Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  When the journalists of Channel 2 – Latin Frequency – rebelled against these methods and began to tell the truth – they revealed the millions that Montesinos was putting into his accounts and spoke of some of the murders by the dictatorship’s death squads – the regime took away the owner, Baruch Ivcher’s Peruvian nationality and handed his channel over to minority shareholders (now in prison) that he had bribed. From that point on, Channel 2 was also, like the rest, a mouthpiece for the regime’s disgusting political actions.

  The owners of the two most powerful channels in the country – 4 and 5 – were bought with dollar bills, many millions of them. And naturally, they were also filmed by Montesinos, appearing in scenes that make one nauseous, counting their pyramids of dollars and, in revoltingly coarse tones, begging the lord and master of the strong-arm regime for even more millions in return for their work as media acolytes. These characters have now fled the country: Crousillat to Miami and Schutz to Argentina. But, even though it beggars belief, they remain the owners and controllers of the channels that they rented out to the dictatorship to manipulate public opinion, broadcasting disinformation and lies, spreading calumnies, defending electoral fraud and violation of the Constitution and, of course, keeping out the opposition, to such a degree that in the last fraudulent elections, they did not even broadcast the advertisements paid for by the candidates opposing Fujimori. To keep up appearances, the fugitives have transferred their shares to family members who act as fronts.

  In my opinion, to leave these channels in the hands of people who committed, through them, the worst crime that can be committed against a society – destroying democracy and supporting a dictatorship – would be a mortal danger for the democracy that is now beginning to surface in Peru, surrounded by lurking threats, after an abject decade. It would be the same as leaving in the hands of its owners a laboratory licensed to produce medicines that instead manufactured narcotics, or leaving a gun in the hands of someone who has just committed a murder. The criminal weapon that these fugitives used were the licences that they sold to the dictatorship and which they are now using through intermediaries gradually to undermine democracy. In an act of real provocation, not just to democracy but to common decency, one of these channels is looking to relaunch a ‘news’ programme fronted by one of the worst media henchmen of the dictatorship, Nicolás Lúcar, whose methods I bear testimony to, because at the time of the government coup, he prepared an ambush for me that I naïvely fell into. He offered me his programme to give my opinion of what was happening in Peru and, when the interview was to be broadcast, cut off my microphone; while I was moving my mouth without any sound coming out, he proceeded to spew out Fujimori propaganda and slogans. His return to the screen is a symbol of the shameless way in which the Fujimori mafia has started out on a new campaign to frustrate the democratisation process in Peru.

  These licences must be withdrawn, not by force but by rigorously following legal procedures to ensure freedom of expression and criticism that these people helped to violate and now seek to debase in order to obstruct the democratic transition. Naturally the process must look to transfer these licences to other private enterprises through a transparent procedure, closely monitored internationally, so that neither the government nor the state of Peru can benefit directly or indirectly from this transfer, or get their hands on these companies, because, were that to happen, the cure would be as harmful as the illness. But there are many different ways of guaranteeing this transfer within civil society, without government intervention, through the involvement of organisations of proven independence – international communications associations and prestigious international auditors – to clear this obstacle that obstructs the complex process of re-establishing law and liberty in Peru. This democracy will never become a reality while, as in the Palace of Government before the purging of the rats, the vermin that the dictatorship adopted remain in their caves and hiding places preparing new attacks on freedom, in the name of freedom!

  Lima, December 2001

  The Captain in His Labyrinth

  There are echoes of the elegant and baroque paradoxes we find in Borges’s stories in the current plight of Captain Vladimiro Montesinos, who is buried alive in one of the cells for high-risk terrorists that he himself designed, in the Callao Naval base, for Abimael Guzmán – Comrade Gonzalo of the Shining Path group – and Victor Polay from the MTRA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement), the leaders of the two organisations that immersed Peru in violence in the eighties. The ironic and humorous note to this, also very Borgesian, is not just that Fujimori’s right-hand man declared that he was on hunger strike, in protest against the dreadful conditions in the prison, but that – lying and greedy to the last – he cheated during his strike, eating chocolates that he had hidden in his trousers.

  Montesinos belongs to an ancient lineage – of discreet and violent criminals who are like the shadows of the tyrants they both serve and profit by in their secret dealings. They use terror and commit major state crimes as well as numerous robberies, following the orders of, and in close complicity with, their masters, who see them as both absolutely essential but also, and with good reason, very suspicious. Dictatorships suppurate such people, the way infections suppurate pus, and almost all of them, such as Stalin’s Beria, Perón’s Sorcerer López Rega, Pérez Jiménez’s Pedro Estrada, and Trujillo’s Colonel Abbés García usually die – as millionaires in Paris or in mysterious, violent deaths – without opening their mouths, taking with them to hell the precise details of their misdeeds.

