Pubdate: Fri, 11 May 2001
Source: International Herald-Tribune (France)
Copyright: International Herald Tribune 2001
Contact:  http://www.iht.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/212
Author: Anthony Faiola, Washington Post Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/corrupt.htm (Corruption)

JAILED U.S. ALLIES SHOW SEAMY SIDE OF PERU'S DRUG WAR

Perils Of Partnership: The Generals Reminisce

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

General Juan Miguel del Aguila, head of Peru's National Anti-terrorism 
Bureau until last year and, later, the security chief of the National 
Police, recalled frequent meetings with American intelligence agents right 
up to the moment when Mr. 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 General 
del Aguila, who was 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 Mr. Fujimori's opponents to portray them as radicals. "The 
United States was our best ally."

Less chatty, General Nicolas Hermoza Rios, an honors graduate from the U.S. 
Army's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, shooed away a 
foreign journalist. The former head of Mr. Fujimori's joint chiefs during 
most of the 1990s - a decade when Peru vied with Colombia as the largest 
recipient of U.S. military aid in South America - General 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 Mr. 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 partnership with 
Peru during the 1990s. Hailed as a model for U.S. military cooperation with 
Latin America, the alliance was part of a quest to crush leftist rebels and 
drug traffickers. To that end, the United States provided Peru not only 
with cash, but also with training, equipment, intelligence and manpower 
from the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. armed forces.

But a purge under way here since Mr. 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 under the noses of 
their American partners. For many Peruvians, this has raised the question 
of whether American 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, the 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 underscores the difficulties and 
compromises of American military partnerships in Latin America. Echoes of 
Peru's problems can already be seen in Washington's $1.3 billion aid 
package to Plan Colombia, instituted during the Clinton administration. 
Critics warn that American officials may be repeating the mistake of 
cooperating with a corrupt military establishment to meet their ends in the 
drug war.

The former chief of the secret police, Vladimiro Montesinos, for instance, 
was for years Peru's top liaison with Washington and Mr. 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, Mr. Montesinos is now facing 31 criminal counts, including 
charges that he ordered civilian massacres in 1991 and 1992 and that he 
protected drug smugglers while aiding in capturing others.

The American officials insist that until recently, evidence indicating 
high-level corruption was largely hearsay, and they point out that, for a 
while, Mr. Fujimori was one of the most popular presidents in Peruvian 
history. Unlike the corrupt, repressive Latin American governments 
Washington supported out of strategic interest during the Cold War, Mr. 
Fujimori was democratically elected in 1990 and re-elected in 1995. And 
when Mr. 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, Mr. 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-style former president sought asylum in his parents' 
native Japan last November amid allegations of corruption and signs that 
Congress would move to impeach him. Mr. Fujimori, who briefly closed the 
Congress in 1992 and seized almost total control of the judiciary and the 
media, is now being probed for theft of gold bars from the Central Bank and 
ordering the assassinations of leftist guerrillas. But he has yet to be 
brought up on formal charges.

Some American officials concede that they lapsed in not taking a stronger 
line on dominant figures in Mr. Fujimori's government, especially Mr. 
Montesinos. An army deserter who sold state secrets to the CIA in the 
1970s, Mr. Montesinos was at one time a lawyer for drug traffickers. In the 
early 1980s, he signed illegal documents 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 American Embassy in Lima as well as in 
Washington. But the CIA argued that rumors of his corruption were 
exaggerated and it called him a vital asset. He continued to be 
Washington's chief liaison, holding repeated meetings with top American 
figures, including the former White House drug policy coordinator, Barry 
McCaffery, and General Charles Wilhelm, the former head of the U.S. 
Southern Command.

Critics here say the relationship flourished despite evidence available 
since the early 1990s that painted a broad, if incomplete, picture of 
high-level official corruption. That evidence included testimony taken 
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 General Hermoza had been receiving 
$50,000 to $100,000 a month in protection money. The witness also said that 
Mr. Montesinos "is the one who is making the most from 'El Vaticano,'" 
according to transcripts of her testimony.

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

Mr. Fujimori's former anti-drug officials say American 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 counternarcotics were 
honest people who didn't know what was going on," said General Dennis del 
Castillo, who headed the National Police Counter Narcotics Bureau until 
last year.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager