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The
Fujimori Gag: the Ivcher-Channel 2 Case
By
Iván García Mayer
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Alberto
Fujimori's government stripped Baruch Ivcher of his Peruvian
citizenship and his position as majority owner of Channel
2.
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Sunday, July 13,
1997: For the first time ever, the official newspaper El
Peruano came out after the Noon hour, without any explanation
being given.
Since the early
morning hours, journalists from Channel 2-Frecuencia Latina
had been canvassing Lima trying to pick up a copy of the government
daily. It had been like looking for a needle in a haystack.
That same day,
I spoke with the newspaper’s editor, who couldn’t pinpoint
what "technical" or "mechanical" cause might have caused the
day’s run to be so late off the presses.
A few hours before,
the Sunday program "Counterpoint," on Channel 2, had awakened
thousands of Peruvian homes with a high voltage investigative
report; it traced a widespread telephone spying net back to
the Intelligence Services. The evidence consisted of close
to 200 transcriptions of conversations, each with its own
code and the identity of the military unit involved. The targets
of the surveillance: journalists, opposition politicians,
judges, prosecuting attorneys, mayors, businessmen, bankers,
and ministers.
Channel 2’s investigative
unit, led by journalist José Arrieta, obtained further
evidence of the authenticity of the transcriptions. Several
of the victims of the electronic surveillance acknowledged
having participated in the conversations.
The news spread
like wildfire and looked like a sure bet for the front pages
the next day. But the lazy Sunday edition of El Peruano
was ahead of the game. In between the pages of official notices,
there was a Resolution through which the government of Alberto
Fujimori stripped Baruch Ivcher of his Peruvian citizenship.
Ivcher, who had become naturalized in 1984, was the majority
stockholder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Channel
2.
According to Peruvian
law, only Peruvians may own media outlets that use the broadcast
spectrum. The government pulled a pretext up by its bootstraps:
Baruch Ivcher’s citizenship certificate was not to be found
in the public archives; consequently, Ivcher was not a Peruvian
citizen and could not own Channel 2.
There had been
clouds on the horizon for a while. If on July 13 there appeared
a Resolution depriving Ivcher of his citizenship and later
of his property, by July 11 Mendel and Samuel Winter, minority
stockholders of Channel 2, had already presented a motion
asking the government to grant them the administration of
the station. They called Ivcher an "Israeli citizen,"
a "pseudo-countryman" and a "totalitarian."
Later they modified the tone of the demand, but the objective
remained the same: to take over Channel 2, in league with
the government, to silence the editorial independence that
led this station to excel in investigative journalism. Or
put another way, to return to the gag.
Between April 6
and July 13, "Counterpoint" had broadcast testimony by Leonor
La Rosa, an ex-agent of the Army Intelligence Service, who
claimed she had been tortured by four officers of the Service
who were later tried and convicted by a Military Tribunal.
La Rosa gave testimony on the brutal murder of Mariela Barreto,
also connected to the Army Intelligence Service. She was dismembered
and her head and hands have never been recovered. La Rosa
also revealed that Vladimiro Montesinos was receiving income
that seemed excessive ($700,000 in 1995 alone). To record
La Rosa’s testimony, "Counterpoint" managed to smuggle a camera
into the Military Hospital, where she was recuperating from
torture.
A week after July
13, "Counterpoint" brought to light "Plan Emilio," a broad
sweep of telephone surveillance directed in 1995 against Ambassador
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, ex-secretary general
of the UN and in 1995 a candidate opposing Fujimori for the
Presidency.
A month and a half
before, on May 23, the Armed Forces had issued a communiqué
accusing "naturalized Peruvian citizen Baruch Ivcher…"
of waging a systematic campaign of slander against the armed
services.
The Winter brothers,
with military punctuality, issued a public declaration in
which they recounted a meeting they had had with high ranking
military officers, to whom they had explained that they had
nothing to do with editorial policy at Channel 2; that was
Mr. Ivcher’s exclusive responsibility.
Sí
magazine had in better times distinguished itself by investigating
the slaughter at La Cantuta, but by 1997 it was toeing the
military establishment's line. It accused Ivcher of supplying
arms to Ecuador and published some incriminating documents.
