An afternoon with Montesinos

It is always exciting to see, in person, a living part of history. I’ve had the opportunity to do so in attending concerts of jazz legends such as Horace Silver, Benny Carter, and Sonny Rollins. I have sat in an auditorium in Havana listening to Fidel Castro speak for hours. This summer in Dublin Airport my father and I exchanged a few words with John Hume. But today was the first day that I have ever been so close (less than 10 feet behind) someone with 74 judicial processes open against him. I certainly don’t mean to place Vladimiro Montesinos in the same category as a jazz great or a Noble Peace Prize winner—but he certainly is a notable, albeit infamous, figure of Peru’s recent political history.

“Despite his questionable connections, Montesinos had played an influential, often malign role in almost every area of Peruvian life: for the last ten years of the 20th century, unelected, he co-governed the country. All those who care about Peru’s future—and that indeed of any other small country—need to ask themselves how this could have been allowed to happen.”
— Sally Bowen and Jane Holligan, The Imperfect Spy: The Many Lives of Vladimiro Montesinos (Lima: Peisa, 2003).

Democracy, rule of law, and human rights in Peru were shelved while Montesinos was both advisor to former President Alberto Fujimori and the de facto chief of the SIN, el Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (the National Intelligence Service). The Fujimori/Montesinos era was marked by corruption, extortion, and blackmail, not to mention instances of extrajudicial killings and “disappearances” of suspected subversives. For more information about Peru under Fujimori, I suggest reading the second chapter of Human Rights Watch’s Probable Cause: Evidence Implicating Fujimori. For more information about Montesinos, I suggest The Imperfect Spy (which is unfortunately out of print) or transcriptions of the Vladivideos.

Today Montesinos is incarcerated at the Callao Naval Base. Just last week he received 20 years for selling arms to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo, or FARC-EP). This afternoon, I heard a judge sentence him to 6 years in prison and a civil repatriation fine of S/. 1,500,000.00 ($461,254.61) for corruption. This was the first sentencing and Montesinos and his lawyers are appealing. A list of his sentences to date can be found here.

The man reading the 40-minute-long sentence spoke faster than the Micro Machine Man, but this is my understanding of the case: Sometime back in the 1990s, some members of congress publicly claimed that the taxes Montesinos had paid didn’t correspond with the actual balance in his accounts. Montesinos obliged some auditors of SUNAT, Superintendencia Nacional de Administración Tributaria, to fix the imbalance and make his accounts appear legal. A handful of people, including the then director of SUNAT and an ambassador, ended up getting involved and they are all on trial for this case. Montesinos is the only one of the group who is currently incarcerated. The argument of the others is that they were coerced into fixing the books / aiding in the cover-up. For instance, one of the auditors was either pregnant or had a child at the time. She’d heard about disappearances and didn’t want to risk not following orders, even if she broke the law in doing so. This case raises interesting considerations such as: if someone is coerced into breaking the law by governmental authorities, is there or is there not a point after which s/he is no longer responsible for her/his actions and, if so, what is that point?

I plan on seeking out more afternoon visits with Montesinos for the public trials of the La Cantuta/Barrios Altos cases.