Ukrainian accomplice of Alberto Fujimori captured to arm FARC

Vladimiro Montesinos (left) and Alberto Fujimori, at the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service, in 1998.

In August 2000, Alberto Fujimori, who had won his second re-election in the Palace amid questions of fraud, held a press conference with his adviser Vladimiro Montesinos to announce that the Peruvian intelligence service had dismantled an arms smuggling network that supplied the Colombian FARC guerrillas. The weaponry, said the former president of Peru, was purchased in Jordan, toured the Canary Islands and Guyana and then parachuted over Colombian territory, in the area of Barrancominas, in the department of Guainía. The aircraft, allegedly carrying timber, then landed in Iquitos, the capital of Peru's Loreto jungle region.

"This trafficking endangered national security and that of the entire region because it strengthened the FARC," Fujimori said at the time. The military mission had been dubbed the Siberian Plan and, according to the authorities, was the result of a painstaking monitoring of more than a year by the National Intelligence Service (SIN). A journalistic investigation soon after uncovered that the successful operation had actually been a fraud, orchestrated by Fujimori and Montesinos, to camouflage that the smugglers who provided weapons to the FARC were them. In other words, falsifying facts to look like heroes.

Lebanese Sarkis Soghanalian, a collaborator of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), confessed that he directly coordinated the sale of AK-47 rifles with the duo that ruled Peru. In an attempt to evade their guilt, those involved accused Army Lieutenant José Aybar, but he claimed that Montesinos had directed the illegal operation. Upon learning from CIA officers that the Colombian intelligence service was tracking rifle smuggling to the FARC, who exhibited unusual might, Fujimori and Montesinos designed the so-called Siberia Plan to arrest those involved.

In September 2006, Vladimiro Montesinos was sentenced to 20 years in prison, along with 35 implicated persons, for this illegal sale. One of them, who dragged a sentence of 25 years in prison, has been arrested on Tuesday, two decades later, in Albania, more than 11,000 kilometers from Peru. This is the Ukrainian Dmytro Chornyi, 58, who led the crew of the Russian aircraft Ilyushin IL-76 that in 1999 collected 10,000 AK-47 rifles, sold by Jordan to the Peruvian Army, and launched them diligently by parachute into FARC territory. The weapons were manufactured by the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Chornyi was captured while trying to enter the Balkan country through the northern area, at the Morina border crossing in Kosovo. This operation, which was a real success, was carried out by the local police of Kuka in cooperation with the Interpol office located in Tirana, capital of Albania. It is precisely this Interpol office that is coordinating with its counterparts in Peru the extradition of Dmytro Chornyi.

Andres Pastrana, then president of Colombia, recounted the fraud in his book Forgotten Memories, in a chapter called The Rifles That Overthrew Fujimori. Its intelligence service detected that the "head of the FARC's drug trafficking operations supplied the Brazilian drug trafficker Fernandinho with the drugs necessary to obtain the money with which the FARC paid the Government of Peru the price of the weapons." The initial plan was for 50,000 AK-47s, but only 10,000 were fraudulently delivered. In October 2000, two months after Fujimori and Montesinos' press conference, Pastrana approached Fujimori at a summit in Brasilia and angrily complained about what is considered one of the most perverse operations to arm a guerrilla group in the region.

"It is unspeakable that Peru has lent itself to something as perverse as rearming terrorism in Colombia [...] Think for a moment, Alberto, what your reaction and that of your country would have been if the Colombian Government had served as a clandestine intermediary to rearm, behind your back, the terrorist organizations of Peru," Pastrana rebuked him. A month later, on November 19, 2000, Fujimori resigned from the presidency of Peru by fax from Japan after the revelation of the systematic corruption of his Government. The capture of Ukrainian Dmytro Chornyi brings to mind an episode that stained the nation.

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