Andean Group - February 2009 (ISSN 1741-4466)

Three gunmen attempted to kill the attorney general, Gladys Echaí­z, on 31 January. Echaí­z was not injured. The motive behind the attack is unclear. The police appear to be leaning towards the line that it was a bungled robbery. Politicians, however, played up the assassination theory. Echaí­z is investigating a corruption scandal that brought down the last prime minister, Jorge del Castillo, in October 2008. Officers from Peru's naval intelligence (Dintemar), both retired and serving, are heavily implicated in the scandal.

Echaí­z was driving in the Jesús Marí­a district of Lima when one of the assailants approached her vehicle on foot and fired twice into the driver's side window. Echaí­z was unscathed and her seven bodyguards managed to repel the attack by opening fire on the gunmen before taking the attorney general to safety. The prime minister, Yehude Simon, said that the attack was an assault on “civilian society".

Echaí­z presented criminal charges last month against eight people accused of involvement in illegal wiretapping. Dintemar is at the heart of the scandal. Four rogue agents were arrested for moonlighting for Business Track (BTR), owned by a senior former Dintemar officer, retired Rear Admiral Elí­as Ponce Feijóo, with close ties to Vice-President Luis Giampietri (see sidebar).

A whistleblower alleged that the agents carried out the illegal bugging of the infamous phone calls by a political lobbyist, Rómulo León, between March and September 2008 in relation to the award of oil exploration licences to the tiny Norwegian company, Discover Petroleum. When the transcript of these calls was leaked to the press last October, the resulting scandal forced Del Castillo to resign.

• Giampietri

A congressman, Ví­ctor Garcí­a Belaúnde, has accused the navy of planning a coup designed to raise Vice-President Luis Giampietri, a retired vice admiral, to the presidency. Ví­ctor Garcí­a Belaúnde's brother, José Antonio, is Peru's serving foreign minister.