It was a late afternoon in April, and hot fog was creeping in from the coast. Lima?s colonial Plaza de Armas was relatively calm for a change: a din of grinding gears and hawker?s cries was in the air, as was a strong smell of diesel fumes and old cooking oil, but there were no jeering strikers, and there was no sting of tear gas. In front of the iron gates of the presidential palace, riot police stood listless ? striking coca cultivators would not arrive from the highlands for another ten days. A clutch of dirty shoeshine boys lolled on the steps of the cathedral. A dozen passersby gathered in a small arc around a newspaper kiosk, feeding on the shrill headlines of the latest political scandal. I was here to meet Enrique Zileri, the director of Caretas, Peru?s leading newsmagazine, and godfather to three generations of Lima?s top journalists. Caretas?s offices, an aging, thick-walled embodiment of Peru?s fourth estate, dominate one corner of the plaza. In recent days, the prime minister had referred to Peru?s press as the country?s most powerful sector, and one observer had told me offhandedly that the press here filled the space left by the absence of real political parties. As Zileri and I walked through the plaza to have a late lunch, he told me that Peru ?is a country of myths and the myths here are more important than reality.?
Zileri was trying to explain the fate of Peru?s president, Alejandro Toledo, who had risen from shoeshine boy to Stanford economist, from opposition leader to Peru?s first president of indigenous background. But since taking office three years ago after the collapse of Alberto Fujimori?s decade of authoritarian rule, Toledo?s myth had been pierced by a string of scandals that now threatened his government ? and perhaps Peru?s return to elected democracy.
I thought Zileri?s observation might also help explain the crisis that was gripping the Peruvian press. In September Caretas had published an article accusing a journalist ? Cecilia Valenzuela, Zileri?s prot駩 and the director one of Peru?s most respected investigative television programs ? of using wiretaps to further her investigations. The Caretas story turned out to be wrong: the young reporter who wrote it later confessed to inventing the key interview. She was fired, and the episode quickly became known as Peru?s Jayson Blair moment. But it had sent a bolt through Lima?s tight-knit group of top journalists, who during the 1990s had stood at the forefront of the fight against a repressive government while their colleagues and bosses were coerced and bought off. It provoked a debate ? argued in public forums and ethics boards, on editorial pages and over the airwaves ? that had left them divided, and, perhaps, burst another myth.
The essence of that debate was whether different standards should apply to journalists under a dictatorship and a democracy. Should hidden cameras, illicit recordings, stolen documents, and paid sources be outlawed now? Were journalists still attacking the government as if it were Fujimori?s dictatorship, as some thought, or had some reporters lost their critical attitude toward this government? Had investigative reporting been replaced by petty tabloidism, or was today?s corruption just more easily exposed? Should journalists be concerned if their reporting leads to a crisis of governability? Were those who helped expose an authoritarian regime now in danger of toppling a democratic one?
Surprisingly, Zileri, whose magazine aggressively opposed Fujimori?s regime, is one of the loudest critics of a new trend in journalism that has emerged with the return of democracy: denuncialogia ? an obsession with denunciations. ?It trivializes investigative journalism. It generates a frenzy of aggression,? Zileri said. ?It creates in the population a sense that the country is in chaos, that we can?t be governed by a democracy.?
How did Zileri explain this apparent collapse in serious but measured reporting, given Peru?s new democratic freedoms, a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, a new freedom of information law, and the proliferation of new independent media outlets? He conceded with a twisted smile that serious investigative reporting might in fact be harder under a democracy than under a dictatorship. ?It?s like an orchestra of voices now.? In the silence of authoritarianism, he says, ?it was much easier to hear the noise.?
During the 1990s, Peru witnessed the creation of one of the most extensive state-run networks of corruption in Latin American history, known here universally as the mafia. The don of that mafia was Fujimori?s Svengali-like national security adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos. When a corruption scandal forced Montesinos and Fujimori to flee the country in 2000, a trove of Montesinos?s secretly recorded videos surfaced and exposed the depth of his corruption. Montesinos was captured and returned to Peru to face trial, and those videos form the backbone of the legal case against him and over 1,300 others who have been connected to his crimes.
