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
(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