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January 17, 2001 Update:

Gorman Predicted Perú's

Plan Colombia Switch

Narco News 2001

The Narco News Bulletin: narconews.com

"The Name of Our Country is América" - Simón Bolívar

CIA COUP IN PERU OPENS DOOR TO PLAN COLOMBIA

by Peter Gorman

January 17, 2001 Update:

Gorman Predicted Perú's

Plan Colombia Switch

Publisher's Note: Former High Times executive editor Peter Gorman has traveled in Perú for more than two decades as a journalist and consultant to the Museum of Natural History in New York. On January 1, 2001, Narco News published his analysis of the situation in Perú.

Although Gorman's analysis was far outside of the permitted discourse in the US press -- suggesting that the US government was behind the fall (as well as the rise) of president turned fugitive Alberto Fujimori -- we found Gorman's explanation the most plausible among the reports from Perú.

In that January 2nd Narco News story, Gorman went even farther out on a limb -- as an Authentic Journalist must sometimes do -- and made a bold prediction that raised plenty of eyebrows:

"While Paniagua's accession to the presidency does not appear to immediately raise hopes in the US State Department that Peru will immediately change its position and sign on to Plan Colombia, the financial turmoil the country finds itself in, and the pressing obligations it has to fulfill make him vulnerable to fiscal pressure from the US. It is this author's belief that within two weeks Paniagua will be offered a way out of the impending financial crisis in exchange for the right of the US to utilize the American-built military base outside of Iquitos near the southern border of Colombia."

-- Peter Gorman, Narco News, January 1, 2001

Two weeks later, on January 16th, Reuters reported:

"Peru's government said on Tuesday it supported a controversial plan in war-torn neighboring Colombia to battle drug traffickers with the help of $1.3 billion in mostly military aid from the United States...

"Plan Colombia deserves our government's support," Interim Prime Minister Javier Perez de Cuellar, the former U.N. secretary-general, told foreign reporters in the first statement of support from Peru's interim government."

-- Reuters, January 16, 2001

Gorman was right. And the US press coverage of events in Perú in 2000 has proven to be extremely misleading because it refused to look critically at Washington's role in manipulating the events.

The Narco News Bulletin is proud to have Peter Gorman as our Perú correspondent, and congratulates him for having broken the information blockade from Perú.

Here is the entire Reuters story, followed by Gorman's previous analysis and prediction.

From somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano

Publisher

The Narco News Bulletin

http://www.narconews.com/

narconews@hotmail.com

(Original Story by Peter Gorman Appears Below the Reuters Story)

REUTERS

Tuesday, 16 January 2001

Peru gives support to U.S.-backed Plan Colombia

LIMA, Peru -- Peru's government said on Tuesday it supported a
controversial plan in war-torn neighboring Colombia to battle drug
traffickers with the help of $1.3 billion in mostly military aid from the
United States.

But interim Prime Minister Javier Perez de Cuellar said Peru was worried
an upsurge in violence between security forces and leftist rebels could
spill into Peru, which shares a porous 1,000 mile-long (1,600 km) Amazon
River border with Colombia.

"Plan Colombia deserves our government's support," Perez de Cuellar, the
former U.N. secretary-general, told foreign reporters in the first
statement of support from Peru's interim government.

The $7.5 billion "Plan Colombia" is aimed at fighting drug trafficking and
drying up financing for Marxist rebels the government says benefit from
the trade -- mostly in cocaine sold in the United States.

Peru itself is a major producer of coca -- the raw material used to make
cocaine -- and the Peru/Colombia border is a major drug smuggling route.

Since 1999, Peru has bolstered patrols along the border -- a policy
started by ex-president Alberto Fujimori and continued by interim
President Valentin Paniagua after Congress fired Fujimori in November amid
mounting corruption scandals.

"(The violence) is serious .. we are guarding our borders for possible
infiltration not only from Colombia but via Ecuador," the minister added.

The frontier, weeks away by river and road from Lima, is only a few
hundred yards (meters) wide. Many villagers have said that they are living
in fear of right-wing paramilitaries, rebels and drug traffickers who
dominate the zone.

Ecuador said this month it had found an abandoned Colombian guerrilla camp
in its jungle, fueling fears that rebels may operate across its borders.
Perez de Cuellar said these rebels could move into Peru from Ecuador.

Fujimori was critical of Plan Colombia, warning of the impact it would
have on the country's borders, including worries that thousands of
refugees could try to escape the conflict by crossing the jungle
frontiers.

Over 30,000 Peruvians died in a two-decade war with Shining Path leftist
guerrillas and that violence is still fresh in the minds of most of the
country's inhabitants.

Copyright 2001 Reuters
________________________________________________________________

Narco News thanks the COLOMBIAN LABOR MONITOR at http://www.prairienet.org/clm for bringing yesterday's Reuters story to our attention.