As the videos document, Montesinos maintained control through Peru?s intelligence apparatus, and reached deep into the courts, the military, the Congress, the police, and the private sector. But nowhere was that control more complete than in the media, which by the end of the decade had been swallowed whole by Peru?s national intelligence service, the SIN. The current crisis of the press is in large part the legacy of this deeply corrupted past. To get a sense of its scope, I caught a taxi to El Callao, where Montesinos is now standing trial. The trial is expected to run for another year.
The taxi sped south along Lima?s coastal freeway, sandwiched between the city?s high sandstone cliffs and a rocky, rubble-strewn beach. The smell of sewage and shellfish drifted through the window. We turned inland, crossed the dry Rimac River and entered the industrial neighborhood of El Callao, once a separate city but today just an extension of Lima?s eight million-person sprawl. Shantytowns thinned into farmland, and we came to the high cinderblock walls of El Callao Naval Base, home to the maximum-security military prison that Montesinos had ordered built a decade ago to hold the country?s terrorists. For three years it has held Montesinos, who spends his days in an isolation cell. He is charged with commanding death squads; corrupting Peru?s judicial, political, and financial institutions; rigging elections; selling guns to Colombian terrorists; protecting drug traffickers; and stealing as much as $1 billion of state money. He and forty co-defendants also are accused of systematically buying editorial control of the country?s television stations and popular press.
The charges stem from the late 1990s, when Fujimori was campaigning for a third five-year term and the obstacles to reelection were significant: the third term was constitutionally barred, a declining economy had left people restless, and a strident political opposition was increasingly vocal. Montesinos knew that control of the media would be crucial. He focused his efforts on two primary targets: television, which reached deep into the rural and uneducated populations; and the prensa chicha, the fourteen-cent tabloids whose headlines blared like banner advertising from kiosks across the country.
Montesinos already had substantial leverage over the country?s main television stations. Advertising had declined, leaving the stations deep in debt and the state as the country?s primary buyer of ad time. Tax reform had also left most television stations with huge debts to the government. Starting in 1999, Montesinos began to invite television executives into his office in the SIN for a talk. The negotiations were simple: You owe the state money, Montesinos said. I can either shut you down or I can forgive some debts, and even give you some operating money. In exchange, the owners were required to clear their coverage of Fujimori?s reelection campaign with Montesinos, and help ruin the credibility of opponents. One by one, the broadcasters took the deal.
One of Montesinos?s secret videos shows the owners of Channel 2 being offered $500,000 a month to ban appearances of the political opposition on their channel. Channel 4 owners got $1.5 million a month for similar cooperation. Another video shows Montesinos counting out $350,000 in cash to Channel 5?s proprietor. The owner of Channel 9 received $50,000 to cancel a bothersome investigative series called Uncensored, directed by Cecilia Valenzuela. By the end of 1999, Montesinos had editorial control over Channels 2, 4, 5, 9, and 13. Channel 7 was already state-owned. One of the country?s two cable channels, Channel 10, had been secretly purchased for the armed forces. That left just one independent station in Peru: Channel N, a twenty-four-hour cable news outlet that reaches barely 5 percent of the population.
The second major news source for Peru?s impoverished majority was the prensa chicha. Chicha refers to the popular culture of Lima?s millions of displaced Andean Indians, who fled their mountain villages during the Shining Path?s rural terror campaign of the 1980s and ?90s, which left 60,000 dead. Hundreds of thousands of migrants flooded Lima in those years, and there, among the second and third generations of urban migrants, the culture of chicha took root. Named for the corn and yucca beer typically made by Andean Indians, chicha has come to represent a vibrant popular culture of tinny cumbia music, doleful lyrics, bright neon colors, and a peculiar street jargon. To Lima?s elite, the word is synonymous with tacky.
The prensa chicha?s front pages follow a formula: a scandalous banner headline, a nearly naked woman, and close-ups of a bloody car crash or murder scene. Sex, death, horror. Montesinos saw in the prensa chicha an ideal vehicle to communicate with the country?s poor.
