Lat-Am Watch: Evil Twins remain tight-lipped

Montesinos’ defence of Fujimori is typical of the two villains

Lat-Am Watch for the Buenos Aires Herald

Peru’s former president Alberto Fujimori and his one-time spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos never fail to protect each other. Attempts to cover each other’s back have earned them the nickname the Evil Twins.


Yesterday it was the turn of Montesinos to testify during the trial of Fujimori, accused of ordering the killing of 25 people in two separate incidents in 1991 and 1992. The two bespectacled convicts wore almost identical suits and ties.

Montesinos, currently serving a 20-year jail sentence for gunrunning, claimed that Fujimori “had no responsibility in the acts pertaining to this trial.” He also denied he himself had anything to do with the death squads held responsible for many killings during the 1990’s as the government sought to exterminate guerrilla groups.

His statements won’t make much difference to the outcome of the trial experts agreed yesterday. The one-time lawyer to drug dealers is hardly a character witness. But the reappearance of such a controversial figure in the public eye was enough to merit a surge of interest in the trial.

Montesinos return to television screens comes at a time when drug trafficking and coca-growing in Peru are on the increase. The terrorist guerrilla organisation Shining Path, reduced to only 20 men in 1999, has grown again in recent years and is believed to operate in cooperation with drug lords.

The cultivation of coca by the world’s second largest cocaine producer stands at almost 54,000 hectares, according to the latest UN survey, an increase of 4 percent compared to 2006. Meanwhile both the eradication of coca plants and the seizure of cocaine have decreased, the latter by 30 percent in comparison to 2006.

Fighting the drug problem is Peru’s biggest challenge at the moment. As the economy grows at a seething rate, the only way to make sure that swaths of the population aren’t left behind is by freeing them from the tyranny of narco-gangs and offering them other ways to earn a decent living. The violence inherent in the drug trade is a serious threat to democracy.

For Montesinos the answer to the drug and guerrilla conundrum was simple. Fight fire with fire because the ends always justify the means. It’s a principle he repeated once again yesterday, when questioned on illegally tapping phones during his spell as intelligence chief. He told the court a crime could be justified for “reasons of state.”

He then cited Ronald Reagan’s illegal arms dealings with Iran to finance the Nicaraguan contra-rebels as a good example of the ends justifying the means. Not everyone would agree.

However the ‘twins’ Montesinos and Fujimori were as much part of the drug trade as its assailants. As a lawyer, Montesinos made a career out of pandering to drug dealers, according to investigative journalist Gustavo Gorriti. Fujimori knew about this, joking in an interview with Mariella Balbi, that the best to way to fight drug traffickers was to hire the lawyer that defended them.

Montesinos took money from the CIA to fight the drugs dealers he defended and money from Pablo Escobar’s brother to finance Fujimori’s campaign. The Americans knew of his ties to organized crime, but didn’t care, claims Gorriti who spent over 20 years investigating Montesinos.

It wasn’t until he started to sell guns to the Colombian FARC guerrilla group that the spy master got into trouble. It lost him the support of the army and a stream of so-called Vladi-videos were aired on national television showing Montesinos bribing politicians and TV-network owners.

His downfall sped that of Fujimori. The president had just pushed Congress into allowing him to run for an unconstitutional third term. Although he won the 2000 elections by a slight margin, when the Montesinos scandal broke out, support for his mandate vanished.

He finally faxed his resignation to Congress from self-imposed exile in Tokyo. Peru’s parliament refused his request and instead sacked him on grounds of “moral disability.”

The fact that Montesinos and Fujimori were able to get away with what they were doing for so long has a lot to with the situation of Peru at the time. When the two took power in 1990 the extremely violent Shining Path insurgency was everywhere and the economy was spiraling out of control. To many, controlling inflation and hunting down the rebels seemed to justify the erosion of democracy and even human rights violations.

Nowadays the economy is healthy and growing foreign reserves are a safe hedge against crisis thanks to the booming export of commodities. However the drug trade is also getting out of hand as cocaine consumption in the US and Europe increase.

In its efforts to root out the traffickers in their jungle hide outs, Peru should be careful to respect the rule of law and the openness required for democracy to work effectively. Ignoring those rights in the pursuit of a quick victory means stooping to the levels of that disgraced duo, the Evil Twins.

P.S. Colombia is facing a similar threat as President Álvaro Uribe debates whether or not he’ll push for another, unconstitutional, third term in office. Last week he called for a referendum on his mandate, supposed to confirm the already controversial decision to let him run for a second term in 2006.

Although yesterday his aides denied he was aiming to stay in power until after 2010, it’s still not clear what an eventual referendum on his presidency would mean. Right now, an 80 percent approval rating thanks to his war on drugs means that Uribe could probably get away with murder.