How was it possible that a regime of this nature, controlled by shameless, undisguised villains who not only committed innumerable abuses every day, but also were recorded by Vladimiro Montesinos in hundreds and perhaps thousands of videos, which document, day after day, the extraordinary scope of the corruption, could be, throughout most of these ten years of dishonour, a popular regime? Because, to the shame of Peruvians, it was popular, right up to the last two years, perhaps less, of its insolent existence. The reply to this question is: thanks to the intelligent and unscrupulous manipulation of the media, especially the television channels accessible to all viewers, that the dictatorship placed at its service, by buying off the owners.
The way in which Montesinos, the handy evil genius of the dictatorship’s intelligence service, proceeded was both subtle and brutal. He blackmailed some media organisations through the tax office. In return for silence, servility and complicity, he could withdraw the sword of Damocles of heavy taxation that could threaten the survival of a company. Those who did not comply had to pay their debts, which increased at the whim of the regime; in other cases, the operation was cruder and more direct: the media owners sold for hard cash their editorials, their headlines and their news stories. They introduced lies, spread rumours or kept silent about certain issues in order to bolster the regime’s campaign of propaganda, and they vilified and discredited critics of the regime in invective campaigns that Montesinos thought up, administered and orchestrated. This demagogic orchestration of public opinion through the main media outlets was the main factor in the popularity of a regime that lived off and in lies.
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.