{"id":168209,"date":"2020-09-07T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=168209"},"modified":"2020-09-06T05:54:05","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T04:54:05","slug":"operation-condor-the-cold-war-us-conspiracy-that-terrorized-south-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/operation-condor-the-cold-war-us-conspiracy-that-terrorized-south-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Operation Condor: The Cold War US Conspiracy That Terrorized South America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0During the 1970s and 80s, eight US (Henry Kissinger)-backed right wing military dictatorships jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of their left wing political opponents. Now some of the perpetrators are finally facing justice.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Oliver Griffin<\/p><\/div>\n

3 Sep 2020 – <\/em>T<\/span><\/span>he last time Anatole Larrabeiti saw his parents, he was four years old. It was 26 September 1976, the day after his birthday. He remembers the shootout, the bright flashes of gunfire and the sight of his father lying on the ground, mortally wounded, outside their home in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina<\/a>, with his mother lying beside him. Then Larrabeiti remembers being taken away by armed police, along with his 18-month-old sister, Victoria Eva.<\/p>\n

The two children became prisoners. At first, they were held in a grimy car repair garage that had been turned into a clandestine torture centre. That was in another part of Buenos Aires, the city that their parents had moved to in June 1973, joining thousands of leftwing militants and former guerrillas fleeing a military coup in their native Uruguay. The following month, in October 1976, Anatole and Victoria Eva were taken to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay<\/a>, and held at the military intelligence headquarters. A few days before Christmas, they were flown to a third country, Chile, in a small aircraft that climbed high above the Andes. Larrabeiti remembers looking down on snowy peaks from the plane.<\/p>\n

Young children do not usually make epic journeys through three countries in as many months without parents or relatives. The closest thing they had to family was a jailer known as Aunt M\u00f3nica. It was probably Aunt M\u00f3nica who abandoned them in a large square, the Plaza O\u2019Higgins, in the Chilean port city of Valpara\u00edso, on 22 December 1976. Witnesses recall two young, well-dressed children stepping out of a black car with tinted windows. Larrabeiti wandered around the square, hand-in-hand with his sister, until the owner of a merry-go-round ride spotted them. He invited them to sit on the ride, expecting some panicked parents to appear, looking for their lost children. But nobody came, so he called the local police.<\/p>\n

No one could understand how the two children, whose accents marked them as foreign, had got here. It was as if they had dropped from the sky. Anatole was too young to make sense of what had happened. How does a four-year-old who finds himself in Chile explain that he does not know where he is, that he lives in Argentina, but is really Uruguayan? All he knew was that he was in a strange place, where people spoke his language in a different way.<\/p>\n

The next day, the children were taken to an orphanage, and from there they were sent on to separate foster homes. After a few months, they had a stroke of luck. A dental surgeon and his wife wanted to adopt, and when the magistrate in charge of the children asked the surgeon which sibling he wanted, he said both. \u201cHe said that we had to come together, because we were brother and sister,\u201d Larrabeiti told me when we met earlier this year in Chile\u2019s capital, Santiago.<\/p>\n

Today, he is a trim, smartly suited 47-year-old public prosecutor with hazel eyes and a shaven head. \u201cI have decided to live without hate,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I want people to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Larrabeiti wants people to know is that his family were victims of one of the 20th century\u2019s most sinister international state terror networks. It was called Operation Condor, after the broad-winged vulture that soars above the Andes, and it joined eight South American military dictatorships \u2013 Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador \u2013 into a single network that covered four-fifths of the continent.<\/p>\n

It has taken decades to fully expose this system, which enabled governments to send death squads on to each other\u2019s territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies \u2013 real or suspected \u2013 among their emigrant and exile communities. Condor effectively integrated and expanded the state terror unleashed across South America during the cold war, after successive rightwing military coups, often encouraged by the US, erased democracy across the continent. Condor was the most complex and sophisticated element of a broad phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people across South America were murdered or disappeared by military governments in the 1970s and 80s.<\/p>\n

Most Condor victims disappeared for ever. Hundreds were secretly disposed of \u2013 some of them tossed into the sea from planes or helicopters after being tied up, shackled to concrete blocks or drugged so that they could barely move. Larrabeiti\u2019s mother, Victoria, who was last seen in an Argentinian torture centre in 1976, is one of them. His father, Mario, who was a leftwing militant, probably died in the shootout when they were snatched by the police. Enough victims have survived, however, to tell stories that, when matched against a growing volume of declassified documents, amount to a single, ghastly tale.<\/p>\n