Several journalists from Channel 2 travelled to Ecuador and
interviewed high-ranking Ecuadorian officers, among them General
Paco Moncayo, all of whom pronounced the documents bogus.
A compliant Parliament approved a resolution "lamenting that
Peruvian journalists had interviewed Ecuadorian military personnel."
Strangely, in 1996, Sí had published more than
10 pages of an interview the editor of the magazine had conducted
with General Moncayo in Quito. At that time, no one thought
it necessary to rend his nationalistic vestments.
And last, of course,
the weekly Gente extraordinarily "discovered" that
there was no naturalization file for Mr. Ivcher in the public
archives. The Ministry of the Interior acted upon a request
to investigate by the magazine with maximum alacrity, resulting
in the Resolution of July 13.
On September 19,
Percy Escobar, a provisional judge, took over the headquarters
of Channel 2 and delivered it to the minority stockholders.
Earlier that same day, an intelligence operative had disconnected
all the phones at the station as well as the journalists'
cellular phones. More than 30 journalists resigned that morning.
Escobar was the
same judge who had removed Ivcher's constitutional right to
citizenship. Both the Interamerican Press Association and
the Relateur for Freedom of Expression of the OAS, Dr. Santiago
Cantón, have called this case one of the gravest examples
of the trampling of Freedom of Expression in the hemisphere.
But the story doesn't end there.
The former chief
of Channel 2's investigative unit, José Arrieta, was
implicated in an investigation of a false report given years
before by an intelligence source concerning a terrorist attack.
Arrieta is in exile in the United States.
In 1998, Baruch
Ivcher and several executives of his mattress factory, Productos
Paraíso, were accused of tax evasion and fraud concerning
customs duties, in "overvaluation mode," that is to say, for
having paid more in taxes than they should have. The trial
was done in a week, including Saturday and Sunday, which in
itself was unprecedented. The sentences, of between eight
and twelve years, are pending because the executives also
opted for exile.
In 1997, Ivcher's
wife, Neomy Even, and his daughter, Michal, initiated a legal
battle in the civil courts to have their rights to Channel
2 recognized. The court recognized that they did have such
rights, because 54% of the shares of stock belonged to husband
and wife and because Michal Ivcher had been a stockholder
since 1994. To get around these findings, the new administration
of Channel 2 made criminal accusations concerning alterations
of the Corporate Records in favor of wife and daughter. Further,
they have been declared in contempt of court because facing
such a flagrant lack of guarantees, they have not appeared
before the court. To compound the harassment, the authorities
asked Interpol to locate and apprehend them.
Coincidentally,
the judge and prosecutor handling this case, Nicolás
Trujillo and Hilda Valladares, are the same ones who handled
the case against the executives of Productos Paraíso.
Worse yet, there are legal actions pending against the magistrates
who found for the wife and daughter in the civil action.
The investigation
for presumed alterations of the Corporate Records also caught
up, by June, 1999, with Julio Sotelo, a former manager of
Frecuencia Latina and Ivcher's legal representative, who was
apprehended arbitrarily in spite of having demonstrated his
innocence in the case. The warrant for his arrest was issued
because he had not been present at a hearing, even though
he had justified his absence for health reasons. Two weeks
later he was released thanks to a national and international
campaign on his behalf. Facing similar charges, another former
manager of Channel 2, Alberto Cabello, opted for exile.
Finally, the government
has announced its withdrawal from the Interamerican Tribunal
for Human Rights. One of the reasons was the Ivcher case,
presented to the Tribunal at the end of March of this year.
Is the Ivcher case
an isolated incident, as the government would have it? Hardly.
It is a chapter whose ending has not been written, but that
has served, in the meantime, for the rest of the press to
take notice and bite the gag, as they face the second re-election
of Alberto Fujimori and the authoritarian model of government
imposed since the coup of April, 1992.
There are only
a few fragments of independent, investigative, critical journalism
left in television. In the printed press there are still a
few remnants that refuse to disappear, but they are ever more
closely watched.
(Iván García
Mayer, is the former director of Canal
2. Currently he is the managing editor of the newspaper Referéndum,
founded in 1998 by former news executives of Canal 2.)
(August
10, 1999)
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