Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Within days of Montesinos' arrival in Panama City in September, Gorriti was on his tail, and the extraordinary saga of these two men's battle began to play out in the pages of La Prensa.
The newspaper revealed the extent of Montesino's business and real estate holdings in Panama, and revealed the fact that he applied for, and received, a residency permit (expired by the time he arrived) from the previous government. La Prensa chronicled his continuing attempts to influence events back home in Peru, and reiterated his abuses of power there, including evidence for prosecuting him in Panama under the Convention Against Torture -- which provided the legal basis for the case against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
In one particularly memorable exchange in early October, after La Prensa's business editor identified a bank in Panama City as having received millions of dollars in deposits from Montesinos, a top official with the bank denied the allegations and accused Gorriti of "conflict of interest" in his handling of the story due to the two men's history in Peru. Gorriti fired back in defense of his editor, on the paper's editorial page, with the numbers of the accounts, and offered a spirited defense of crusading journalism.
"Does a journalist threatened with reprisals by the Mafia stop covering the Mafia because he thinks there will be a conflict of interest?" he wrote. "If [Montesinos] is here, he is laying down the gauntlet for journalists to investigate and shine the public spotlight, and we will continue to tell his story."
Indeed, La Prensa's coverage created an unparalleled public awareness of Montesinos' presence in Panama. From Parliamentarians to taxi drivers, Montesinos has been on the tip of everyone's tongue. The uproar marked a contrast to the last dictator who sought refuge here, Raoul Cedras of Haiti, who was given asylum quickly by President Balladares last year, and who has since faded into the comfortable rhythms of elite Panamanian society.
There is every reason to believe Montesinos expected the same soft landing. Recent reports had him seeking to purchase an entire Panamanian island off the country's Caribbean coast with the estimated $200 million he is thought to have stolen from the Peruvian treasury, or accumulated through drug, arms and money laundering deals that marked his reign at the top of Peruvian intelligence.
"People of most countries do not like the idea of a criminal moving in next door," comments Reed Brody. As advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, he flew to Panama City in mid-October to meet with top government officials on the Montesino case.
"But to get to that point, they have to know what's happening. Usually, they just move in, settle down, no one knows. Gorriti followed the issue, he put it before the Panamanian public. La Prensa's coverage enabled the natural revulsion of people against human rights abuses to come to the fore."
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Sitting in his office in La Prensa one recent evening, Gorriti cuts an impressive figure. He is genial, intense, a bit stocky, bemused at the twist of fate that threw his enemy back into his sights. He laughs at how he and Montesinos seemed to have come full circle.
"We are reproducing our old relationship," he says. "I keep looking for him, and he keeps hiding from me. I try to put the spotlight on him, and he keeps trying to stay in the shadows."
On that night two weeks ago in Ecuador, their rivalry came to a head. Shortly after Montesinos took off, Gorriti received a tip from a reliable Panamanian source telling him that Montesinos was heading home, via Ecuador. The flight, on a private jet owned by Marc Harris -- an infamous American expatriate offshore financier with extensive business interests in Panama -- was supposed to be clandestine.
Gorriti phoned a friend at Peru's only independent television channel, Channel N, with the news. "They put me on the air," Gorriti recalled a few days after the incident. "I told Peru on Sunday night, 'Vladimiro's on the way.' When he landed in Guayaquil, the place was swimming with media." Within minutes of Montesinos' arrival, Gorriti was interviewed on several of Peru's leading radio stations. The story received coverage on CNN Español, and quickly hit the wires across Latin America and the world.
The blanket coverage derailed Montesinos' plan to land in Lima. Instead, his plane headed straight for a secure air force base in Pisco in southern Peru.
But it was too late. By the time he arrived, Montesinos was greeted by the sight of himself, being broadcast on television, his own beak-nosed, pinched visage plastered onto masks of thousands of demonstrators in Lima and elsewhere demanding that he face prosecution for the many human rights violations associated with his SIN tenure.
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