A renowned Peruvian reporter fights a smear campaign as well as cancer

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LIMA, Peru (AP) — At 75, one of Latin America’s most renowned journalists hoped to weave into books the loose threads of more than four decades of investigative journalism that exposed high-level abuses of power inside and outside from Peru.

In an illustrious career, Gustavo Gorriti has received death threats from drug traffickers, survived the harsh Sendero Luminoso insurgency in Peru and a kidnapping by military intelligence agents with silencers during a self-coup in 1992.

Then he was hit by an aggressive lymphatic cancer, which consumed the robust body of the former national judo champion. Gorriti was diagnosed in August and was finishing two months of chemotherapy in December when he received a blow of another kind.

A smear campaign—amplified by complicit, cowed, or indifferent media—showed the reporter as public enemy number one, an egomaniacal and cruel man who harmed innocent people.

Gorriti is clear about who is behind it: a group of “kleptocrats” from the Peruvian political and business elite who are at risk of being prosecuted largely due to their findings. His objective, he points out, is to “liquidate all the progress made in the fight against corruption.”

Chemotherapy left him hairless and his trademark white beard was left in “three little hairs,” and Gorriti said he looked like “a pathetic Fu-Manchu.” He felt so weak that “the only thing he had was the desire to be sleeping,” he said in an interview on the terrace of his apartment in Lima.

But outrage spurred the combative reporter into action, leading his team at IDL-Reporteros, a news website, to mount a detailed and forceful defense.

“You don’t choose when you start a war,” he said.

Then it got worse. By March 27, Gorriti was facing a criminal investigation in a bribery case with a strange approach that accused him of “favoring” two anti-corruption prosecutors with publicity.

“Of course, that is false,” one of the prosecutors, José Domingo Pérez, told The Associated Press.

“This is a blatant attempt to silence one of the best reporters in Latin America, the media he founded and, by extension, any journalist who dares to tell the truth despite the powerful in Latin America,” said the National Press Club. , based in Washington, in a statement signed by seven press and human rights groups.

The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, based in France, have also protested.

The case could harm prosecutors in a huge bribery scandal involving five former presidents and Keiko Fujimori, a highly influential figure in Peruvian politics and perennial presidential candidate, who was on the verge of winning the job in 2021. His trial is scheduled to begin on July 1.

It was agents of Fujimori’s father, Alberto, who kidnapped Gorriti to silence him when the autocrat forcibly shut down Congress in a self-coup in 1992. An international scandal led to the reporter being quickly released.

The prosecutor now investigating Gorriti has demanded his communications with Pérez and fellow anti-corruption prosecutor Rafael Vela between 2016 and 2021. Gorriti has refused, citing protections for journalists, but fears that he may receive a court order.

After years of democratic regression, a “loose coalition of corrupt actors” has taken over enough institutions that arbitrate Peruvian political life to use against their rivals, said Steven Levitsky, co-author of “How Democracies Die” and Harvard professor. “And that is exactly what is happening with Gustavo.”

It is a textbook authoritarian strategy that destabilizes democracies and threatens journalists around the world.

Similar examples in the region are seen in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Guatemala, where journalist José Zamora is imprisoned for what press freedom groups describe as a fabricated case of money laundering designed to silence him. Another emblematic case is that of the Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize.

Gorriti’s enemies have been trying to discredit him — including accusations that he sympathizes with left-wing terrorists — since he began unmasking politicians bribed by Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht in the biggest corruption scandal in Latin American history.

The case known as Lava Jato, the Brazilian term for car wash, involves some $788 million in bribes associated with more than 100 public works paid for in 12 countries, such as Argentina, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela. Of that sum, $29 million went to Peruvian officials between 2005 and 2014, according to the United States Department of Justice.

To discover its network outside Brazil, Gorriti recruited journalists from several countries and traveled there personally. Judicial processes have varied by country. If it weren’t for pressure from Gorriti’s team and other journalists, the Peruvian cases could have come to nothing, said Pérez, the anti-corruption prosecutor. The state prosecutor’s office did not want to investigate Keiko Fujimori in 2017, he said.

Gorriti became a hero who received ovations at literary fairs and hugs in the street.

But now that the Lava Jato cases reach the courts – all the former elected Peruvian presidents of the 21st century are involved – the crowds in front of Gorriti’s house and the IDL Reporteros offices have taken a different and more sinister turn, with petty criminals who insult and even throw bags of excrement.

The investigation against Gorriti was requested by the unusual alliance of Keiko Fujimori’s party and his old nemesis, the party of former president Alan García.

Immersed in the Odebrecht scandal over railway projects, García shot himself in the head in 2019 rather than surrender to police after the Uruguayan embassy denied him asylum. His followers claim that Gorriti and the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office set a criminal trap for him.

That’s absurd, says Gorriti. After the suicide, journalists concluded that García had told friends and family that he would end his life to avoid public humiliation.

The clamor for Gorriti’s head stems from unfounded accusations by Jaime Villanueva, a former advisor to an attorney general who was suspended.

Villanueva made his accusations after being investigated for alleged crimes such as bribery and influence peddling, and agreeing to testify against his former boss in exchange for preferential treatment. Neither he nor the prosecutor who initiated the investigation against Gorriti, Alcides Chanchay, responded to AP requests to interview them.

After working with then-prosecutor Patricia Benavides to try to stop anti-corruption efforts, Villanueva advised lawmakers on how to reduce judicial independence, Gorriti said.

The reporter has a great capacity to create a stir.

While in exile in Panama, then-president Ernest Balladares attempted to oust Gorriti in 1997 when investigations he led at the local newspaper La Prensa revealed high-level corruption that included the trafficking of Chinese workers. At the time, Gorriti told AP that Latin American journalists usually don’t mind being called thieves or tyrants, but they do mind well-founded journalism.

In the statement accompanying a 1998 press freedom award, the Committee to Protect Journalists called Gorriti “the best investigative reporter in Latin America.”

Of course, international pressure could help now. Gorriti is regaining his strength after achieving good results from the immunotherapy he started in February. She has regained most of her hair. But the relative silence of Peruvians worries him.

In general, they deny the president, Dina Boluarte, and Congress. Polls show that more than nine out of ten want them removed. But political stagnation has delayed the new elections. Pedro Castillo, the last elected president, was impeached in 2022 for trying to dissolve Congress. Security forces then killed at least 40 people in subsequent protests.

Peruvians are demoralized by all the corruption and still have not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, Gorriti said. No other country suffered such a high per capita death rate. Furthermore, they have had six presidents in six years.

Gorriti, who wrote a book about the Shining Path insurgency in 1990, believes that just as Peruvians have not reflected on the group’s uprising, they have avoided examining the problems with its handling of the pandemic.

At the end of the 1990s they demonstrated to expel the discredited and disgraced 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 Peruvians would be motivated to act again.

Between intermittent coughs, Gorriti expressed hope that his case could mark a milestone for freedom of expression and democracy.

As he recently said in a podcast with Colombian journalist María Jimena Duzán, “if you have to fight in your old age, then nothing. Old people can fight too.”

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Frank Bajak was AP news director in the Andes from 2006 to 2016.

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Associated Press writer Franklin Briceño contributed to this report.