Arrests of Peruvian Officials Expose Corruption, Deceit

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
 

LIMA, Peru -- Inside a dilapidated downtown prison, a gaggle of former president Alberto Fujimori's top generals sulked around a green cement jail yard on a hot
afternoon. The recently arrested generals whiled away their recreation time halfheartedly, playing soccer and reminiscing about the days when Fujimori's finest could
count on at least one steadfast friend: Uncle Sam.

Gen. Juan Miguel del Aguila, head of Peru's National Anti-Terrorism Bureau until last year and, later, security chief of the National Police, recalled frequent meetings
with U.S. intelligence agents right up to the moment when Fujimori abandoned the presidency and fled to Japan in November.

"The U.S. was our partner in every respect, giving us intelligence, training, equipment and working closely with us in the field," said del Aguila, who is charged with
conspiracy in the state-sponsored bombing last year of a bank in central Lima, an act meant to look like the handiwork of Fujimori opponents to portray them as
radicals. "The United States was our best ally."

Less chatty, Gen. Nicolas Hermoza Rios, an honors graduate from the U.S. Army's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., shooed away a foreign journalist.
The former head of Fujimori's joint chiefs during most of the 1990s -- a decade when Peru vied with Colombia as the top recipient of U.S. military aid in South
America -- Hermoza had just pleaded guilty to taking $14 million in illicit gains from arms deals. He was still fighting more potent charges of taking protection money
from the same drug lords the United States was paying Peru to fight.

The arrests of 18 generals in the six months since Fujimori's fall -- among more than 70 of his government's high ranking military and intelligence officials against
whom criminal charges have been brought -- have lifted a curtain on the dark side of Washington's strategic partnership with Peru during the 1990s. Hailed as a
model for U.S. military cooperation with Latin America, the tight alliance was part of a quest to crush leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers. To that end, the United
States provided Peru not only cash, but also training, equipment, intelligence and manpower from the CIA, DEA and U.S. armed forces.

But a purge underway here since Fujimori's disgrace has shown that many of the people the United States worked with most closely to accomplish its goals --
especially in the drug war -- appear to have been working both sides of the street, forming a network of corruption right under the noses of their U.S. partners. For
many Peruvians, this has raised the question whether U.S. officials working here were duped or just averted their gaze.

"The United States was working with people involved in massive criminal activity in Peru," said Anel Townsend, head of a Peruvian congressional subcommittee
probing government links to drug trafficking in the 1990s. "If U.S. intelligence did not know what was going on, it certainly should have. You can't just offer that kind
of assistance to a government like Fujimori's and then take no responsibility for the consequences."

The underside of cooperation in Peru illustrates the difficulties and compromises of U.S. military partnerships in Latin America. Echoes of Peru's problems can
already be seen in Washington's $1.3 billion contribution to the Plan Colombia anti-drug campaign. Critics warn that U.S. officials may be repeating the mistake of
cooperating with a corrupt military establishment to meet their ends in the drug war.

Vladimiro Montesinos, for instance, was for years Peru's top liaison with Washington and Fujimori's intelligence chief. He is now a fugitive with a $5 million price on
his head. Continuously defended by U.S. officials and the CIA as a staunch ally in the drug war, Montesinos is facing 31 criminal counts, including charges that he
ordered civilian massacres in 1991 and 1992 and that he protected drug smugglers while aiding the United States in capturing others.

Peruvian investigators and Fujimori's longtime political opponents are demanding answers from Washington and requesting release of CIA documents on Peru.
Many officials here insist it is inconceivable that U.S. intelligence -- and particularly the CIA, which enjoyed a close relationship with Montesinos -- was unaware of
at least some of his alleged crimes. And if the United States was unaware, its critics here say, it was lax.

Current and former U.S. officials working in Peru respond that critics forget the bright side of the partnership with Fujimori: the crusades that stamped out the
powerful Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrilla movements and an aggressive anti-drug program that led to a 70 percent reduction in cultivation of the coca leaf
used to make cocaine .

