Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 5 - 11 October 2000 Issue No. 502
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Fujimori's swansong

By Hisham El-Naggar

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is on his way out. That, at least, is the verdict most political analysts appear to have pronounced on the fate of the highly unpredictable and decidedly authoritarian Fujimori. And public opinion, it seems, has emerged as a decisive factor in Peruvian politics.

Fujimori's image was badly tarnished last week when a videotape emerged showing his trusted intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos offering a bribe to an opposition politician to switch sides and express support for Fujimori's questionable election victory. The pressure on Fujimori to give Montesinos the boot had become impossible to ignore. At that precise moment, Fujimori surprised friends and foes alike by announcing that he would call new elections next May. More significantly, he said he would not participate in them.

It appears that public unrest has managed to succeed where the Organisation of American States (OAS), the United States government and a solidly united opposition have all failed. Lima was abuzz with rumours, but people in the know concluded that Fujimori was compelled to relinquish power on a tip that there are more incriminating videotapes.

Why should the corruption of Fujimori's number one spy deal such a blow to Peru's seemingly indestructible president? The answer lies in the key role Montesinos played in the so-called Fujimorato -- the name given by detractors to Fujimori's thinly-disguised authoritarian rule. Montesinos is an ex-military man who maintains strong ties with his former profession. Despite a colourful past as a leftist militant -- Montesinos parents called him Vladimiro after, you guessed it, Lenin -- Montesinos has come to be characterised by his cloak-and-dagger intrigues rather than by any ideology. Much of what is known about him is hearsay, although it appears that at one point he fell from grace amid accusations by the army of spying for the CIA.

Under Fujimori, Montesinos rose like a phoenix from the ashes and proceeded to become the power behind the throne. "Grey monk" is arguably the least memorable epithet he earned; some took to saying that he was like the supreme being, invisible but making his presence felt everywhere. The National Intelligence Service, a sort of Peruvian CIA-cum-FBI led by Montesinos, has a provocative enough Spanish acronym (SIN); but in vernacular Spanish the word means "without" -- prompting Lima's wits to add the word "scruples" after and thus aptly describing Montesinos' style of doing politics.

Montesinos is widely held responsible for the Fujimorato's most extravagant stunts, most notably the "self-coup" in 1992. Fujimori used the move to suspend Congress long enough to carry out the privatisations that both transformed Peru's economy and earned him some powerful friends abroad. Incidentally, the financial standing of his allies weren't exactly hurt either. Lenin would have been dazzled, if not a little amused, by what his namesake has wrought.

None of this would have been possible without the alliance Montesinos forged between Fujimori and the armed forces. Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, was perceived as an outsider by Peru's establishment. Montesinos -- his own troubled background notwithstanding -- convinced the military that Fujimori was their best bet for carrying on their struggle with subversive groups like the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru. And, of course, his intelligence service did its bit too, the result being the near-total defeat of the guerrilla movement. This was counted as a major achievement by most Peruvians, fed up with the brutality of guerrilla groups. Much of Fujimori's popularity was attributed to his success in largely ending the civil strife that had plagued the country. That his own soldiers, stage-managed by Montesinos, could also be brutal was a regrettable detail.

As Fujimori, goaded on by Montesinos, became increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic abuses piled up. And who better than Montesinos to do the dirty work? He did it with ruthless determination when he engineered Fujimori's constitutionally dubious third electoral victory. Montesinos must have reasoned that there was no life for him after Fujimori, perhaps literally. For a while, it seemed the gamble would pay off. Foreign critics grumbled, but in the end they did not carry out threats of sanctions. The remaining domestic opposition, although furious, was a matter that Montesinos probably felt he could rein in.

The videotape upset his careful calculations. To make matters worse, it was released a few days after fingers started pointing at Montesinos as the key person behind smuggling arms to Colombian guerrillas. The combination of the two scandals seems to have convinced the armed forces that Montesinos, and perhaps Fujimori as well, had outlived their usefulness. Fujimori has made it clear that he needs time to make the necessary preparations so that his adieu does not turn into a full-scale rout. There is speculation that he may be grooming his daughter, Keiko, to carry on the battle and perpetuate the dynasty. If she does, it will have to be without Montesinos who appears to have fled to Panama. The lot of lackeys who fancy themselves kingmakers is not always a happy one.

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