Peruvian reporter is target of smear campaign after taking on political elite

Gustavo Gorriti, who has long exposed corruption, is the target of a criminal investigation campaigners call ‘politically motivated’

Dan Collyns in Lima
Fri 24 May 2024 07.30 ED

For more than four decades, Gustavo Gorriti has been a thorn in the side of corrupt elites, relentlessly uncovering government wrongdoing in Latin America – most recently exposing an unprecedented level of graft in Operation Car Wash, the continent-wide scandal that has ensnared nearly every elected Peruvian president of this century.

Gorriti made his name reporting the bloody rise of the Mao-inspired Shining Path. He was kidnapped by military intelligence agents during Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 power grab after unmasking his shadowy spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos.

Now at 76, the combative five-time former judo champion is facing a criminal investigation and a smear campaign unlike anything he has faced in the past. The assault comes as his body wrestles with aggressive lymphatic cancer. He completed chemotherapy in December – just as what he calls a “filthier kind of sickness” was pumped out in fake news outlets.

The “massive campaign of disinformation” led to him becoming the subject of a criminal investigation into claims he swapped “media support” for leaks from Operation Car Wash prosecutors.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/may/24/gustavo-gorriti-reporter-peru



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Renowned Peruvian investigative reporter battles criminalized smear campaign — and cancer


BY FRANK BAJAK
Updated 12:25 AM CDT, April 28, 2024
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LIMA, Peru (AP) — At age 75, one of Latin America’s most storied journalists had been looking forward to weaving into books the fragmented threads of more than four decades of investigative reporting that exposed high-level abuse of power in Peru and abroad.

In an illustrious career, Gustavo Gorriti has endured death threats from drug traffickers, survived Peru’s harrowing Shining Path insurgency and a kidnapping by silencer-toting military intelligence agents during a 1992 presidential power grab.

Then an aggressive lymphatic cancer struck, wasting the former five-time national judo champion’s robust physique. Diagnosed in August, Gorriti was in the final drips of two months of chemotherapy in December when a different kind of body blow landed.

A smear campaign — amplified by complicit, cowed or indifferent broadcast and print media — portrayed the self-styled “intelligence agent for the people” as Public Enemy No. 1, a ruthless, egotistical victimizer of innocents.

Gorriti is clear on who is behind it: A cabal of “kleptocrats” in Peru’s political and business elites who are in prosecutorial peril due in large part to his crowning gumshoe achievements. Their aim: “to liquidate all gains in the war on corruption.”

More:
https://apnews.com/article/peru-gustavo-gorriti-corruption-journalist-4fcc84fdc3d37b76c64c9988f299c77b