For shame, Peru.

The weather has been awful... not a big surprise given the season...

...yet ~2,000 tourists (exact count unknown), who were allowed to go up even in these conditions, have been trapped by deadly mudslides in the vicinity of the historic Machu Picchu site, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

This is a large, remote area, accessible by trail and a specially-build road and rail line (which can't operate in dangerous weather like this). Many bridges along the line are washed out, anyway. Other than the facilities for the tourist arrivals and departures, there is basically nothing more than a few hostels there in the way of shelter or supplies.

The national government did declare a state of emergency, and did begin a rescue/relief effort. But it is one thing to set in motion a relief plan, and quite another thing to run it with any competence, priority, or basic fairness.

Washington Farfan, a guide at the site, said: "The situation is chaotic. Unfortunately, the rescue effort has not been organised correctly. People are really upset right now."

He also said that food was running short. "We haven't been given anything to eat. Each one is left to work out his rations," he said, adding that the vendors at the tourist site had immediately doubled their prices when it became clear the foreigners were stuck.

Bad, but almost expected.

Rudy Chalco, a tour guide with a group of elderly Europeans, said that the rescuers were not complying with the government's orders to prioritise the evacuation of children, the elderly and sick, and that some were paying to skip to the top of the list.

"The situation is about to erupt," he said.

"We don't have any more food, disorder is starting to reign, the soldiers and police that are here don't know what to do or how to organise the help that has arrived, people are getting desperate and no one is taking charge."

Worse.

There are five people known to be dead already: one tourist, a guide, and three locals.

If the Government of Peru doesn't get a handle on this, there will likely be more.

I *know* that the Government has limited resources. That isn't the matter in question. This is:

After the rescue is completed... UNESCO should demand a criminal inquest into rescuers accepting or even demanding bribe money... as a condition of UNESCO *not* suspending World Heritage financial support over this fiasco.

Chavez's Imperial Game

This is a recommended read for anyone who is trying to follow the Empire-By-Franchise schemes of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez:

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, writing at RealClearPolitics (for the WaPo Writers Group): Hugo Chavez's Imperial Chess Game.

It lays it all out, from the role of the ALBA front organization to the next move on the chess board... Peru.

The only thing left unmentioned is the Honduran situation, which is best described as a taken piece.

Please take the time to read it.

By the company that they keep

Throughout the tribal uprising in Peru's Department of Amazonas this last week, rumors of ALBA House (the Bolivarian Socialist International) being money behind the movement have circulated.

Well... with the Peruvian Army having moved in on Saturday after the local police were overwhelmed, taken hostage (and in the case of nine of the officers, reportedly killed), and with charges being filed against indigenous leader Alberto Pizango of sedition, conspiracy and rebellion...

A. Pizango has fled to the protection of the Nicaraguan Embassy.

If "You shall know them by the company that they keep" applies here, that pretty much answers the rumors.

Don't count out the FARC yet

Just in case anyone was thinking that the FARC was on its way to the dustbin of history any time soon, *Here* is a report from yesterday's Miami Herald newspaper on what is being called "Plan Rebirth".

Between the FARC and the reforming Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path Movement; Peru), this matter of guerrillas as narco-traffickers is far from resolved.

Six reports you should read

While each of these deserves a detailed commentary of their own, matters mundane simply preclude my having the time to address them properly. Here they are, for your interest and general information, pending further discussion:

Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, wins re-election. The Oppo's carried the Guayaquil Mayoralty, but the country as a whole went toward Correa's party by 55%.

Manuel Rosales was granted Asylum in Peru, and Peruvian President Alan Garcia claims this "will not disturb" bilateral relations between Peru and Venezuela. Good luck with that. Venezuela has withdrawn their Ambassador in protest.

Speaking of people under international warrant: INTERPOL has issued a warrant for Russian State Duma Deputy Adam Delimkhanov in the case of the murder of Chechen commander Sulim Yamadayev in Dubai last month. This case is the latest event in what appears to be a series of assassinations targeting rivals of Kremlin-backed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

The Seychelles Coast Guard, in cooperation with the Spanish Navy, has captured 9 pirates in the waters of the Seychelles believed to have participated in the attempted hijacking of the cruise ship MSC Melody. Spanish, French, and Indian Navy patrols are now active in the Seychelles region. More at EagleSpeak on this item.

