United States to return $20 million to Peru

Posted on Thu, Jan. 15, 2004

United States to return $20 million to Peru
Associated Press

MIAMI - The federal government will return to Peru more than $20 million stolen by a corrupt government official and stashed in U.S. bank accounts, officials said Thursday.

The announcement by U.S. Attorney Marcos Daniel Jimenez comes a month after the United States signed the U.N. Convention Against Corruption, which requires countries to cooperate in investigations and return funds to the countries where they were stolen. Dozens of other countries have also signed the U.N. treaty.

In December, Peru accused Victor Venero Garrido of hiding the money in U.S. accounts under the guidance of former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos.

Montesinos, former President Alberto Fujimori's intelligence chief, is charged with masterminding a complex web of multimillion dollar kickbacks, drug dealing, arms trafficking and death squad killings while he served as security adviser to ex-President Alberto Fujimori through the 1990s.
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http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/breaking_news/7720121.htm

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(snip/...)CIA Gave $10 Million to Peru's Ex-Spymaster

By Angel Paez, The Public i
July 3, 2001

The Central Intelligence Agency gave ex-Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos at least $10 million in cash over the last decade, as well as high-tech surveillance equipment that he used against his political opponents, the Center for Public Integrity has learned.


Montesinos, who now faces trial on murder, arms and drug trafficking charges, among others, had founded and personally controlled a counter-drug unit within Peru's National Intelligence Service, known by its Spanish acronym SIN.


It was to that Narcotics Intelligence Division, known as DIN, that the CIA directed at least $10 million in cash payments from 1990 until September 2000, U.S. officials told the Center's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Most of the money was to have financed intelligence activities in the drug war, though officials acknowledged a small part was for antiterrorist activities.


The CIA knew the money was going directly to Montesinos and had receipts for the payments, the sources said. "It was an agency-to-agency relationship," said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity in Lima, the capital, "with Vladimiro Montesinos as the intermediary.... Montesinos had the money under his control."
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11131

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From declassified documents, obtained through the FOA:

November 22, 2000: To mark the resignation of Alberto Fujimori from his post as President of Peru, the National Security Archive, a non-governmental foreign policy documentation center at George Washington University, today posted on the World Wide Web a collection of declassified U.S. documents on Vladimiro Montesinos – referred to as “Fujimori’s Rasputin.” The documents show that as early as October 1990, U.S. army intelligence analysts were already referring to Fujimori as “in the hip pocket of the National Intelligence Service (Servicio Inteligencia Nacional –SIN),” and as “particularly influenced by Vladimiro Montesinos.” In a report titled “Who is Controlling Whom” high-level Peruvian army officers described to U.S. intelligence analysts this “extraordinary…situation in which the intelligence apparatus is in effect running the state.”

Document 4: U.S. Embassy (Lima) Cable, Army General Denies Providing Information on La Cantuta to Robles, June 1, 1993, Secret, 5 pp.

General Rodolfo Robles Espinoza, once the third most powerful man in the Peruvian army, based part of his claims that General Commander of the Army Nicolás de Bari Hermoza Rios and Montesinos were involved in the creation and operation of a death squad on alleged conversations with one time head of the Army Intelligence Directorate, General Willy Chirinos. According to Robles, during his brief tenure at army intelligence, Chirinos learned of the existence of a death squad under the direction of Vladimiro Montesinos. This death squad was responsible for the massacres at La Cantuta and Barrios Altos. Fearing that the existence of a death squad would inevitably embarrass the army, Chirinos urged that it be disbanded. Montesinos, however, ordered that it remain intact. Robles goes on to claim that Chirinos was dismissed as head of army intelligence after making this recommendation. Chirinos, in statements published in Lima newspapers denies that he spoke to Robles about La Cantuta, or the existence of a death squad connected with Montesinos. The large section excised at the end of this document might possibly reveal embassy commentary on the validity of these claims. (snip)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB37/

Am I getting jaded?