Lima, Peru — At age 75, one of Latin America’s most celebrated journalists longed to weave into books the fragmented threads of more than four decades of investigative reporting that exposed high-level abuses of power in Peru and abroad.
In an illustrious career, Gustavo Gorriti suffered death threats from drug traffickers, survived the harrowing Sendero Luminoso insurgency in Peru and a kidnapping by military intelligence agents with silencers during the presidential seizure of power in 1992.
Then aggressive lymphatic cancer appeared, destroying the former five-time national judo champion’s robust physique. Diagnosed in August, Gorriti was in the final two months of chemotherapy in December when he received a different kind of body blow.
A smear campaign – amplified by complicit, intimidated or indifferent media and television outlets – portrayed the self-described “people’s intelligence agent” as Public Enemy No. 1, a ruthless and selfish victimizer of innocents.
Gorriti is clear about who is behind it: a cabal of “kleptocrats” in Peru’s political and business elites who are in danger of prosecution due, in large part, to their greatest achievements. Its objective: “to liquidate all gains in the war against corruption”.
With his hair removed from chemotherapy and his trademark white beard down to “like three hairs,” Gorriti said he “looked like a pathetic Fu Manchu.” He was so weak that “I just wanted to sleep,” he said in an interview on the terrace of his apartment in Lima.
But outrage spurred the pugilistic reporter into action, rallying his team at IDL-Reporteros, an online news site, to mount a vigorous and detailed defense.
“You can’t choose when you go to war,” he said.
Then it got worse. On March 27, Gorriti faced a criminal investigation in a bribery case with a bizarre structure, accused of “favoring” two anti-corruption prosecutors with publicity.
“Of course it’s not true,” one of the prosecutors cited, José Domingo Pérez, told the Associated Press. “This is a blatant attempt to muzzle one of Latin America’s best investigative reporters, the media outlet he founded and, by extension, any journalist who dares to speak truth to power in Latin America,” said the National Press Club, with headquarters in Washington. said in a statement co-signed by seven press and human rights groups.
The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders based in France also protested.
The case could jeopardize proceedings in an epic bribery scandal that implicates five former presidents and Keiko Fujimori, the éminence grise of Peruvian politics and a perennial presidential candidate who came within a whisker of winning office in 2021. Her trial is scheduled for July 1st.
It was Fujimori’s father, Alberto, whose agents kidnapped Gorriti to silence him while the autocrat forcibly closed Congress in a presidential power grab in 1992. An international outcry led to the reporter’s immediate release.
The prosecutor now targeting Gorriti demanded his communications with Pérez and fellow anti-corruption prosecutor Rafael Vela from 2016-2021. Gorriti refuses, citing reporter privilege, but fears getting a court order.
After years of democratic backsliding, “a loose coalition of corrupt actors” has captured enough institutions that arbitrate Peruvian political life to weaponize them against rivals, said Steven Levitsky, co-author of “How Democracies Die” and a Harvard professor. exactly what is happening with Gustavo.”
It’s something straight out of the authoritarian playbook that attacks democracies and puts reporters in danger around the world.
Regional examples include Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala, where journalist José Zamora is imprisoned on what press freedom groups call a fabricated money laundering conviction designed to gag him. Another emblematic case: the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Filipino journalist, Maria Ressa.
Gorriti’s enemies have been trying to discredit him – including with allegations that he sympathizes with left-wing terrorists – since he began unmasking politicians bribed by Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht in Latin America’s biggest-ever corruption scandal. Nicknamed “Lava Jato,” after a car wash in Brazil, it received an estimated $788 million in bribes associated with more than 100 public works projects paid for in 12 countries, including Argentina, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico , Guatemala and Venezuela; $29 million went to Peruvian authorities between 2005 and 2014, according to the US Department of Justice.
To uncover their machinations outside of Brazil, Gorriti recruited reporters from several countries and personally traveled there. The subsequent processes varied by country. If it weren’t for pressure from Gorriti’s team and other journalists, the Peruvian cases could have failed, said Pérez, the anti-corruption prosecutor.
“In 2017, the Public Ministry did not want to investigate Keiko Fujimori,” he added.
Gorriti gained hero status, giving standing ovations at book fairs and hugging in the streets.
But with the Lava Jato cases reaching a fever pitch – every elected Peruvian president of the 21st century is implicated – the meetings outside Gorriti’s house and the IDL Reporteros offices took on a different, sinister tone: street bullies hurling insults and even bagging excrement.
Gorriti’s investigation was prompted by an unusual alliance between Keiko Fujimori’s party and his longtime enemy, that of former president Alan García.
Caught up in the Odebrecht scandal over railway projects, García shot himself in the head in 2019, rather than surrendering to police, after the Uruguayan embassy denied him refuge. His supporters claim that Gorriti and anti-corruption prosecutors “criminally imprisoned” him.
This is absurd, says Gorriti. After the suicide, reporters determined that García told friends and family that he would take his life to avoid public humiliation.
The frenzy of demands for Gorriti’s head stems from unsubstantiated stories spread by Jaime Villanueva, a former aide to a suspended national chief prosecutor.
Villanueva triggered the charges after being investigated for alleged crimes including bribery and influence peddling, and agreed to testify against his former boss in exchange for favorable treatment. Neither he nor the prosecutor who initiated the investigation against Gorriti, Alcides Chanchay, responded to AP’s interview requests.
After working with then-Attorney General Patricia Benavides to try to stifle anti-corruption efforts, Villanueva advised lawmakers on paralyzing judicial independence, Gorriti says. “The guy had a trajectory that Judas Iscariot would have envied.”
Gorriti has a special talent for stirring wasps’ nests.
While in exile in Panama, then-president Ernesto Balladares attempted to expel Gorriti in 1997, after investigations he led at local newspaper La Prensa uncovered high-level corruption, including trafficking in Chinese workers.
“Generally, Latino politicians don’t care if you call them thieves, tyrants, shameless, God’s punishment, whatever,” Gorriti told the AP at the time. “What matters a lot to them is substantive journalism. They’re not used to it.”
In its 1998 press freedom award citation, the Committee to Protect Journalists called Gorriti “the best investigative reporter in Latin America.”
International pressure could certainly help now. Gorriti is regaining strength after good results from immunotherapy started in February. Her hair almost grew back. But the relative silence of Peruvians worries him.
They generally despise the president, Dina Boluarte, and Congress. Polls show that more than nine in ten want them gone. But the political impasse delayed new elections. Pedro Castillo, the last elected president, was impeached in 2022 for trying to dissolve Congress. Troops then killed at least 40 people in the protests that followed.
Peruvians are demoralized by all the corruption and still confused by the COVID-19 pandemic, says Gorriti. No country has suffered a higher per capita death rate. And they’ve had six presidents in six years.
Gorriti, who published a book about the Sendero Luminoso insurgency in 1990, believes that, just as Peruvians failed to take the group’s rise into account, they also avoided examining their inadequacies in confronting the pandemic.
At the end of the 1990s, they mobilized to take the disgraced and discredited Alberto Fujimori into exile. Since then, he and his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, have been convicted of several crimes – including the 1992 kidnapping of Gorriti.
If Gorriti ended up in prison, perhaps the Peruvians could once again be stirred to action.
Suppressing an intermittent cough, Gorriti expressed hope that his case could mark a milestone for freedom of expression and democracy.
As he told Colombian journalist Maria Jimena Duzan in a recent podcast: “If I need to fight in my old age, so be it. Elderly people can struggle too.
___
Frank Bajak was AP’s head of Andean news from 2006 to 2016.
___
Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
