THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE

John Simpson follows the trail of drugs and power in a mysterious country where no man can be both honest and safe

Lima PERU IS a Looking-Glass land where nothing is what it seems. The chief of the secret police is a man of evident probity, Who risked his career to protect the people he arrested. The most powerful political figure, who has an unexplained hold over the President, was last sighted in public in When an expensive hotel opens in the depths of the worst economic crisis the country has ever faced, you can be sure that somewhere behind it is a man who needs an outlet for a great many unexplained dollars. When an open-and-shut court case suddenly folds Up, it is reasonable to assume that someone has Paid a visit to the judge. Between 60 and 75 per cent of the entire world supply of cocaine origi- nates on the coca bushes of the Huallaga Valley, in

the east of Peru; this fact explains most of the strange things about the country. In 1990, the last year for which there are reli- able figures, the Peruvian coca-growers received 0.15 per cent of the profit from the cocaine trade; those who helped to smuggle the basic paste to Colombia received 16.5 per cent; and the mostly ,,,Colombian traficantes received 82 per cent.

he industry which is eating away at every aspect of Peruvian life brings little enough profit to the country.

From the air, the Huallaga Valley seems remarkably peaceful. As the pilot of our light aircraft tilted his starboard wing indul- gently so the cameraman could get a better shot, I could clearly see the light green bushes on the lee of the gentle hills. Smoke drifted across the tree-tops, where the Huallaga River ran. Below us was the town of Campanilla, neatly laid out around the usual Plaza de Armes. It was hard to grasp that if we landed at this particular place, so similar to all the other small Peruvian towns we had visited, we would stand an excellent chance of getting ourselves killed. Nearby, the road had been widened so that planes could land and take the basic paste back to Colombia. We knew who had widened the road and protected the airstrip from inquisitive visitors: it was the Peru- vian army.

With us on the plane was a Peruvian journalist, Cecilia Valenzuela. She had been to the Huallaga Valley once before, for a television programme which had been taken off the air directly she offended the government a little too much. Now she was working with us, and had handed us her recording of a ground-to-air conversation with the pilot of a Colombian plane which was coming in to pick up a load of coca paste: Pilot: Is it all OK down there?

Control: Everything's OK. There's nobody here but the army.

Pilot: Are you sure it's OK?

Control: Yes, I'm telling you: there's only the army here.

We headed on to Tocache, another dan- gerous town. There were guns everywhere as we got out of the plane. 'Staying a few days?' asked a heavy, dark man in uniform with a face like an Inca. He had 'NAZI' written on his rifle. `Quien sabe?' I said. He grunted, flicked through our passports and looked at our tele- vision gear. Then he turned and raised a couple of fingers, each the thickness of two of mine. A pair of taxi- drivers at once got into their ancient cars and started the engines. You do what the army tells you in Tocache.

A little cloud of golden dust approached us along the main road from the centre of town. At the heart of the cloud was a small, neat dark man on an underpowered motor- bike. This was the man we had come to see. He stopped and gave us each a firm, confi- dent handshake. Then he turned round and guided us back, our two rusting taxis fol- lowing his cloud of dust until we reached his house. It was almost bare of furniture, since most of what he owned had been destroyed when his previous house was attacked.

Luis Zambrano was a teacher, but at the elections of 1990 he had joined Cambio 90, the political party of the presidential candi- date, Alberto Fujimori, and stood for the post of sub-prefect in Tocache. Both he and Fujimori won, but Zambrano's plea- sure in his victory lasted no longer than his first meeting at the town hall. As he sat at the council table he realised there was only one real subject of interest for everyone present: each time a plane left Tocache air- port with drugs on board, all the main offi- cials who ran the town received a share of the profits.

There is serious money available in Tocache. In 1990 the head of the provincial council received $5,000 for each plane- load; so did the senior police officer, the commander of the army base and the investigating magistrate. Zambrano, as sub- prefect, was entitled to much less: only $200. I asked him what the reaction of the others had been, when he told them he didn't want the money. 'They thought I was just trying to ingratiate myself with the people. When they saw I was serious they were happy: it meant more money for them.'

Under American pressure, the police began to improve. A new police chief came to Tocache and cut all links with the drug- traffickers. After that the flights switched from Tocache airport to an airstrip under the exclusive control of the local army com- mander, known as Comandante Alfonso. Nowadays he runs Tocache. There are fre- quent killings.

