Peru is debating whether to amend or repeal a law just passed by congress that allows the military to become directly involved in antidrug actions — as distinct from fighting ‘narcoterrorists’ — against a backdrop of warnings that not only the fate of the antidrugs effort but even the forthcoming elections are threatened by the pervasive penetration of the country’s institutions by organised crime.
The warnings have been escalating since early April, when interior minister Walter Albán called in a television interview which received widespread media coverage for a broad agreement between ‘people of different ideological options’ to face the reality of ‘mafias that have grown and become very powerful.’ As an example of this said that a ‘mafia’ linked to illegal mining had managed to appropriate, thanks to a court order, half a tonne of gold that had been seized by Sunat (the customs and tax authority). Some ‘mafias’, he said, hire police officers through security firms: ‘In the Peruvian state, and the national police is no exception, corrupt practices have been embedded for a long time [...] We are going to do everything necessary to eradicate it, but if we want to eradicate it completely we need a medium-term plan with a great scope.’
Albán was speaking to a public already sensitised by the scandal involving high-ranking police officers with a man with convictions for illegal arms possession and acts of corruption who had been a participant in the notorious network Vladimiro Montesinos, intelligence chief under the now-jailed President Alberto Fujimori [SSR-13-12].
Late last year a survey conducted by GFK and published by La República showed that 68% of the respondents were convinced that groups linked to Montesinos during the Fujimori era — often collectively labelled montesinismo — remain influential nowadays within political parties across the spectrum: 62% said that montesinismo had penetrated the fujimorista Fuerza Popular (FP), 33% that it had infiltrated the Partido Aprista Peruano (PAP) and 22%, the ruling Partido Nacionalista (PN) — indeed 48% believed that there are contacts between the Humala government and past associates of Montesinos.
The broader threat
Montesinos himself has a history of links with drug traffickers, but the current wave of concern goes beyond montesinismo. In late April this year the two agencies in charge of organising and supervising the elections, the Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales (ONPE) and the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE) issued an alert about the likelihood that organised crime would try to influence the elections scheduled for October. Political analyst Jaime Antezana followed up with a claim that a six-month investigation had identified about 40 ‘narco-candidacies’ across the country.
In May antidrugs procurator Sonia Medina warned of the spreading influence of the drugs trade on ‘some high-level institutions [...] including the judiciary’. She called on the ONPE and JNE not to confine themselves to issuing an alert, ‘since it is their job to prevent this.’ She also urged Antezana to make available the names of the ‘narco-candidates’.
To illustrate the extent to which public institutions have been corrupted she cited the case of the Áncash regional government, where two-term regional president César Álvarez Aguilar has been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the 14 March murder of former regional councillor Ezequiel Nolasco. Investigations led to the arrest of a suspect who chose to become a protected witness and offered evidence that the region’s chief prosecutor was in the pay of Álvarez Aguilar.
The inquiry into the murder of Nolasco is running in tandem with another by the office of the anti-corruption procurator who is looking into allegations that Álvarez Aguilar was the head of a network that included two congressmen and two businessmen, plus a dozen other people involved in shady public contracts, shielded by a number of corrupt magistrates. Analyst Ricardo Uceda has noted that the murder investigation is proceeding far more rapidly than the anti-corruption one and warned of the risk that the latter could be obstructed, keeping the lid on ‘the black money that has enabled the huge political, media and judicial cover’ for criminal activity.
Greater military role?
The prospect of ‘narco-candidacies’ or other manifestations of drugs-trade influence on the political parties comes just as the government appears to be gearing up for a massive drive to eradicate coca plantations in the Apurímac-Ene-Mantaro valley (Vraem) and as it is contemplating the resumption of its long-suspended shootdown policy [SSR-14-03;04].
On 15 April the congress approved a law that allows the military to engage in the interdiction of drug shipments on land, sea and air. The law was promoted by the fujimorista legislator Carlos Tubino, who first submitted it in August 2011. Tubino say that it will ‘strengthen the state’s fight against drug trafficking’. Up to now the military deployed in the Vraem were barred from acting directly against the drugs trade — which, according to Tubino, meant that they could not destroy the ‘logistical support enjoyed by the narco-terrorists.’
Defence minister Pedro Cateriano has said that the executive will ‘analyse what is most convenient’ regarding the law. President Ollanta Humala has been more explicit. ‘The constitutional responsibility for the fight against drugs,’ he said, ‘does not lie with the armed forces but with the police [and] we believe that the police has the required capability to perform this task.’ The chairman of the defence committee in congress, Hugo Carrillo (PN), has said that the executive’s ‘observations’ would be evaluated.
Tubino argues that Humala has not read the text of the new law with enough attention. The law, he notes, ‘does not say that the military should replace the police but allows them to support the [police’s] interdiction efforts and the capture of the drug traffickers [...] In the Vraem the armed forces have 27 bases, while Dirandro [the police’s antidrugs directorate] has only one.’ On 20 May an executive decree extended the deployment of the military in support of the police confronting illegal miners in Arequipa, Puno and Madre de Dios.
On 12 May the newspaper El Comercio published an editorial that reminds Cateriano that the Tubino law had been submitted to his ministry for observations, and that amendments had been made as a result of those observations. It also points out that the law says the military should act, when confronting resistance, according to legislation that has been in place since 2010: legislative decree 1095, which governs the use of force by the military.
Another reminder followed: that legislative decree 826 of 1996 allows the navy and the air force to interdict drug shipments at sea or in the air, and to use force if they are resisted. This is the ‘shootdown’ law, which is still on the books though its application has been suspended since 2001 — and that prime minister René Cornejo said could be reactivated.
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