Vladimiro Montesinos, an intelligence officer under former Peruvian authoritarian President Alberto Fujimori, who is being tried on corruption and human rights charges, gave brief testimony on June 30th:

[He] said that he had participated in phone tapping since 1974, which led to the Public Prosecutor’s question, “Do you mean to say that for matters of state crimes can be committed?” Montesinos firmly responded “yes.”

[emphases mine]

Shortly thereafer, Montesinos invoked his right to silence:

Montesinos has a powerful incentive to keep quiet. Already serving up to 20 years for crimes including corruption and running guns to Colombian rebels, he faces a 35-year sentence in a separate trial if convicted of organizing the death squad.

The president and spymaster will try to avoid incriminating each other, Prosecutor Avelino Guillen predicted Thursday in an interview with Peru’s CPN radio network. But he also said the court has enough evidence to prove that “Fujimori, from the beginning of his regime, put Montesinos in charge of creating a parallel strategy of dirty war” to confront terrorism. He said they had acted as “co-governors.”

Their courtroom encounter, to be broadcast live on Peruvian television, is sure to be dramatic. It will be their first meeting since Fujimori fired Montesinos in September 2000 when a videotape surfaced showing the spymaster bribing a congressman for political support.

From Fujimora on Trial:

Some lawyers, such as José Ugáz Sáchez-Moreno, have said that “Both know that their judicial survival depends on the mutual refusal to incriminate the other. Both defenses have surely been in contact and have sought a deal for neither to jeopardize the other.”

On Alberto Fujimoro:

During the 1990s, under Fujimori’s direction, the Peruvian state became increasingly more authoritarian while claiming to be a procedural democracy. Draconian anti-terrorist laws promulgated by executive decree in 1992 created a dragnet for silencing dissents. At the same time, the paramilitary group Colina carried out some of Peru’s worst massacres, including those that occurred in the neighborhood of Barrios Altos (the extrajudicial execution of 12 people at a local party in 1991) and the University of Cantuta (the extrajudicial execution of 8 students and a professor in 1992). Both tragedies supposedly occurred because it was believed that the victims were members of the Shining Path and both cases, which rise to the level of crimes against humanity, would eventually be heard by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In fact, the majority of cases brought to the Inter-American System against Peru pertain to events that occurred during Fujimori’s regime.

[emphasis mine]

Fujimoro faces trial and sentencing on two charges of human rights violations and corruption and usurpation and abuse of authority charges and also a possible five -year sentence for the illegal phone tapping of people who opposed him – politicians, business people, journalists and others. 

I wonder if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are following this trial.