  This is the big difference between this universal history of authoritarian infamy and the now famous Vladimiro Montesinos. Unlike others of his kind, who remained silent about their crimes, he is going to talk. He has already started talking, like a parrot, trying to show that no one is a villain in a society where everyone is a villain and where villainy is the only political and moral norm that is universally respected. To prove the point he says that he has some thirty thousand videos that document the ethical depravity and the civic filth of his compatriots, something which, if it is true, would make him not the high-profile criminal that the press writes about, but rather a hard-working Peruvian who, through skill and Machiavellian stratagems, created the conditions whereby an immense number of his compatriots could act on a deep-seated propensity: to sell out to a dictatorship and fill their pockets in the shortest time possible.

  It is improbable that this apocalyptic line of defence will be successful; it is almost certain that – if the stars of this extraordinary video collection do not arrange for him to die of a heart attack or by suicide beforehand – the Law will decide that this singular character will spend, like Abimael Guzmán and Víctor Polay, men as cruel and completely lacking in scruples as him, most of the rest of his remaining life behind bars. Nothing would be more just, of course: although the long list of tyrannies that Peru has suffered has created a good number of rogues, torturers and despoilers of the public purse, none of them had ever before wielded so much power or done so much damage as this obscure captain who was thrown out of the army for selling military secrets to the CIA, this lawyer and frontman for drug-runners, a man who gave a ‘legal’ veneer to the abuses to the legal system perpetrated by Fujimori, his right-hand man in the coup that destroyed Peruvian democracy in 1992, a gun-runner for the Colombian guerrilla groups, a representative of the big drugs cartels, to which he offered the services of the army and the use of Peruvian territory in the Amazon, the head and organiser of the state terrorist commando groups that, between 1990 and 2000, tortured, assassinated and caused thousands of people to disappear who were suspected of being subversives, a blackmailer, a thief and a systematic manipulator of the Judiciary and the media which, with very few exceptions, he bought, bribed or intimidated until they gave their unconditional support to the abuses and violations committed by the dictatorship.

  A mathematician has taken the trouble to calculate how many hours of tape would be on these thirty thousand v
ideos – at an average of two hours a video – and has concluded that the ten years of the Fujimori regime would not be long enough for a production on such a scale unless, in addition to his office in the Intelligence Service, which Montesinos turned into a secret film studio after Fujimori took power in 1990 and appointed Montesinos to his coveted post, there were several other camouflaged studios where the SIM also secretly filmed other operations of pillage and political intrigue by the regime. We cannot discount this theory, of course. But it is likely that the figure is exaggerated, the desperate boasting of an official in a tight corner wanting to scare his likely prosecutors. However, even if only ten per cent of these videos exist and, as happened with Fujimori when he broke into Montesinos’s house, took the videos that incriminated him and escaped with them to Japan, many other members of the Fujimori mafia have managed to steal or destroy the videos that they star in, what is left – there are some fifteen hundred tapes in the hands of the Judiciary – is a precious, rare document, unprecedented in history, that reveals in a direct and vivid fashion the organisation and the extent - the extraordinary extent – of corruption in an authoritarian regime. For this alone, future historians will always be grateful to Vladimiro Montesinos.

  There has been a great deal of speculation about what prompted him from the outset to film these scenes which both implicated legally and politically the military, professionals, judges, businessmen, bankers, journalists, and government and opposition local officials and parliamentarians, but also incriminated himself with a document that, with a sudden change of government, as happened in Peru, would be seen as a form of hara-kiri. The accepted view is that he filmed his accomplices so that he could blackmail them and bring them into line should the need arise. There is no doubt that to have, for example, Fujimori’s ministers captured on film by the hidden cameras, receiving every month thirty-thousand-dollar supplements to their salary, would turn these poor mercenary devils into loyal servants of the head of the SIM when it came to signing specific decrees. And it is not surprising that the newspaper editors or heads of television channels that received thousands or millions of dollars – that they had to count, note by note, patiently, observed by the hidden camera – would then become tame supporters of government policy and implacable opponents of anyone daring to criticise its policy.

  But when you see these videos, or read the transcriptions of the conversations, you realise that they are more than just a form of coercion. They offer a particular, utterly contemptuous, view of humankind; a constant reiteration of how cheap and grimy and abject people can be when they move into a sphere where the dictator holds sway and can tempt them. They were important public figures in the country, who enjoyed great prestige and a high profile because of their office, their influence, their money, their stripes, their surnames or because of services rendered in the past. There is an entire philosophy underpinning this long sequence of images where a single scene is repeated time and again, with minimal variation, with different people and voices: some evasive and hypocritical preliminaries, to justify the imminent transaction with flatulent arguments, and then, in a few words, the essential: How much? That much! Right away and in cash.

  In the ten years of the Fujimori dictatorship – perhaps the most sinister and divisive that we have ever suffered and without any doubt the most corrupt – Montesinos’s office was visited not only by mediocre opportunists and the usual suspect politicos who, like vermin in putrid waters, always prosper during strong-arm regimes. There were also people who appeared respectable, with seemingly decent political or professional credentials, and a considerable number of successful businessmen – including one of the richest men in Peru – who, because of their influence, power and wealth, one would have thought of as incapable of getting involved in such ignominious dealings. Some of this human filth that went to Montesinos’s office to sell themselves and sell the best thing that Peru had – a democratic system re-established with difficulty in 1980 after twelve years of military dictatorship – for fistfuls or suitcases full of dollars, for tax breaks for their companies, to win a hearing, or gain a tender, a ministry or a parliamentary job – were people known to me and whose support of the dictatorship I thought was ‘pure’, a production of the sad conviction that seems so widespread among the wrongly named Peruvian ruling class: that a country like ours needs a strong hand in order to progress because the Peruvian people are not yet ready for democracy.

