The man without a country

His arrival kicked off the surreal saga now unfolding in Peru, with Fujimori charging off on a quixotic search -- or an absurd pantomime of a search, as Fujimori critics say -- for his former aide. Gorriti comments, "Those two, they've been so intimate with each other for so long, it's like one side of a string trying to find the other side of the same string."

Montesinos is now a man on the run, dodging the ostensible efforts of his former patron to find him, fearful of prosecution from a judicial system that he for years twisted to his own ends.

"Montesinos should not receive protection in Panama from a justice system [in Peru] he helped to create," asserted Marco Ameglio, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of Panama's National Assembly in an interview last month. The government's decision was a remarkable political event, defying the requests of the United States, 11 Latin American nations and the Organization of American States that it grant Montesinos asylum -- on the grounds that it would speed Peru's transition to democracy.

In addition to Gorriti, Montesinos is haunted by the legacy of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Montesinos' status as the world's leading pariah illustrates how inhospitable the world has become to human rights abusers in the wake of the international legal assault against Pinochet, which established the principle of prosecuting torturers outside of their own national territory.

"Pinochet has changed the way everybody thinks about justice," comments Brody, one of the chief strategists behind Human Rights Watch's legal offensive against Pinochet. "The norm used to be you brutalize your people and plunder the treasury. Then go off somewhere to retire. Now, you can't do that. Countries may actually go off and arrest you."

If Montesinos had stayed in Panama, he might very well have faced a legal challenge. Panamanian human rights activist Miguel Antonio Bernal filed a complaint in early October on behalf of several of Montesinos' victims, demanding that he be charged with violations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (which provided the legal standing for the Spanish case against Pinochet).

Three additional complaints have also been filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights from Peruvians claiming to have been victims of Montesinos-orchestrated brutality -- two from the families of tortured and murdered former SIN officials, a journalist who was tortured in a SIN facility and a former general who revealed the existence of a death squad run through the intelligence agency. Another complaint concerns the abduction and murder of nine students and a teacher from Peru's La Cantuta University in 1992.

Refuge for Montesinos anywhere in the world now appears highly unlikely. Requests for sanctuary in Brazil and Argentina were rejected even before Montesinos' flight to Panama. On Oct. 20, while Montesinos was still in Panama, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took a dramatic step in distancing itself from the pro-asylum position taken by Cesar Gaviria, chairman of the Organization of American States. The commission, formerly a branch of the OAS, expressed its disagreement with Gaviria by recommending that "member states of the OAS ... refrain from granting asylum to any person alleged to be the material or intellectual author of international crimes."

Under intense public pressure, last week Fujimori even withdrew a proposed amnesty for human rights abuses by the military and security forces overseen by Montesinos.

Thus, Montesinos finds himself in a situation eerily similar to that of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before his fall from power. With dwindling options, he holds onto the final cards in the deck -- loyalists in the military and the specter of a coup -- and pushes against the growing public protests calling for him to be brought to trial.

Does Gorriti harbor the slightest respect for his longtime adversary? "No. To respect an enemy, you must find nobility. Montesinos has astuteness. He has ruthlessness, he has a lack of scruples. He has treachery imbedded in his every molecule. His greed is enormous. But nobility, not at all."

Gorriti still sees their rivalry in almost military terms. "It is a battle that will end when one of us ceases to breathe," he says. "But I believe now the war is over, and he has lost. He will live life like a pariah, in a smaller and smaller world."

Gorriti continues to monitor events closely as they unfold in his native Peru, and hopes, perhaps, to return there as a journalist after a democratic transition. As Fujimori headed off on the hunt for his former bagman, Gorriti said, "Peru is changing through comedy, through farce, but it is changing. In my case, knowing these characters, I might be pardoned to sit and watch these events and smile."

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