Vladimiro Lenin Ilich Montesinos Torres (; born May 20, 1945) is a Peruvian former intelligence officer and lawyer, most notorious for his role as the head of Peru's National Intelligence Service (SIN) during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori. Montesinos was widely regarded as the power behind the throne, often regarded as the true authority in the government, supported by the Peruvian Armed Forces.
Montesinos' career was marked by his deep connections with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), through which he received substantial funding ostensibly for anti-terrorism efforts. His tenure saw numerous human rights abuses and corruption scandals. The "Vladi-videos," secretly recorded tapes showing Montesinos bribing officials, led to a national scandal in 2000. This exposure forced him to flee Peru and precipitated Fujimori's resignation.
Investigations unveiled Montesinos' involvement in a wide range of illegal activities, including embezzlement, drug trafficking, and orchestrating extrajudicial killings. He was subsequently captured, tried, and convicted on multiple charges. Despite his imprisonment, Montesinos continued to influence Peruvian politics and sought to protect allies within the Fujimorist faction, including Keiko Fujimori.
Montesinos' early life was influenced by his communist parents and his cousin, a leader of the Shining Path guerrilla group. He received military training in the U.S. and Peru, later becoming involved in intelligence and political advisory roles. His legal career, following a brief imprisonment for espionage, was marred by fraudulent activities and associations with drug traffickers.
Early years and education
Vladimiro Montesinos was born in the city of Arequipa on May 20, 1945, at Goyeneche State Hospital, the first of five children. His parents were devout communists of Greek origin and named their son after Vladimir Lenin. The family lived in Yanahuara District, at a home traditionally known as La Casa Encantada. and a cousin of the incarcerated communist leader Óscar Ramírez Durand, a.k.a. "Feliciano", the leader of the Shining Path. In 1965, Montesinos graduated as a military cadet at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Panama. A year later, he graduated from the Chorrillos Military School in Lima, Peru.
Montesinos met his future wife, María Trinidad Becerra, at a classroom during a public relations course given by the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in the late 1960s, located at its campus in what had been the Fundo Pando. Montesinos was then an army lieutenant and Becerra was a history teacher. The couple married on March 9, 1973, at San Antonio de Padua, a church in Jesús María. At the time, Montesinos was an assistant of general Luis Edgardo Mercado Jarrín, who was the wedding's best man. The religious ceremony was preceded by a civil one two days earlier in San Isidro. The couple had two daughters, Silvana (b. 1975), and Samantha Elsa (b. 1984). Additionally, Montesinos had another daughter with lawyer Grace Mary Riggs Brousseau, his cousin's wife, named Stefani.
Career
Military career
Aide to prime ministers
In 1973, during the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru's leftist military junta of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, Montesinos became an artillery captain in the Peruvian army and was appointed to the role of aide to General Edgardo Mercado Jarrín, who served as both Prime Minister and Chief of the Armed Forces. A talented writer, Montesinos wrote many of the speeches for ministers of the government and was a frequent contributor to newspapers. Montesinos expressed during the nomination process that he wanted to meet with officials of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United States National Security Council of President Gerald Ford to discuss military and economic relations. The military decided against committing a coup as initially outlined in Plan Verde as they expected Mario Vargas Llosa, a neoliberal candidate, to be elected in the 1990 election. According to Fernando Rospigliosi, Montesinos was not initially involved with Plan Verde, but his ability to resolve issues for the military resulted in the armed forces tasking him with implementing the plan with Fujimori,
Peruvian political analyst Umberto Jara would describe the relationship Montesinos had between the military and Fujimori:
Mario Vargas Llosa later reported that United States Ambassador to Peru, Anthony C. E. Quainton, personally told him that allegedly leaked documents of the CIA purportedly being supportive of Fujimori's candidacy were authentic. Rendón writes that the United States supported Fujimori because of his relationship with Montesinos. Fujimori would win the election, and according to Oiga, the armed forces finalized plans on 18 June 1990 involving multiple scenarios for a coup to be executed on 27 July 1990, the day prior to Fujimori's inauguration. The magazine noted that in one of the scenarios, titled "Negotiation and agreement with Fujimori. Bases of negotiation: concept of directed Democracy and Market Economy", Fujimori was to be directed on accepting the military's plan at least twenty-four hours before his inauguration. In a statement to a colleague at the time, Montesinos would remark "[Fujimori] is completely malleable: he does nothing at all without me knowing". The United States reportedly maintained a relationship with Montesinos as a way to have direct influence in Peru; the SIN head would clear bureaucratic obstacles and would immediately implement the recommendations of the CIA. Bribes ranged from approximately US$500,000 per month to Channels 2 and 5 to $1.5 million per month to Channel 4. In total, Montesinos paid more than US$3 million per month in bribes to Peruvian television channels.
