How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru

P eru has in place the full set of democratic mechanisms: a constitution,opposition parties, regular elections, a presidential term limit, safeguardsfor the independence of the judiciary, and a free press. In the 1990s, Peru was run, in the name of President Alberto Fujimori, by its secret-police chief, Vladimiro Montesinos Torres. In the course of exercising power, Montesinos methodically bribed judges, politicians, and the news media. Montesinos kept meticulous records of his transactions. He required those he bribed to sign con-tracts detailing their obligations to him. He demanded written receipts for the bribes. Strikingly, he had his illicit negotiations videotaped. In what follows, we use Montesinos’s bribe receipts and videotapes to study the breakdown of checks and balances. Montesinos and Fujimori maintained the facade of democracy—the citizens voted, judges decided, the media reported—but they drained its substance. We discuss how they went about undermining democ-racy: the negotiation and enforcement of the secret deals, the workings of covert authoritarianism. Of the checks and balances that underpin democracy, which is the most forceful? We use the bribe prices to quantify the checks and balances. The size of the bribes indicates how much Montesinos was willing to pay to buy off those who could have checked his power. The typical bribe paid to a television-channel owner was about a hundred times larger than that paid to a politician, which was some-what larger than that paid to a judge. One single television channel’s bribe was five times larger than the total of the opposition politicians ’ bribes. The strongest of the checks and balances, by Montesinos’s revealed preference, was television