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| STEPPING DOWN | |
 September 18, 2000  |
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Amid a bribery scandal and election fraud allegations, Peru's president announces he will resign.
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| Political upheaval in Peru | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Vladimir Kochera, what have you been hearing from Peru today? What's going on?
VLADIMIR KOCHERA: Well, he hasn't left office yet. He's still kind of running things. We can... we could say right now that there's still a power struggle going on. The key question there also is how the military is going to play this. We are still getting confusing reports on which side are the military falling on. But the decision by President Fujimori announced last Saturday, two days after the video that was aired on cable TV on Thursday, the only independent cable TV that we have in Peru presently, really shocked everybody. Not even his closest advisers might have thought that President Fujimori would pull this decision or take this bold decision, to close government. We're talking about not only closing the presidency, the vice presidency, close congress. So this is like going to a different stage in Peruvian politics. There's no precedent to this, unless we had a coup d'etat in the past. But there's no constitutional precedent to close everything. RAY SUAREZ: Let's talk quickly about the video. A lot of people are probably assuming that it was made by somebody trying to catch Mr. Montesinos. How is that video made? VLADIMIR KOCHERA: The video, from what we know, is... there is the firm belief among most Peruvians that Montesinos caught many people on video, and this video is one of his own videos. RAY SUAREZ: So he was making a video of himself bribing someone. VLADIMIR KOCHERA: So he could blackmail this other... I mean, that's what everybody believes. The video was filmed in his own office. Now, how it got out, the different rumors. But from what we know, we have some sort of evidence that there's more than one video that managed to get only one out. Only one has been aired. There might be two others that have other congressmen taped, being bribed also. And this has been... Montesinos could be said that he has been paid with his own currency. And this, as we know now, has shocked everybody, seeing somebody actually bribing somebody else. Now, besides these three videos that we know that are in the open right now, there might be thousands of other videos that Montesinos has been piling up throughout the past six, seven years, with which he might have been blackmailing other people. What it should say is that the country started falling into a very deep moral crisis, in which these kind of actions were believed to be happening and be... and nobody could do nothing about it. So now everything points to a falling apart between Fujimori and Montesinos. Now one of them has to emerge victorious, and Fujimori has already taken a bold step in announcing his decision to call for elections. |
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| A tainted government | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: Carol Graham, was the president of Peru already under a lot of pressure before these revelations came out in the past week?
CAROL GRAHAM: Fujimori has been tremendously useful, and that's why although there was a lot of public criticism, it's not clear that there ever was any concrete action behind the public criticism. He's been a very staunch ally in the war on drugs. Peru has been the best performer in terms of cooperating with the U.S. in the war on drugs. He's also been a star performer from the point of view of the international financial institutions up until this recent electoral process in terms of implementing dramatic and far-reaching market reforms, in terms of them having an effect -- also in terms of redirecting public expenditures substantially towards the poorest Peruvians. His record on these things is very, very good. Lastly, a concern for the U.S. is clearly the stability of the Andean region as a whole where you have Ecuador in very precarious circumstances, Venezuela very precarious circumstances, and Colombia on the brink of civil war. Peru has been until now an island of relative political stability, continued economic growth and economic progress, and a country that's willing to cooperate with the U.S. So I think the approach towards Fujimori has been public criticism, but not as much willingness to take concrete action, precisely for those reasons. |
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| Looking forward | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: Well, a lot of speculation. Vladimir has started to circle around who takes the lead in the campaign to be the next president of Peru. You were with Alejandro Toledo when the news broke.
RAY SUAREZ: What was his reaction? VLADIMIR KOCHERA: His reaction was first... most of us felt shock. It was very unbelievable. Then when we heard the voice of President Fujimori on the Internet saying, "look, this is what my decision is," by the way, his announcement had two steps to it. First, it was to disband or dismantle the intelligence service. Second was to call for new election. So that's a very interesting point there. But besides... well, once this announcement was made, then of course everybody was trying to understand what the reasons were behind this, and I think we still do not know exactly what has prompted this decision to be taken. And moreover, I don't think that everything has been played out yet. So we can see still events developing in the next few days. RAY SUAREZ: So quickly, do you like his chances, Alejandro Toledo? Is he the front-runner?
RAY SUAREZ: Carol Graham, Vladimir Kochera, good to speak to you both. |
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RAY
SUAREZ: This is the video that rocked Peru. The surveillance allegedly
shows President Alberto Fujimori's security adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos,
bribing an opposition congressman to support the government. Montesinos
has been Fujimori's right-hand man throughout the president's ten years
of increasingly authoritarian rule. The military arrested Montesinos,
according to Peruvian news reports this afternoon. During a televised
address late Saturday, President Fujimori stunned Peruvians nationwide
when he called for new elections and said he would not be a candidate.
