PABLO ZOIDO

THE VIEWERS ARE STARING AGHAST at the television. The images are grainy and the angle of view is static—the camera that filmed the episode was hidden in a wall—but the viewers are transfixed as they watch a congressman taking a bribe from the nation’s spymaster.

“How much? How much?” says the spymaster pulling an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket. He says, “Here’s ten. You tell me.” The congressman replies “Let’s talk about fifteen, twenty.”

“Fine. Fifteen! Ten plus five, fifteen,” the other assents, as he hands over another cash-stuffed envelope. The spymaster has committed to paying the congressman, in total, almost a million dollars. 15,000 USD is to be paid each month over a five-year congressional term, plus a signing bonus. “That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?” he remarks. Pocketing the wads of dollars, the congressman dryly retorts, “It’s an investment.”

That 56-minute videotape brought down the government. Citizens took to the streets to demand the President’s resignation. The President and his spymaster fled the country in disgrace. It was September 2000 in Lima, Peru.

The spy chief who starred in the tape, Vladimiro Montesinos Torres, was the head of the SIN, the Servicio de Intelligencia Nacional (the national intelligence service). For a decade, acting in the name of President Alberto Fujimori, he controlled Peru, methodically bribing judges, politicians and the news media.

Montesinos kept meticulous records of his transactions. He required those he bribed to sign contracts detailing their obligations to him. He demanded written receipts for the bribes, and he had his illicit negotiations videotaped. Meanwhile, Montesinos and Fujimori maintained the facade of democracy—the citizens voted, judges ruled, the media reported—but they drained its substance.

While this behavior may seem peculiar, there is a logic to it. Record keeping proved essential to the management of a large network of corruption. By videotaping his negotiations, Montesinos had proof of the others’ complicity. He made sure the videos recorded the bribe-takers accepting his cash. By making people sign contracts and receipts, he had proof of their sins. In the event that the whole network collapsed, this evidence gave him a threat he could use against anyone who turned against him.

The tapes, which came to be called the ”Vladivideos”, revealed the breadth of Vladimiro Montesinos’ reach. They showed him offering Alipio Montes de Oca, a Supreme Court justice, the presidency of the National Elections Board plus an extra $10,000 monthly salary, medical care and personal security; bribing Ernesto Gamarra, a member of a congressional committee investigating Montesinos’ sources of money, to direct the investigation away from Montesinos; and assuring the owner of Lucchetti, a Chilean pasta company, of a favorable judgment in a legal dispute over the construction of a factory.

Montesinos and his associates made a point of counting in front of the (hidden) camera. One video shows the spy chief pulling wads of bills from a plastic bag and putting them into a briefcase. “And now comes the good stuff. One, two, three, four, five, six.” His counterpart said, “Here there is a million. Better this other little briefcase, no?” Montesinos replies, “Which one? No, no, this is great because you can close it… You can keep it as a gift. Look: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, a million. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 2 million.”

The politicians’ bribes were mostly between $5,000 and $20,000 per month. Bribes went not only to opposition congressmen but also to Fujimori’s Cabinet. A prominent example is Federico Salas, Fujimori’s last prime minister, who confessed to accepting from Montesinos an extra salary of $30,000 per month.

The bribe price for ordinary judges was $2,500 to $10,000 per month. Supreme Court judges got bribes of around $25,000 per month, and the president of the Supreme Court got $35,000.

The director of Expreso, a broadsheet newspaper, received a lump sum of $1 million, ostensibly so he could buy a controlling block of the newspaper’s shares. El Tío, a tabloid newspaper, got an incentive contract, being paid over about two years a reported total of $1.5 million based on content: $3,000 to $4,000 for a front-page headline, $5,000 for a full-page article and $500 for a shorter article.

The five privately owned television broadcasters, Channels 2, 4, 5, 9 and 13, were bought off, as was a cable service, CCN. Only the remaining cable channel offered independent investigative journalism: Channel N, owned by El Comercio. (It was on this channel that the videotape that brought everything down first aired.)

Channel 4, which has the largest viewership, got $1.5 million per month in bribes, and Channel 2 got $500,000 per month. With such large amounts of money involved, Montesinos made the owners of the channel sign a contract with him. The contract gave Montesinos full control over news broadcasts. The channel agreed to allow him to review each day’s news programs before they aired, and not to broadcast anything about presidential or congressional candidates or any program referring “explicitly or implicitly to political issues” without Montesinos’ written approval.

The contract was drawn up as a legal document. Montesinos, who held the sole copy, is not named, but just called the “Contractor.” The contract adds that this “does not however nullify the legal value of this document” (oddly, since it clearly had no legal value at all). At the start of each month, Montesinos was to pay Channel 2 its half-million dollars.

The videos show Montesinos crowing about his control of the media. “Each channel takes, damn, $2 million monthly, but it is the only way, that is why, damn it, we have won, because we have sacrificed in this way.” Talking to some associates about the television owners, he said, “We have made them sign on paper and all. Now we are playing with something very serious. They are all lined up. Every day at 12:30 p.m., I have a meeting with them…We plan what is going to be aired in the evening news.”

Montesinos exerted control not only by bribery but sometimes by blackmail. He would obtain video proof of sexual indiscretions and use these tapes for persuasion. Some were filmed in a brothel where intelligence service agents had installed hidden cameras. (After he was imprisoned, the judges handed dozens of these videos over to the Roman Catholic Church, to be returned to those featured in them.)

With all of these tools at hand, Montesinos chose to pay some bribes in cash-occasionally extraordinarily large amounts of cash. The typical bribe paid to a television-channel owner was about a hundred times larger than that paid to a politician, which was somewhat larger than that paid to a judge. One single television channel’s bribe was five times larger than the total of the opposition politicians’ bribes.

A straightforward explanation for why the television owners were more expensive to bribe than the politicians and judges is simply that they were richer. The judges’ bribes were one-and-a-half times to four times their official salaries. The politicians’ bribes were multiples of their official income. By contrast, a few thousand dollars a month might not have impressed a wealthy television-channel owner.

TV owners were richer; they were also fewer and more precious. To a degree, it is a question of supply and demand. If Montesinos did not like a judge’s decision, he could replace her with a different one (he controlled the attorney general and through her the whole judiciary). As for politicians, he had to buy off a majority and not the whole of congress. If a congressman said no or asked for more, Montesinos could go to the next one.

It only takes a single TV channel to inform the citizenry. When it aired the video that brought down the government, Channel N proved that even a small cable channel with a small viewership can have an impact. It can inform the people and make them react.

The power to inform is the difference between the news media and the other checks and balances in a democracy. Television, informing with images, can bring forth the ultimate sanction of citizen reaction. Montesinos and his associates understood this. “If we do not control the television, we do not do anything,” said Gen. Elesván Bello at a 1999 meeting involving Montesinos, high-ranking members of the armed forces and television executives. “The addiction to information is like the addiction to drugs,” Montesinos declared. He considered information the basis of his power. “Here you feel the need for information…We live on information. I need information.”

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands,” said United States Founding Father James Madison, “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The Fujimori regime, by stealth, accumulated all of these powers, plus power over the news media. While Fujimori’s government did not own the media, it controlled many of its outlets. In a democracy, the news media provide the most potent checks and balances against government abuse. By informing the citizenry, television can bring it into action. Measured by the bribes Montesinos paid, the legislature and the judiciary are far weaker constraints on potential tyranny than television. When one check is weak, they are all weak. But even in a fake democracy, where all checks failed, television proved capable of producing the coup de grâce.

Pablo Zoido performed the research for this article at Stanford University. He is currently employed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.