The civil disorder in Madagascar grows worse, with the arrest of four members of the Ravalomanana faction for inciting violence and the possession of weapons. In addition, a former member of ousted-President M. Ravalomanana's Presidential Guard has been accused of plotting the murder of the wife of coup-leader President A. Rajoelina.

More Kivu troubles in the D.R. Congo are happening. The arrest of L. Nkunda has left the CNDP under the leadership of J. B. Ntaganda, who is a wanted fugitive from ICC war-crimes prosecution, but that hasn't stopped the Congolese Army (FARDC) from integrating the remaining CNDP forces into their command and preparing a new offensive in South Kivu as an expansion of ongoing operations against the Interahawme Hutu-based factions of the FDLR. The MONUC U.N. peacekeepers have stated they can not continue to support the FARDC if Ntaganda is involved, but internal reports show that the MONUC administrators have known since April 8th of his role.

Red Notice for Rosales

Manuel Rosales, one of the Venezuelan opposition targeted by the latest Chavez-inspired persecutions, is now under a "Red Notice" warrant from INTERPOL as a fugitive. He is reported to be in Peru, seeking Political Asylum.

***
Addenda:

Fausta of Fausta's Blog has a full work-up on the situation.

***
Update:

El Universal (in English) has several reports related to this item.

*Here* is the statement from Nicolás Maduro, Foreign Minister of Venezuela, on the declaration of Rosales as an international fugitive.

"We hope that the request we are making through the international mechanisms of capture and search of criminals such as Manuel Rosales is granted by all the countries of the region and all the countries in the world and is complied strictly, just like Venezuela does," Maduro said...

which may also be a reference to *this*.

Rosales has claimed that the arrest was part of a plot to kill him.

"They wanted to put me in jail. They were going to send me to a prison called La Planta, characterized by inhumane conditions... They wanted to put me in jail and then somebody would kill me... I decided to leave Venezuela to protect my integrity because they could have killed me and later they would have said that I had fought with them (the inmates)," Rosales said.

Meanwhile, the City Council of Maracaibo has appointed Daniel Ponne as the replacement to Rosales as Mayor, pending a new election.

Rosales seeking asylum?

There is one report in now that Venezuelan opposition leader Manuel Rosales is now seeking asylum in Peru.

He has been functionally hounded from office as the Mayor of Maracaibo, and has been in hiding since last month. See this CompHyp thread for related material on the supposed case against him.

***
Heads Up on something else:

I've got one more item on Venezuela, related to the Chavez criticism of the Catholic Church in the country, but...

...I can't open-source the item yet for confirmation.

So stay tuned late today and I'll see what I can say about the matter.

Fujimori Trial: the verdict is in

Guilty.

He is facing up to 30 years for this; sentencing is expected later Tuesday, local time.

An appeal is planned.

***
Update Wednesday morning ('blog time)

The sentence is in. 25 years.

You can read about it, and how dutiful daughter may not be the big political success she thinks she is *here* -- source: The AP

Daddy's Girl

It seems that Keiko Fujimori, the most popular single politician in Peru recently and the daughter of disgraced (and arrested) former President Alberto Fujimori, seems to believe that the opinion of the electorate matters more than the ruling of any judge.

"My father's true sentencing will come in the 2011 elections, in which the people will decide if Alberto Fujimori is innocent or not," said Keiko Fujimori, a Peruvian lawmaker who received more votes than any other congressional candidate in the 2006 elections.

She is also voicing again the Fujimori defense of record: that her father did nothing wrong himself, but was manipulated and deceived by Vladimiro Montesinos, her father's administration's Intelligence Chief and political player.

Now, there is no doubt that V. Montesinos is a villain. That's been established and he is cooling his heels in the clink because of it. But it is going to be rather hard to convince anyone of A. Fujimori's innocence in all the dirty matters when his first action upon being warned of a possible arrest was to flee to Japan, abuse the rights of ancestral-Japanese to claim Japanese nationality, and hide out with his fortune under the protection of people who got rich fronting for his Peruvian government in Japan.

To no one's surprise, K. Fujimori is considered a likely candidate for President of Peru in the coming election cycle. She has said that were she to become President, she would pardon her father if (in her mind the unlikely event of) his conviction.