"We have had a very focused mission in Peru, first zooming in on the guerrillas and then on narco-traffickers," said a State Department official involved in U.S.-Peru
policy. "We were busy dealing with the bad guys outside the government, so perhaps we weren't pointing all our sensors toward the bad guys within the
government."

The U.S. officials also insist that until recently, evidence indicating high level corruption was largely hearsay, and they point out that, for a while, Fujimori was one of
the most popular presidents in Peruvian history. Unlike the corrupt, repressive Latin American governments Washington supported for strategic reasons during the
Cold War, Fujimori was democratically elected in 1990 and reelected in 1995. And when Fujimori appeared to be robbing a new term through fraudulent elections
last year, these officials say, the United States began distancing itself from his government.

"While everyone is now trying hard to forget it, Fujimori did have a reputation for being relatively honest, and it remains to be proven to what extent he was corrupt,"
said a former State Department official who worked for years in Peru. "For instance, in the privatization of some $17 billion worth of state-run enterprises, I never
heard that the process was corrupt. Many businessmen compared it very favorably in that regard to Argentina."

The authoritarian former president sought asylum in his parents' native Japan last November amid allegations of corruption and signs that Congress would move to
impeach him. Fujimori, who briefly closed Congress in 1992 and seized almost total control of the judiciary and media, is being probed for theft of gold bars from
the Central Bank and ordering assassinations of leftist guerrillas. But he has yet to be formally charged.

Some U.S. officials concede that they lapsed in not taking a stronger line on dominant figures in Fujimori's government, especially Montesinos. An army deserter
who sold state secrets to the CIA in the 1970s, Montesinos at one time was a lawyer for drug traffickers. In the early 1980s, he signed a legal document on behalf of
a Colombian client for the purchase of buildings in Lima that were later discovered to harbor cocaine processing equipment.

His background, as well as continuing allegations of misdeeds throughout the 1990s, did raise concerns at the U.S. Embassy in Lima as well as in Washington. But
the CIA argued that rumors of his corruption were exaggerated and called him a vital asset. He continued to be Washington's chief liaison, holding repeated meetings
with top U.S. figures, including the former White House drug policy coordinator, Barry R. McCaffery, and Gen. General Charles Wilhelm, former head of the U.S.
Southern Command.

Critics here say the relationship flourished desite evidence available since the early 1990s that painted a broad, if incomplete picture of high level official corruption.
That evidence included testimony during congressional hearings on corruption in 1993, when a government witness who had worked with Peru's most notorious drug
trafficker, Demetrio "El Vaticano" Chavez, testified that Gen. Hermoza had been receiving between $50,000 and $100,000 a month in protection money. The
witness also said that Montesinos "is the one who is making the most from 'El Vaticano,' " according to transcripts of her testimony.

Chavez was finally arrested in Colombia and extradited to Peru. During his trial in 1996, he testified that he had paid Montesinos $50,000 a month. Several days
after Chavez's testimony, he recanted his story. But Chavez now says he was tortured and ordered to recant.

Other captured drug traffickers also say they provided information and testimony to U.S. officials about money being paid to Montesinos, but their stories were
ignored. A U.S. official said, "The problem with the so-called proof about Montesinos and the generals is that they always seem to come from drug traffickers."

But other evidence surfaced as well. In May 1996, police seized 383 pounds of cocaine -- with a U.S. street value of roughly $17 million -- on a Peruvian air force
DC-8 transport plane en route to Russia through Miami. Thirteen air force personnel were arrested. That July, 280 pounds were found on two Peruvian navy ships,
one in Vancouver, Canada, and the other in the main Peruvian port of Callao. Also, dozens of officers were investigated, and many arrested, on drug trafficking
charges throughout the decade.

But Fujimori's former anti-drug officials say U.S. drug enforcement and CIA officials were reassured by promises of efforts to root out the corruption.

"I'm not going to defend an administration that we now know was rotten, but I can tell you that most of us working in counter-narcotics were honest people who
didn't know what was going on," said Gen. Dennis del Castillo, who headed the National Police Counter-Narcotics Bureau until earlier last year.

Special correspondent Lucien Chauvin contributed to this report.

                                               © 2001