Vladimiro Montesinos - Trial

Trial

Montesinos is imprisoned at the Callao maximum-security prison naval base (which was built under his orders during the 1990s) and is facing sixty-three charges that range from drug trafficking to murder. The lengthy series of court cases in Lima in which he is being tried is revealing the scale of the corruption during the Fujimori administration.

In 1998 the government purchased three new MiG-29 fighter planes from Russia, for which it paid USD $300 million, although observers say the true cost of the planes is only around $100 million. Following subsequent international investigations of the sale, the government of Italy issued an arrest warrant for Yevgeny Ananyev, former general director of the government-owned company Rosvooruzhenie. Ananyev was accused of money laundering with Montesinos by diverting $18 million through Swiss and Italian banks after overseeing the sale of the jet fighters via Belarus.

Montesinos was convicted of embezzlement, illegal assumption of his post as intelligence chief, abuse of power, influence peddling and bribing TV stations. Those charges carried sentences of between five and fifteen years each, but Peruvian prison sentences are served concurrently, so prosecutors continued to pursue him on additional charges. He was acquitted of two specific charges of corruption and conspiracy related to the mayor of Callao, whom he was alleged to have helped evade drug-trafficking charges.

In August 2004, U.S. officials returned to Peru $20 million in funds embezzled by Montesinos; it had been deposited in U.S. banks by two men working for him. Prime Minister Carlos Ferrero and other prosecutors believed that the total amount embezzeled by Montesinos during his tenure at the National Intelligence Service surpassed one billion dollars, most of which was deposited in foreign banks.

In October 2004 Wilmer Yarleque Ordinola, 44, was apprehended in Virginia in the US and convicted of immigration fraud. He had been working as a construction laborer without papers. The Peruvian government sought his extradition as an alleged member of Montesino's Grupa Colina and responsible for 26-35 of the 7,260 deaths or "disappearances" which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Peru) attributed to the group. In October 2004 Yarleque was being held by the U.S. Marshals in Alexandria, Virginia. The suspect was initially granted a writ of habeas corpus, as he argued that he could not be extradited for political offenses committed for the government, but the US Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in 2005, opening the way for his extradition.

Montesinos was sentenced in September 2006 to a 20-year prison term for his direct involvement in an illegal arms deal to provide 10,000 assault weapons to Colombian rebels. Tribunal judges made their ruling based on evidence that placed Montesinos at the center of an intricate web of negotiations designed to transport assault rifles from Jordan to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia FARC.

In 2007 Montesinos was on trial for allegedly ordering the extra-judicial killings of the MRTA hostage-takers during the 1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis. The former chief of the armed forces, Nicolas de Bari Hermoza, and retired Colonel Roberto Huaman are also charged with ordering the extrajudicial execution of the 14 rebels. This action followed the government's commando raid in April to free the more than 70 diplomats who had been held hostage for more than four months in the Japanese embassy. The Peruvian special forces’ recapture resulted in the deaths of one hostage, two commandos and all of the MRTA rebels. The former Japanese political attaché Hidetaka Ogura, one of the hostages freed from the Embassy, stated that he saw at least three of the MRTA rebels captured alive. If convicted, Montesinos and the two former military officers face up to 20 years in prison.