In the past two decades, Larrabeiti\u2019s story has been told and retold in half a dozen courts and tribunals around the world. In the absence of a fully formed global criminal justice system, the perpetrators of Condor are being taken to court through a piecemeal process. \u201cThe trouble with borders is that it is easier to cross them to kill someone than it is to pursue a crime,\u201d says Carlos Castresana, a prosecutor who has pursued Condor cases and the dictators behind them in Spain. Those seeking justice have had to rely on a judicial spider\u2019s web of national laws, international treaties and rulings by human rights tribunals. The individuals they pursue are often decrepit and unrepentant old men, but a tenacious network of survivors, lawyers, investigators and academics, rather like the postwar Nazi-hunters<\/a>, has taken up the challenge of ensuring that such international state terror does not go untried.<\/p>\n

The process is painfully slow. The first major criminal investigation focusing on Condor \u2013 with victims and defendants from seven countries \u2013 began in Rome more than 20 years ago. It still has not ended. On a sweltering day in July 2019, a judge in the Rome case handed life sentences<\/a> to a former president of Peru, a Uruguayan foreign minister, a Chilean military intelligence chief and 21 others for their role in a coordinated campaign of extermination and torture. The defendants are appealing, and a final verdict is due within a year.<\/p>\n

Much of what we now know about Condor has been unearthed or pieced together in Rome, Buenos Aires and in dozens of court cases \u2013 large and small \u2013 in other countries. Further evidence comes from US intelligence papers dealing with Argentina that were declassified on the orders of Barack Obama. In 2019, the US completed its handover<\/a> of 47,000 pages to Argentina. These documents show how much the US and European governments knew about what was happening across South America, and how little they cared.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The \u2018pau-de-arara\u2019 was a preferred form of torture in Brazil, introduced by the CIA in the 60\/80\u2019s Operation Condor. Electric shocks were applied to limbs, genitals and anus, plus cigarette burns and beatings to unconsciousness. When the person passed out, they would throw a bucket of water over and continue the electrification, now multiplied many times over. Deaths were not uncommon during torture.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pau-de-arara.\u00a0 Method of torture introduced in Latin America by the Operation Condor led by Kissinger supposedly against Communism and Communists but that targeted all who opposed US imperialism: journalists, priests, students, workers, politicians, artists, writers.<\/p><\/div>\n

W<\/span><\/span>hen he was seven, Anatole Larrabeiti discovered his true identity, thanks to his tenacious paternal grandmother, Ang\u00e9lica, who tracked the siblings down. Stories had appeared in the Chilean press when they vanished in 1976, though headlines claimed they were abandoned by unidentified \u201cred terrorist parents\u201d. Over the next few years, word of the missing children\u2019s whereabouts spread from one humanitarian organisation to another, before eventually reaching the Brazilian human rights group Clamor, which had activists in Valpara\u00edso, the city in Chile where Larrabeiti and his sister were living. After a tipoff, the activists secretly photographed the children on their way to school and sent pictures to Ang\u00e9lica. She immediately recognised her grandchildren. \u201cMy sister was a replica of my mother as a child,\u201d explained Larrabeiti. \u201cAnd I have her lips.\u201d<\/p>\n

By agreement with their biological grandparents, the children remained with their adopted parents in Chile. When Victoria Eva turned nine, she was told about her true identity, and the children started to make family visits to Uruguay. \u201cThey were good parents,\u201d said Larrabeiti, of the couple who adopted them. \u201cThey kept the links with Uruguay and we had psychological support, which I needed when I became a very angry adolescent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crimes committed by Latin America\u2019s military regimes during the cold war continue to haunt the continent. Only a perverse combination of power and paranoia can explain why these regimes awarded themselves the right not just to murder and torture, but also to steal children such as the Larrabeitis. The men perpetrating such crimes saw themselves as warriors in a messianic, frontierless war against the spread of armed revolution across Latin America.<\/p>\n