ALBERTO
FUJIMORI: (Translated) This is a grave accusation which has clearly
undermined my position, and it can only be answered with a thorough
investigation to determine responsibilities before the law. This above
all is a political development, which obviously has had a strong impact
on the stability of my government and of the country. 
RAY
SUAREZ: Immediately after the president spoke, hundreds of anti-Fujimori
demonstrators flooded the streets outside the presidential palace to
celebrate. Fujimori's announcement to step down was a shocking reversal
from his iron-fisted approach to maintaining power. The former college
dean was first elected in 1990. Early on, he got credit for holding
down inflation, which once ran at 7,500 percent annually, boosting economic
growth, and defeating guerrilla armies after civil strife. But Fujimori's
actions often provoked criticism from human rights and opposition leaders
in Peru and elsewhere. 
In
1997, he removed three judges from a constitutional court who said the
president could not run for a legally forbidden third term in office.
Fujimori eventually emerged victorious after a runoff vote in May. In
the first round, he failed to garner a majority. In the runoff, he faced
stiff opposition from Alejandro Toledo, a U.S.-trained economist. But
Toledo pulled out a week before the balloting, and asked his supporters
to boycott the election. He warmed of electoral fraud. Toledo returned
to Peru Sunday. He officially declared his candidacy for president and
praised Fujimori's decision to give up power and pave the way for a
peaceful transition to a new government.
RAY
SUAREZ: For more on President Fujimori's decision: Vladimir Kochera
is a correspondent for El Gestion, a Peruvian financial newspaper
and for CPN, Peru's second largest radio network. And Carol Graham is
a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and has written extensively
about Peru and Latin America. 
VLADIMIR
KOCHERA, El Gestion: Well, things are still confusing, but as
we speak, things are still developing as we speak. The latest is that,
while we're all asking where Vladimiro Montesinos is. Right now, the
reports that our radio gave earlier today, this afternoon that Montesinos
has been detained, still to be confirmed, corroborated. There are some
congressmen, congresswomen standing in front of the headquarters of
the intelligence service hoping to see Mr. Montesinos being detained
so physically we know what his whereabouts are. That's the first question
everybody's asking. And then of course the other questions that will
be played out as we know the fate of Montesinos is what is going to
be the fate of President Fujimori, whether he will be in charge of this
transitional period. He had spoken about. There's growing consensus
we're hearing that there should be another caretaker of the government
for the next few months while the institutions are put in place to call
for these new elections. 
RAY
SUAREZ: Was there shock that the president left office rather than staying
and fighting? He's established a reputation as a pretty tough customer
over the last ten years. 
CAROL
GRAHAM, Brookings Institution: Absolutely. He was under a lot of pressure
at the time of the elections, and widespread international pressure
and discontent with how the electoral process ran. Here was a man whose
legacy was saving Peru, integrating Peru into the international economy,
and here he was seen to be ruining his own legacy by undermining the
legitimacy of his own government. On top of that, there is and has been
for a while quite an extreme fiscal crisis. The government overspent
before these elections as they did in '95. There's a real need for economic
adjustment to get the economy back on track - for all kinds of fairly
difficult institutional reforms to make the growth process sustainable.
All of these things are very difficult to do with a weak president and
weak leadership. In addition, he was under international pressure --
both from donor agencies and from the U.S. Government. Some of the neighboring
countries, although they've been less strong than the US has been. So
his position was very, very weak going into this scandal. 
RAY
SUAREZ: For all the public U.S. criticism of President Fujimori, had
he been useful to American policy in South America, for instance in
the war on drugs? 
VLADIMIR
KOCHERA: That's right. Well, three questions that all Peruvians are
asking ourselves now, number one, the fate of Montesinos, second the
fate of Fujimori, whether he's going to be the caretaker or if somebody
is stepping down, having somebody like the ombudsman take over. And
the third question is once all the institutions are put in place, because
Peru cannot hold elections right now, we need to have an independent
electoral board, which we don't have. So once this interim process is
spent and we have the institutions in place, who will run? Alejandro
Toledo, yes, he was here in Washington as a matter of fact this past
Saturday. When the news broke, I happened to be with him. 
CAROL
GRAHAM: He's the front-runner at this moment because it's very early
on in the process, and nobody else is immediately there. However, I
must say that Toledo did damage his sort of star of the opposition status
by pulling out of the second round right before the election. A lot
of people, independent observers and Toledo supporters thought that
was a very irresponsible thing to do and were very disappointed and
felt that it was a demonstrated lack of leadership.