On October 2, 1996, Clinton's drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey met with and gave his public support to his Peruvian counterpart Captain Vladimiro Montesinos. Montesinos is also chief advisor of the dictator Fujimori. Both "czars" have known each other for a while, since Gen. McCaffrey was the commander of the U.S. Southern Fleet based in Panama for many years. There apparently, part of his job was to "interdict" the plentiful drugs flowing from Latin America to urban centers in the U.S., including the cocaine shipped by the CIA to fund the anti-Communist U.S. mercenaries (Contras) in Central America in the 80's. Furthermore, in spite of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets during the U.S. invasion of Panama in December of 1989, in which Gen. McCaffrey played a prominent role for the Bush Administration, the New York Times editorial page ("American Drug Aid Goes South," Nov. 25, 1996), called McCaffrey "a General with a good record on human rights issues," but criticized him for endorsing and calling czar Montesinos, "an honest advisor." The Times has not yet figured out that both military men are two sides of the same coin.
Who is Czar Montesinos? He has a long career in the "drug war." After being recruited as a CIA informant when he was a young army officer (for which he was expelled from the army during the regime of General Velasco), he became a well-known attorney for drug barons in the 70's, and in the 80's a real estate/land trafficker working in partnership with Alberto Fujimori. At the time, both Montesinos and Fujimori were close to the U.S. Embassy in Lima, participating in the Peruvian-North American Institute. By 1990, Montesinos was already working at the National Intelligence Services (SIN -the Peruvian CIA) leading the scheme to elect the "obscure" murderer Fujimori as President of Peru.
On August 17, 1996, Demetrio Chavez Peñaherrera, alias "Vaticano," one of the biggest drug kings in Latin America operating in the Huallaga Valley testified in a public hearing that since 1991 he has been "personally paying Czar Montesinos $50,000 per month in exchange for information through radio transmissions on the operatives of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (USDEA) in the area of Campanilla, and for protection from the Maoist guerrillas. This agreement ended when Montesinos requested a 100% increase in the payments." A few days later, "Vaticano" was taken to the Navy base at Callao, tortured and drugged in prison by SIN until he recanted. Czar Montesinos' ties to cocaine trafficking is so extensive that his intermediaries and cronies in Miami, Mexico and Colombia are still being identified.
Drug czar Montesinos' ties to the CIA have been acknowledged even by U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Christopher Dodd. In an October, 1996 letter to CIA Director John Deutch, these Senators requested that the Agency cut its close ties with Montesinos: "...We are aware of the links of Montesinos with violations of human rights, including massacres, torture, disappearances, and his links with drug cartels in Peru, whom he served before becoming an advisor to Fujimori." (Gestion, October 25, 1996) Obviously Sen. Leahy's (a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee) concern for Peru is hypocritical; he wants to shield the CIA from another drug scandal.
The fact of the matter is that the U.S. and Peruvian drug czars are not really interested in fighting against the drug cartels operating in Peru, but against the powerful People's War of liberation led by the PCP, being waged in the entire country. If there was a genuine war on drugs by U.S. imperialism, drug trafficking would have been wiped out long ago. A real "war on drugs" is incompatible with U.S. imperialist interests.
First, it is not in the interests of the U.S. bourgeoisie (the ruling class of big bankers and corporation heads) to eradicate drugs from poor urban neighborhoods which are some of the largest consumers. The drug business accomplishes two important goals for the imperialists: one is that the ultimate destiny of the huge drug money is the U.S. banks (Wall Street), and two, drug consumption keeps the U.S. youth (especially the poor) in a dormant-passive stage, thus preventing the most rebellious sectors of U.S. society from actively participating in the inevitable class struggle to be waged in this country.
Second, and this is the most important, the economy of Peru as of other Andean countries, is dependent on drug profits. In Peru money laundering, including the "washing" of narco-dollars is legal. The Fujimori dictatorship, certified by the U.S. State Department as "drug clean," is involved in narcotics dealings up to the neck. The military institutions themselves are compromised with drug trafficking. Here are a few examples:
1. January 10, 1996, Judge Carmen Rojas issued a warrant for the arrest of Generals Ortiz Lucero and Edgar Solis, Vice-Minister of the Interior (in charge of the National Police) and partner in the Law Firm of Montesinos respectively. They were charged as protectors of the drug cartel "Los Norteños." A few days later, Judge Rojas was fired by Montesinos.
