Media Corruption In Peru



April 14, 2001





BROOKE GLADSTONE:

BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week after months of rule by an interim government, Peru got closer to electing a new president. The April 8th vote narrowed the field of candidates to just two. Alejandro Toledo and former President Alan Garcia [sp?] will now face each other in a runoff election in a year when it seems the government has loosened its grip on the media.

BOB GARFIELD:Lucien Chauvin, a freelance journalist in Lima joins us now. Lucien what a difference a year makes when On the Media last spoke to you during the Peruvian presidential elections a year ago. The coverage in Peruvian broadcast media was so slanted against the opposition it almost seemed like it had been bought and paid for by Alberto Fujimori's government. Now it turns out that...

LUCIEN CHAUVIN: Indeed it was bought and paid for.

BOB GARFIELD: What happened?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Beginning in, in 1996-1997 when Fujimori, Alberto Fujimori decided he was going to run for a third term last year, his government began devising a plan to take control of the media. Basically what this entailed was, was buying off the station owners with sumptuous sums of money.

BOB GARFIELD: And this wasn't simply revealed; this was actually videotaped. The whole country got to witness this. Tell me about that.

LUCIEN CHAUVIN:Yes, well Fujimori national security advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos [sp?] had a penchant for, for taping everything and, and all of the people who passed through his office over the past few years. When Fujimori's government collapsed in November, and he fled to Japan, raids on, on Montesinos' and investigations into the national security service turned up thousands of videos. There are four television station owners shown taking bribes. In the case of Channel 4 which is America Television here, there is a video of father and son Crusi Yatt [sp?], the owners, taking 1.5 million dollars in small bills. There are also tapes of them discussing how they'll slant the news coverage in the case of Channel 13 which is owned by Kenado Delgado Parker [sp?], there is a video of him with Montesinos discussing how he can win court cases if the government would manipulate the courts in his favor. An Israeli-born Peruvian, Borok Ivcher [sp?], his station was highly critical of the Fujimori administration, so in 1997 the government came up with a very interesting way to deal with him. They rescinded his nationality and once he was no longer a Peruvian they confiscated his station. When the new government came in, one of the first things they did was return Ivcher's station to him and that obviously changed the focus of the station.

BOB GARFIELD:All right, now the first round of elections is over. The runoff is upon us. How different were the elections this time, viewed through the media prism.

LUCIEN CHAUVIN: Well I - you know, on a scale of 1 to 100 the improvement was 120. Not only did all of the stations cover all of the candidates; the government, through the national election bureau, offered all of the candidates free air space on the radio and on television. In the runoff, which we all expect to be somewhere toward the end of May, again the government will offer the candidates free access to television and it's expected that the networks will continue the trend that we've seen in the last couple of months which is treating all candidates equally. They're trying to be very even-keeled to recuperate some of their credibility because people watch the news here and have second thoughts about everything they see and they hear.

BOB GARFIELD:An interesting little quirk of this whole saga is that for whatever reason the Fujimori government didn't bother compromising the cable channel N, but it was on Channel N that the videos appeared. What's happened to Channel N? Has it come out of this as a heroic institution in Peruvian media?

LUCIEN CHAUVIN: It has. You know last year it won the Human Rights Coordinating Committee, it won their top prize for the work they did covering the elections last year and covering the collapse of the regime. The Fujimori government didn't pay attention to it because nationwide I think there were only 400,000 households that received cable television. The government basically dismissed it as too small.

BOB GARFIELD:One final thing, Alejandro Toledo and Alan Garcia are now running for president in the runoff. Could you imagine a scenario if one of these men were to win the presidency that history would repeat itself and one of them would appropriate Fujimori's methods for media control.

LUCIEN CHAUVIN: I highly doubt it. Garcia was president of Peru between '85 and '90, and one criticism that no one has ever lodged against him is trying to manipulate the press. The same with, with Alejandro Toledo. During the race last year he knew full well that the media was being manipulated against him. He constantly mentioned that if he were to win, there would be full freedom of expression and full freedom of the press. So, no I - at least with these two candidates I really don't see any return to the pattern.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Lucien. Thank you very much!

LUCIEN CHAUVIN: Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD:Lucien Chauvin is a freelance journalist who works for Time Magazine and the Miami Herald in Lima, Peru. As Peruvian television continued its renaissance this week, American broadcasters were struggling to squeeze a complex international story into rigid formats. The right versus left talk shows were ill-equipped to deal with the issue of American policy toward China because the issue doesn't break down neatly along party lines.