As the 2000 elections neared, he developed a strategy to co-opt the prensa chicha. To fund the operation, Montesinos siphoned millions of dollars from the intelligence budgets of the armed forces. He offered prensa chicha owners about $3,000 for every front-page headline. A small office in the Intelligence Services became a news factory: during morning meetings, Montesinos and his advisers would agree on the next day?s headlines. The ?news? was then sent out via encrypted fax to the owners, who laid out the front pages and sent a proof back to the SIN for final approval.
According to prosecutors, Augusto Bresani, Montesinos?s liaison with the prensa chicha, decided to open his own line of tabloids, with one innovation: realizing that their purpose was served by the headlines alone, Bresani stopped wasting money on content. His tabloids were reduced to full-page headlines followed inside by a three-line story wedged among three pages of ads. Soon, the number of chicha publications had exploded. El Chino, El Tio, El Men, La Chuchi, El Mananero, La Yuca, El Popular, Repudica, Diario Mas, El Chato ? all screaming in unison.
Ironically, it was the near total repression of the mainstream press that fostered some of Latin America?s best investigative reporting. I spoke with Gustavo Gorriti, one of Peru?s top investigative journalists, in his office in a sprawling colonial house in Lince, a wealthy neighborhood near downtown Lima. The house serves as the offices of Instituto de Defensa Legal, a Peruvian nongovernmental organization where Gorriti is now a journalist in residence. He is returning to journalism after serving as an adviser to Alejandro Toledo, whom he now refers to sarcastically as ?God?s gift to Peru.? Gorriti, who is in his mid-fifties, has never been one to mince words. ?The essential struggle of the 1990s can be construed as the struggle between spies and journalists, with information as the battleground,? Gorriti tells me. ?And the journalists won, again and again and again.?
Gorriti?s own career can be seen as a prolonged battle with Montesinos, whom Gorriti first exposed in an investigation for Caretas in 1983, when Montesinos was merely a well-connected drug lawyer. Throughout the 1980s Gorriti investigated the terror war that was consuming his country, publishing an authoritative book about the Shining Path in 1990. That same year, Montesinos became the adviser to Peru?s newly elected president, Fujimori. By April 1992, when Fujimori, at his adviser?s behest, ordered tanks into the streets, dissolved the Congress, and announced an ?autogolpe,? or ?self-coup,? as Peruvians called it, both Gorriti and Montesinos were in their prime.
That April night, as he sat finishing a dispatch on the coup for Spain?s El Pais, armed men climbed over Gorriti?s garden wall. He was held incommunicado in the basement of army intelligence headquarters, near an incinerator where investigators with Peru?s Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found human remains. After fifty hours of being officially ?disappeared,? he was released, thanks to an international outcry. He spent much of the next few years in exile in the U.S. and Panama, where he continued to uncover Montesinos?s crimes.
After the 1992 coup, the number of newspapers, magazines, and television stations that criticized the government shrank until only a handful of independent journalists were left. Still, they were able to uncover many of the regime?s crimes, and are today credited with playing an important role in its fall.
In late 1993, Cecilia Valenzuela, then a young Caretas reporter, published an investigation that linked Montesinos to a death-squad responsible for two recent massacres. The day after the piece ran, a box appeared in the elevator of the Caretas office with Valenzuela?s name on it. Inside was a chicken, slashed and bloody, wrapped in black tape with an enlarged photo of Valenzuela tied to it. A week later, on her birthday, flowers were delivered to Valenzuela?s desk by a messenger. The card inside read, ?You?re going to die, bitch.?
In July 1997, Channel 2 reported on Montesinos?s inflated income and, later, that intelligence services had been tapping the phones of 200 opposition politicians and journalists. The station?s Israeli-born owner, Baruch Ivcher, had his Peruvian citizenship revoked, and his right to own a television station along with it. Control of Channel 2 passed to minority shareholders, who quickly ended investigations.