'Most of the people who die are inno- cent,' Zambrano said. 'They are caught because they owe money to a drug-traffick- er. Someone might go to the army base and say, "So-and-so has sold my coca leaves and hasn't paid me; will you, Comandante,

get the money off him and take a percent- age?" The person is then arrested and tor- tured, and maybe his body will be found in the road with a placard on it to say he has been killed by terrorists.' Zambrano, as sub-prefect, was the man people came to if they had the courage to make a complaint against the army. Several of them had spo- ken of an underground tank by the heli- copter pad where they would be kept for days on end without food or light. Soldiers would hammer on the sides of the tank until the prisoners went nearly mad, Zam- brano said.

But time was getting on, and we had more filming to do by the riverside. Zam- brano had told us they often found bodies there, weighted down by white-painted stones of the kind that were to be found at the army base. When we had finished, only one task remained: to go and meet Coman- dante Alfonso. We didn't talk much as our ancient taxis headed off.

Two men met us outside the base. One looked extremely tough, with a seamed, lined face. The word 'Alfonso' was printed on the shoulder of his T-shirt. He put on a show of joviality in inviting us to his office. The cameraman, with long experience of these things, held the camera on his knees; sticking-tape hid the red light and the turn- ing counters which would- have shown Comandante Alfonso that he was being filmed surreptitiously. I smiled ingratiating- ly. 'Can you ask him,' I said to Rosalind, `to assure us that no one at this base is tor- tured or murdered?'

The Comandante moved heavily in his chair: 'I am telling you that there has never been any proof that I have tortured any- one. There have been clashes and my peo- ple, soldiers and officers, have died, and some civilians have died, so the terrorists call that a violation of human rights. But it's war, isn't it?' I broached the subject of drugs, and he started talking louder. 'I have orders from my commanding officer that I 'You're only tough when there are 4,735,420 of you.'

don't fight drugs. To me, it's like saying a word that isn't in my dictionary. .. . To saY the army is involved is a lie. That is defam- atory.' He was getting distinctly warm. It was a relief when the conversation at last petered out. 'Would you be interested in seeing round the base?' he asked. He led us down a walkway between two long lines of white-painted stones and became sud- denly boisterous. `I'd like to show you our helicopter pad. Good, don't you think?' He winked at his second-in-command. Then he walked us back to our car. 'I have greatly enjoyed our meeting,' he said, and gripped my hand painfully. 'Please don't forget,' I said, 'the eyes of the whole world will now be on Tocache, and everyone who lives here.' His smile was as false as my own. As we flew back down the Huallaga Val- ley to the safety of the much larger town of Tingo Maria I looked out at the bright green coca plants on the hillsides, which provided so much profit for Comandante Alfonso and his friends. But I couldn't for- get the small, upright figure of Zambrano sitting in his empty house and saying, 'If I die, I am going to die defending the truth. I hope my death will serve to remove the blindfold that people have over their eyes. We had come to Peru with the expecta- tion of interviewing Abimael Guzman, the guiding figure behind the Shining Path guerrilla movement — more properlY called the Peruvian Communist Party — which has carried out a campaign of mur- der and terror for over a decade. The final arrangements were to have been made on Sunday 13 September; but on the SaturdaY evening Guzman had been arrested. Since then the entire atmosphere had changed. The threat of car bombs had been lifted from the expensive area of Miraflores, which had been badly hit by a number of explosions a couple of months earlier. The feeling quickly spread that the threat from the Shining Path was over. Only a week or so earlier, experienced politicians had been forecasting a probable collapse of the gov- ernment in the early months of next year followed by a take-over of power by Guz- man and the Shining Path. Now that Guz- man was behind bars — literally, since the government paraded him in a cage as though they regarded him as a wild animal — President Fujimori was suddenly PoP1.1. lar again. Yet the arrest had shown the curious underground currents which run through Peruvian political life. The policeman In charge of the case, General Vidal, decided not to tell his superiors that he had tracked Guzman down and was about to arrest hi.m. On the evening of 12 September the British embassy gave a party for Kenneth Clarke, the Home Secretary, who was briefly IO Peru. Several members of the Fujuno. ° cabinet were there, including the interior minister and the minister in charge ofthe police. There were no calls for them oo their cellular phones, no sudden depar- tures. General Vidal did not trust the

enough to warn them. Nor did he tell the President, even though the President assured me, in an interview soon after- wards, that he had known three or four days beforehand that the arrest was about to happen. It could not have been true.