The Weekly N&C for November 17th, 2008

An Opportunity to Reopen the Door

This week the main sessions of the APEC PERU 2008 international conference will commence, bringing high-level representatives of the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum member economies together in Lima, Peru. The term “member economies”, by the way, is a convenient euphemism to allow the Republic of China (as Chinese Taipei), Hong Kong, China (Special Administrative Region) and the People’s Republic of China (generally recognized government of China) to all attend. On this week’s schedule are in particular Ministerial meetings that are the prelude to the Leader’s Meeting at the end of the week. Japan’s delegate to the Ministerial meetings is two-months-in-office gaimu daijin (Minister for Foreign Affairs) Nakasone Hirofumi (H. Nakasone). This trip is to continue on Friday with a visit to Colombia for meetings and the celebration of the centennial of Japan-Colombia bilateral relations. Both stops offer much needed opportunities to reopen doors that have closed, for Japan and for each host nation.

In the case of the Colombia visit, it can only be hoped that some balance will be restored (if not some overt preference) after the recent agreements between several Japanese Trading Houses and the Government of Venezuela for some pieces of the Orinoco Basin petroleum pie. No slight to the merchants for finding a way to make an oil deal at a time when prices looked to be going up, and it might even be proven a good idea a few years from now, but restoring Japan-Colombia ties to their ideal fullest and working toward tariff reductions and investment opportunities will likely serve both countries very well.

The situation in Peru as of this date is one fraught with peril as both the instability in the world’s financial system and the resurgence of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency cast a dark pall over the possibilities for Foreign Direct Investment to continue to come in. Given the experience of the first Alan G. L. Garcia Perez (Alan Garcia) government (1985-1990), which brought hyperinflation, debt-service failures and attempts at nationalizing the banking and insurance industries, one might well look rather carefully at the conduct of the second (and current) Alan Garcia administration. Fortunately, it appears that lessons were learned in the intervening years and the choice in 2006 of A. Garcia over Ollanta Humala, a Bolivarian Socialist whose campaign was supported openly by the H. Chavez government of Venezuela, looks to be a good one for Peru. But those intervening years that saw A. Garcia in exile in Colombia and France are defined by yet another problem that is yet to be completely overcome: then-President Alberto Ken’ya Fujimori.

For by 1990, Peru was in the grip of a vice, pressed on one side by economic failures that had ruined international investment incentives, in particular for Japan which had suffered losses on investments, and unpaid development loans, and on the other by rising guerrilla warfare against the government and foreign assets. Japan’s interests suffered from the violence as well, with interruptions of mining activities and attacks on Japanese-owned manufacturing and banking operations. *Here is a map* of how bad things had gotten by 1990.

But rising to the moment in the presidential election of that year, A. Fujimori upset Mario Vargas Llosa and became the first Japanese-Peruvian to lead the nation. The combination of his “Fujishock” neo-liberal economic intervention and his determination to confront the various guerrilla threats proved instantly commendable in the eyes of the international community, and cast his political rivals (who still controlled the legislature) as obstructionists. Furthermore, in his 1990 visit to Japan, he was accorded almost heroic status in the media and provided with all manner of support including aid campaigns to fight poverty and charters for Non-Governmental Organizations to gather financial support. A. Fujimori saw those commendations as a license to act, and act he did…

The action taken by then-President Fujimori was the rather less-than-common ploy of an autogolpe (self, or presidential, coup) where with the help of the military, he basically ended Peruvian democracy for a time. Other than holding one election to form a Constitutional Congress to re-write the constitution, he ruled as an autocrat from 1992~95. The Organization of American States turned against him, various states broke off or suspended diplomatic relations, but two countries basically stood by and came to support his coup: The United States of America recognized his government “as legitimate” after a brief period of suspension of aid; and Japan, which basically never flinched in its collective adoration of him. More importantly, inside Peru the Fujimori regime was astonishingly popular. The financial reforms mostly worked, and the major guerrilla threats (the Maoist Shining Path and the Marxist Tupac Amaru MRTA) were in desperate decline.

In the return to “regular” democracy in 1995, A. Fujimori carried nearly two-thirds of the vote and his party swept into control of the legislature. But even before he was inaugurated for his term, whispers of ill-repute began to be heard accusing him of “despotism”, and some rumors of criminality circulated. Then there came the attack on the Japanese Ambassador’s Residence in 1996~97 by the MRTA, the four month long standoff and bloody conclusion. No matter, it seemed, for he was well on his way to the third term (having gained approval from the legislature to run for an unconstitutional third term) when The Montesinos Scandal broke in September of 2000, with video showing the Chief of the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, paying off bribes to a congressman. Within a month, all the rumors and accusations were *believed* to be fact and public support for the Fujimori government collapsed. By November, he had lost his exemption to be a candidate in the upcoming election and then while out of the country (co-incidentally for an APEC summit), Alberto Ken’ya Fujimori skipped out. He went into self-exile in Japan where he was almost immediately recognized as Fujimori Ken’ya, Japanese National. He sent his resignation letter back to Peru by fax while on the way to Japan.

