Six months into the murder trial of Alberto Fujimori, prosecutors have produced little hard evidence that the former Peruvian president approved of a death squad to eliminate rebel collaborators. But they're about to put a blockbuster witness on the stand in a trial that is riveting the nation.
Vladimiro Montesinos, the de-facto head of Peru's intelligence service during Fujimori's decade in power, allegedly organized the Colina group, a squad of army killers who slaughtered 25 civilians during Peru's war against leftist rebels. He finally faces his former boss in court on Monday.
Montesinos, 63, was the shadow behind Fujimori as the two men crushed the rebels and cemented the autocratic leader's popularity. He was accountable to none but the president, whom he preferred to meet in pre-dawn darkness. Secrets were his stock in trade. He paid off his opponents, or used information from his spy network to bend them to his will.
And by 2000, when Fujimori's government collapsed in a corruption scandal involving Montesinos, many believe the spymaster's power had grown to exceed even the president's.
"Montesinos controlled the armed forces, the judicial system, the attorney general's office. He had immense power," said Fernando Rospigliosi, a political scientist who reorganized Peru's intelligence agency in a post-Fujimori government.
He has also been linked to some of the Fujimori government's darkest days. A former death squad member testified he saw his leader meeting with Montesinos in 1991 a day after the squad, looking for a subversives' gathering, showered the wrong barbecue party with bullets, killing 15 people including an 8-year-old boy.
Now prosecutors hope Montesinos will provide the testimony they need to convict his former boss.
Fujimori, 69, faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine of $33 million if found guilty. He has denied any knowledge of the squad's existence and says he never approved a dirty war against leftist rebels. Montesinos has denied being involved, blaming the army instead.
In other cases, Montesinos has said he was acting on Fujimori's orders, and once dared his former boss to return from self-imposed exile and face Peruvian justice, saying from jail that "a responsible and courageous leader should face up to what his subordinates have done, or what he permitted them to do."
Fujimori, for his part, says Montesinos betrayed his trust.
"If you have contact with Montesinos, you have the impression you are dealing with a sincere man with a kind face," Fujimori said some years ago from Japan, his ancestral homeland where he fled after his ouster. "But behind that kind face, we now know a diabolical person is hidden."
Montesinos has a powerful incentive to keep quiet. Already serving up to 20 years for crimes including corruption and running guns to Colombian rebels, he faces a 35-year sentence in a separate trial if convicted of organizing the death squad.
Their courtroom encounter, to be broadcast live on Peruvian television, is sure to be dramatic. It will be their first meeting since Fujimori fired Montesinos in September 2000 when a videotape surfaced showing the spymaster bribing a congressman for political support.
The government soon collapsed and both men fled Peru, each apparently suspecting the other wanted him dead. Fujimori wore a bulletproof vest during his final weeks in power, and Montesinos appealed unsuccessfully for asylum in Panama, saying he feared for his life.
Now the ex-president's lawyer says he is ready to confront his former aide.
"Fujimori does not fear Vladimiro Montesinos," Cesar Nakazaki said. "Whoever has truth on his side has nothing to fear."
Fujimori testified he felt defrauded when he heard the allegations that Montesinos was involved in money laundering, drug-smuggling and influence peddling. But he heaped praise on his spy chief for helping to defeat the leftist Shining Path and Tupac Amaru rebels. Nearly 70,000 people were killed by rebels or the government in the political violence.
"He was an extremely able man in intelligence. I can't deny that. Independently of his crimes, he contributed to dismantling" the insurgencies, Fujimori said early in his trial.
He now denies Montesinos was his friend and says he was just one among many advisers. But in a carefully staged appearance on a TV news show in 1999, just as Fujimori prepared to run for a constitutionally questionable third term, the two men appeared together in identical suits and ties.
In another videotaped meeting, the two seemed so in tune that they repeatedly finished each other's sentences.
The "symbiosis," as Montesinos once called it, began in 1990, when Fujimori's presidential campaign was threatened by a tax investigation.
Montesinos, at the time a lawyer defending drug traffickers, was brought in to torpedo the probe using contacts in the justice system. He did the job in just three days, delighting the candidate, said Francisco Loayza, a former intelligence analyst and campaign adviser who introduced the men.
Loayza said Montesinos "crept in like gas under the door" and became a key operative overnight. By 1998, Loayza wrote in his book, "The Dark Face of Power," "the true power in Peru is Vladimiro Montesinos, an absolutely unscrupulous man."
Fujimori, a university dean before he ran for president, was a workaholic loner, and Montesinos controlled him by playing on his distrustful nature, said Carlos Orellana, Fujimori's speechwriter and closest aide.
"He fabricated enemies and then assured the president that he shouldn't worry, that he would take care of it," Orellana said.
But Dennis Jett, the U.S. ambassador to Peru from 1996-99, says Fujimori "was in charge at all times."
"I think he created Montesinos," Jett said. "He kept Montesinos there as long as he was useful, and he gave him a lot of discretion to do things.
"I think when the video was shown and he attempted to fire him, he discovered the monster he had created."
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Monte Hayes, AP bureau chief in Lima, covered Fujimori's 10 years' in power, his exile in 2000, his extradition in 2007 and now his trial.
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