-Caveat Lector-
U.S. allies in drug war in disgrace
Arrests of Peruvian officials expose corruption, deceit
By Anthony Faiola
THE WASHINGTON POST
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.
'The U.S. was our partner in every respect, giving us intelligence,
training, equipment and working closely with us in the field.'
- GEN. JUAN MIGUEL DEL AGUILA
Jailed Peruvian official 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.
DARK PARTNERSHIP
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."
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.
DIFFICULT U.S. PARTNERSHIPS
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.
PARTNERSHIP HAS SOME BENEFITS
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.'
- FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL
"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."
PROBE INTO FORMER PRESIDENT
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.
Some 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.
HIGH-LEVEL CORRUPTION
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 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."
AIR FORCE COMPLICITY
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 The Washington Post Company
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