Jul 8, 2019
Today an Italian court has sentenced 24 people to life in prison for their involvement in Operation Condor, in which the dictatorships of six South American countries conspired to kidnap and assassinate political opponents in each other’s territories.
In a previous case in Argentina. 18 military officers – including Argentina’s last dictator Reynaldo Bignone, 88 – also faced charges of including kidnapping, torture and forced disappearance in 2016.
Seven other defendants, including Jorge Videla – the general who headed Argentina’s junta during its bloodiest first three years – have died since the trial began in 2013. It was the first time the existence of the murderous, multi-nation plan is proven in court.
Those sentenced included Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who was president of Peru from 1975 to 1980, Juan Carlos Blanco, a former foreign minister in Uruguay, Pedro Espinoza Bravo, a former deputy intelligence chief in Chile, and Jorge Néstor Fernández Troccoli, a Uruguayan former naval intelligence officer.
It was the first court case to specifically focus on the conspiracy.
Operation Condor – named after the world’s largest carrion bird – was devised to eliminate thousands of exiled leftwing activists who dared confront the military dictators who ruled the continent in the 1970s and 80s. US-backed regimes conspired to hunt down, kidnap and kill political opponents across South America and beyond.
Exactly how many people died as a result of the conspiracy is unknown, but prosecutors in South America and Italy provided evidence that at least 100 leftwing activists were killed in Argentina, including 45 Uruguayans, 22 Chileans, 15 Paraguayans and 13 Bolivians.
The new information cast a fresh light on allegations that the operation was backed by the CIA – and at least tacitly approved by the then secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
In 2001, elder statesman Kissinger was staying in a hotel in Paris. While he was there, a French judge named Roger Le Loire called for a summons of this prominent US figure.
Kissinger never met with him that day, but the aim of Le Loire was to question Kissinger about some of his actions decades ago and about the fate of several French nationals who were amongst the many thousands of the ‘disappeared’, a term for those captured, tortured, and killed by the governments of South American military dictatorships.
Le Loire also wanted to question Kissenger’s connection with Operation Condor, a brutal series of coups, and mass killings that scars Latin America to this day and came with a lot of help from Washington during a dark chapter of the Cold War.
United States involvement policy in Latin America started with the Monroe Doctrine – famous, or infamous depending on who you ask, part of American foreign policy.
It s basically the rule that the US has the self-declared right to interfere with it’s sphere of influence, that being basically the entire western hemisphere.
Back then it was to prevent Spain from trying to reclaim former colony countries, but today, it really means forcing involvement in Latin American governments.
Now, Operation Condor used it a for a slightly different purpose in the Cold War as a larger operation to recruit and use security forces in countries around Latin America. This was done to make sure these countries stayed friendly to US interests, and out of the orbit of Moscow.
This work mostly happened with the help of the CIA. It began with ideas drawn up at the infamous School of the Americas.
Declassified documents show a meeting occurred between different officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The idea was to coordinate their efforts against “subversive targets”.
It sounds like its trying to stop guerrilla fighters, but moreover it meant anyone who threatened these dictatorial regimes that took over all the countries listed earlier plus Brazil from 1954, to 1976.
The first actions were for the support and direction of groups called death squads.
They’re about as nice as the name implies and are basically teams that execute extrajudicial killings, as an act of terrorism in order to repress a population or commit genocide just like many authoritarian regimes such as the Cheka in revolutionary Russia as a preamble to the gulag system.
Their first targets were political exiles living in Argentina. Anyone associated with the old governments or anyone displaced for being socialists were now finding themselves victims of these squads. Estimates are as high as 80,000 people died in these killings.
On top of that, the program included kidnapping, assassinations, and torture socialist leaders like Juan Jose Torres, democrats like Bernardo Leighton Guzman, and former diplomats like Orlando Letelier, who was murdered by a car bomb in Washington DC.
In 1975, representatives from the military intelligence of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay collaborated with the chief of the Chilean secret police called the DINA on plans to fight their political opponents under the guise of targeting armed resistance fighters like Montoneros in Argentina.
Let’s talk about a few examples, beginning with Argentina. One example of these operations is something called the Argentinian Dirty War.
During this time, the Argentinian military police murdered activists, trade union leaders, clergy members such as nuns, university professors, and their families in order to suppress dissent.
Sometimes committing horrific murders such as death flights, where they would kidnap someone and throw them from an aircraft into a body of water. There were also many cases of taking children from their families, and illegally adopting them to loyal families.
