Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet reviews troops as he enters La
Moneda Palace in the capital Santiago. (photo: Reuters)
"Operation Condor:
Cross-Border Disappearance and Death."
By J. Patrice McSherry,
teleSUR
28 May 16
Operation
Condor’s targets were activists, organizers, and opponents of the
dictatorships.
Operation
Condor was a covert, multinational “black operations” program organized by six
Latin American states (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and
Uruguay, later joined by Ecuador and Peru), with logistical, financial, and
intelligence support from Washington.
In the
Cold War climate of the 1960s and ’70s, when U.S. leaders and Latin American
militaries regarded popular movements and political dissidents as “internal
enemies,” any methods were considered legitimate in the “war against
subversion.” In fact, many of these new social movements were indigenous
nationalist, leftist, socialist, or radically democratic forces fighting to
represent the voiceless and the marginalized.
As
leftist and nationalist leaders won elections throughout Latin America in the
1960s and early 1970s, and new revolutionary and progressive movements gained
strength, U.S. security strategists feared a communist-inspired threat to U.S.
economic and political interests in the hemisphere. Local elites similarly
feared that their traditional political dominance and wealth were at risk.
Washington poured enormous resources into the inter-American security system,
of which Condor was a top-secret part, to mobilize and unify the militaries in
order to prevent leftist leaders from taking power and to control and destroy
leftist and popular movements in Latin America. Anticommunism and “preventing
another Cuba” were the national security priorities of the U.S. in Latin
America.
The
reigning national security doctrine incorporated counterinsurgency strategies
and concepts such as “hunter-killer” programs and secret, “unconventional”
techniques such as subversion, sabotage, and terrorism to defeat foes. Much of
counterinsurgency doctrine is classified, but scholars have documented many of
its key components. Michael McClintock, for example, analyzed a classified U.S.
Army Special Forces manual of December 1960 Counter-Insurgency Operations, one
of the earliest to mention explicitly, in its section "Terror
Operations," the use of counterinsurgent terror as a legitimate tactic. He
cites other secret U.S. army special operations handbooks from the 1960s that
endorsed "counterterror," including assassination and abduction, in
certain situations. One March 1961 article in Military Review stated,
"Political warfare, in short, is warfare. . .[that] embraces diverse forms
of coercion and violence including strikes and riots, economic sanctions,
subsidies for guerrilla or proxy warfare and, when necessary, kidnapping or
assassination of enemy elites.” In short, “disappearance” was a key element of
counterinsurgency doctrine.
Operation
Condor was a multinational system to specifically target exiles who had escaped
the wave of military coups and dictatorships in their own countries. Thousands
of Argentines, Uruguayans, and Brazilians fled to Chile in the early 1970s when
the progressive Unidad Popular government was in power. After the September
1973 CIA-backed coup against President Salvador Allende, thousands escaped to
Argentina. Operation Condor focused on these people — many of whom were under
United Nations protection — using covert, cross-border abduction-disappearance,
“rendition” to other countries, torture, and extrajudicial execution.
Condor’s
targets were activists, organizers, and opponents of the dictatorships, as well
as guerrillas or armed insurgents (all of whom were entitled to due process and
freedom from torture). Exiles were considered dangerous enemies by the regimes
because of their powerful influence in the developing global human rights
movement. The Chilean exiles, for instance — some 200,000 Chileans were forced
out of the country in the first years after the coup — were pioneers in
organizing solidarity and anti-dictatorship groups worldwide, providing
information to the U.N. and human rights groups, and transmitting through their
music and art the hopes and promise of the Unidad Popular.
Under
a top-secret agreement known as “Phase III” Condor also assassinated, or
attempted to assassinate, key political opposition leaders exiled in Latin
America, Europe, and the United States. Special teams of assassins from member
countries were formed to travel worldwide to eliminate “subversive enemies”—
political leaders who could organize and lead pro-democracy movements against
the military regimes. One Condor assassination targeted former Chilean Foreign
Minister Orlando Letelier, a prominent critic of the Pinochet regime. He and
his U.S. colleague Ronni Moffitt were murdered in a 1976 car bombing in
Washington, D.C. Other targets included constitutionalist Chilean general
Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, assassinated in Buenos Aires (1974),
and two Uruguayan legislators and opponents of the Uruguayan military regime,
Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, disappeared, tortured, and killed
in Buenos Aires (1976). Washington and its Latin American allies feared elected
leftist leaders as much, if not more, than revolutionary guerrillas in the
region, as the plots against Presidents Goulart of Brazil and Allende, among
others, demonstrated.
