‘GUS’S PERUVIAN GUIDEBOOK’ PROUDLY PRESENTS:

Chapter Six: Peru’s Color-fullest Characters

Aye, Peru no is the biggest dog in history’s fight. She was founded on the exploitation of her natural wealths: gold, jewels, slaves, cotton, bird poop, and coca. Lots of bird poop and coca.

But, if there is one area where she pound-for-pound punches above her height, it’s in the colorful cast of characters.

Makes the pisco! Not the wars!

It’s 1880 and the Peruvians and Chileans is enjoying in they War of the Pacific, also known as the Saltypeter War, when Colonel Francisco Beolognesi speaks the most badassified words ever recorded by a Peruvian: “Tengo deberes sagrados que cumplir, y los cumpliré hasta quemar el último cartucho — I have a sacred duty, and I will carry it out until the last bullet is fired.”

Truth to his words, he got gunned down like a mange-inflested dog with rabies by the Chilean invaders. Cool speech, though. Not one to be outmartyred, fellow Peruano Alfonso Ugarte decides to kick it up a notch and rides his horse off a cliff to keep Peru’s flag from getting captured. A tad dramatic and a bad last day in the life for one of Peru’s true heroes, but you do what you has gotta do to get into them historical books, man.

Poor horsie.

Drawing by Danilo D’acunto

But that’s just how Peru rolls. Open up any book on Peru’s military heroes, and if your name is there, chances are you has died a gnarly death: cast from a battlement, beheaded, drawn and quartered, run through with a lightsaber, shot, shot at the stake, propelled from a cliff, gettin’ shot again, blown up, assassinated, y maybe killed by friendly fire just to spice things up. And that’s just on page uno. Dying for a lost cause is all part of the fun en Peru. Is the thoughts that counts!

I have but one life to. . . aye carajo!

Not only did them Peruvian war heroes die gnarly deaths. The big-time hero of Peruvian medicine is Daniel Carrion. In them 1870s a bunch of dudes building the railroad from Callao to La Oroya starts dropping like shit-eating flies, dying by the thousands from an epidemic of fever and warts. The doctor dorks ain’t ever seen nothing like it before. The only thing they gots to go by was an increased cases of verruga peruana, which is a disease that causes fug ugly wart-like breakouts in all kinds of nasty shapes and sizes.

On August 27, 1885, at the tendered age of twenty-six, Daniel decides it’s time to take his shots at Peruvian medical immortality and find the cure. Only problema is Danny Boy ain’t got no lab coat, let alone a lab. He can’t even find a test subject to play guinea pigs with. But that’s no problema. Since Daniel’s a badass, he gets his closest compadres to injects him with blood taken from the eyebrow wart of an infected fourteen-year-old. Then, he just chills out to see what kinda cool shit will happen next so he can writes about it in his dear diary. “What importance is there to the sacrifice of one’s life if I am serving humanity?”

He dies thirty-eight days later, provings through his self-experiment that the Oroya Fever and them verruga peruana are two phasers of the same, inoculatable disease. But, on the cool side of things, they renamed the Oroya fever Carrion’s disease.

A few years on the go, the Peruvian Congress gots into a big debate team about a bill that would elevate Carrion from “martyr” to “hero.” Some peoples say it ain’t much of a promotion, but that’s all pussy talk. After alls, they has no idea how tough it is to die. They hasn’t tried it, yet. Any hows, the bill passes, and Carrion’s remains gets to moves to the official Heroes Crypt.

Vamos a Peru!

“My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.” — Mario Vargas Llosa

But if they is one guy who The Gus must give a special color-full character shouts out to, it would be good, ol’ Vladimiro Montesinos.

Big, Bad Vlad

“Montesinos and Fujimori maintained the facade of democracy, but drained its substance,” — John McMillan, Stanford University economics professor.

The Vlad is So Bad he’s The Rad. Montesinos’ life reads like if Ian Fleming imagineered a cartoon Henry Kissinger who channeled his inner James Bond, except that 007 would definitely be playing the bad guy.
Back in them days, The Vlad got cadet training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. In 1976, he falsifies a blank form, and flies to the U.S. as a guest of the U.S. government. According to Peruvian smartie pants journalist Gustavo Gorriti, once in the United States, Montesinos starts chillin’ out with the poindexters in the CIA.