Here is Peter Gorman's original report:

CIA COUP IN PERU OPENS DOOR TO PLAN COLOMBIA

by Peter Gorman
Published January 1, 2001 on Narco News

In what has all the earmarks of a bloodless coup arranged by the US CIA, Peru's longtime president, Alberto Fujimori has been forced from office and his right hand man and Pentagon-trained CIA informant Vladimiro Montesinos is in hiding and faces criminal charges. Little known lifetime politician, Congressman Valentin Paniagua, after a series of resignations by several people in line for the post, has ascended to Peru's Presidency, albeit only on an interim basis until new elections can be held next April.

How and why the popular though dictatorial Fujimori so suddenly lost his autocratic grip on the government, and what will undoubtedly happen soon-as well as who will benefit-make for a scenario straight out of a spy novel or the CIA's history book on Central and South America.

In truth, Fujimori was forced from office by the CIA in a coup so smoothly arranged that no major Western press outlet has even hinted at it's being such. The reason was because Fujimori was vocal in his dislike of the military components in US President Bill Clinton's Plan Colombia and refused to allow the US to use Peru as a staging post for the US troops needed to make Plan Colombia work.

The plot has roots that go back more than a year, to the time when Plan Colombia was first unveiled. That plan, a $1.3 billion dollar effort by the US to rid the Andean nation of Colombia of it's burgeoning coca-producing fields (conspiratorialists would say to wrest control of that trade from the Colombian rebels and return it to the Colombian armed forces and known narco trafficantes who put their proceeds in American banks), centers on US Special Forces training Colombian military in jungle warfare and then arming them with more than half-a-billion dollars in US made helicopters and arms.

At the time of the plan's unveiling, the US knew that Venezuela, with a socialist government, would not go along with it. Ecuador, which will, is neither strong enough nor stable enough to offer much in the way of assistance. Brazil, whose little-populated northwest corner is likely to see an influx of refugees from the fray, also dislikes the plan. Bolivia, under the leadership of President General Hugo Banzer-a Pentagon-trained former cocaine baron and the man who protected Klaus Barbie, the nazi Butcher of Lyons for years-was all for the plan, and even volunteered to build a large airbase for US use in its Chapare district-but they were too far away from Colombia to be of much use.

Which left Colombia's immediate neighbor to the south, Peru, as the anticipated ally of Plan Colombia. After all, with Fujimori dependent on the US and the International Monetary Fund to keep it's loan-cycles floating, as well as with Peru's spy-chief and School of the Americas graduate Montesinos as Fujimori's closest advisor, the US expected Peru to herald the plan and volunteer it's jungle city of Iquitos and environs as a staging ground.

In fact, the US had helped build a large military post outside of Iquitos near Colombia's southern border-where much of the fighting produced from Plan Colombia is expected to take place-during 1998 and 1999. But Fujimori threw the US a curve when he said the new post would be for use by Peruvian military exclusively, and then further enraged the US when he decried Plan Colombia.

Which meant he had to go. But he was about to be elected to a third term in office (which, though illegal by Peruvian law, didn't seem to matter much to the Peruvian populace, which gave him a 42% approval rating, very high in that country) and any overt attempt to remove him would draw severe backlash.

Worse, last April, when Colombia's President Andrés Pastrana was set to come to the US to push for emergency passage of the plan, many republicans, including Majority Leader Trent Lott, were decrying it, or at least pressing for a postponement of allocating emergency funds, instead suggesting that it ought to wait until 2001 and the normal budgetary timetable (which would mean Clinton would not have it as part of his legacy, something that would please the piss out of the republicans).

But Clinton and his Drug Czar-and former head of the Southern Command General Barry McCaffrey, would have none of that, and so just days before Pastrana's visit, the State Department leaked a story to MSNBC that Russian planes were picking up used Kalishnakov's rifles in Aaman, Jordan which were being delivered to the FARC rebels in Colombia. Moreover, according to MSNBC, the planes were being refueled in Iquitos' airport, where they were also being filled with as much as 40 tons of FARC-made cocaine at a clip for distribution in Europe. Though the story was a fake on the face of it-the Iquitos airport is very public and borders on a Peruvian airforce base where several US DEA agents work, which means that not only would the Peruvian's know about the cocaine, but the US DEA agents as well, and that's not even going into the concept that the FARC rebels have never been known to refine coca base into cocaine-it had its desired effect.

Trent Lott and the other republicans who just days earlier were saying no to Plan Colombia quickly changed their positions in the face of looking soft on drugs and Clinton got his plan and the monies approved.

The first hope to remove Fujimori, having him simply lose his third election to previously unknown US Stanford-trained World Bank head and former Lima shoeshine boy Alejandro Toledo, failed, when Fujimori and Toledo wound up in an election runoff in which Toledo refused to participate, leaving Fujimori the winner of his third term. But the bitter election, with talk of Fujimori having stolen it through vote-rigging, left Fujimori vulnerable and there was talk he would be denounced at an August meeting of the heads of the South American countries. Instead of voluntarily stepping down, however, Fujimori cleverly resurrected the State Department story of the Russian guns making their way to the FARC rebels, claiming that his spy-chief Montesinos had busted a ring of arms dealers and at the August meetings of the SA presidents he was lauded for his work against the rebels rather than ridiculed for stealing an election.

