manufacture cocaine.

Between 1980 and 1983, Montesinos revealed sensitive information related to military wiretapping and assassinations to the newspaper Kausachum, run by Augusto Zimmerman, ex-spokesperson of deposed president Juan Velasco Alvarado. General Carlos Briceño, the Commander of the Peruvian Army, re-opened the investigation into Montesino's alleged treason.

Montesinos fled to Ecuador, where in 1984 he revealed information to the Ecuadorian Army about Peru's military weapons purchases. The investigation was closed that year in order to "protect institutional image", and Montesinos was allowed to return to Peru.[citation needed]

[edit]The Fujimori years

Montesinos came to public notice again in 1990 when he defended Fujimori against accusations of fraudulent real estate dealings, during the presidential campaign, when Fujimori was an obscure candidate. The paperwork in the case disappeared and the charges were dropped. After Fujimori won the election on July 28, 1990, Montesinos became his chief advisor and the effective head of the intelligence service, whose acronym is SIN.[citation needed]

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 Peruvian Armed Forces. 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.[citation needed]

[edit]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 Barrios Altos massacre and the La Cantuta massacre, actions intended to repress the Shining Path (Senderoso Luminoso), the major Communist insurgency that had been operating since the 1980s.

Four officers who were tortured during interrogation 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 illegalwiretaps of leading politicians and journalists. Zanatta also said that army intelligence agents had killed fellow agent Mariella Barreto Riofano because she gave a magazine information about human rights violations, as well as the location of bodies from the La Cantuta massacre. Zanatta said that in early 1997, Barreto had told her 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 and showed evidence of torture before death and mutilation.

[edit]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. (Her testimony was later brought into question or proved false.[3][4])

On July 14, 1997, the government legally stripped Ivcher, a native Israeli, of his Peruvian nationality for supposed offenses against the government. In September control of Channel 2 was given 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."[citation needed]

[edit]2000 Elections

The 2000 presidential election, following years of political violence, was controversial. A journalist claimed to have a videotape of Montesinos bribing election officials to fix the vote. The journalist claimed to have been kidnapped by secret police agents, who sawed his arm to the bone to get him to give up the tape. In view of such tactics, the Clinton administration threatened briefly not to recognize Fujimori's victory. It backed off from this threat, and pressured Fujimori's government to take action to root out abuses, including ousting Montesinos.

US policy was aimed at preserving the achievements of the Fujimori regime, while ending its excesses.[citation needed] Continuing political unrest in Peru would have represented a serious problem as US operations against the FARC in Colombia got under way. Peru was needed as a base of operations and a defensive backstop against guerrillas based in Colombia's south, not far from the Peruvian border.[5]

[edit]Drug traffic

Allegations circulated that Montesinos and Gen. Nicolás Hermoza Ríos, the chairman of Peru's joint chiefs of staff, were taking protection money from drug traffickers. Documents declassified later by the US government showed that in 1996 the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was aware of the allegations.[6] Despite evidence that Montesinos was in business with Colombian narco-traffickers, the CIA paid Montesinos's intelligence organization $1 million a year for 10 years to fight drug trafficking.

Demetrio Chávez Peñaherrera, known as "El Vaticano", testified that Montesinos was a protector of drug traffickers. In a drug trafficking trial on August 16, 1996, Chávez Peñaherrera stated that he had bribed members of the Peruvian Armed Forces and Montesinos, as the effective chief of the Peruvian Intelligence Service (SIN), to be able to operate freely in Campanilla, a jungle area of the Huallagaregion. Recordings of radio communications presented during the trial showed that members of the army had let Chávez's organization operate freely in the Huallaga region in exchange for bribes. During certain appearances in the court, Chávez appeared drugged and maybe tortured.[citation needed]After sentencing, while in prison, Chávez talked to the press and revealed that Montesinos said 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. As proof, the government presented recordings during Chávez's trial of radio communications between his drug traffickers and members of the Armed Forces attesting to bribery of Montesinos.[7] In addition, Chávez said that retired generalNicolás de Bari Hermoza, the ex-president of the Armed Forces Joint Command, and the ex-President Alberto Fujimori, both had complete knowledge of the illicit acts of Montesinos.

[edit]Downfall

Frequently, Montesinos secretly made videotape of his bribing individuals in his office, incriminating politicians, officials and military officers. His downfall appears to have been precipitated by the discovery of a major illegal arms shipment. Arranged by guerrilla leader Tomás Medina Caracas, the arms were airlifted from Jordan via Peru, to the FARC insurgent guerrillas in southern Colombia .