In 1998 Angel Paez, an investigative reporter at the left-leaning daily La Republica, began publishing articles about suspicious arms acquisitions by the armed forces in which associates of Montesinos were skimming large commissions for faulty equipment. Soon after, Paez was accused of being a traitor to his country in a vicious campaign by the prensa chicha. In 1999 the opposition paper Liberacion published documents that showed Montesinos had $2.6 million stashed in Peruvian bank accounts. In March 2000, investigative reporters at the cautious El Comercio, the country?s oldest paper and last remaining broadsheet, revealed that Fujimori?s reelection campaign had forged over one million signatures to enroll in the coming elections.
Fujimori won the second round of elections uncontested when Toledo withdrew in protest, but the network of control that Fujimori and Montesinos had built was starting to unravel. In August 2000, the two announced the bust of an international arms trafficking ring that had sold 10,000 assault rifles to Colombia?s FARC guerrillas. The day after the press conference, Cecilia Valenzuela began publishing an investigation that named Montesinos as the mastermind of the deal. Three weeks later, a video ? the first of the Vladi-videos, as they would be called ? was broadcast simultaneously on Channel N and in Congress, showing Montesinos giving an opposition congressman $15,000 to change political parties. The game was up. Montesinos fled the country eight days later, and was eventually captured and extradited to Peru. Fujimori fled in November 2000, faxing his resignation from Japan, where he remains today, plotting his political comeback. ?They were investigations that completely shook up the political situation and put reality in a new light,? Gorriti told me. ?For me, that is what defines good investigative reporting.?
One of the legacies of Montesinos?s governance-by-espionage has been a society obsessed with surveillance.
?Now everyone records telephone conversations, everyone uses hidden cameras,? said Julia Maria Urrunaga, former investigative editor at El Comercio and now a director at the Institute for the Press and Society. On a daily basis, Lima editors receive a stream of clandestinely recorded conversations, documents, and photos of everything from petty love affairs to President Toledo?s private phone conversations. ?Everyone wants to be a little Montesinos,? Urrunaga said.
This, coupled with the government?s political bungling, has generated a seemingly endless supply of scandals from Toledo?s first days in office. First, it was the presidential salary, which Toledo raised from $3,000 to $18,000 a month. (A public outcry eventually forced him to lower it to $3,660.) Then it was his repeated refusal to recognize Zarai Toledo, whom the press had identified as his illegitimate daughter. (In 2002, after years of denials, Toledo recognized her.)
Over the past six months, denuncialogia has gripped the capital like a fever. The head of the cabinet quit in December after being accused in the press of homosexuality. In January the vice president resigned when the media published photos of him in an intimate embrace with his young girlfriend. (The girl?s father allegedly received a tax break.) The president?s personal attorney resigned the same day after a secretly recorded audio tape revealed his conversations with a member of the Fujimori regime. In March Peru?s intelligence agency was closed when its seventh president in two and a half years resigned after his implication in an alleged $7 million land sale fraud. (He had been on the job just two days, replacing the former president, who was forced to resign after documents were leaked suggesting he was plotting against the interior minister.) As I arrived in town, the First Lady was embroiled in a scandal about the mismanagement of public funds, Toledo?s approval rating hovered in the single digits, and his sixth cabinet in thirty-two months in office was in danger of collapse.
His supporters, and some journalists, are quick to blame the press.
Lima journalists are ?a bunch of monkeys with machine guns,? says Fernando Yovera, a veteran reporter who, like a number of other top journalists, left the profession to advise Toledo during the 2000 campaign. He now works for the Congress as a liaison between the press and the government. ?For ten years journalists were mute, now they can?t shut up: everyone is guilty of everything! They use headlines like firing squads.?
Emerging out of this flood of denunciations ? or perhaps the force behind it ? is a new form of journalism: the wildly popular hybrid of the prensa chicha and serious papers epitomized by Lima?s three-year-old leading tabloid daily, Correo. ?I like to call it serious sensationalism,? said Juan Carlos Tafur, the director of Correo. I met Tafur on a Saturday morning at his home in the leafy coastal suburb of Barranco to talk about the changes in the newspaper industry that had made Correo, almost overnight, the most-read paper in the country.
