POLITICS-US/Peru: Fujimori’s Moves Called “Good Beginning”

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 19 2000 (IPS) - The US State Department Monday hailed Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s stunning weekend call for new elections and the dissolution of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) “a good beginning” toward strengthening democracy and urged all parties to return as soon as possible to a political dialogue overseen by the Organisation of American States (OAS).

“This represents a good beginning in such an endeavour, and we will follow closely the next steps,” said a spokesman.

While Washington had been urging Fujimori with increasing urgency to fire SIN director Vladimir Montesinos, US officials said they were surprised that the Peruvian president also called for new elections and ruled out his own participation.

“I don’t think anybody – even in Peru – expected it,” said one official who added that Washington was still unsure about the sequence of events that led to Fujimori’s decision.

It appears, however, that US pressure on Fujimori to get rid of Montesinos, a lawyer who reportedly worked at one time for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and, according to Fujimori himself, remained in frequent contact with it, set in motion a chain reaction which ended with the president, who mounted a “self-coup” eight years ago, ousting himself.

One theory Peru specialists analysts here is that Montesinos, who, as SIN’s chief, is known to have collected thousands of files on Peru’s elite, threatened to expose damaging information about Fujimori if the president acted against him alone. Another is that Fujimori felt he risked a coup d’etat by the military high command whose members have been handpicked by Montesinos over the years.

“Fujimori could have decided to try to weather the storm on his own,” said Cynthia McClintock, a Peru expert at Georgetown University here. “But he was in a very difficult position.” In addition to the political problems he faced arising out of May’s elections, which were denounced by international observers as neither free nor fair, Fujimori’s efforts to revive the economy and foreign investment have not borne fruit.

Long considered Fujimori’s eminence grise, Montesinos had increasingly become a major liability to the president. Successive scandals – including his implication in an arms-trafficking deal for Colombian guerrillas and his video-taped bribery of an opposition lawmaker to switch parties – outraged the Peruvian public and a high-level OAS mission which has been working since the elections to promote democratic reform.

The mission issued an extraordinary communique Saturday after the videotape was made public, calling on Fujimori to promptly suspend Montesinos in light of the “utmost seriousness” of the bribery case. The statement followed a meeting by OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria and Canada’s Ambassador Peter Boehm with Alejandro Toledo, the opposition presidential candidate who pulled out of the elections after the first round.

The OAS was backed by the State Department which called the bribery case “a matter of utmost gravity” and called for “clear and dramatic steps to restore the public’s confidence in the intelligence services while (an) investigation goes forward.”

But Washington was already pushing hard on Fujimori to fire Montesinos before the video-tape came to light. Indeed, last week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright personally called for Fujimori to get rid of Montesinos when she met him at the United Nations last week.

For Washington, “the heart of it was the arms scandal,” said Colletta Youngers, a Peru specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights group here. She said the evidence that Montesinos has been running guns to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – possibly in exchange for drugs – had grown steadily in recent years.

Disclosure that the SIN may have brokered the sale of some 10,000 Russian assault rifles by the Jordanian government to the FARC, against which the US Congress has just earmarked some 1.6 billion dollars in mostly military aid for the Colombian government, prompted heavy US pressure on Fujimori to finally dump his chief adviser.

“I heard even the CIA was fed up with Montesinos, ” said McClintock.

“This aspect needs to be investigated much further,” according to WOLA’s Youngers, who said there is evidence that Montesinos, who defended major drug kingpins as a lawyer during the 1980s and was accused publicly by one of them of taking 50,000 dollars a month for arranging landing rights in a jungle airfield outside an army base, has been trafficking in guns and drugs for years.

“US intelligence must have known this was going on,” according to Youngers. “The question is, what did they know and when did they know it?” she added, echoing a famous phrase from the Watergate scandal.

She noted that Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms was among a number of lawmakers from both US parties who were interested in holding hearings on the gun-running case. “The administration was scared about what could come out, and putting pressure on Fujimori (to get rid of Montesinos) may have been an effort to nip the scandal in the bud,” said Youngers who noted that Helms and others were planning to meet with Toledo here shortly when Fujimori made his announcement.

Most analysts here believe that elections will indeed be held and that Fujimori is likely to honour his commitment to stay out of the race. But there is considerable concern over a number of unresolved issues, including the timetable for elections, which institutions will oversee them, the role of the OAS, and the lack of a transitional arrangement.

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Monday that Fujimori “should stand down immediately in favour of a caretaker president who can enjoy the confidence of all political sectors.”

Youngers said Washington should be pushing now for a quick timetable and a transitional process both of which should be overseen by the OAS, rather than the Peruvian Congress whose credibility has clearly been undermined by the bribery videotape.

Montesinos’ fate – and the internal manoeuvrings of the army – are also of great concern here. There were conflicting reports Monday as to whether he had been taken into custody or whether he remained holed up in SIN headquarters.

According to McClintock, the army is certain to be badly divided between officers, including the High Command, who were picked by Montensinos and presumably could remain loyal to him and a faction, believed to have grown steadily since the election, who believe that his interference with the promotion process has greatly weakened one of Latin America’s traditionally most professional militaries.

“The big unknown is what is what is happening in the army,” said Youngers who added that she is especially concerned about the High Command which “will go down with Montesinos.”

“It will be a pretty difficult road ahead,” she predicted.