Drug War: S.I.N.

Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: S.I.N.

www.blythe.org/peru-pcp

In Peru, McCaffrey's "narco-guerrillas" have many names, among them "The Shining Path," Sendero Luminoso and Túpac Amaru. The Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru was named after Túpac Amaru II, the last Inca king to rise against the Spanish, in 1780. 17 of Peru's 25 millions, most of Incan descent, live in extreme poverty. The most valuable cash crop in the vast, impoverished Huallaga River Valley is coca. It's the traditional basis of the economy.

Although the countryside is racked by epidemic cholera, the government puts nothing at all into medical care, sanitation or structural economic projects. Millions of people have virtually no access to medical care, and no political hope of ever getting any. If your 3-year-old daughter died of an easily preventable disease, and she was the last of your four children to die, would you pick up a gun?

During the 18 months prior to the seizure of the Japanese Embassy by Túpac Amaru in late December of 96, Peruvian President Fujimori imprisoned 500,000 poor campesinos on charges of terrorism or treason. But when the Embassy was seized, Fujimori was quick to insist that this was an unpopular fringe group. Sure. Like the Vietminh. Tupac Amaru is allied with Sendero Luminoso, the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), which leads the Popular Army of Liberation (EPL). The EPL has the political allegiance of the overwhelming majority of Incan campesinos.

The guerrillas are Incan tribalists, committed to free medical care, education, and sweat-equity work for the poor. Incan tribal lands are traditionally held in common. "Communist," to an Incan campesino, means that the Incas once again have an army. That's why their leaders take the names of Incan kings. "The Shining Path" enforces a floor price for coca leaves, by far Peru's most valuable crop, and so serves as an armed force to prevent extortionate eradication. The guerrillas also provide a buffer between their people and the dealers.

Brazil's Prof. Anthony Richard Henman, 1990: "...coca [is used] not only as an excellent physical stimulant, but also as a major element of traditional healing practices, and—through the support and stimulus given to myth recitation—the prime means of activating the collective memory. Thus, to attack coca chewing in the Amazon amounts to more than a minor act of behavioral re-training, on a par with making Indians cover their private parts. It involves a fundamental assault on the cohesion of a culture which has existed for millennia."

A family shares the power-giving coca during a fertility rite; Catherine J Allen

That is, coca leaf is the central religious sacrament of this culture. Quillabamba, peopled by the highland Quechua and Aymara of southern Peru, a Sendero Luminoso stronghold, is the ancient Incan capital of the department of Cuzco on the eastern Amazonian slopes of the Central Andes. It's a popular tourist stop on the way to the ancient mountaintop city of Macchu Piccu.

"By the mid-1960s, a process of land reform was under way, which has led in turn to the emergence of a strong peasant federation in the area—the Federación de Productores Campesinos de La Convención y Lares (FEPCACYL). Understandably, FEPCACYL is a strong and highly articulate defender of the legal market in coca leaves; probably for this reason, La Convención is the only major coca producing region in South America never to have suffered the effects of forcible eradication. With Sendero Luminoso guerillas poised on the very hilltops surrounding Quillabamba, any attempt at armed intimidation of coca growers could only lead to widespread bloodshed."

The dealers responded with paramilitary forces of their own, known as rondas or "blackheads." The rondas operate as irregulars for the Peruvian Army. Operation Aries, April, 1994, challenged Sendero Luminoso for control of the Huallaga River Valley. According to Peru's National Coordinator of Human Rights, the Peruvian Army's tactics consisted entirely of machine-gunning the mountain hamlets from the air, then landing in force to gang-rape, murder and loot. The Army didn't engage the guerrillas once. It hit their families. When the International Committee of the Red Cross came to investigate, it was denied access to the entire region.

As Peruvian Gen. Cisneros once explained, "It is necessary to kill ten peasants to kill one guerrilla." So how unpopular could they be? As of January, 1996, according to the Andean Commission of Jurists, official emergency zones included 50% of the Peruvian population and 28% of its national territory. Much of the territory in question is the most valuable land in the country, the coca basket.

Sendero Luminoso advocates land redistribution. This is to be combined with replacement of the ubiquitous coca leaf with diversified food crops. This would localize and diversify an internationalized monocrop economy. It would also remove the Army's excuse, and motive, for stealing campesino land. You can't buy weapons with corn.

