The once powerful head of Peruvian intelligence under the days of former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), Vladimir Montesinos, has been sentenced to 17 years in prison for the 1992 abduction of a journalist who criticized the government, the court said on Thursday.
The sentence for the abduction of Gustavo Goriti, then a correspondent of the Spanish newspaper El País, is considered to have already been served by Vladimir Montesinos, 76 years old. He has been in prison since 2001, after being sentenced to 25 years in prison for a series of human rights violations.
The Peruvian judiciary does not add up the sentences it imposes; it simply applies the longest.
Gustavo Goriti was abducted by the military while at home on the night of April 5, 1992, the day Alberto Fujimori, with the support of the armed forces, dissolved parliament and suspended the Peruvian Constitution.
The journalist was briefly detained in a cell at the army’s general staff, but was released due to pressure from Spanish diplomacy and the press.
Mr Montesinos, long known as “Rasputin of the Andes”, was sentenced in 2001 to 25 years in prison for his involvement in the massacre of 15 people in Barrios Alto and the disappearance of nine students and a La Cantuta University professor from a group. military. These crimes were committed at the height of what the Fujimori government described as a war on “terrorism.”
Vladimir Montesinos was considered the mastermind of President Fujimori’s government in the war against the Bright Path (Maoists) guerrillas and the Tupac Amaro Revolutionary Movement (Guevara).
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