http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Americas/2000-12/fuji151200.shtml Fujimori let spymaster flee by yacht while plotting his own departure
By Jan McGirk, Latin America Correspondent
15 December 2000
Disloyal bodyguards have revealed that Peru's former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, fled Peru on a private yacht called Karisma and has been on an island-hopping voyage toward Costa Rica for the past six weeks.
Despite a farcical manhunt for the shadowy intelligence officer, who is wanted for alleged corruption and human rights abuses, Mr Montesinos apparently hid for less than a week in his home country, slipped the dragnet and sailed away with the full knowledge of the armed forces and Alberto Fujimori, the former president.
For ten years, Mr Montesinos was the spymaster behind the Peruvian regime. Three of Mr Montesinos' personal security team testified on video that generals had safeguarded him during his sojourn in Lima.
Shortly after Panama refused to grant him exile, the restive fugitive left his hiding place – perhaps using one of his getaway tunnels – and boarded a yacht in the Peruvian port of Callao.
While Lieutenant-Colonel Ollanta Humala mutinied against Mr Montesinos and Mr Fujimori in the south, distracting the army, the VIP runaway and his guards set sail on the yacht Karisma, with a young woman, two crew members and the owner, Jose Francisco Lizier Corbetto, a businessman. With a satellite telephone on board, they travelled six days across the Pacific to the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador.
After a scheme to escape to Venezuela in a private plane was thwarted, the sea-borne desperadoes sailed north to the Coco islands, off the coast of Costa Rica in Central America. While at sea, the guards said, Mr Montesinos learnt that Geneva officials were freezing his bank accounts worth more than $48m (£35m). From there, he switched to a quicker vessel, which he used to reach the Costa Rican mainland. His trio of bodyguards returned to Ecuador and back to Peru by sea and land.
Anel Townsend, an opposition congresswoman, wants the incriminating videotape to be broadcast on the same television station that broke the clandestine video of bribery that led to the regime's downfall. Politicians suspect that Mr Montesinos attempted to plot a military coup to stay in power after Mr Fujimori was forced to fire him in September. His brother-in-law headed the Lima garrison, and was well placed to help him. Mr Montesinos has been on the run since, facing charges ranging from political assassination to gun running. His wife is under house arrest.
Ever since Mr Montesinos surfaced as the powerful fixer for Mr Fujimori, an unknown agronomist who became Peru's strongman, analysts have pondered why the politician tolerated his excesses. Opponents speculated that Mr Fujimori owed his citizenship and presidency to the spymaster, after Mr Montesinos had faked a birth certificate, placing Mr Fujimori's birth in Surco, Peru, on National Day rather than in his parents' native Japan.
Now that Japan considers the disgraced former president to be a Japanese citizen, Peruvians are ruing the day that they let themselves be duped by the populist they once hailed as "El Chino".