Drawing by Danilo D’acunto

When he returns to his ol’ stompin’ grounds in Peru, Bad Vlad gets arrested and convicted of lying and being a little stinker in May 1977. He’s expectorated from the army and sentenced to one year in jail. While behind bars, Montesino figures out that if he’s gonna go to all the trouble to break the law he might as well becomes a lawyer. In them roarin’ 1980s, he is making a fortune helping drug traffickers with their unpaid parking tickets.

By 1990, Vlad is exchangin’ cookie recipes with the CIA station chief in Lima and payin’ visits to CIA headquarters in Langley for Sunday morning Bingo. In 1991, Montesinos’ Dr. Evil wet dream finally comes true and he takes charge of the joint Peru-U.S. anti-drug unit in the National Intelligence Service (SIN).

And sin they do. Through former President Alberto “El Chino” Fujimori’s 10 years in office, from 1990 to 2000, Bad Vlad and SIN enjoy unlimited fluck you power.

At first, the Fujimori government was muy popular in Peru for pledging to kick ass on inflation, foreign investment and the Shining Path. But by 1992, the corruption was gettin’ out of his hands. According to the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., the CIA gaves the narco division of Montesinos’s SIN services a guesstimated $10 million. Some of this cash, the Center alleges, ends up in Montesinos’ personal coffers. I is sure it was just an accident.

A former U.S. intelligence agent, who spoke to FRONTLINE/World on the condition of oh shit, don’t say my name! said that during the mid-1990s, the CIA was getting spooky vibes from the State Department that “the U.S. government should not deal with him or meet with him.” This MENSA intelligent agent dude still thought Montesinos was a valuable asset. “Was he a bad guy? Yes,” he said, explaining that intelligence comes from “all sorts.”

Others saw Montesinos in a shittier light, calling him “Rasputin, Darth Vader, Torquemada and Cardinal Richelieu,” in the words of a 1997 U.S. Army intelligence report released under the Freedom of Information Act.
At the end of the Full Montesinos power grab in Peru, his tax records shows he is making $600,000 a year, even though his official salary is $18,000. Maybe he was doin’ the bake sales thing on the weekends?

The Vladi-videos

On September 2000, ‘bout 3 months after Fujimori’s re-election, Peruvian TV broadcasts a video of Montesinos bribing a congressman to support Perú 2000, Fujimori’s party.

In them next few months, more “Vladi-videos” starts to making the rounds. One shows the owners of Channel 4 gettin’ $1.5 million a month to ban the political opposition. Others show Montesinos counting out $350,000 in cash to Channel 5’s big wig, and the owner of Channel 9 got a piddly $50,000. What a dumbass.

Aye. The magic of the “show me the moneys bidness.”

Baddy Vladi’s videos cause Fujimori’s supports to go poof like a fart in the wind. He hands Montesinos his well-earned pink slip and thanks him for his genocide. . . uh, services. Then Fujimori gets his ass on the first flight outta the country and faxes his resignation when he hits the ground runnin’ in Japan.

But you can’t kick a good James Bond villain in the dick forever and just expect him to stay down. Vladi the Baddy slips out of Peru on a luxury yacht, scams them Costa Rican border patrol Nazis with a wacky beard and fake ID like the ones 16-year-olds likes to use on spring break, then goes on a six-week ‘Where’s Waldo?’ Odysseus trek around Latin American and the Caribbean ’til he winds up in Caracas, where he gets facial reconstruction surgery — then skips town without paying the bill.

At these points, he’s even managed to piss off the FBI, who takes up the search for Bad Vlad. In June 2001, they pinpoints Montesinos in Venezuela where he is arrested and sent back to his beloved Peru.

The trials of being The Vladinator

Montesinos is convicted of embezzling, illegal assumption of his post as intel chief, abuse of power, under the influence peddling, bribery, and just being a dick. Aye, not bad for a career in government, to be honest.

Now, he enjoys himself at the maximum security naval base prison in Callao — which he helped design during the 1990s. Betcha he wishes he added in that luxury rec yard with an Olympic-sized pool and ping pong tables when he had the chance. In totals, he got himself accused of sixty-three crimes that derange from drug trafficking to murder.

“Maybe Mr. Montesinos didn’t need to be influenced,” said former French ambassador to Peru Antoine Blanca, who was representing French government interests in the case at the time.

“He knew exactly where his interests were, he worked for the CIA.”