Montesinos funneled additional funds to the television channels through government advertising. From 1997 to 1999, the Peruvian government increased their advertising budget by 52%, becoming Peru's largest advertiser. Ultimately, Montesinos held editorial control over Peru's free-to-air television networks: Frecuencia Latina, América Televisión, Panamericana Televisión, ATV, and Red Global.
2000 elections
The 2000 presidential elections, which followed years of political violence, was controversial. A journalist claimed to have a videotape of Montesinos bribing election officials to fix the vote. He claimed to have been kidnapped by secret police agents, who sawed his arm to the bone to get him to give up the tape. In view of such tactics, the Clinton administration threatened briefly not to recognize Fujimori's victory. It backed off from this threat, and pressured Fujimori's government to take action to root out abuses, including ousting Montesinos.
Continuing political unrest in Peru would have represented a serious problem as US operations against the FARC in Colombia got under way. Peru was needed as a base of operations and a defensive backstop against guerrillas based in Colombia's south, not far from the Peruvian border.
Drug trafficking allegations
The DEA was aware of reports in August 1990 that Montesinos was involved with being paid for the immunity of drug traffickers. Despite evidence that Montesinos was in business with Colombian narco-traffickers, the CIA paid Montesinos's intelligence organization $1 million a year for 10 years to fight drug trafficking.
One of the most notorious scandals during this period was the 11 May 1996 seizure of 169–176 kg of cocaine (the quantity depends on the source) aboard a Peruvian Air Force Douglas DC-8 (frequently confused in the media as the presidential Boeing 737 as it had operated on this role until the acquisition of the Boeing) that was about to depart on a mission to Russia (with stopovers at the Canary Islands and Bordeaux), carrying military aviation equipment for maintenance. The scandal remains a mystery to this day because the drug's origin and destiny were never determined and the investigations were compromised by Fujimori's corrupt government and possibly Montesinos himself. A 2011 investigation revealed that some four drug shipments were made abroad, with Miami listed as a destination, in air force planes during 1993–1994. Only the material authors (several low-ranking officers) were processed, acquitted and publicly defended by Fujimori in late 1997 (amongst them Fujimori's aide-de-camp who was part of the plane's crew).
Peruvian drug kingpin Demetrio Chávez Peñaherrera, known as "El Vaticano", testified that Montesinos was a protector of drug trafficking. During a trial audience on 16 August 1996, Chávez Peñaherrera stated that he had bribed members of the Peruvian Armed Forces and Montesinos himself, as the effective chief of the Peruvian Intelligence Service (SIN), to be able to operate freely in Campanilla, a jungle area of the Huallaga region (where he operated an illegal airstrip). Recordings of radio communications presented during the trial showed that members of the army had let Chávez's organization operate freely in the Huallaga region in exchange for bribes. During a latter appearance in the court, Chávez appeared tortured and drugged, evidenced by his incoherent speaking. After sentencing, while in prison, Chávez talked to the press and revealed that Montesinos said to him at one point that he "did some work" with Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellín Cartel.
Montesinos was paid US$50,000 a month during 1991 and 1992. As proof, the government presented recordings during Chávez's trial of radio communications between his drug traffickers and members of the Armed Forces attesting to bribery of Montesinos. In addition, Chávez said that retired general Nicolás de Bari Hermoza, the former chief of the Armed Forces Joint Command, and Fujimori had both complete knowledge of the illicit acts of Montesinos.
Downfall
Frequently, Montesinos secretly videotaped himself bribing individuals in his office, incriminating politicians, officials and military officers. His downfall appears to have been precipitated by the discovery of a major illegal arms shipment. Arranged by guerrilla leader Tomás Medina Caracas, the arms were airlifted from Jordan via Peru, to the FARC insurgent guerrillas in southern Colombia.
