With little money, Montesinos hid in Caracas barrio

  BY JUAN O. TAMAYO

  CARACAS - Before he went on the lam to evade corruption charges, Vladimiro Montesinos was one of the most powerful men in Latin America, wealthy head of Peru's intelligence service, mainstay of President Alberto Fujimori's regime and friend of the CIA.

  But the woman who hid him in Caracas last year says his last months of freedom were a lonely nightmare of extortions and threats from the very Venezuelans who
  charged him $1.2 million to smuggle him here.

  The fugitive wound up with little cash, the woman said, shut in for weeks at a stretch in a simple 10-by-16-foot bedroom in a grindingly poor and crime-ridden Caracas barrio ironically named El Amparo -- The Shelter.

  ''We'd sit in the two beds in his room and talk about all his problems. He cried because he was afraid for his life,'' said Ismelda Núñez, 37, the divorced housewife who sheltered Montesinos for five months.

  One year after Montesinos was captured by agents of Venezuela's Military Intelligence Directorate (DIM) on June 23, 2001, no one has been arrested for hiding him here, kindling charges of a coverup by President Hugo Chávez's government.

  The government's insistence that it was not aware of his presence does not wash with Miami FBI chief Hector Pesquera, whose office helped crack the case by arresting Montesinos' chief security guard in Miami.

  ''I'm not saying Chávez knew, but the government certainly knew,'' Pesquera said.

  ''The current government, from the president on down,'' was aware Montesinos was in Venezuela, said José Guevara, the security chief arrested by the FBI and a former agent of the secret police, the DISIP.

  Núñez herself hinted at a government involvement when she said that Montesinos ''received a cellular phone from the DIM.'' But she refused to expand on the comment during her first-ever media interview at her El Amparo home.

  She also noted that Montesinos had been visited at least twice by Guevara's half-brother, Otoniel, then an agent in DISIP's counterintelligence branch. ''Montesinos really liked Oto,'' Núñez added.

  DEPORTED TO PERU

  Accused of corruption after Fujimori resigned in late 2000, Montesinos was deported to Peru the day after his arrest, before judicial investigators could question him. The former CIA ally is now jailed and awaiting trial in Peru, but has refused all comment on those who helped him in Venezuela.

  Núñez's version partially supports government claims that a dozen Venezuelan businessmen and former and current DISIP officers charged the fugitive $1.2 million to hide here in luxury, then cheated and extorted him.

  A stocky five-footer with short reddish hair and a lively manner, Núñez said her brother José Núñez, a former DISIP agent, and José Guevara asked her on Dec. 16, 2000, to briefly hide a man named ''Manuel'' who had marital problems.

  But she recognized Montesinos after Caracas media reported later that month that police had raided a hotel where he stayed after arriving in Venezuela Dec. 7 with a Venezuelan passport in the name of Manuel Rodríguez.

  She asked Guevara and her brother to get him out, but they stalled and moved him on May 14 to her mother's house in the nearby barrio of Niño Jesús, where he stayed until his capture, Núñez said.

  ''That greedy Guevara came only to extract money and threaten Manuel if he didn't pay,'' she said. ``Manuel told me they charged him $1.2 million and promised him a big house, a car, guards and a computer, but they kept him here and always asked for more money.''

  Montesinos had only a small wad of cash in a foot-square black leather case, Núñez said, and told her that a suitcase full of cash was lost when police raided his hotel. She never got a dime for sheltering him, she added.

  ''I asked him once what a rich and powerful man like him was doing in a poor house like mine instead of a big house with air conditioning,'' she said.

  'He just cried and said, `Well, lady, that's life.' ''

  NECESSITIES

  What little money he had he doled out to her to buy toiletries and clothes as well as beef and bread, because he did not like the corn arepas and stews that she served.

  He almost never left his room and never received visitors other than José and Otoniel Guevara and Venezuelan businessman Julio Ayala -- identified by government
  investigators as a Montesinos partner in many weapons deals in the 1990s.

  ''He was very calm, never a bother,'' Núñez recalled, spending his time reading newspapers, watching television and eating in his Spartan second-floor bedroom to avoid running into Núñez's visitors.

  As Montesinos' cash ran out, she added, José Guevara would set up a laptop computer on her formica dining room table and e-mail the fugitive's business partners and bankers around the region to collect more funds.

  Guevara was arrested in Miami on June 21, 2001, on one such mission: to withdraw money from a Montesinos account in the Pacific Industrial Bank that the FBI had been monitoring for months.

  In exchange for immunity, he telephoned José Núñez and persuaded him to deliver the fugitive to the Peruvian Embassy in Caracas, promising him a share of the $5
  million reward offered by the Peruvian government.

  But José Núñez ''got cold feet,'' the FBI's Pesquera said. Fearing that Venezuelan officials would be embarrassed and angry if he delivered Montesinos to the Peruvians, he instead turned him over to the DIM. Chávez claimed credit for the capture, boasting the DIM had infiltrated a spy amid Montesinos' protectors.

  Attorney General Isaías Rodríguez and DISIP chief Carlos Canejón Trejo did not answer Herald requests for interviews on the case.

  But the Chávez government's version is essentially contained in a report by an investigative commission in the National Assembly -- controlled by Chávez supporters and boycotted by the opposition -- that took sworn testimony from about 50 suspects, Cabinet ministers, prosecutors and DISIP and DIM officials.

  For a $1.2 million fee, businessmen Ayala, Carlos Mora, Guido Pérez and Efraín Muñoz, all Montesinos friends, arranged his escape from Peru and secret arrival in
  Venezuela, its report said. José Guevara and José Núñez were in charge of his security here.

  DISIP Investigations Chief Enoé Vásquez was paid $200,000 to keep Montesinos' security ring informed, the report added, and DISIP Counterintelligence Chief Edgar Rodríguez was ''aware'' of his presence here.

  The report noted that Vásquez, Otoniel Guevara and Rodríguez were dismissed shortly before or after Montesinos' capture. It failed to mention that no charges have been filed against any of them, or the allegations of a government coverup.

  José Guevara fueled those charges in a March 24 interview with Venezuelan television. Now believed to hiding in South Florida, he declined Herald e-mailed requests for an interview.

  ASKED FOR ASYLUM

  Guevara claimed Montesinos told him that he had donated $10 million to Chávez's 1998 campaign, and had therefore asked Adán Chávez, the president's brother, for asylum in Venezuela as soon as he fell into trouble in Lima.

  ''The answer was to take José Vicente Rangel to a secret meeting in Panama'' with an offer, Guevara said. ''$100 million up front.'' Rangel, then foreign minister and now vice president, has denied making any such offer.

  Montesinos replied that he did not have that kind of money and began negotiating a less official entry to Venezuela through the group of Venezuelan businessmen,
  Guevara said.

  A year after Montesinos was captured, even the $5 million reward offered by Peru remains unsettled, contested by Guevara; Luis Percovich, a Pacific Credit Corp. official in Miami who tipped the FBI; and Orlando Laufer, a Venezuelan private investigator.