Crop replacement is to be done not with coercion, however, but with economic incentive, by collapsing the price of coca leaf through controlled legalization. That is hardly the position of narcotraficantes. Any photo of Sendero support centers, as the one below, simply shows the local young women and men of fighting age. Decree 22095 of 1978 specifically criminalizes highland culture by prohibiting the possession and sale of coca leaves at altitudes below 1500 meters. It became illegal to be an Inca.

PCP fighters recruit in Uchiza, 1987; Victor Vargas

For the time being, of course, in the absence of international legalization and agricultural infrastructure, the regional economy is dependent on Syndicate coca dealers. Since Fujimori's secret police are running the Syndicate, Fujimori's government has absolutely no intention of replacing the monocrop coca economy.

Fujimori, legally, runs the national coca monopoly he inherited from the Spanish, Empresa Nacional de la Coca, ENACO. ENACO legally converts some 5,000 metric tons of coca leaves into most of the world's medical cocaine. As things now stand, coca cultivation is the only way many campesinos can feed their families. Coca legalization, of course, would collapse ENACO's monopoly. Fujimori wants a nation of sharecroppers. The sharecroppers want title to their land, a free market in coca, and Fujimori dead. Both the Huallaga River Valley of the Incas and the Ene River Basin of the Ashaninkas are now Fujimori free-fire zones.

President Fujimori's new laws define "provoking anxiety," "affecting international relations," or seeming to favor the guerrillas as treason. Those accused of treason are imprisoned without the possibility of bail until a final verdict is rendered. No evidence of guilt is required for imprisonment, and imprisonment often ends in extrajudicial murder, or a life sentence passed by anonymous, hooded military judges. Fujimori's first year in office was characterized by "one of the world's most dismal human rights records."

Alberto Fujimori, a grey academic aiming at a Senate seat, was elected president of Peru in an election rigged by the National Intelligence Service, SIN, Peru's CIA. Without the fraud, Peru's 1990 President would have been the great writer Mario Vargas Llosa. SIN's 1990 election liaison to Fujimori was Vladimiro Montesinos. The Madrid daily La Vanguardia called him "the second most powerful man in Peru, after the president." That was an understatement.

During the 80's, Montesinos built a reputation as the top drug lawyer in Peru. "Within a few years, Montesinos became a sought-after legal and administrative strategist for drug traffickers, providing services that went far beyond the practice of law. He rented homes for Colombian traffickers, advised accessories of traffickers when to go into hiding, managed the disappearance of files of fugitive Colombian traffickers to prevent extradition requests, and in at least one case, produced falsified documents to buttress his defense of a cocaine dealer…. For the drug mafia…Montesinos' handle on the system made him almost indispensable."

According to Peru's most famous journalist, Gustavo Gorriti, quoted above, Montesinos had been investigated by the DEA for "his connection to the most important Peruvian drug cartel in the 1980s, the Rodriguez-Lopez organization, and also links to some Colombian traffickers." In 1986, when Reynaldo Rodriguez-Lopez went on trial for running the largest cocaine smuggling organization in Peru, Vladimiro Montesinos ran his legal team. Montesinos also represented the more important police generals indicted for being on Rodriguez-Lopez' payroll. In a brilliant series of covert moves among his police and military contacts, Montesinos used the case to take control of the Peruvian Attorney General's office, arranging the military replacement of the original prosecutor with his own puppet. Montesinos, below, was back in power.

In 1990, this master-fixer, working under orders from the National Intelligence Service, arranged the quashing of tax evasion charges against presidential candidate Fujimori, who was SIN's only hope of beating the conservative and incorruptible Vargas. Immediately upon election, Fujimori chose to live and work in the Military Circle, an exclusive Army officer's club. This kept him unavailable to the press between the election and his inauguration. Montesinos remained Fujimori's SIN handler. His title was "national security advisor."

Fujimori's first move was to sack army intelligence chief Córdova and most of the rest of Peru's best prosecutors and anti-drug police, whom drug lawyer Montesinos knew all too well. The Interior and Justice ministries were then stacked with Montesinos' own people. Montesinos then hand-picked the Armed Forces Joint Command. He also chose Gen. José Valdivia for a senior post. Valdivia, who would become one of the Army's chiefs after the 1992 coup, was the butcher who had been accused of the Army's revenge massacre of 28 peasants at a wedding in the Ayacucho village of Cayara in 1988. Montesinos had been Valdivia's SIN lawyer, arranging such legal niceties as the disappearance of witnesses.