  I trust that the government of Alejandro Toledo, which is coming to office after clean elections that nobody has disputed, can show to the world that this belief is as false as the falsifiers that brought the political process into disrepute. It is clear that the new government is not able to resolve the immense problems facing the Peruvian people, which the dictatorship aggravated while adding a raft of new problems. But it can and must establish the foundations for any future resolution of these problems by preventing, once and for all, the possibility of a further collapse of the constitutional order. For that reason it must pursue the moral policy that it has initiated so firmly, giving judges all the support they need to judge and sentence criminals and thieves, starting at the top. It is a unique opportunity. The putrefaction of the Fujimori regime had spread to such an extent that when it collapsed, all the institutions collapsed with it. This means that now all the institutions – the Armed Forces, the Judiciary, the Administration – can be reformed root and branch. And the videos that, unintentionally, Montesinos has bequeathed so opportunely to democracy must be used to cleanse and reform this democracy and its leaders in the most limpid way.

  Marbella, 18 July 2001

  The Pinochet Affair

  The ruling of the British magistrate Roland Bartle is another step towards the extradition of General Pinochet to Spain to be tried for crimes committed against human rights during the seventeen years of the dictatorship he presided over. This is a historical judgement that extends well beyond the particular case of Chile, and should be greeted with jubilation by all those millions of people across the world who have been persecuted, ill-treated or silenced for their ideas, and by all those who are not content for the culture and practice of democracy to be the prerogative of a mere handful of countries, while the barbarity of despotism and autocracy holds sway over seventy-five per cent of the planet.

  People who, without being in favour of dictatorial regimes, question the right of Spain and the United Kingdom to extradite the ex-dictator, put forward a series of arguments that, for me, do not stand up to close scrutiny. The most common of these arguments is pragmatic: the international pursuit of Pinochet is endangering the Chilean transition to democracy and might destabilise the present government, aggravate and inflame the political debate, and even provoke a new coup. This doom scenario is not borne out by the facts. Quite the reverse: the reality is that, although it is very virulent, the dispute between those for and against Pinochet being tried outside Chile is being spearheaded by radical minorities, while most of Chilean society follows it at a distance and with increasing indifference. The national debate about the forthcoming elections is much more intense, and in this debate – something that the international media tend to leave out – the Pinochet affair is no longer a central issue, in what seems like a tactical (and very sensible) agreement between the main candidates, Lagos (centre left) and Lavín (centre right).

  There is no serious argument to support the gloomy prediction that the Pinochet affair will destroy Chilean democracy. The opposite is true, as the New York Times has recently shown in a report on the state of justice in the country. The prosecution of Pinochet in Spain has seen a revival of legal initiatives in Chile against the crimes and abuses committed during the dictatorship, and in the last twelve months twenty-six officers accused of these crimes have been imprisoned after court cases. This is a very clear demonstration that Chilean judges have a greater willingness and freedom to act on this issue now that the obstacle to the normal development of justice – the presence of the ex-dictator,
who, as a senator elected for life to one of the ruling bodies of the Chilean state, cannot be impeached – has been removed. Instead of weakening democracy, international action against Pinochet is helping to complete and accelerate the democratisation process that is already firmly rooted in Chile.

  Another objection to the prosecution of Pinochet by Judge Baltazar Garzón is based on nationalism: the violation of national sovereignty implied in judging the ex-dictator outside his own country. This is an extraordinarily anachronistic argument which ignores the current historical moment of globalisation, the systematic erosion of borders and of the nineteenth-century concept of the nation state. The economy has led the great modern onslaught against this narrow and exclusive view of sovereignty, which is incompatible with the interdependence that the development of science, technology, information, commerce and culture has established between all the societies of the world at the end of the twentieth century. Why should justice be excluded from this general process of internationalisation of contemporary life? In fact, it is not excluded. No one objects if common criminals, drug-runners or smugglers are prosecuted and sentenced outside their ‘countries’; quite the reverse – it is normal for governments to seek the joint action of other countries against their criminals (for example, with regard to terrorism). Why should crimes and abuses against human rights be a separate case? Are these crimes less serious from an ethical or legal point of view?

  The importance of the Pinochet affair is, precisely, that it sets a precedent to end the impunity that a great many little tyrants and satraps have enjoyed. For up until now, after perpetrating their misdeeds, robbing the public purse and amassing large fortunes, they have been able to retire and enjoy a magnificent old age, free of any sanction. Now everyone from Baby Doc to General Cedras, from Idi Amin to Menghistu, from Fidel Castro to Saddam Hussein, and so many others of the same ilk know that they will not be able to live peacefully, that wherever they go and wherever they are, the law can reach them and demand that they answer for their crimes. The deterrent effect that this might have on potential coup plotters should not be underestimated.