Their fantasies were overblown, but not entirely baseless. In 1965, the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto \u201cChe\u201d Guevara had waved an emotional goodbye to his comrade-in-arms Fidel Castro, leaving Cuba. He vowed to initiate a new phase of revolutionary activity, extending guerrilla warfare across Latin America. Che was killed while carrying out his mission in Bolivia in 1967, but the US by then viewed revolution in Latin America as an existential threat \u2013 recalling how Russian nuclear weapons had reached Cuban soil during the 1962 missile crisis. In a bid to strengthen anti-communist forces, the US pumped money and weapons to armed forces across the region, vastly increasing the power of the military within these states and eventually, as the American journalist John Dinges has written, ending up in an \u201cintimate embrace with mass murderers running torture camps, body dumps, and crematoriums\u201d. In the 70s, as rightwing military coups and state terror swept the continent, an attempt at coordinating an armed response was made via a loose network known as the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR). Formed by groups from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia in 1973, the JCR had grandiose plans to pursue Che\u2019s continental uprising, but lacked funds, friends and firepower. Meanwhile, South America\u2019s military regimes began to collaborate more closely, initially striking bilateral agreements that allowed operatives to carry out their work on foreign soil.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Argentine <\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Argentine special forces in operation in Buenos Aires in 1982. <\/strong>
\nPhotograph: Daniel Garc\u00eda\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aurora Meloni, a Uruguayan who had gone into exile in Argentina with her husband, Daniel Banfi, and two young daughters, was one of the first to suspect that South America\u2019s violent right was plotting an international network of terror and rendition. At 3am on 13 September 1974, Meloni and Banfi were at home in a suburb of Buenos Aires when about half a dozen armed men burst through their door. Meloni, then aged 23, immediately recognised one of them as the notorious Uruguayan police inspector Hugo Campos Hermida. Back in Uruguay, Hermida had once questioned Meloni and Banfi \u2013 then students of literature and history respectively \u2013 after they had taken part in a demonstration back home in support of the leftwing Tupamaro guerrilla movement, to which Banfi belonged. \u201cI remembered how he [Hermida] had hit me,\u201d Meloni told me. \u201cHe was very aggressive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meloni could not understand why Hermida was working freely in a foreign country. At that time, Argentina was still a democracy, with rule of law. (The military takeover came later, in March 1976.) Foreign policemen had no right to act there. After their apartment had been ransacked for clues as to the whereabouts of other exiled Tupamaros, Hermida took Banfi away. Aurora assumed she would soon discover which police station or jail he had been taken to, but there was silence.<\/p>\n

In September 1974, this was still a bizarre event. \u201cWe had never heard of people disappearing in Argentina before. I was sure I would find him,\u201d Meloni told me. Eventually she called a press conference. How could someone vanish like that? The answer came five weeks later, when three bodies bearing torture scars were discovered by police 75 miles away. Car headlights and a group of men had been seen in a remote spot at night, and pile of fresh earth had been left behind. Daniel Banfi was one of three murdered Uruguayans found in the hastily dug grave.<\/p>\n

The following month, Meloni left Argentina, and eventually moved to Italy, where, since her father was Italian, she had dual nationality. She returned to Uruguay for three spells over the next 25 years, seeking justice. But, just as in Chile and Argentina, the price of ending dictatorship in Uruguay in 1985 was an amnesty, which ruled that state representatives could not be charged with crimes committed during the regime\u2019s 12 years in power. It seemed nothing could be done.<\/p>\n

I<\/span><\/span>t wasn\u2019t until the end of the century that cracks in the legal status quo began to appear. In the late 90s, a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garz\u00f3n began testing a previously ignored law that obliged Spain to pursue any alleged human rights abusers anywhere in the world, if their own countries refused to try them. Garz\u00f3n and a group of progressive prosecutors opened investigations for genocide and terrorism against Argentina\u2019s former military junta and Pinochet\u2019s regime, and \u201ca criminal conspiracy\u201d between them.<\/p>\n

Since the accused did not live in Spain, Garz\u00f3n\u2019s quest was viewed as quixotic. \u201cPeople laughed at us,\u201d the Spanish prosecutor who brought these cases, Carlos Castresana, told me in Madrid recently. On 16 October 1998, however, Pinochet was arrested<\/a> by police at a London clinic after a minor hernia operation. He was a frequent visitor to the city, taking tea at Fortnum & Mason and popping in on his old friend and ally Margaret Thatcher.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Augusto <\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Augusto Pinochet after his arrest in London in 1998. Photograph: Reuters<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Amid the headlines and the flurry of paperwork sent to London over the following days, few people noticed that the initial warrant for Pinochet\u2019s arrest was based on a Condor case. It named a Chilean victim who disappeared in Argentina, Edgardo Enr\u00edquez, and stated that \u201cthere is evidence of a coordinated plan, known as Operation Condor, in which several countries took part\u201d.<\/p>\n