To describe what happened next in Peru as a “national uproar” is almost an understatement. The remaining Fujimori administration fell from power and almost in a deluge accusations began to pour out: murder, kidnapping, crimes against humanity (those all made the INTERPOL warrant), arms trafficking, grafting of donations from Japanese Charity NGO’s, and just plain old fashioned looting of the national treasury. The Special Prosecutor appointed by the interim Peruvian government estimated the looting and graft to have run to US$2,000,000,000 all in (including Montesinos’ scams and deals) and Transparency International makes the far better defined estimate of US$600,000,000. Even in the lower figure, that is an astonishing sum. With all that lined up, the even more astonishing detail is this: Japan refused to extradite him, or serve the INTERPOL warrant.

That is correct; for six years Japan turned aside every claim, call or warrant against their newly-minted national. Sometimes the Government of Japan actually argued, as in the response to Peru’s direct request: “We don’t have an extradition treaty”. More often, the official position was just to ignore the calls. If that bespeaks that US$600 million (or whatever large sum) lets one buy quite a lot a friendship, well that may be so however no proof of any such has ever been found. The other likely possibility is a sense of entirely misplaced ethnic pride, but be that as it may, for SOME reason, elements of the Japanese government protected him for years.

Had not his own almost inexplicable desire to gain a renewed Peruvian passport (which he got at the Embassy in Toukyou (Tokyo) in 2006) and then an almost quixotic trip back to Latin America with the intent to re-enter Peruvian politics, likely he would still be safely whiling away the time in the elite quarter of the big city. But apparently his 10-year ban from becoming a candidate in Peru did not concern him and he felt that the rather successful minor political party his daughter had risen to the top of back in Peru would form a springboard for his return to rule. But when his flight landed in Chile en-route, the Chilean authorities were perfectly happy to serve the international warrant for his arrest.

It took a while, but the Chilean Supreme Court authorized his extradition on 7 of the 13 cited charges in September of 2007, and his first trial back in Peru (on a single charge of ordering an illegal search) returned a guilty verdict (Spanish language link), a fine and a 6 year sentence. But in the “adding insult to injury” department, Japan had allowed A. Fujimori to rather blatantly attempt to slip Chilean custody by registering as a candidate in the 2007 Upper House election in Japan. Had he won a seat (unlikely as that would have been, given his small sponsoring party), he could have claimed immunity as a Japanese lawmaker on foreign travel and demanded release from Chilean detention before they could hand him over to Peru.

It is time to make amends, Japan. I know full well this is hard to do, but it needs be done.

That means making a good-faith effort to cooperate with the Peruvian investigation of the major crimes A. Fujimori stands accused of, to either his gain or detriment.

That means promising to investigate once and for all the schemes behind APENKAI and AKEN, the two Japan-based NGO’s that may have been misused.

That also means *not* having H. Nakasone visit or pay any notice to A. Fujimori, or his daughter while he is in Peru. Claim the APEC schedule is too hectic. Be a diplomat; dissemble if you must.

And *if* a meeting with Peruvian Foreign Minister Jose Antonio Garcia Belaunde can actually be arranged, then our good Foreign Minister need privately but correctly recognize the mistakes ‘our’ nation has made, so things can get back to ‘our’ having a respectful relationship with the whole nation of Peru,

…instead of just the part that sounds like it should be Japanese.

***
End Notes:

All direct citations are embedded as links in the text.

APEC PERU 2008 homepage

Regarding the NGO accountability issue, See note (9) in *this* document.

For general information, the following are Wiki-p links. The usual caveat holds; check all the sources:

Personal Profile: Alberto Ken’ya Fujimori

Personal Profile: President Alan G. L. Garcia Perez of Peru

Personal Profile: Vladimiro Montesinos

Peruvian Instability

Some of this has been building up for a couple of weeks, and there is enough wrong that there is some severe danger to the continued stability of the administration of Alan Garcia in Peru.

The major problem of the day is riots, but there are tax-rivalry problems between some of the southern provinces and then there was the Oil Scandal (bribery and profiteering) revealed earlier this month...

If this continues to build, things look dark for the government, and for Peru.