The Life and Drug Dealings of Vladimiro Montesinos: Peru’s Shadiest Drug Dealer

In December, Peru’s President Pedro Castillo tried to shut down Congress to prevent its members from impeaching him. His orders were not followed, and hours later he was arrested on charges of rebellion and conspiracy. Awaiting his trial, Castillo is believed to be being held in a police jail in Lima — the same police jail that houses another former Peruvian leader, Alberto Fujimori.

Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, was president from 1990 to 2000. Like Castillo, he attempted to shut down Congress during his tenure. But unlike Castillo, he succeeded. Backed by the army, Fujimori completely rewrote the country’s constitution and might have stayed in power indefinitely had he not been prosecuted and imprisoned for human rights abuses. Revered as a conservative strongman – the strongest ever – Fujimori began his career as a political outsider. When he announced his first candidacy, no one believed he had a chance of winning. Today, historians argue that the only reason he won – and won for so long – was the man by his side: Vladimiro Montesinos.

Montesinos, named after the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, was born in Arequipa in 1945 to communist parents who were keen to be perceived by their neighbors as rich and cultured. Montesinos’ father, understanding that the army was the only way ordinary Peruvians could attain wealth and power, prompted his son to enroll in the famous military school of Chorrillos in Lima. Despite being an unremarkable student, Montesino’s passion for reading and obsession with gathering sensitive information helped him become the most powerful person in Peru. After a detour through life that involved short prison sentences and several career changes, Montesinos eventually found himself heading his country’s central intelligence network – the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional, or SIN for short – and Alberto Fujimori’s most trusted adviser. During this time, he also presented himself as an indispensable ally of both the CIA and the Colombian Medellín cartel.

Montesinos got into the drug trade after being thrown out of the army for an illicit visit to the US. Freed from military prison, the disgraced and impoverished young officer began working in a family member’s law firm, where he hired soldiers and police officers accused of drug-related crimes. When Montesinos successfully defended Medellín cartel member Evaristo Porras Ardiles, he gained the interest (and gratitude) of Pablo Escobar himself. After a bacchanalian visit to his Napoles ranch in Puerto Triunfo, Montesinos not only defended the cartel in court, but also shipped Peruvian coca leaves to Colombia. Pablo’s brother Roberto claims Montesinos received between $100,000 and $120,000 per drug flight and that the cartel donated $1 million to Fujimori’s presidential campaign in hopes of increasing the influence of their Peruvian contact.

Your investment has paid off. When Fujimori was sworn in as President of Peru, Montesinos took control of the SIN. According to Rafael Merino, who worked with Montesinos at the Secret Service, his newly appointed boss “contacted the main drug mafias in Colombia and Mexico” as soon as he settled into his office. Incarcerated criminals confirm this story. The operator of the Los Camellos drug ring, Boris Foguel, said in an October 2000 interview: “Anyone who didn’t deal with [Montesinos] The right to cross-border operations — that is, to pay him millions of dollars in bribes — was pursued to death by Peruvian authorities, to the point where they shot down small planes laden with cocaine and dollars in mid-flight were.”

As the SIN mastermind, Montesinos performed an extremely dangerous and delicate balancing act, accepting money from cartels to keep the drug trade going while simultaneously working with the CIA and DEA to try and shut it all down. That level of duplicity was bound to backfire eventually, and it almost did in 1996. This year, about 170 kg of cocaine was seized on board a Peruvian Air Force plane carrying military equipment to Russia. Despite extensive investigations, no one was ever convicted.

“All the evidence,” write journalists Sally Bowen and Jane Holligan in their seminal book The Imperfect Spy: The Many Lives of Vladimiro Montesinos, which I picked up at a book fair in Puno on the Peru-Bolivia border, “is that Montesinos was personally involved in the illegal drug trade until the late 1990s, perhaps even until he fled Peru. He had power and insider knowledge of drug control efforts, and he made it known that his influence was for sale.”

What brought Montesinos to the top – his desire for knowledge and control – also proved to be his downfall. Throughout his political career, Montesinos routinely and covertly filmed himself bribing politicians, judges, and other government officials. His idea was to use these tapes as blackmail if necessary. However, this plan fell through when one of these videos ended up in the hands of a Peruvian television station on September 14, 2000. Unmasked, Montesinos turned into an outcast. When Fujimori tried to sack Montesinos in a vain attempt to salvage his own reputation, the security chief flatly refused to accept his resignation. Entrenched in SIN headquarters, he began planning a coup d’état, then fled the country realizing his chances of success were microscopically slim. With the help of the FBI, Montesinos was arrested in Venezuela and extradited to Peru. Held in a maximum security prison, Montesinos – still alive – faces ever more charges as new evidence of his criminal activities comes to light.

Despite his long imprisonment, Vladimiro Montesinos still exerts a significant influence on Peruvian society. Many of his incriminating ties were spirited away by allies, and those in power remain loyal to him for fear those ties have been leaked. Along with Fujimori, Montesinos continues to be admired by Peruvian conservatives who – much like Trump’s supporters in America – faithfully deny the irreparable damage he has inflicted on their country, let alone the countless murders he has authorized. While I was sitting in a bar with some construction workers from Mancora – a coastal town in northern Peru – an elderly gentleman grabbed my copy of Imperfect Spy and said to me, “This book is full of lies!” I didn’t answer. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to tell him why I thought he was wrong. But even if it were, I don’t think it was my place to tell him.