Montesinos claimed the credit for uncovering the arms smuggling, which involved upwards of 10,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles. Jordan rejected the Peruvian version of events, insisting the shipments were legitimate government-to-government deals. Evidence emerged which pointed to Montesinos having orchestrated the gun-running operation rather than dismantling it. A senior Peruvian general was found to have participated in the deal, and another principal participant was a government contractor. He had signed at least eleven deals with the Fujimori regime, most of them to provide supplies to the Peruvian military.
According to one report, a group of military officers angered by Montesinos's apparent role in the arms deal broke into his offices and stole the video that was subsequently broadcast. Because of the arms deal, Montesinos lost the support of the US, which attached high strategic importance to crushing the FARC. and thanked him for his services. He then announced the dissolution of the National Intelligence Service (SIN) and new elections, in which he would not run. Shortly thereafter, Montesinos sought political asylum in Panama.
In following months, some of the most infamous "Vladi-videos" were released. One showed the owners of Channel 2 being offered US$500,000 a month to ban appearances of the political opposition on their channel. Another showed Channel 4 owners getting $1.5 million a month for similar cooperation. Others show Montesinos counting out $350,000 in cash to Channel 5's proprietor, and the owner of Channel 9 receiving $50,000 to cancel an investigative series called SIN censura (Uncensored). In June 2001, through the assistance of the U.S. Government, Montesinos was turned over to the Venezuelan government in Caracas and extradited back to Peru. Then his trial began.
Trial
Montesinos was convicted of embezzlement, illegal assumption of his post as intelligence chief, abuse of power, influence peddling and bribery. 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. Montesinos was imprisoned at the Centro de Reclusión de Máxima Seguridad (CEREC) in Callao (which was built under his orders during the 1990s) and is serving 15 years in prison, but he will have to face at least 8 more trials in the next years. In total he was accused of sixty-three crimes that range from drug trafficking to murder.
On 29 January 2024, Montesinos pleaded guilty to charges of homicide, murder and forced disappearance in the 1992 killings of six farmers accused of being rebels in Pativilca, Lima Region, and was sentenced to 19 years' imprisonment.
Imprisonment
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 embezzled 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 Grupo Colina and responsible for 26-35 deaths or "disappearances" which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Peru) attributed to him. 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 United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit 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 hostage-takers from the left-wing Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) during the 1997 Japanese embassy hostage crisis. The former chief of the armed forces, , and retired Colonel Roberto Huaman were 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. Montesinos, Hermoza, and Huaman were acquitted of those charges in 2012, as the court found that a chain of command linking the accused to the killings had not been proven.
In August 2012 Montesinos and the former chief of the Peruvian Air Force, Waldo Richter, were acquitted of drug trafficking for the 1996 Air Force plane case. He had been involved by a number of drug traffickers.
Vladi-audios
Following the 2021 Peruvian general election, audio recordings deemed Vladi-audios were leaked revealing that Montesinos was allegedly involved in at least 17 landline phone calls while imprisoned at the CEREC maximum security prison in an effort to prevent leftist presidential candidate Pedro Castillo from entering office and to protect Keiko Fujimori from being imprisoned. In one reported audio, Montesinos mentions a first plan to have Fujimori's husband to go to the United States embassy in Lima to present "documentation of the fraud" to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and Central Intelligence Agency, with Montesinos allegedly saying he already contacted the embassy, that the documents would reach President Joe Biden and that his administration would condemn the election as interference from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, subsequently giving Fujimori's claims of fraud more weight. In other reported audios, Montesinos suggests to retired military officer and Popular Force member Pedro Rejas Tataje on 10 June 2021 that they should bribe three electoral magistrates of the National Jury of Elections (JNE) – who were tasked with reviewing the narrow and controversial election – with one million dollars each, telling the former officer to contact attorney Guillermo Sendón who then reportedly made contact with JNE magistrate Luis Arce. The next day on 11 June, the JNE extended the deadline to file complaints to annul the election despite the maximum deadline already passing. Following the leak of the audios, Pedro Rejas Tataje released additional recording saying that he collected them as he believed that Montesinos was participating in illegal activities. Rejas would later explain that he believed Montesinos was directly involved with the campaign of Keiko Fujimori. while four officers were replaced at the naval prison.