Our Man in Peru

The anything-but-resounding electoral victory of Alejandro Toledo over the discredited Alan Garcia in Peru's recent presidential election is the fulfillment of Washington's longstanding plan to get our man into power in Lima. This is a particularly urgent need now as the United States prepares to intervene massively in the civil war in neighboring Colombia. The ostensible U.S. goal is to fight the drug trafficking. The real goal is to bring it under control, much like the $400 billion drug business that annually goes through Kosovo under the watchful eyes of NATO. Peru is needed as a staging ground for the U.S. Special Forces and the Blackhawk and Huey helicopters that are to do battle with the FARC guerrillas.

Peru's former President, Alberto Fujimori, had repeatedly told Washington that he had no intention of allowing Peru to get involved in the war in Colombia.

Fujimori was one of those Latin American leaders who, though they pursue policies that meet with U.S. approval, nonetheless insist on a measure of independence from Washington. Throughout the 1980s Panama's Manuel Noriega made sure the rich were well looked-after and the U.S. got all the cooperation it needed whether against Nicaragua's Sandinistas or the drug traffickers. Yet evidently he was still too independent-minded for Washington. So he had to go. Fujimori privatized like mad, followed IMF prescriptions assiduously, cracked down on coca production and defeated two separate guerrilla movements?the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru.

This should have endeared him to Washington. Unfortunately, he blotted his copybook. He bought Sukhoi-25 warplanes from Russia and MiG-29s from Belarus. He also opened negotiations with North Korea for the purchase of $52 million worth of Scud-C surface-to-surface missiles. Fujimori also obtained financial help from Japan and thereby introduced a U.S. economic rival into the region. And now he was refusing to go along with Clinton's "Plan Colombia." Clearly he had to go.

Alejandro Toledo, on the other hand, was a Washington dream come true. Educated at Stanford, a former official of the World Bank and a regular habitue of the well-oiled international conference circuit, he can be relied on to carry out Washington and IMF orders faithfully. His cause had long been championed by U.S. government agencies that purport to be "independent" like the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. He was one of three main speakers, along with George Soros, at last year's U.S.-sponsored World Democracy Forum in Warsaw.

However, installing him in power was not going to be easy. Toledo was the Bill Clinton of Peruvian politics. He was said to have done drugs and consorted with prostitutes. Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a former ally, claims that Toledo arranged for the payment of a $10,000 bribe to prevent dissemination of police records showing that he had been picked up for drug use. There is also at least one girl who claims that he is her father.

Washington brought out its usual bag of tricks for last year's presidential elections. Long before a single vote had been cast, U.S.-financed observers like the Carter Center were on hand to declare that the election was a fraud. It was unconstitutional, U.S. officials cried, for Fujimori to seek a third term! Peru's constitution prescribes a two-term limit. However, Peru's constitutional court had ruled that since the new constitution was promulgated after Fujimori's first election in 1990, his "third term" should count as his second. The decision was debatable, but it is hardly up to the U.S. government to make the call. As the election went on, observers cited one flaw after another. The media was too pro-Fujimori; the computers that would count the votes needed new software; Fujimori was bribing voters with free food?so very different from our own impeccably conducted elections. Predictably, when Fujimori comfortably won the first round of voting, the U.S. cried fraud. The evidence for fraud was negligible. Nonetheless, the Clinton Administration rushed off to the OAS to impose sanctions against Fujimori. The OAS refused to oblige Washington. Peru's elections were its own business, it decided. Frustrated, the United States then put into operation the plan that would prove so successful in Yugoslavia a few months later. Toledo pulled out of the second round and took his anti-Fujimori campaign to the streets in the hope of provoking violence. But he needed some money. Luckily, billionaire financier George Soros stepped up to the plate and wrote out a check for $1 million.

The campaign of violence reached its crescendo by the time of Fujimori's inauguration. After that, Toledo's campaign fizzled out. There was one final option left to Washington: a military coup. Having failed to win a majority in Peru's parliament, Fujimori had persuaded 12 members of the opposition to come over to his side, thereby giving him a majority. Suddenly a video was released showing Fujimori's intelligence chief, Vladimir Montesinos, paying an opposition Congressman $15,000 to get him to come over to the government side.

There was a huge public outcry. However, Montesinos was playing a much more intricate game. Having bribed opposition figures to come over to the government, he now bribed members of the governing coalition to go over to the opposition. One of them, CongressmanJuan Carlos Mendoza, who had earlier crossed over to the government benches, claimed that he had been pressured by the military to abandon the government coalition and join a new bloc, which was to support a coup d'etat. Mendoza said that he had been ordered to sign a document stating that he was leaving Fujimori "to form a parliamentary slate backing" Vladimiro Montesinos. The release of the tape could only have been a CIA operation. Who had access to Montesinos' tapes?

Abandoned by the military, Fujimori stepped down. The United States had finally prevailed.