Peruvian President Fujimori's Right-Hand Man Was a Gun Runner and Drug Dealer -- and Employed by the

[Judi Lynn]

Peruvian President Fujimori's Right-Hand Man Was a Gun Runner and Drug Dealer -- and Employed by the U.S.
By Coletta Youngers, September 3, 2010

A Supreme Court verdict in Peru this week once again shows how the U.S. government has engaged in unholy alliances -- often with those involved in the very drug trade it claims to be combating -- in order to further its short-term drug policy objectives and to the detriment of broader U.S. foreign policy goals.

After four years of deliberations, a tribunal of the Peruvian Supreme Court finally upheld the 2006 verdict sentencing Peru’s Vladimiro Montesinos to 20 years in prison and a steep monetary reparation for selling weapons to the Colombian Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia, or FARC. At the same time that Montesinos was running guns to the FARC, he was the right-hand man of then-Peruvian president turned dictator Alberto Fujimori, functioning as de facto security adviser and drug czar. He was also a key ally of the U.S. government in the so-called war on drugs. Even more ironic, Montesinos’ arrangements with the FARC coincided with the launching of Plan Colombia.

As in the case of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega (a paid CIA informant until the 1989 U.S. invasion), the U.S. government’s relationship with Vladimiro Montesinos shows the absurd lengths that U.S. policy makers have been willing to go in attempting to show progress in the “war on drugs.” While in power in Peru, Montesinos organized death squads, orchestrated the undermining of Peruvian democracy with the aim of keeping Fujimori in power indefinitely, and amassed a huge illegal fortune (by some estimates over $250 million) through corruption and blackmail. He was also the U.S. government’s prime interlocutor on drug policy issues.

Before emerging as Fujimori’s trusted aide, Montesinos was widely known as a lawyer for major drug traffickers. Now-declassified 1991 cables from the U.S. Embassy in Lima carried clear warnings; one stated, “There is substantial circumstantial evidence linking Montesinos to past narcotics activity…among the police and military figures recommended by Montesinos are men with possible ties to drug trafficking.” Yet even that did not persuade U.S. intelligence and drug-related agencies from seeking to forge an alliance with him. Montesinos quickly won the support of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which then, with Montesinos’ help, edged out the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as the lead anti-drug agency for the U.S. government in the country.

He was soon courted by State Department officials as well. He became known in U.S. government circles as “Mr. Fix It.” If you wanted to get something done, you went to Montesinos. But the strategy worked both ways. If Montesinos didn’t like what he thought Washington was up to, he would withhold drug-related intelligence and slow down or even cease drug control activities. One U.S. official told me privately that Washington was always quick to give in. It seems that Montesinos, an expert in blackmail, managed to get the upper hand over his U.S. backers.

More:
http://www.fpif.org/blog/peru_drug_dealer_gun_runner_CIA_Montesinos_Fujimori?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FPIF+%28Foreign+Policy+In+Focus+%28All+News%29%29

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