Peru’s former intelligence chief under Alberto Fujimori has been sentenced to 19 years and eight months in prison after being found guilty of masterminding one of the country’s most brutal massacres in the early 1990s.
Vladimiro Montesinos had already been sentenced to prison for earlier crimes, but his sentence was increased with this new trial, in which he pleaded guilty to accusations of homicide, murder, and the forced abduction of six farmers accused by the government of being rebels.
Report say the six were accused of being members of a rebel group, taken from their homes by soldiers, and executed.
Montesinos, a former military commander and lawyer for drug traffickers in the 1980s, was appointed intelligence head after Fujimori was elected president in 1990.
Fujimori, who is also charged in the case, has not pled guilty, and a trial is planned for his role.
Meanwhile, the former president, now 85, was released from prison in December when Peru’s constitutional court determined that Fujimori’s presidential pardon from 2017 should stand.
Fujimori was serving a 25-year term for the deaths of 25 Peruvians by death squads in the 1990s.
Montesinos has been in prison since 2001, charged with numerous counts of corruption schemes and human rights violations. He remains in a prison by the Pacific Ocean that he himself helped design at the time he enjoyed power during the Fujimori government from 1990 to 2000.
His actions led to the collapse of Fujimori’s presidency after clandestine tapes emerged that showed him paying bribes to congressmen, businessmen, and media moguls, in an effort to buy support for Fujimori’s government.
