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 videos — 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 essentiaclass="underline" 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.