PERUVIAN DRUG TRAFFICKER TELLS TALE OF TORTURE

LIMA, Peru -- (AP) -- Demetrio Chavez says torturers used drugs,
electric shocks and even drilled a hole in his head to make him forget
about his drug-trafficking partnership with Peru's chief of security.

His story, told to congressional investigators and TV cameras, is the
latest to fascinate Peruvians as they unravel the lurid goings-on
during the decade-long rule of former President Alberto Fujimori,
which ended in November.

Chavez's story keeps the spotlight where it has been for months -- on
Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori's feared spymaster, who is believed to
have fled Peru in a boat in October as the regime collapsed.

Montesinos is accused of running a corruption and drug-running network
that infected the armed forces from generals down. Peru is one of the
world's major producers of the coca leaf used to make cocaine.

The most hair-raising details given by Chavez -- a convicted drug
kingpin -- to the congressional committee investigating Montesinos'
alleged wrongdoing involve a brutal 1994 interrogation.

"They grabbed me by the neck and I felt an electric charge until I
passed out. I woke up in a dark cell. My head hurt," he said. "A few
days later I washed it and I felt a lethal pain in the center of my
head. I touched it. Material was leaking out and it smelled awful.

"Now I have a hole in my head," he told Congress. He did not explain
what the hole was used for.

Chavez, 47, who is better known by the alias "Vaticano," told more
in a series of prime-time TV interviews from his prison cell last week.

He said he paid Montesinos $50,000 a month for allowing smugglers to
use an airstrip in Peru's jungle-shrouded Huallaga Valley to ship
semi-refined cocaine to Colombia.

He said Montesinos bragged that he had worked with slain Colombian
cocaine lord Pablo Escobar -- bolstering a similar allegation by
Escobar's jailed brother, Roberto.

Montesinos doubled the fee for the landing strip, but Chavez said he
refused to pay and fled to Colombia, believing Montesinos wanted him
killed. He was captured and extradited back to Peru.

Special state attorney Jose Ugaz said Chavez's testimony is crucial
for the most important of several criminal investigations into alleged
narcotics trafficking and money laundering by Montesinos and his underlings.

Ugaz -- who says that Chavez's testimony is credible -- asserted that
many military officers are implicated, including retired army Gen.
Nicolas Hermoza, Peru's former armed forces commander. Hermoza denies
the allegations.

Fujimori's iron-fisted rule ended in November amid mounting corruption
scandals surrounding Montesinos, once his most trusted security adviser.

Fujimori has fled to Japan, his ancestral homeland. When Montesinos
disappeared, he left behind a collection of secretly taped videos
documenting his manipulation of legislators, judges, election
officials and business leaders with favors, political appointments and
cash.

The videotaped revelations have rocked Peru's political establishment
ahead of April 8 elections to elect Fujimori's successor.

In 1994, four years into Fujimori's presidency, a military court
sentenced Chavez to life imprisonment for treason, later reduced to 30
years. He was transferred this week to a non-military prison after
testifying to the congressional committee, and he hopes to win retrial
in a civilian court.

"It is urgent that his case be reopened," said Anel Townsend, a
congresswoman on the committee.

"He has been trying to make his declaration since 1994, but there was
never an investigation," she said.

For years, Chavez's charges were ignored or ridiculed by Fujimori's
government. He got some public attention in 1996, when he testified
about the payoffs during a public hearing on drug trafficking. But
days later, appearing gaunt and dazed, he recanted in a televised interview.

"I don't remember things. I'm not well. I talk to myself at night and
scream," he told the court when asked why he had changed his testimony.

He says now that hallucinogenic drugs had been slipped into his
food.

"His argument that he was the victim of torture and manipulation with
medication is absolutely credible," state's attorney Ugaz said. "It
is very probable that it was a part of a formula to prevent him from
declaring what he knew."

It was not the first episode suggesting manipulation by Montesinos'
intelligence apparatus. A few months after his arrest in January 1994,
a congressional delegation visited Chavez in his cell at the maximum
security naval prison in Lima's port of Callao.

They said they found him disoriented. He did not recognize his defense
lawyer and remembered only half of his own name. He told the
congressmen his jailers had performed surgery on him and he described
a helmet being placed over his head.