Gustavo Gorriti (Lima, 1948) was six times national judo champion of Peru. When he grew tired of injuries he switched to Krav Maga, the self-defense system of the Israeli armed forces. The journalists of IDL-Reporters, the investigative newspaper he directs, practice it three times a week, not as a suggestion, but as a work obligation. The politician who is exposed to a scandal may be waiting for you at the door of the newsroom the next day with a baseball bat in his hand.
Gorriti, throughout these years, has realized that few things complement each other as well as martial arts and journalism. This learned discipline helps him at this serious moment in his life: in August of last year he was diagnosed with mantle lymphoma, a very aggressive cancer, in an advanced state. He underwent chemotherapy and is now taking medication. At this point he should spend the mornings practicing yoga nidra, a relaxation technique through Tibetan stories, but Gorriti has requested voluntary discharge and dedicates the day to defending himself from the persecution of the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office, which has ordered him to hand over the phones. which he used when he investigated the Odebrecht case and discovered the involvement of politicians and businessmen from his country.
“I combine treatment with confrontation. If there’s one thing I can’t do in a circumstance like this, it’s not to resist,” he says in a video call he takes from his office in Lima, in front of a library that he has treasured for a lifetime. He came late to journalism, he did not set foot in the editorial office of a magazine until he was 30, in the 1980s. But from that moment on he was introduced to the secrets of a profession that would make him, over the years, a legendary reporter.
The attempt by the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office to reveal Gorriti’s sources of information has awakened a wave of international solidarity from the journalistic community and organizations in defense of freedom of expression. IDL-Reporteros began investigating the Lava Jato case in 2011, considered the largest corruption scandal in the history of Brazil – and probably in all of Latin America -. From there came the Odebrecht case, which followed the trail left by a construction company that massively bought politicians, businessmen and former officials from across the continent. In Peru, the matter was especially serious. The company financed none other than four Peruvian presidents and, apparently, the main opposition leader, Keiko Fujimori. All of them have been prosecuted and have spent time in prison or on probation.
To investigate the root of this matter, a special team was created for Lava Jato, with two prosecutors, Rafael Vela and José Domingo Pérez, who are now also being investigated, like Gorriti. The prosecution accuses the three of bribery, both active and passive. “Supposedly, they gave me information and I gave them media support,” explains the journalist. This statement is based on the statement of Jaime Villanueva Barreto, a former confidant of former National Prosecutor Patricia Benavides, who goes so far as to say that Gorriti, with his exclusives, induced former president Alan García to commit suicide, who shot himself when The police entered his house to arrest him for corruption, in 2019.
García tried to publicly demonstrate that he had not been bribed by Odebrecht, but Gorriti obtained the evidence. The two got into a public fight with a bitter and harsh exchange of epithets. “That’s why they accuse me of pulling the trigger,” he says. “There was a lot of violence and great passion in all of this. And I must tell you that that death shocked me deeply. Choosing death in those circumstances seemed incredibly exaggerated to me, it did not correspond to the facts.” From that moment on, a defamation campaign against Gorriti increased exponentially, echoing on social networks, private television, and now in the judicial branch.
The journalist had until April 5 to hand over to the authorities the phones he used between 2016 and 2021. He has not done so. He has given the numbers he used at that time because, likewise, that information is public. The next step for the prosecution, which has not done any investigation beyond giving veracity to Villanueva Barreto’s testimony, could be to order a search of Gorriti’s house and try to forcibly remove that information from him, even if it is secret and protected by the law. Constitution. “I have set the limit that there will be no lifting of the secrecy of communications, it will not be obeyed at all. I will make an effort to maintain the integrity of this information as much as possible. And with this resistance what we do is comply with the law,” he maintains.
All this has happened to him at a time in his life when he entered into Cancerland, a territory to which you do not need a visa to enter, but from which it is very difficult to leave, as Paul Auster says. It will be a hard road, but he does not plan to give up. And he faces a very powerful enemy: “Disinformation works. Attacks against investigative journalists have been preceded by disinformation campaigns, as in the case of Dafne Caruana. You have to know how these mechanisms work, you have to understand them and you have to face them. Because investigating takes time and is expensive, but lying requires no effort.”
Gorriti is the author of the reference book on the Shining Path, which has two volumes. He was kidnapped in 1992 after Alberto Fujimori’s self-coup. He has accumulated countless awards, the latest being the Gabo for an investigation his editorship carried out into the deaths of protesters at the hands of the police in Ayacucho during the protests against the Government of Dina Boluarte, Pedro Castillo’s successor. Boluarte, despite having a popularity index that does not reach 10%, has been screwed into power with the consent of Fujimorism, a political movement that in theory was the opposition. Gorriti’s investigations also reach the Fujimori family, so right now there is no counterweight that can guarantee a fair process for the journalist.