2. February 4, 1996, Generals Rios and Bellido [see The New Flag, July 1996] and nine other Army officers were charged as being accomplices of the drug king "Vaticano." They implicated General Hermoza Rios, Chief of the Armed Forces. In addition, Generals McDonald Perez and Sobrevilla, were implicated as protectors of the drug king, Abelardo Cachiche.
3. May 10, 1996, 169 kilos of cocaine were found in the presidential DC-8 plane heading to Paris. The pilot of the plane, Air Commander Alfredo Escarcena Ichikawa, is Fujimori's military attache and crony.
4. July 3, 1996, during a routine inspection, 120 kilos of pure cocaine were found in the Peruvian Navy ship "Matarani" by the government of Canada in Vancouver.
5. July 11, 1996, the Peruvian Navy warship Ilo was detained with 62 kilos of cocaine.
According to the Mexican paper La Reforma, Montesinos and close cronies and relatives of Fujimori are involved in international cocaine trafficking through 15 dummy corporations (Wotan International, Colinsa, Crousillat Brothers, Mobetek, Vifebrina, Debrett, Benavides Inc., etc.) whose owners are Santiago Fujimori (brother), Isidro Kagami Fujimori (nephew), and Augusto and Manuel Miyagusuku. Their drug trafficking is linked to the purchase on the black market of Russian-made weapons, including planes and helicopters, that are then re-sold at higher prices to the Peruvian armed forces. Among the helicopters purchased with drug money were seven MI-25s and 12 MI-17s from the Sandinista Army of Nicaragua, that are being used mainly to strafe civilians as part of the counter-insurgency war.
While the generals of the U.S.-funded police group known as "Dirandro" profit from the drugs and properties confiscated, the Army, Air Force and Navy are engaged directly in narcotraficking (see Mirko Lauer, Resumen Semanal Dec. 29, 1995.) Let us recall the testimony of General Bellido, former political and military commander in the Huallaga Valley (the biggest coca producing area in the world) who publicly admitted that the military has been working with the Colombian/Peruvian drug cartels for many years in exchange for "food and money for the troops."
In reality, the Peruvian Army and its U.S. advisors based at Santa Lucia (Alto Huallaga Valley) have never fought against the drug cartels. They have used the war on drugs as a disguise to fight the People's Army of Liberation (the real fighters against drug trafficking), and this has to do not only with the bold recovery of the PCP activity, but with its expansion in all the three regions that comprise Peru: The coast, the sierra and the selva, or jungle area.
The narco government of Peru is asking the U.S. Congress (through Gen. McCaffrey) for supplemental aid of 250 million dollars (EFE, October 22, 1996). Clinton's 1997 "war on drugs" budget is 15.1 billion dollars compared with 4.7 billion in 1988, while overall drug use in the U.S. has doubled between 1992 and 1995 despite big spending on interdiction (Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Economist, October 1996). However, the infusion of more U.S. taxpayer money to the dictator in Peru won't change the intense activity of the Maoist guerrillas.
Sooner or later, U.S. imperialism will implement outright military intervention in Peru, most likely under cover of the "war on drugs." Invasion contingency plans drawn up by the Bush Administration could easily be put into effect, backed up by a Reagan-style propaganda blitz about "fighting narcoterrorism," this time spouted by liberal Clinton. To confirm this, on September 4, 1996 Douglas Wankle of the DEA stated that "cocaine producers are already established in Peru." Previously, "Peruvian narcos shipped the raw cocaine to be refined in Colombia." (Gestion, September 5, 1996.) Patrice Vandenberghe of the anti-drug office of the United Nations in Lima also stated, "The price of coca has increased in Peru, and the Army has stopped the war on drugs. The participation of the police is meaningless. This has opened a breach for the narcotraffickers who will buy the coca leaves from the peasants." What does this mean? Who else will do the dirty job if the Peruvian military cannot do it? Wasn't the UN a useful tool for U.S. imperialist invasions in other oppressed countries?
The PCP has analyzed all these possibilities. In its documents Let the Strategic Equilibrium Rock the Country and The Two Hills, the PCP Central Committee masterfully evaluated this matter and concluded that a U.S. invasion will change the fundamental contradictions of the People's War to become a war of national liberation. Considering the above, on September 24, 1992, President Gonzalo in his last public speech, as a prisoner of war inside a tiger cage, called for the formation of the People's Front of National Liberation under the leadership of the Peruvian Proletariat and the PCP. This call is currently being implemented as part of the advance toward the conquest of power.