Former Peru dictator's spymaster reappears in alleged plot to swing recount

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Former Peru dictator’s spymaster reappears in alleged plot to swing recount

Vladimiro Montesinos secretly recorded apparently suggesting bribes be paid to secure election for Keiko Fujimori

Dan Collyns
@yachay_dc
Tue 29 Jun 2021 11.46 BST

He was known as the Peruvian Rasputin, the spymaster of one of the country’s most corrupt and brutal regimes.

Vladimiro Montesinos masterminded a network of political espionage, mining state coffers to control the military top brass, the courts, and the media, until he was brought down by one of his own videotapes, which showed him bribing politicians.

Now Montesinos, the éminence grise of the jailed former president Alberto Fujimori, has re-emerged after nearly two decades in relative obscurity – this time amid an apparent bid to aid Fujimori’s daughter Keiko Fujimori, whose baseless claims of electoral fraud have plunged Peru into its most tumultuous weeks in recent history.

With all the ballots from the 6 June election counted, the leftwing candidate Pedro Castillo holds a razor-thin lead of about 44,000 votes out a total of more than 19m.

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Montesinos is serving multiple sentences for human rights crimes, corruption and arms and drugs trafficking in a maximum security naval base prison, yet he was somehow able to use a landline number to make 17 phone calls to Pedro Rejas, a retired military officer and formerly loyal Fujimori cohort who later revealed the recordings.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/peru-vladimiro-monterinos-keiko-fujimori-pedro-castillo

[Judi Lynn]

1. So glad the story has been leaked. Hope it will put Keiko Monster's coup attempt in the dirt.

Montesinos did this while in prison, too, like her father, and where Keiko, herself should be right now.

Peru's ruling party should all be behind bars for their savage atrocities against the Native Peruvian people.

Thanks for the news.