The arrest was announced on television at around 11.10 p.m. that night. The first call to Vidal's office came from the Presi- dent's shadowy aide, Vladimiro Mon- tesinos, the man who most Peruvians believe really runs the country. 'Is this a Joke in bad taste?' he asked; it was a strange way of describing the capture of the government's worst enemy. 'Why didn't You obey your orders?' he went on. Vidal's orders were that if he ever did capture Guzman he should keep the arrest secret for 24 hours; at the end of which time Montesinos and his associates would decide whether to kill Guzman quietly or to make the news of the arrest public. By telling the television station so soon after he had captured Guzman, Vidal had made sure that no one would be able to kill him, and that the law would take its course ___ n. ot, one might think, the immediate Instinct of most South American secret Police chiefs.

From now on, Vidal will have to take care. Unpleasant things happen to people who cross Montesinos. A bomb was thrown at the house belonging to the chairman of a Senate committee the night he handed over an official report on Montesinos's links with death squads. Vice-president San Roman, who broke with President Fujimori over the decision to suspend the constitu- tion last April, told us in an interview that Peru was in the hands of a drug-running maim. Soon afterwards his wife and chil- dren were threatened with death.

A senior intelligence officer, who had Worked closely with Montesinos, told us that he had a group of 90 officers to carry °tit what he called 'operational tasks'; he confirmed that these included disappear-

ances and murders. I asked about Mon- tesinos's links with drug-traffickers. The officer said Montesinos had six houses; some were for his personal use, others were used for drug-trafficking. He described how, under his orders, drugs which had been confiscated and were sent to be destroyed were switched for some harmless substance and would be burned instead.

Montesinos, who is 48, has a military background, though he left the army after disciplinary action in 1976. Seven years later he was accused of treason after allegedly giving information to the Ameri- cans about Peru's purchase of Soviet weaponry. The case was dropped for lack of evidence. He also trained as a lawyer, and has represented a number of people accused of drug offences. He has had some remarkable victories; the most significant was the so-called Villa Coca case of 1985, when the policemen who accused a known drug-trafficker were themselves accused of stealing coca paste. The drug-trafficker got off. Only two photographs of Montesinos are known to exist. When we went to film the block of flats where he lives, we were stopped by a jeep-load of men in balaclava helmets.

This is the man who is now President Fujimori's closest associate, seeing him for at least an hour a day according to one of our informants in the presidential palace. In the relatively free and independent Peruvian press, theories about Mon- tesinos's influence over the President abound. He certainly helped him in the 1980 election, when a tax case seemed like- ly to cost him the chance of winning the presidency. Fujimori is a calm, self-con- trolled, inscrutable man of Japanese origin, who came into politics to carry out genuine reforms; but it seems as though he may have lost his way in the sordid complexity of Peruvian public affairs.

I interviewed him in the palace, where he sits at his desk each evening and watches the television soap operas. The only time he showed any sign of tension was when I asked him about Montesinos: he jiggled his foot irritably under the table until I changed the subject. Although in the past he has admitted that Montesinos was his adviser, he denied it now. 'He is a lawyer in certain matters,' he added. 'He is a civil servant in the intelligence service.' He went on to accuse the press of being biased against Montesinos, and suggested there was a plot to ignore real drug-dealers by concentrating on him.

Fujimori now has some real achieve- ments to his name. With the arrest of Guz- man, the government's objective of ending terrorism by 1995 no longer looks so absurd. Inflation is down to 3 per cent a month, having been as high as 80 per cent. He will sweep the board in the elections on 22 November, especially now the main political parties have all pulled out. No doubt Western countries will then set aside some of the disapproving measures they took after the constitution was suspended. But in Looking-Glass Land, the drugs issue tarnishes every achievement. Montesinos is a man no respectable government could possibly give a job to.

Peru is not a totalitarian society; people express their opinions openly. Montesinos, though, seems like a grander version of Comandante Alfonso in Tocache: both men expect to run things on their terms, and it takes considerable courage to stand up to them, as Luis Zambrano, General Vidal and others have done. It's hard not to remember Brecht's Galileo: when Andrea says, 'Unhappy the land that has no heroes,' Galileo corrects her: 'No, unhappy the land that has need of heroes.'

John Simpson's reports from Peru will be broadcast from Monday to Friday next week on the Nine O'Clock News on BBC], and Newsnight on BBC2.