Peruvian Presidential run-off candidate has a shadowy cabinet

continuing the thread of my earlier posts, here's an update on sunday's peruvian elections... the leader, ollanta humala, with 29.5% of the vote, is headed for a runoff...

Ollanta Humala, a former military officer and a fierce nationalist, appeared to be beating a pro-globalization candidate, a former president and 17 other candidates vying to win Peru's presidential election, early results showed Monday.

Since no single candidate won a majority Sunday, the top two vote-getters will meet in late May or early June in a runoff.

With a bit more than 72 percent of the votes counted Monday, Humala had 29.5 percent.

but it seems humala has a few folks standing with him that he'd rather not be all that visible...

Unlike the other 20 candidates running for president in the Sunday elections in Peru, front-runner Ollanta Humala has not presented the members of his campaign team to the public.

It turns out that several of them are military officers who had ties to Vladimiro Montesinos, ousted ex-president Alberto Fujimori's notorious former intelligence chief.

Most of the officers who are now close associates of the nationalist Humala - who is himself a retired lieutenant colonel - signed the "Acta de Sujeción", a document drafted by Montesinos, in March 1999.

By signing, they committed themselves to opposing any investigation of members of the military who took part in Fujimori's April 1992 "self-coup" or are accused of committing human rights violations during the 1980-2000 "dirty war" against the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) Maoist guerrillas.

to be sure, any tie to montesinos isn't a good resumé entry for anybody working for peru's likely new president...

Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres was the long-time, powerful head of Peru's intelligence service, Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), under President Alberto Fujimori. In 2000, a secret video was released revealing him bribing a politician and the ensuing scandal caused Montesinos to flee the country, later bringing down the administration of Fujimori. Subsequent investigations revealed Montesinos was at the centre of a vast web of illegal activities, including embezzlement, graft, and drug trafficking, for which he is currently being tried.

[...]

Montesinos is widely suspected of organizing the repression of Fujimori's political opponents. Evidence shows he supervised a death squad known as the Grupo Colina, part of the National Intelligence Service, which was thought to have been responsible for the La Cantuta massacre, in which nine students and a professor disappeared from La Cantuta university on July 18, 1992. Four officers who were tortured after plotting a coup d'état against Fujimori in November 1992 stated that Montesinos took an active part in torturing them.

[...]

As of 2006, Montesinos is imprisoned at the Callao maximum-security prison naval base (which was built under his orders during the 1990s) and is facing sixty-three charges that range from drug trafficking to murder. The lengthy series of court cases in Lima to which he is being tried is revealing the scale of the corruption during the Fujimori administration.

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