Lima?s newsstands have been dominated by two types of newspapers: the forty-five-cent ?serious? papers, which sold as many as 100,000 copies a day in the 1980s, and the fourteen-cent prensa chicha. But in the 1980s and 1990s, the flood of poor Indian migrants coupled with a series of economic and educational crises transformed Lima?s population, giving rise to a new readership. A growing class of the educated but poor ? students, retired people, government workers ? were left without a paper that spoke to their reality and met their budget. Readership of the serious papers went into free fall.
Correo emerged in November 2000 amid the political turmoil that followed the collapse of Fujimori?s government. Suddenly there was a tabloid that looked chicha and cost fourteen cents, but covered politics and social issues aggressively. Within months of Toledo?s taking office, Correo was one of the few papers openly critical of his government. The paper?s coverage reflected its hybrid origins: articles were short and to the point; big photos and info boxes summarized the facts quickly. Sprinkled throughout was a difficult-to-distinguish mix of serious investigation and uncorroborated attack.
It sold fantastically. To the surprise of many in the industry, Correo had tapped into a population of readers utterly frustrated with Toledo that other papers had either missed or ignored. Soon Correo?s circulation, driven by banner headlines and daily scandals, surpassed even the staid El Comercio, the longtime leader of Peru?s serious press. A wave of imitations flooded the newsstands, led by Peru21, published by El Comercio?s owners and a direct knock-off of Correo?s format. Like Correo, these other ?serious tabloids? were harshly critical of Toledo?s government. Today, in a niche that did not exist three years ago, there are seven ?serious tabloids,? with new ones appearing regularly.
Correo?s success ? and the tabloid phenomenon it has spawned ? were met with criticism almost immediately. At first the attacks were personal, directed toward Tafur and the paper?s owners, whom critics called ?sashimi-eaters? or ?kimono-wearers,? references to their connections to Fujimori?s regime. As Correo matured and improved, its critics focused more on the paper?s style of journalism, accusing it of sloppy sensationalism disguised as investigative reporting.
?Sensational? It?s true; I treat every piece of news as a scandal. Our headlines scream at you,? Tafur admits. ?Imprecise? Sure, we?ve committed errors. When you turn up the volume, you get some distortion.? But he?s not convinced that the investigative journalism of the ?90s was any better. ?What exactly did they expose?? Tafur asked. ?More than great investigative journalism, I think it was the content of the denunciations that was different. There was an authoritarian government, a major terror campaign, and vast corruption. That?s why they think it was so great. But basically they were accusations, just like today.?
And Tafur doesn?t buy into the notion that the rules have changed now that Peru is under a democracy. ?The only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is a change in shells. Inside, nothing has really changed, and the press shouldn?t anesthetize itself.?
Even those who disagree with Tafur?s type of journalism envy his bottom line. At a time when most serious papers are running a net loss, Correo has proved remarkably profitable. ?The expensive papers are pachyderms,? he says. ?I think Correo and Peru21 are the future of the press here.?
If there is a television equivalent of the Correo phenomenon, it would be Cecilia Valenzuela?s weekly program, La Ventana Indiscreta. I visited her at the Channel 2 studio on a Sunday night to watch a live broadcast. In the center of a large sound studio bathed in orange light, Valenzuela sits at a glass table, where she interviews the week?s newsmakers. Seated in a semi-circle around her is her team of six young investigative reporters, whose quick, edgy video reports form the main segments of the ninety-minute show. In the background is a comical bust of Toledo.
