There it is my new article on democracy in Peru.
Q&A: “Just Keeping the Achievements of Democracy Means a Daily Struggle”
Interview with Gustavo Gorriti, President of Instituto Prensa y Sociedad
 Gustavo Gorriti
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ROME, Sep 25 (IPS) – With former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos in jail, Peru faces a new era. How did it come to happen, and what is in store?IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez speaks with Gustavo Gorriti about the unprecedented decision of the Chilean Supreme Court to extradite Fujimori, who was president 1990-2000, and its significance.
Gorriti, an award-winning investigative journalist, covered Peru’s internal war in the eighties. He followed former head of intelligence service Vladimiro Montesinos’s career since 1983 — Montesinos was the source of Fujimori’s power, and his downfall. It was his actions that led to the allegations of murder and drug trafficking.
Gorriti is author of ‘The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru’ and the recent ‘Calavera en Negro’ (Skull in Black). He is columnist for Caretas newspaper and president of Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, a Latin American association that promotes independent journalism and freedom of expression. He was earlier associate director of Panama’s La Prensa newspaper, and co-director of Peru’s La Republica.
In the aftermath of Fujimori’s dissolving the Peruvian Congress in 1992 and seizing wide powers, a coup as it came to be called even though Fujimori was president already, Gorriti was kidnapped, and held in the Intelligence Service area of the Pentagonito, the army headquarters, where so many others were tortured and killed. Because of an international outcry, he was finally released.
IPS: This is the first time in history that a court orders the extradition of a former head of state to be tried for human rights violations and corruption in his home country. Fujimori’s extradition also means that all the main public servants involved in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres are arrested. (The Barrios Altos massacre took place in the Peru suburb of that name Nov. 3, 1991; 15 were killed by a death squad of the Peruvian armed forces. In the La Cantuta massacre, a professor and nine others from Lima’s La Cantuta university were abducted and ‘disappeared’ by a military death squad). Do you feel somehow vindicated?
Gustavo Gorriti: Fujimori’s extradition doesn’t vindicate me. It means that justice has, so far, been partially served. It also somehow closes an extraordinary period in our history filled with incredible paradoxes, ironies and twists of fate. Its lessons are that consistent action in defence of democracy and human rights, while exposing the crimes of tyrants will in due time end up with a similar scenario as the one we have in Peru: with Montesinos and Fujimori in jail, facing the results of their past misdeeds.
As for me, it has been a long road fraught with the kind of conflict and peril no journalist should have to face. Do I feel any kind of elation now? None at all. It took too long, most of the time uphill. It cost too much to many people and to the country as a whole. Much was lost, and will never be recovered. We’ll have to make sure that our democracy becomes unassailable to the Montesinos and the Fujimoris of the world, and severe measures may have to be taken. But there is no joy in it. At least, I don’t feel any.