Pinochet was held for 17 months while Britain\u2019s law lords twice approved extradition to Spain. Labour party home secretary Jack Straw stymied the extradition, instead sending Pinochet home to Chile on health grounds. On his return, the former dictator made a mockery of that justification by stepping out of his wheelchair to wave joyfully at supporters. Yet something major had changed, as prosecutors, judges and activists realised that South America\u2019s dictators and their henchmen were no longer untouchable.<\/p>\n

In 1999, inspired by Garz\u00f3n, Aurora Meloni brought a murder case in Italy against Uruguayan security officials who were suspected of killing Banfi and others. Families of other Condor victims with Italian citizenship joined Meloni, and the case broadened to cover Condor crimes in several countries. From her home in Milan, Meloni \u2013 now aged 69 \u2013 has kept the case alive ever since. \u201cIt has taken a long time,\u201d she told me. After last year\u2019s sentencing in Rome, the plaintiffs were delighted, but Meloni points out that until we know the outcome of the appeals, the story isn\u2019t over.<\/p>\n

W<\/span><\/span>hen Daniel Banfi was murdered in late 1974, Condor did not yet formally exist. His death can be seen as a precursor, or trial run. Hermida Campos was one of a handful of Uruguayan security officials who were secretly testing ways of hunting down exiles with their Argentinian counterparts.<\/p>\n

Another of those preparing the rendition programme with Argentina, which would later be absorbed into Condor, was the Uruguayan navy lieutenant Jorge Tr\u00f3ccoli. Now a grey, jowly 73-year-old, Tr\u00f3ccoli was the only defendant present at the Rome trial. He had moved to Italy and was arrested in Salerno, near Naples, in 2007. In the 90s, Tr\u00f3ccoli wrote two semi-autobiographical novels about how Uruguay\u2019s military had embraced torture, murder and repression. In La Hora del Depredador<\/em> (The Predator\u2019s Hour), a torturer who appears to act as a proxy for the author (though Tr\u00f3ccoli insists this is fiction) declares: \u201cWhen this is over, we will have to make peace. And that won\u2019t happen if we use methods like this \u2026 What\u2019s more, you will begin to feel bad about it as the years go by.\u201d Yet, in court, Tr\u00f3ccoli showed no remorse, claiming innocence. \u201cHe sat beside me one day,\u201d Meloni told me. \u201cHe was angry, not ashamed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of what we know about Operation Condor only emerged years after it was over. Formal coordinating offices existed in several countries, and the network generated considerable paperwork as documents and encrypted cables were sent back and forth over a dedicated communications network called Condortel. But at the time the victims did not understand the scale of the international conspiracy.<\/p>\n

For more than a decade, public knowledge of Operation Condor was largely limited to an obscure FBI note quoted in a book, published in 1980, by John Dinges and fellow journalist Saul Landau. They were investigating the murders of a former Chilean ambassador and his American assistant, who were killed in Washington DC in 1976 by Pinochet\u2019s agents. In a cable sent shortly after the killings, an FBI officer wrote: \u201cOperation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning leftists, communists and Marxists which was recently established between the cooperating services in South America.\u201d The note went on to mention \u201ca more secret phase\u201d of Condor, which \u201cinvolves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to travel anywhere in the world to carry out sanctions, [including] assassinations\u201d.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, relatively little was known. It was in Paraguay where the first major breakthrough took place. In 1992, a young magistrate, Jos\u00e9 Agust\u00edn Fern\u00e1ndez, received a tipoff on the whereabouts of the secret police archive of the country\u2019s former strongman Gen Alfredo Stroessner, who grabbed power in 1954 and stayed until 1989. At dawn, three days before Christmas, Fern\u00e1ndez made a surprise visit to a police station outside the capital city, Asunci\u00f3n. With a caravan of television cameras as company, but armed only with a warrant signed in his own hand, the magistrate forced Paraguay\u2019s once-untouchable police to hand over the documents. \u201cThe journalists had to lend us a truck to take it all back to the court house,\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez told me. \u201cPerhaps the most shocking thing were the photographs. They included people who were disappeared by Condor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fern\u00e1ndez\u2019s haul became known as the Archive of Terror. Here, buried among half a million sheets of paper detailing three decades of domestic repression under Stroessner, was the story of how Operation Condor was created, and by whom. It was not what Fern\u00e1ndez had originally sought, and he was shocked. \u201cWe had heard the stories about it, but here was written proof,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