The ?indiscrete window,? the show?s name, refers to the window of the presidential palace; the program offers its viewers a glimpse into the world behind that window. But at times, Valenzuela?s critics say, the show can be as indiscrete as its subject matter. Like the ?serious tabloids,? La Ventana Indiscreta reaches out to a mass audience by mixing humor, irony, sarcasm, and scandal with serious investigative reporting and political coverage. Valenzuela?s commentaries between segments are often opinionated and scathing, at times going beyond the facts. The show?s reports are filmed with small, handheld digital video cameras that give it a hidden camera feel. Techno music drives many of the segments to a conclusion that, more often than not, exposes some corruption, big or small, in the political class. While highly regarded for her attacks on Montesinos and Fujimori during the 1990s, Valenzuela has drawn criticism from her peers now for her harsh criticism of Toledo?s government, and the form those attacks take. The criticism, Valenzuela feels, comes from those who believe Peru has changed fundamentally from the days of the Fujimori regime. In her view, it hasn?t. ?The majority of journalists, and Peruvians in general, thought that with the shift from dictatorship to democracy, things would change from night to day. They thought the city would suddenly smell differently. But it still smells like shit,? Valenzuela tells me. ?Those who have power in my country always abuse it. Corruption in Peru is endemic: it wasn?t just the dictatorship of Fujimori, it has to do with the political class in this country.?
Like Correo?s Tafur, Valenzuela is in her early forties, a younger member of Lima?s journalism elite, which is dominated by men in their late fifties and sixties, and she largely dismisses what her older colleagues see as a decline in the quality of Peruvian journalism. Revealing corruption in Toledo?s government simply doesn?t require profound investigation, she argues. ?Under Fujimori, there was incredible corruption, but the corrupt people were very efficient. This government is inhabited by the most incapable, inept group of people we?ve seen in years. Every time you scratch the surface, a terrifying smell of putrefaction comes out.?
The crisis in the press is merely a reflection of the larger crisis in Peruvian society, she claims. ?Now nobody believes in anything: in politicians, in journalists, in priests. That doubt is healthy. For now, we have the right to feel our pain, to live our sorrow, to expiate our faults. I don?t know how long that will last. After the doubt, confidence will come back, and we?ll have to see who demonstrates credibility. I think this is a very healthy thing for the press. It will only make us better.?
On my last day in Lima, striking coca cultivators descended on the city to demand the president?s resignation, and once again, the sting of tear gas mixed with the smell of diesel fuel and cooking oil in Lima?s Plaza de Armas. The papers again were filled with scandal, calling for the head of the interior minister. Congress had gathered the signatures necessary for his censure, and by the end of the day the most popular member of Toledo?s beleaguered cabinet was forced to resign.
?There should be a coup,? my taxi driver told me on the way to the airport. ?We need a strong hand in power. Peru is like a tree that is growing crooked: someone has to straighten it out.? Earlier in the week, a major United Nations study showed that 54 percent of Latin Americans said they would prefer an authoritarian government if it improved their economic situation. Another poll found that Fujimori would place first if elections were held tomorrow. Toledo?s approval rating threatened to sink below the 8 percent it had clung to in recent weeks.
My taxi driver?s comments made me think of something Gustavo Gorriti told me as I was leaving his office, a warning not to underestimate the ?mafia?: ?People eventually feel a nostalgia for the whip, the saddle, and the spurs,? Gorriti said. ?They want to be ridden. It?s the perverse inheritance of the caudillos [Latin American feudal lords]. It?s the democracy that never had the chance to sink its roots in. Thanks to the idiot we have in the palace, thanks to the embarrassment of the Congress we have, but thanks also to the bad journalism being done, we run the risk that after ten years of struggle, we?ll have to fight again, bleed again, start all over again.
?People should realize that if the mafia once again governs Peru ? they have high hopes of doing so, and it is very possible ? they will make sure this time they don?t make the mistakes of last time, allowing the independent journalists to operate as we did.?
Two months before my visit, television cameras covering the opening of Montesinos?s trial for media corruption had by chance captured a chilling moment that drove home Gorriti?s warning. Surrounded by prosecutors, judges, guards, and the media, Montesinos scribbled a note on a pad of paper and casually tilted it toward a co-defendant, the owner of a popular tabloid sitting next to him. Captured from behind by a camera, the note read: ?Tomorrow raise the drug issue.? The next morning the tabloid carried a banner headline, the latest dispatch from a mafia intent on making a comeback: NEW VIDEOS DOCUMENT TOLEDO'S DRUG ABUSE!
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Jason Felch is a fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and Legal Affairs.