Unfortunately that story shortly blew up in Fujimori's face when the Aaman arms dealers acknowledged the arms sales, but said they'd all occurred a year earlier, and that the buyers were Peruvian Generals and all the paperwork was in order. Vulnerable again, Fujimori quickly announced that jailed American Lori Berenson would get a new trial, a story which the Western press jumped on, while all but dropping the fake FARC arms bust.

By early September, with Fujimori firmly in place for his third term, the US was getting desperate. The first US Special Forces trained Colombian military forces were-and are-set to stage their first offensive into FARC territory around January 1, and Fujimori was still not going along with the idea of the US using the new military base near Colombia's southern border.

That is when the US CIA stepped in with a classic maneuver. In mid-September, a video was widely released throughout Peru-and subsequently through worldwide media outlets-showing Montesinos giving Peruvian Congressman Alberto Kouri US$15,000. Shortly after the money exchanged hands Kouri, from Peru's opposition party, switched allegiances and joined Fujimori's party. What was most interesting about the tape was that it was made by Montesinos in his own offices.

That someone could get into the incredibly well protected head of Peru's secret police offices and locate a short segment of tape made months earlier among the thousands of other hours of tape that Montesinos-we have since learned-made of all his office doings, apparently to use as blackmail if the occasion arose-is fantastic.

It is safe to say Montesinos did not release it himself, which means someone close to him did. And whomever did it know it would bring the spy chief down, and with him, eventually Fujimori. Which means, though it is yet to be proven, that someone got to someone close to Montesinos and promised something big in the new administration that would take over after Fujimori fell. Who the promiser and promisee were we don't yet know.

We do know that Alberto Kouri, the receiver of the alleged bribe, fled to Dallas on October 27, where he was greeted with open arms and currently remains.

That suggests that Kouri was aware that the tape was going to be released and offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb in exchange for asylum in the US. All of which points to US CIA involvement and arrangements.

As to the tape of the apparent bribe, it immediately disgraced Montesinos, who fled to Panama, where he has extensive landholdings, seeking political asylum. That bid failed, and he returned to Peru in late October, where he has been in hiding. Fujimori tried to ride out the tide of public opinion which rose against him after his advisor was caught bribing Kouri by publicly going after Montesinos. In the staged event, he couldn't locate him, and, embarassed, he announced that he would hold new elections in April, 2001, in which he would not participate, and promised to step down when the new president took office on July 28, 2001.

Unfortunately, that timetable simply did not work with the US need for a military base near Colombia's southern border by January 1, 2001. By chance, Peruvian Congressional investigations were started into both Montesinos and Fujimori in early November and allegations of millions of dollars in secret bank accounts immediately surfaced.

Those allegations, coupled with the sudden instability of Peru's Presidential administration had an immediate and dire effect on Peru's economy when on November 3, Standard and Poor's downgraded Peru's sovereign long-term foreign currency rating to a level four notches below investment grade status, leaving the country in a position of not being able to make good on major international loans due at year's end.

Again trying to cleverly avoid the Peruvian public reaction to the burgeoning corruption scandal, Fujimori travelled to Brunei for a Pacific Rim summit meeting and then on to Japan to try to secure loans desperately needed by Peru by the end of the year to keep their loan-cycles floating.

But while there, political opposition party leaders wrested control of the Congress from Fujimori's party, leading to Fujimori faxing in a resignation "for the good of the country."

The resignation was refused, with Peru's Congress instead choosing to oust Fumimori in late November on the grounds that he was "morally unfit" to lead the country. He is currently in Japan and is expected to seek political asylum there should he be indicted on criminal charges in Peru.

Beyond Fujimori, the next several players in Peru's Constitutional succession order for the vacated presidency resigned, and Valentin Paniagua, a politial moderate was chosen by Congressional consensus to take over as interim president until the April elections.

Paniagua, 64, is a lawyer with the Popular Action party who served as justice minister in the 1960s and as education minister in 1984 during the two administrations of former Peruvian President Fernando Balaunde.

While Paniagua's accession to the presidency does not appear to immediately raise hopes in the US State Department that Peru will immediately change its position and sign on to Plan Colombia, the financial turmoil the country finds itself in, and the pressing obligations it has to fulfill make him vulnerable to fiscal pressure from the US. It is this author's belief that within two weeks Paniagua will be offered a way out of the impending financial crisis in exchange for the right of the US to utilize the American-built military base outside of Iquitos near the southern border of Colombia.

And if that does come to pass, then we might well have seen one of the most clever CIA-engineered coups in South America in some time - Blood-less and clean as bone.

The Coup from Below