Hi all, I won't get more into it, but I spoke to Gorman (the author of this piece) yesterday here in the Apple, and found out a lot of stuff I hadn't even been aware of, such as the base the US built, scant miles form the Peru/Colombia border, than ol Fuji changing his mind, insisting that no Plan Colombia from his country would take place. Ooops, bad move. This has to be one of the most fuid, bloodless coups ever by our glorious CIA. Enjoy. Peace, Preston CIA COUP IN PERU OPENS DOOR TO PLAN COLOMBIA FILED 12/01/00 In truth, Fujimori was forced from office by the CIA in a coup so smoothly arranged that no major Western press outlet has even hinted at it being such. The reason was because Fujimori was vocal in his dislike of the military components in US President Bill Clinton's Plan Colombia, and refused to let the US use Peru as a staging post for the US troops needed to make Plan Colombia work. In what has all the earmarks of a bloodless coup arranged by the US CIA, Peru's longtime president Alberto Fujimori has been forced from office, and his right-hand man, Pentagon-trained CIA informant Vladimiro Montesinos, is in hiding and faces criminal charges. The new president is Congressman Valentin Paniagua, a little-known lifetime politician who ascended to the post after a series of resignations by several people in line for it. He will serve on an interim basis until new elections can be held next April. How and why the popular though dictatorial Fujimori so suddenly lost his autocratic grip on the government makes for a scenario straight out of a spy novel or the CIA's history book on Central and South America, as does what will undoubtedly happen soon, and who will benefit. In truth, Fujimori was forced from office by the CIA in a coup so smoothly arranged that no major Western press outlet has even hinted at it being such. The reason was because Fujimori was vocal in his dislike of the military components in US President Bill Clinton's Plan Colombia, and refused to let the US use Peru as a staging post for the US troops needed to make Plan Colombia work. The plot has roots that go back more than a year, to the time when Plan Colombia was first unveiled. That plan, a $1.3 billion effort by the US to rid the Andean nation of Colombia of its burgeoning coca-producing fields (conspiratorialists would say to wrest control of that trade from the Colombian rebels and return it to the Colombian armed forces and known narcotraficantes who put their proceeds in American banks), centers on US Special Forces training the Colombian military in jungle warfare, and then arming them with more than half a billion dollars in US-made helicopters and arms. At the time of the plan's unveiling, the US knew that Venezuela, with a socialist government, would not go along with it. Ecuador would, but is neither strong enough nor stable enough to offer much in the way of assistance. Brazil, whose little-populated northwest corner is likely to see an influx of refugees from the fray, also dislikes the plan. Bolivia, under the leadership of newly elected President General Hugo Banzer‹a Pentagon-trained former cocaine baron who protected Klaus Barbie, the fugitive Nazi "Butcher of Lyon" for years‹was all for the plan. Banzer even volunteered to build a large airbase for US use in Bolivia's Chapare district, but that was too far from Colombia to be of much use. That left Peru, Colombia's immediate neighbor to the south, as the anticipated ally for the plan. After all, with Fujimori dependent on the US and the International Monetary Fund to keep the country's loan-cycles floating, and with School of the Americas graduate Montesinos as his spy chief and closest advisor, the US expected Peru to herald the plan and volunteer its jungle city of Iquitos and environs as a staging ground. In fact, the US had helped build a large military post outside Iquitos, near Colombia's southern border‹where much of the fighting produced from Plan Colombia is expected to take place‹during 1998 and 1999. But Fujimori threw the US a curve when he said the new post would be for use exclusively by the Peruvian military, and then further enraged the US when he decried Plan Colombia. Which meant he had to go. But he was about to be elected to a third term in office (which, though illegal by Peruvian law, didn't seem to matter much to the Peruvian populace, which gave him a 42% approval rating, very high in that country) and any overt attempt to remove him would draw severe backlash. Worse, last April, when Colombian President Andres Pastrana was set to come to the US to push for emergency passage of the plan, many Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, were decrying it, or at least pressing to postpone allocating funds for it until 2001 and the normal budgetary timetable. (That would mean Clinton would not have the plan as part of his legacy, which would please the piss out of the Republicans.) But Clinton and Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey‹former head of the Pentagon's Southern Command‹would have none of that. So just days before Pastrana's visit, the State Department leaked a story to MSNBC that Russian planes were picking up used Kalashnikov rifles in Amman, Jordan, which were being delivered to the FARC rebels in Colombia. Moreover, according to MSNBC, the planes were being refueled in Iquitos' airport, where they were also being filled with as much as 40 tons of FARC-made cocaine at a clip for distribution in Europe. The story was obviously fake. The Iquitos airport is very public and borders on a Peruvian air-force base where several US DEA agents work, which means that not only would the Peruvians know about the cocaine, the DEA agents would too, and that's not even going into the concept that the FARC rebels have never been known to refine coca base into cocaine. But it had its desired effect. Trent Lott and the other Republicans, who just days earlier were saying no to Plan Colombia, quickly changed their positions, afraid of looking soft on drugs, and Clinton got his plan and the monies approved. The first hope of removing Fujimori, simply having him lose the election, failed. He wound up in a runoff with Alejandro Toledo, a relatively unknown World Bank executive and former Lima shoeshine boy educated at California's Stanford University; when Toledo refused to participate in the runoff, it left Fujimori unopposed for a third term. But the bitter election left Fujimori vulnerable, with rumors that he had stolen it through