Showdown In Peru

By Tim McGirk/Lima

For years people have accused Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori of running a brutal and authoritarian government right out of a dictator's textbook. But last week Fujimori's regime morphed from a monolith into a weird, militarized soap opera, and it seemed no one, perhaps not even Fujimori, understood how the plot was unfolding. Was the President still running the show? Was he resigning, as he suddenly promised? Would he, as he declared, really clean up the thuggish security apparatus that had done so much to blacken his administration's name? Would the nation's powerful military back him or revolt?

Fujimori tried to cast himself as the hero of the drama, which began with an explosive power play against his shadowy secret police chief, Vladimiro Montesinos Torres, after the latter was caught red-handed paying a bribe. But despite the jaunty posture Fujimori struck during the crisis, it looked as if his presidency had become terminally entangled in the web of intimidation, bribery and other criminal activity swirling around his erstwhile ally, Montesinos.

Fujimori and Montesinos, head of the National Intelligence Service (SIN), have been virtually inseparable since 1992, when the President abruptly dissolved Congress for eight months and took near absolute power in order to fight--successfully, as it turned out--a Maoist insurgency that had brought the country to chaos. Ever since, charges of torture, fraud in last April's presidential election, and gunrunning have been leveled against SIN. They culminated two weeks ago with the broadcast of a videotape, apparently leaked from Montesinos' headquarters, showing the spy chief handing over a thick packet of cash to persuade an opposition legislator to switch his allegiance to Fujimori, which he did.

Watching this evidence of his comrade's skulduggery at the same time the nation did, Fujimori "must have felt like he was hit by a missile in the face," says a friend. His challenge then was to strike out at Montesinos without destroying himself. Two days later, the President chose to self-inflict a wound. On national TV, he announced that just months after winning a third term in an election international observers described as unfair, he was ordering new elections in which he would not stand. Fujimori startled Peruvians further by stating that he would disband the SIN, one of the main props of his rule.

By failing to act on his pledge as of late last week, however, Fujimori raised doubts about his resolve on that or other undertakings. With Montesinos holed up in his apartment at the top of SIN's downtown headquarters, guarded by 800 of his agents, the President made no moves against him. And congressman Alberto Kouri, the compromised opposition member, was not so much as questioned by police.

Three days after his bombshell announcement, Fujimori made a bizarre nocturnal foray from the presidential palace. Along with his daughter Keiko, whom he anointed First Lady after a messy 1994 split from his wife, he climbed a lamppost atop the palace gate to wave at a few thousand supporters who had been bused in from Lima slums. Addressing reporters afterward, he began backpedaling furiously. Defying opposition demands to set up a transitional government, Fujimori said he was not resigning until next July 28, after elections that he said would wait until March or April. When reporters asked about his plans for 2006, he hinted that he might run again for the presidency.

About Montesinos, Fujimori was evasive and mild. "We have to give security to this man who has made mistakes like all human beings but who has contributed to the pacification of this country," he said. Fujimori never addressed the issue of when he might start taking apart the SIN.

For days rumors circulated that the intelligence chief had lined up the country's top military commanders behind him. During his eight years as Fujimori's right hand, Montesinos had controlled military promotions, weeding out officers who might oppose the spy chief. (He owed no allegiance to the military. A onetime army captain, Montesinos was expelled in 1977 amid charges that he sold state secrets to the CIA.) The chiefs of the army, navy and air force are all Montesinos' choices, along with the Interior and Defense Ministers.

Nevertheless, four nervous days after the showdown began, the military high command issued a statement, albeit vague, supporting Fujimori's decision to dismantle the SIN and hold elections. According to a well-connected Western diplomat in Lima, military commanders were worried that a coup would provoke international sanctions and a cutoff of foreign aid.

Even before the bribery scandal, Montesinos and the SIN were becoming increasingly hard to defend. In August Montesinos was tipped off that an investigative journalist was going to expose an arms-smuggling ring involving former Peruvian military officers. Fujimori and Montesinos staged a pre-emptive strike. At a press conference, they boasted that the secret service had busted a gang that was buying Russian AK-47s from Jordan and air-dropping them, for a profit, to guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist group that should have been anathema to the right-wing Peruvian government. Later it was alleged that the traffickers were linked to Peruvian intelligence.

Even with the military brass so far sitting this battle out, Montesinos was not necessarily done fighting. A clandestine group of dissident officers known as COMACA claimed that within his intelligence redoubt, Montesinos had ordered his staff to make copies of computer discs and some of the 2,500 videos and audio recordings held in the SIN vaults--presumably incriminating evidence against other officials. The videos, as a Fujimori government figure remarked, are Montesinos' "life insurance." The soap opera may yet have more installments.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington and Jane Holligan/Lima

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington and Jane Holligan/Lima