\n
\"The <\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
The \u201cArchives of Terror\u201d, papers relating to Operation Condor, seized in Paraguay in 1992. Photograph: Norberto Duarte\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The documents established that Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Pinochet\u2019s spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to the Army War Academy on La Alameda, Santiago\u2019s central avenue. Pinochet welcomed them in person. \u201cSubversion has developed a leadership structure that is intercontinental, continental, regional and sub-regional,\u201d Contreras told them, referring to organised resistance from opponents of the continent\u2019s military regimes. He proposed a sophisticated network linked by \u201ctelex, microfilm, computers, cryptography\u201d to track down and eliminate enemies.<\/p>\n

The club, with the first five countries as members, came into existence on 28 November. Brazil joined the next year, while Peru and Ecuador joined in 1978. At its height, Condor covered 10% of the world\u2019s populated land mass, and formed what Francesca Lessa of Oxford University calls \u201ca borderless area of terror and impunity\u201d.<\/p>\n

T<\/span><\/span>he Archive of Terror documents were revealing, but they were largely dry, bureaucratic records. Behind them lay a reality of the kidnap, torture, rape and murder of at least 763 people, according to a database that Lessa is building<\/a>. Yet it was only after the archive was found \u2013 and especially after Condor was named in Garz\u00f3n\u2019s Pinochet case \u2013 that the disconnected stories of the victims began to cohere into a bigger story.<\/p>\n

Laura Elgueta lives in a small house in La Reina, a tranquil suburb of Santiago where purple jacaranda trees blossom. She is one of Condor\u2019s survivors. Her friend Odette Magnet \u2013 whose 27-year-old sister, Mar\u00eda Cecilia, disappeared in Argentina in 1976 \u2013 lives a five-minute walk away. \u201cWhen I was looking for somewhere to move to, I wanted to live near her,\u201d Magnet explained as we made the walk to Elgueta\u2019s home. Together, the two women have long shouldered the burden of explaining Condor to Chileans at human rights conferences and in the media.<\/p>\n

Although Condor operatives hunted down targets in all member states, their work focused on Argentina in particular, which was a refuge for exiles escaping military dictatorships across the continent before it, too, fell under military control. Condor squads dispatched to Argentina from Uruguay and Chile used a series of makeshift jails and torture centres provided by their hosts. The first was the abandoned car repair garage, Automotores Orletti, where Anatole Larrabeiti was held and his mother Victoria was last seen alive. Larrabeiti still recalls seeing a jar of glittering metal in the garage, in which victims\u2019 wedding rings were kept.<\/p>\n

Later, Condor victims were taken to Club Atl\u00e9tico, a codename for the basement of a police warehouse in Buenos Aires. This is where a blindfolded, 18-year-old Laura Elgueta arrived in July 1977 with her sister-in-law, Sonia, after armed Chileans and Argentinians snatched them from her home nearby. At the time, Elgueta\u2019s Chilean family \u2013 part of which was now exiled in Argentina \u2013 was still searching for her activist brother, Kiko, who had disappeared in Buenos Aires the previous July. \u201cWe knew he had been kidnapped, but that was all,\u201d Elgueta told me.<\/p>\n

In the car, the sexual, physical and verbal abuse began. It continued at Club Atl\u00e9tico \u2013 where the women were stripped, handcuffed, hooded and given their numbers, K52 and K53. \u201cWhoever walked past would insult you, or beat you, or throw you to the ground,\u201d Elgueta recalled. They could hear fellow prisoners walking in chains. The Chilean torturers made no attempt to disguise their nationality, and Elgueta and Sonia\u2019s interrogation focused solely on Chile\u2019s exile community in Argentina. The women were taken to the torture room by turns. Beatings, more sexual abuse and electric shocks followed. \u201cThey\u2019d say: \u2018Now the party can really start.\u2019 Despite all we know and have read, you cannot imagine what human beings are capable of. It was a house of horrors,\u201d Elgueta told me. \u201cWhen my sister-in-law came out of one session, they had given her such strong electric shocks that she was still trembling.\u201d<\/p>\n

After eight hours, Elgueta and her sister-in-law were released. Their torturers had realised the two women knew nothing about Pinochet\u2019s political or armed opponents. \u201cAs I left, the one [torturer] who had decided I was his girlfriend was there shouting: \u2018Don\u2019t take her away. I want to be with my girl!\u2019\u201d Elgueta was still blindfolded when she was driven away and dumped on a street corner near her home.<\/p>\n