Peru’s Golden Mean

The clumsy, kleptomaniac corruption that blooms so frequently in warm climates is to politics what alliteration is to prose — childish, and all too often lucrative. Take Peru, where fresh scandals have made telenovelas of the news in recent weeks.

We begin with José E. Crousillat. The Conrad Black-ish former owner of a prominent television station made his first star turn ten years ago, when he was busted taking bribes from Vladimiro Montesinos (the diabolical power behind the throne during the Fujimori regime) in exchange for providing upbeat coverage of government policy. Crousillat received an eight-year sentence in 2005 and joined both Montesinos and Fujimori in jail. But last December, current president Alan García (who had fled Peru on corruption charges after his first term ended in 1990) pardoned Crousillat on humanitarian grounds: his doctors had claimed he was nearly dead from a heart condition, prompting an appeal to spend his last days with his family.

Public sympathy, never high to begin with, evaporated altogether when, a few weeks ago, Crousillat was spotted sipping cocktails on a beach. He disappeared before he could be reeled in for a fresh medical, and continues to elude the police. No one knows where he’s soothing his valves now.

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The Crousillat uproar was quickly overwhelmed by a second case involving not only past and present presidents, but potential future leaders as well. This one revolves around a private firm, Business Track, which specializes in spying on just about everyone who matters in Peru. The story began two years ago, when a series of tapes known as the “petroaudios” exposed Big Oil executives bribing senior government ministers for oil contracts. Nothing much came of the petroaudios until a few weeks ago, when Business Track released a treasure trove of even juicier dialogues. (The firm is now being investigated for espionage even as the fruit of its labours is used as evidence.) These new conversations revealed further players in the Petrogate scandal, as well as several unrelated bribings in other industries and ministries.

The Justice Department received the recordings on a single USB drive, but before the police could finish their analysis, or even duplicate the files, this nuclear piece of evidence was erased by an unknown hand within the Justice Department itself. Patchy, scintillating details have been emerging ever since, leaked from the snippets police did manage to peruse. One of the biggest emerging culprits is Jorge Del Castillo, secretary general of the ruling Apra party and heir apparent to President García in the 2011 election; Castillo is reported to have put in a few words tying him to Petrogate in no uncertain terms. On the other end of the political spectrum, Ollanta Humala, the far-left runner-up in the last election and Castillo’s strongest competitor in the next, was taped accepting money from Hugo Chavez via the Venezuelan embassy in Lima. Humala interprets this as evidence that García paid Business Track to spy on him during the 2006 campaign, lending fresh momentum to his longstanding claim that the president won the poll through fraud.

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2010/04/21/perus-golden-mean/