Just one of several nasty techniques employed under the explicit goals of crushing dissent. The dirty war ran from 1976 until the end of Argentina’s dictatorial regime.
The Argentine secret police called the SIDE were the chief perpetrators of this violence but had plenty of help from their counterparts in Chile.
They carried out a number of assassinations of dissidents from their country and others in their alliance who were hiding out in Argentina.
In 1977, they disappeared two French Nuns, the ones from the opening story, who were part of an activist group of mothers whose children had been disappeared called the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.
They were found later to be victims of the death flights, but the mothers still fight on to get justice for the disappeared to this day.
Bill Clinton ordered a large declassification of US-Argentinian relations in the late 90s finding that the US was complicit in these actions.
The Argentina government fell in 1983, and the new democratic government set up a national commission to find the fates of the disappeared.
It resulted in powerful testimonies of the depths these programs went, and resulted in the trial and life imprisonment of many of the high ranking Argentinian officials involved, but gave many military officers amnesty after the army pressured the government.
Since then, there have been a number of high profile trials and sentences for those involved, even some military officials. Brazil is a different story.
No one has yet come under prosecution there for their involvement in Operation Condor, which came to Brazil in 1978.
The Uruguayan military,with consent from the Brazilian military government, crossed over to capture a couple in the Uruguayan opposition as well as their young children.
Some wrong place and wrong time journalists managed to expose this operation, and are credited with saving their lives.
Then the Uruguayan military kidnapping Uruguayan nationals in Brazilian territory became an exposed scandal.
The Brazilian government captured the couple themselves, tortured them, and sent them to an Uruguayan prison where they stayed until the restoration of democracy in Uruguay in 1984.
I think it’s important to mention the countries that took in refugees from this violence during this period.
Costa Rica, Canada, France, the UK, Spain, and Sweden took in many refugees, but none took as many as Mexico. Operation Condor officially ended in 1983, when the Argentinians overthrew their dictatorship after losing the Falklands War.
In 1992, a victim of torture, and a Paraguayan judge uncovered a collection of documents known today as the Archives of Terror.
These were the records of those kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with tacit support from Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela.
There were 4 tonnes of documents, outlining tens of thousands killed, 30,000 people disappeared, and hundreds of thousands imprisoned. The document cache has been used in prosecutions of some of the perpetrators.
One of the most infamous of these dictators would be Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
A dictator put in power with help of the CIA overthrowing the democratically elected Salvadore Allende on September 11th, 1973.
Thousands died under his regime, and to this day many are still unaccounted for and details are sparse because Chile has been, less than cooperative bringing details of his regime to light. That being said, more information about his involvement came out when the Spanish arrested Pinochet in 1998.
What they found was several collaborations with fascists in Europe to organize the assassination of socialist leaders in Chile as well as a host of other dissidents.
One project under the Chilean government was Operation Silence, which tried to remove witnesses from Chile before too much information about the Pinochet regime could come to light.
Lastly, we have some evidence from Paraguay. A US army officer reported he was sent from Washington to work on the development of a prison and interrogation centre called La Technica as part of Operation Condor.
Documents from the Archives of Terror as well as declassified documents from the CIA show the US was a key part of Operation Condor, giving assistance with technology, money, and organization.
In 1976, the CIA published an article saying that the countries of Condor felt embattled by encroaching communism.
They also wrote about the advantages of these six regimes having a common purpose. The head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras was a paid CIA contact until 1977.
The plaintiffs allege that Operation Condor received support from the US, especially in the form of its communications system, which they say operated through Condortel, a US telex system based in Panama.
Gastón Chillier, the executive director of Cels, said: “What we found among the large amount of documents we presented as evidence is that the US definitely had knowledge of the existence of the operation and even provided a communications station in Panama for the intelligence services of the 6 nations involved to communicate with each other via telex.”
According to secret documents unearthed after democracy returned to the region, Operation Condor was originally drawn up at a secret 1975 meeting of intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, and later expanded to include Brazil.
The minutes of the meeting were signed for Chile by Colonel Manuel Contreras, the dreaded head of that country’s Dina secret police.
Its purpose was to allow cooperating countries to send death squads into each other’s territory – and sometimes further afield – to monitor, kidnap or kill political exiles.
While some individual crimes committed during Operation Condor have been the subject of previous trials, Friday’s verdict will focus on participation in the plan itself, said Chillier.
“What distinguishes this trial from other cases involving isolated crimes committed by Operation Condor is that the defendants now face being condemned for being members of an illegal association,” he said.