Montesinos claimed the credit for uncovering the arms smuggling, which involved upwards of 10,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles. Jordan rejected the Peruvian version of events, 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. He had signed at least eleven deals with the Fujimori regime, most 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.[citation needed]Because of the arms deal, Montesinos lost the support of the US, which attached high strategic importance to crushing the FARC.

[edit]The Vladi-videos

On 14 September 2000, Peruvian television broadcast a video of Montesinos giving a bribe to opposition congressman Alberto Kouri to support Fujimori's Perú 2000 party. The video caused Fujimori's remaining support to collapse, and immediately he announced the firing of Montesinos, dissolution of the intelligence service and new elections—in which he would not run. Shortly thereafter, Montesinos sought political asylum in Panama.[8]

In following 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's 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. He is on trial.

[edit]Trial

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 tomurder. The lengthy series of court cases in Lima in which he is being tried is revealing the scale of the corruption during the Fujimori administration.

In 1998 the government purchased three new MiG-29 fighter planes from Russia, for which it paid USD $300 million, although observers say the true cost of the planes is only around $100 million. Following subsequent international investigations of the sale, the government of Italy issued an arrest warrant for Yevgeny Ananyev, former general director of the government-owned companyRosvooruzhenie. Ananyev was 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.[9]

Montesinos was convicted of embezzlement, illegally assumption of his post as intelligence chief,abuse of power, influence peddling and bribing TV stations. Those charges carried sentences of between five and fifteen years each, but Peruvian prison sentences are served concurrently, so prosecutors continued to pursue him on additional charges. He was acquitted of two specific charges of corruption and conspiracy related to the mayor of Callao, whom he was alleged to have helped evade drug-trafficking charges.

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

In October 2004 Wilmer Yarleque Ordinola, 44, was apprehended in Virginia in the US and convicted of immigration fraud. He had been working as a construction laborer without papers. The Peruvian government sought his extradition as an alleged member of Montesino's Grupa Colina and responsible for 26-35 of the 7,260 deaths or "disappearances" which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Peru) attributed to the group. In October 2004 Yarleque was being held by the U.S. Marshals in Alexandria, Virginia.[10] The suspect was initially granted a writ of habeas corpus, as he argued that he could not be extradited for political offenses committed for the government, but the US Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in 2005, opening the way for his extradition.[11]

Montesinos was sentenced in September 2006 to a 20-year prison term for his direct involvement in an illegal arms deal to provide 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 ColombiaFARC.[12]

In 2007 Montesinos was on trial for allegedly ordering the extra-judicial killings of the MRTA hostage-takers during the 1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis. The former chief of the armed forces, Nicolas de Bari Hermoza, and retired Colonel Roberto Huaman are also charged with ordering the extrajudicial execution of the 14 rebels. This action followed the government's 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, stated that he saw at least three of the MRTA rebels captured alive. If convicted, Montesinos and the two former military officers face up to 20 years in prison.[13]

[edit]Notes

  1. ^ Angel Paez, "CIA Gave $10 Million to Peru's Ex-Spymaster, AlterNet News, July 3, 2001. Accessed online 21 March 2010
  2. ^ "Corruption", Global Policy, 3 Aug 2001
  3. ^ "Leonor La Rosa", Agencia Peru
  4. ^ "Leonor La Rosa", Agencia Peru, 2005
  5. ^ "Peru", WSWS, Sep 2000
  6. ^ "Lori", Miami Herald, 1 Aug 2003
  7. ^ "Fujimori's Rasputin: The Downfall of the former Intelligence Chief, Montesinos", National Security Archives Website, George Washington University, 22 Nov 2000, accessed 10 Nov 2010
  8. ^ Andrew F. Cooper, and Thomas Legler (2005), "A Tale of Two Mesas: The OAS Defense of Democracy in Peru and Venezuela," Global Governance 11(4)
  9. ^ "Current Affairs", RUSNet, 7 Jun 2010
  10. ^ Allan Lengel, "Man Found Guilty in Va. Sought by Peru in Killings", Washington Post, 1 Oct 2004
  11. ^ Barbara Grzincic, "4th Circuit orders extradition of Peruvian special-ops agent", The Daily Record(Baltimore), 26 Feb 26 2007, accessed 10 Nov 2010
  12. ^ SIMON ROMERO, "Peru: New Conviction For Ex-Spy Chief", New York Times, 23 Sep 2006
  13. ^ "Peru spy chief on trial for siege" BBC NEWS Saturday, 19 May 2007

[edit]External links

Fuente:wikipedia

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