According to Human Rights Watch/Americas, "A death squad composed of members of the SIN and military agents and organized under Montesinos' direction has been responsible for some of the most serious rights violations attributed to the armed forces under Fujimori's administration, including disappearances, torture and illegal executions."

On the night of November 3, 1991, a death squad armed with the army's assassination weapon of choice, silencer-equipped H&K submachine guns, burst into a Lima barrio chicken barbeque. The pro-Sendero sentiments of the locals had proven obnoxious, since Barrios Altos was less than 30 meters from the police intelligence directorate's headquarters and 50 meters from another police precinct.

Despite the presence of a troop transport filled with soldiers, or perhaps because of it, 16 people, including children, were left riddled with machine-gun bullets. A horrified witness jotted down the license plate numbers on the death-squad vehicles. One was assigned to the office of Santiago Fujimori, the president's brother, and the other to the office of David Mejía, the vice-minister of the interior.

The outraged Congress appointed a commission of inquiry, which revealed that the murders were the work of the officially-sanctioned death squad of the Army Intelligence Service, the "Colina Group." The Colina was led by Gen. Julio Salazar, a subordinate of Vladimiro Montesinos. Just as prosecutor Pablo Livia was preparing to do ballistic tests on weapons belonging to army intelligence, he was taken off the case. To prevent the Congress from taking corrective action, Montesinos' Army suspended it, the constitution, civil liberties, the vice-presidency and the supreme court - at gunpoint, April 5, 1992.

According to Gorriti, in one of the first actions taken after the April coup, "army intelligence officers had ransacked archives in the judiciary and in the prosecutor's offices mainly to get hold of all the cases in which Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's closest advisor, was involved as a lawyer for drug traffickers and perhaps other documents that Fujimori does not want the public to know."

La Vanguardia quotes Peruvian Senator César Barrera as saying they were searching to "destroy evidence that Montesinos maintains close relations with the CIA despite the fact that the CIA knew he was protecting drug traffickers." More than 10,000 files were destroyed.

Gorriti says that "in late 1990, Montesinos also began close cooperation with the CIA, and in 1991 the National Intelligence Service he controlled began to organize a secret anti-drug outfit with funding, training and equipment provided by the CIA." This move enraged the DEA in Lima, because it switched Peruvian anti-drug operations from DEA to CIA control. According to a 1991 DEA internal report quoted in the Miami Herald, "Montesinos has gained the president's unconditional confidence, and using that position, he arranges the appointment of ministers and advisors as well as transfers of Army officers . . . always with the aim of supporting narcotics trafficking." Remember, that's DEA intelligence experts talking.

Former Vice President San Román declared that since the coup "the number of airplanes carrying drugs has been increasing steadily." Immediately after the 1992 coup the U.S. announced it was dismantling its anti-drug night radars in northern Peru, without giving an explanation. According to San Román, this was done to facilitate the drug trade, which he says is now directly organized by Montesinos' National Intelligence Service. "The CIA trains the SIN's intelligence units in everything from vetting witnesses to polygraph testing; it has even donated jeeps." President Bush's CIA was the chief financier and trainer of the coup engineers. As head of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Barry McCaffrey organized this effort.

On October 2, 1996, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey met personally with Vladimiro Montesinos in Peru. It was the first time that Montesinos, now official head of SIN, had been seen in public in six years. Montesinos, said McCaffrey, was "an honest advisor…and…an outstanding and knowledgeable strategist." Given the public record, it is impossible that McCaffrey didn't know the drug-dealing assassin he was lauding.

That was also the conclusion of Senators Patrick Leahy and Christopher Dodd. In a public letter that immediately followed McCaffrey's meeting with Montesinos, to CIA Director John Deutch, these Senators demanded that the Agency cut its ties with Montesinos, because "We are aware of the links of Montesinos with violations of human rights, including massacres, torture, disappearances, and his links with drug cartels in Peru, whom he served before becoming an advisor to Fujimori." Who's the liar, Gen. McCaffrey, or Senators Leahy and Dodd?