POLITICS-PERU: The Usual Suspects

By Ángel Páez Reprint | | Print |

Ángel Páez

LIMA, Dec 26 2005 (IPS) - A mantle of corruption and impunity has begun to cast a shadow over the campaign for Peru’s April presidential elections, despite the fact that the candidates have not even been officially registered yet.

The presidential hopeful of the right-wing National Unity coalition, Lourdes Flores, who is the front-runner in the polls, presented businessman Arturo Woodman as her vice presidential running mate.

Woodman was not only closely involved with the corrupt regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), but is also a close associate of banker Dionisio Romero, who faced charges for trafficking of influences.

Two congressional commissions that investigated economic and financial crimes committed during the government of Fujimori found that Woodman was involved in four cases of corruption.

In addition, it was Woodman who personally brought Romero to the offices of then-security chief Vladimiro Montesinos, considered the power behind the throne during the Fujimori administrations.

Both Fujimori and Montesinos are in prison today – the former in Chile, where he is awaiting extradition to Peru on charges of crimes against humanity and corruption, and the latter in Peru, where he is being tried for a long list of crimes.

Montesinos filmed hundreds of videos in his office, showing how he bribed politicians, media owners and others. One of the many video recordings that triggered the scandal which brought down the Fujimori regime showed Romero asking Montesinos to intervene in a legal case involving one of the clients at his bank.

Although Woodman admitted that he took Romero to Montesinos’ offices, he claimed that the two men “never spoke of business or politics.”

However, on a video showing one of their meetings, Romero and Montesinos can be heard commenting on the need to lower taxes on wheat imports, another of the areas in which Romero has a business interest.

The banker himself also testified before a congressional investigatory commission that he and Montesinos touched on political and business issues.

Despite everything, Flores decided to put Woodman on her ticket.

“Someone who has had such close ties to Montesinos should abstain from participating in politics, let alone run for vice president, no matter what party he belongs to,” Ronald Gamarra, a former anti-corruption prosecutor and an investigator at the Legal Defence Institute, told IPS.

But the allegations against Woodman are not the only ones that have tarnished the campaign for the elections in which President Alejandro Toledo’s successor will be elected.

Questions have also been raised about the running mate of former president Alan García (1985-1990), who plans to seek a second term representing the social democratic Peruvian Aprista Party.

García announced that he would put retired admiral Luis Giampietri Rojas, a veteran naval officer who specialised in commando and intelligence operations, on his ticket.

Giampietri is a self-declared enemy of human rights organisations and a fierce critic of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the “dirty war” waged by the security forces against the insurgent Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) between 1980 and 2000.

The former president has presented Giampietri as an expert in security with ample combat experience, while highlighting his democratic and personal credentials.

But he neglected to mention that the retired naval officer was one of the two officers who ordered the June 1986 crackdown on a riot staged by inmates jailed for “terrorism” in the prison on El Frontón island, during the García administration. Some 300 prisoners were killed in the bloody incident.

The Truth Commission found that many of the prisoners were summarily executed after they surrendered, although the deaths were reported as having occurred during a firefight. Several of the prisoners who were killed were later found innocent of the charges on which they had been jailed.

García is facing criminal charges in that case, in which Giampietri is a witness.

But despite the abundant well-documented evidence and testimony, Giampietri denies that the prisoners were the victims of extrajudicial executions, and claims that “what happened in Frontón was not a massacre, but combat.”

“What happened was that some of my men were killed. We are facing unfair penal proceedings, but we will come out of it just fine,” he has stated.

Nor was the retired officer completely unconnected with the Fujimori regime. His name was on the parliamentary slate presented by Juan Carlos Hurtado, who ran for mayor of Lima for the Vamos Vecino movement, a Fujimori front.

Hurtado, whose campaign was financed by Montesinos, has been a fugitive from justice since a video recording was divulged showing the former spy chief handing Hurtado a briefcase full of cash.

But the problem is not only incidents from the past that raise doubts concerning Woodman and Giampietri. The real issue, said Gamarra, is not only that they have not repented, but that they justify their past actions.

In spite of his well-known relations with Fujimori, Montesinos and Romero, Woodman is an outspoken critic of the special anticorruption bodies set up to investigate and prosecute past offences.

“The citizens do not want to see people who are implicated in corruption and who have ties to the ‘Fuji-Montesinos mafia’ in the political arena, or in public posts,” said Gamarra.

And in the case of Giampietri, analysts point out that he has been a staunch opponent of the removal of the military courts, which under Fujimori violated the most basic rights of civilians accused of belonging to insurgent groups.

Fujimori and Montesinos allegedly used military judges to persecute and punish their foes, and to save their associates and collaborators from the ordinary courts. Many members of the armed forces accused of human rights abuses or involvement in the drug trade were protected by the military courts.

There are fears that if Giampietri becomes vice president, he will attempt to bring to a close the trials faced by military personnel accused of committing crimes against humanity during the dirty war. The retired officer has stated that he considers the trials “an act of vengeance against those who risked their lives to pacify the country.”

“The naming of Giampietri as Alan García’s vice presidential candidate is in keeping with the Peruvian Aprista Party’s position in favour of impunity and against investigations of human rights violations,” said Gloria Cano, with the APRODEH human rights association.

“Giampietri has not only been investigated for the El Frontón massacre, but has always openly defended all of the members of the armed forces facing charges or investigations for crimes against humanity,” the activist told IPS.

“As a candidate on García’s slate, Giampietri’s position as a witness in the trial against García is compromised,” she said.

“It is a fact that García and Giampietri have agreed that everything should be left in complete impunity,” Cano maintained.

Opinion polls show Flores in the lead for the April elections, followed by indigenous retired army colonel Ollanta Humala, who has a slight advantage over García.