In
1973 or early 1974, before the Condor apparatus acquired its code name and
formal structure, the counterinsurgents created the prototype of Condor. A
February 1974 meeting took place in Buenos Aires to plan deeper collaboration
of the police of six South American states. Between 1973 and 1975 cross-border
disappearances and forcible, extralegal transfers of exiles (“renditions”) by
multinational Condor squadrons intensified under an unwritten agreement
enabling the associated militaries to pursue individuals who had fled to
neighboring countries. This was the essence of Condor, as yet unnamed.
Chilean
colonel Manuel Contreras, head of the fearsome Dirección de Inteligencia
Nacional (DINA), was a key Condor organizer. He called for a founding meeting
in Santiago to institutionalize the Condor prototype in 1975. In 2000, the CIA
acknowledged that Contreras had been paid by the CIA between 1974 and 1977, a
period when the Condor network was planning and carrying out assassinations in
Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
In
1974 a Uruguayan abduction-disappearance squadron took up residence in Buenos
Aires and worked with its Argentine and Chilean counterparts to “disappear,”
torture, interrogate, and illegally transfer exiles. Selected Uruguayan navy
units began to coordinate secret repressive actions with personnel from the
notorious Argentine Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in 1974, and an ESMA delegation
traveled to Uruguay that year to train officers in torture techniques in
counterinsurgency courses. In an emblematic case, Uruguayan exile Antonio Viana
was kidnapped from his home in Buenos Aires by a joint Argentine-Uruguayan
squad, taken to the federal police headquarters, and tortured by Uruguayan
officers he recognized. Viana soon realized that the squad included officers
from the Argentine Federal Police and the Uruguayan Organismo Coordinador de
Operaciones Antisubversivas (OCOA) and Dirección Nacional de Información e
Inteligencia (DNII). In the Argentine federal police headquarters, La
Superintendencia de Seguridad Federal, Viana was tortured both physically and
psychologically. Viana testified that his torturers and interrogators included Argentine
police officers Miguel Angel Iñiguiz and Alberto Villar and Uruguayans Carlos
Calcagno, José Gavazzo, Hugo Campos Hermida, Jorge Silveira, and Víctor
Castiglioni, names that are infamous in Uruguay.
Viana's case is one of many
confirming that Condor was operative long before its official founding meeting
in November 1975, thus highlighting the importance of the February 1974 meeting
in Buenos Aires. Viana was transported back to Uruguay where he remained
“disappeared” for years (he survived).
Documents
discovered in Argentina show that the Chilean DINA and Argentine intelligence
agencies were working together in 1974 to abduct members of the Chilean
Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) and the so-called OPR-33 of
Uruguay in Argentina. Condor officers in Argentina used an abandoned auto
repair shop, Orletti Motors — code-named OT [Operaciones Tácticas] 18 — as a
secret torture and detention center for foreign detainees. Survivors reported
seeing Bolivians, Chileans, Uruguayans, as well as two young security guards
from the Cuban embassy in Argentina, imprisoned and tortured there. Most were
killed.
Recent
testimonies, such as that of Brazilian coronel Paulo Malhaes, who appeared
before Brazil’s Comisión de la Verdad, provided confirmation of joint covert
operations by Brazil’s Centro de Informaciones del Ejército and Argentine
Batallón 601 de Inteligencia de Campo de Mayo against Argentines who were in
Rio. Malhaes confessed to following and “disappearing” many Argentines, some
who were protected by the U.N. and others who were members of the
Montoneros. Malhaes died of a
heart attack in 2014 after three men broke into his house and held him hostage
for ten hours, ransacking the place and taking files and weapons.
Condor,
“officially” institutionalized in November 1975, filled a crucial function in
the inter-American counterinsurgency regime. While the militaries carried out
massive repression within their own countries, the transnational Condor system
silenced individuals and groups that had escaped the dictatorships to prevent
them from organizing politically or influencing public opinion. The
anticommunist mission, of which Condor was a part, ultimately crushed
democratic as well as radical movements and individuals. Condor was not solely
a Latin American (or Chilean) initiative; nor was it a simple instrument of
Washington. Condor was secret component of the continental counterinsurgency
regime. The militaries’ use of “disappearance” was central for carrying out
covert counterinsurgency wars, provoking terror, and at the same time providing
plausible deniability — the ability to camouflage links to the state and create
impunity.
Justice
is still pending for many crimes committed under the Condor system.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