vote-rigging, and there was talk he would be denounced at an August meeting of the heads of the South American countries. Instead of voluntarily stepping down, however, Fujimori cleverly resurrected the State Department story of the Russian guns making their way to the FARC rebels, claiming that Vladimiro Montesinos had busted a ring of arms dealers. At the August meeting, he was lauded for his work against the rebels, rather than ridiculed for stealing an election. Unfortunately, that story shortly blew up in Fujimori's face, when the Jordanian arms dealers acknowledged the arms sales, but said they'd all occurred a year earlier, and that the buyers were Peruvian generals and all the paperwork was in order. Vulnerable again, Fujimori quickly announced that jailed American Lori Berenson would get a new trial, a story which the Western press jumped on, while all but dropping the fake FARC arms bust. By early September, with Fujimori firmly in place for his third term, the US was getting desperate. The first US Special Forces-trained Colombian troops were‹and are‹set to stage their first offensive into FARC territory around January 1, and Fujimori was still not going along with the idea of the US using the new military base near Colombia's southern border. That is when the CIA stepped in with a classic maneuver. In mid- September, a video was widely released throughout Peru‹and subsequently through worldwide media outlets‹showing Montesinos giving Congressman Alberto Kouri US$15,000. Shortly after the money changed hands, Kouri, from Peru's opposition party, switched sides and joined Fujimori's party. What was most interesting about the tape was that it was made by Montesinos in his own offices. That someone could get into the incredibly well- protected offices of the head of Peru's secret police, and locate a short segment of tape made months earlier among the thousands of other hours of tape that Montesinos had‹is fantastic. (Montesinos, we have since learned, taped all his office doings, apparently to use as blackmail if the occasion arose.) It is safe to say Montesinos did not release the tape himself, which means someone close to him did. And whoever did it knew it would bring the spy chief down, and with him, eventually, Fujimori. Which means, though it is yet to be proven, that someone got to someone close to Montesinos and promised something big in the new administration that would take over after Fujimori fell. Who the promiser and promisee were we don't yet know. We do know that Alberto Kouri, the receiver of the alleged bribe, fled to Dallas on Oct. 27, where he was greeted with open arms and currently remains. That suggests that Kouri was aware that the tape was going to be released, and offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb in exchange for asylum in the US‹all of which points to CIA involvement. The tape of the apparent bribe immediately disgraced Montesinos, who fled to Panama, where he has extensive landholdings, seeking political asylum. That bid failed, and he returned to Peru in late October, where he has been in hiding. Fujimori tried to ride out the tide of public opinion by publicly going after Montesinos. In the staged event, he couldn't locate him. Embarrassed, he announced that he would hold new elections in April 2001, in which he would not participate, and promised to step down when the new president took office on July 28, 2001. Unfortunately, that timetable simply did not work with the US need for a military base near Colombia's southern border by January 1. By chance, Peruvian Congressional investigations were started into both Montesinos and Fujimori in early November, and allegations of millions of dollars in secret bank accounts immediately surfaced. Those allegations, coupled with the sudden instability of Peru's presidency, had an immediate and dire effect on the country's economy. On Nov. 3, Standard and Poor's downgraded Peru's long- term fiscal rating to four notches below investment-grade level, leaving the country in a position of not being able to make good on major international loans due at year's end. Again trying to cleverly avoid the public reaction to the burgeoning corruption scandal, Fujimori traveled to Brunei for a Pacific Rim summit meeting, and then on to Japan, where he tried to borrow enough money to save Peru from defaulting on its loans. But while he was there, opposition leaders wrested control of Congress from his party, leading to Fujimori faxing in a resignation "for the good of the country." In late November, Congress refused to accept that resignation, instead choosing to oust Fujimori on the grounds that he was "morally unfit" to lead the country. He is currently in Japan, and is expected to seek political asylum there should he be indicted on criminal charges in Peru. Beyond Fujimori, the next several players in Peru's constitutional order of succession for the vacated presidency resigned, and Valentin Paniagua, a political moderate, was chosen by congressional consensus to take over as interim president until the April elections. Paniagua, 64, is a lawyer with the Popular Action party who served as justice minister in the 1960s and as education minister in 1984, during the two administrations of former President Fernando Belaunde Terry. While Paniagua's accession to the presidency does not necessarily mean that Peru will immediately change its position and sign on to Plan Colombia, the country's financial turmoil and debt obligations make him vulnerable to fiscal pressure from the US. It is likely that within two weeks, Paniagua will be offered a way out of the impending financial crisis in exchange for allowing the US to utilize the American-built military base outside Iquitos, near the southern border of Colombia. And if that does come to pass, then we might well have seen one of the most clever CIA-engineered coups in South America in some time. Bloodless and clean as bone. -Peter Gorman, Special to HighWitness News ========================================================= Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed. *** COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 doctrine of international copyright law, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this info for nonprofit research and educational purposes only. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml *** -------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/0/_/475667/_/976108898/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_->
