Condor Plan
The Plan Condor, also known as Operation Condor, was a US-backed campaign of political repression and state terrorism that included intelligence operations and the assassination of opponents. It was officially and formally implemented on November 25, 1975 by the leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and later implemented by the leadership of the dictatorial regimes and democratic governments of South America, through with the exception of Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the French and Dutch dependencies in that region. Various sources have also indicated the secondary, indirect or sporadic participation in the Condor Plan by authorities from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, according to the DW agency of the German State, the Public Ministry of Argentina, or the former head of the Argentine Army General Martín Balza. Despite the fact that some sources affirm the sporadic participation of Venezuela in the Condor Plan, the country showed its rejection and opposition to the Operation on repeated occasions, and during its validity it became one of the main destinations for exiles from the dictatorships in the Southern Cone.
This coordination implied, officially and directly, the monitoring, surveillance, detention, interrogations with torture, transfers between countries, the rape and disappearance or murder of people considered by said regimes as "subversives" to the established order, or contrary to its political or ideology. The Condor Plan was established as an international clandestine organization for the strategy of State terrorism that orchestrated the murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of opponents of the aforementioned dictatorships, most of them belonging to movements of the political left., Peronism, unionism, student groups, teaching, journalism, the artistic field, liberation theology and the human rights movement. The so-called "Terror Files" found in Paraguay in 1992 give the figure of 50,000 people murdered, 30,000 disappeared and 400,000 imprisoned.
The Condor Plan was produced within the framework of the United States strategy in the Cold War, guided by the doctrine of national security, promoting dictatorships, in order to suppress or repress democratic, popular, political sectors of left or nationalist organizations, as well as youth, union, religious, neighborhood and peasant organizations, and promote a new economic model focused on dismantling the power of the state in the economy and giving benefits to privileged sectors, both national and transnational. Before and during the validity of the Condor Plan, the United States government, within the framework of the National Security Doctrine (DSN), the Nixon Doctrine and the action of the School of the Americas, provided planning, coordination, training on methods of torture and state terrorism, technical support, and provided military aid to coup groups and military juntas, during the Johnson administrations (1963-1969),[citation needed] Nixon (1969 -1974), Ford (1974-1977), Carter (1977-1981) and Reagan (1981-1989). This support for human rights violations was often channeled through the CIA. and the School of the Americas.
During Operation Condor, the democratic countries of the region showed their rejection and opposition, offering asylum to politically persecuted and receiving thousands of exiles from dictatorships. The Venezuelan Congress condemned the 1973 coup in Chile against Salvador Allende, and in 1976 Venezuela broke diplomatic relations with the military dictatorship of Uruguay. Venezuela became one of the main destinations for exiles of dictatorships in the Southern Cone, receiving between 8,000 and 9,000 Uruguayan exiles, around 11,000 and 15,000 Argentine exiles, and a total of 80,000 Chilean exiles.
Background
With the background of the Nacht und Nebel decree in Nazi Germany and similarities with the "tension strategy" used in Italy in the 1970s, the doctrine embodied in Operation Condor emerged, according to American professor Joan Patrice McSherry (Long Island University), in the 1960s at the School of the Americas and the American Army Conferences, in which the United States teaches Latin American officers trained in them "preventive" actions (torture) in the region.
On the other hand, it is worth highlighting the context in which Operation Condor was launched. In the mid-1970s, after a series of coups, there was a real network of dictatorships in the Southern Cone and in Latin America:
- In Paraguay, General Alfredo Stroessner came to power in 1954 after a coup d'etat.
- In Brazil, the military defeated the democratic government of João Goulart in 1964.
- In Bolivia, General Hugo Bánzer came to power in 1971, after a series of coups.
- In Uruguay, a civic-military dictatorship was installed in June 1973.
- In Chile, a dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet was installed in September 1973 following a coup against Socialist President Salvador Allende.
- In Argentina, the military junta chaired by General Jorge Rafael Videla took power in 1976 after a coup d'etat to the Peronist president María Estela Martínez de Perón.
American journalist A.J. Langguth credits a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative (as a defensive part of the Cold War, to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America) with organizing the first meetings between Uruguayan and Argentine security officials to discuss the surveillance of political exiles, as well as acting as an intermediary in meetings between the leaders of the Brazilian death squads, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A) and Uruguayan agents.
But the United States did more than organize the meetings: the CIA's technical services division supplied torture equipment to Brazilians and Argentines (among others) and offered advice on the degree of shock the human body can withstand, it also notes Langguth.
In 2007, Professor Joan Patrice McSherry, relying on a declassified CIA document dated June 23, 1976, confirms the kidnapping and torture of Chilean and Uruguayan refugees in Buenos Aires. This document explains that already "a In early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against white subversives."
History
The Plan Cóndor was established on November 25, 1975 in a meeting held in Santiago de Chile between Manuel Contreras, the head of the DINA (Chilean secret police), and the leaders of the services of military intelligence from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, Starting in 1976, the Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, the SIDE, were the vanguard of the Plan Cóndor.
Timeline of the dictatorships that participated in the Condor Plan
On December 22, 1992, an important volume of information about Operation Cóndor came to light when José Fernández, a judge from Paraguay, visited a police station in Lambaré —Asunción suburb— to search for files of a former prisoner political. Instead, he found what became known as the Terror Archives, detailing the fate of thousands of Latin Americans secretly kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The documents proved the existence of the agreement between these countries for the exchange of information and prisoners, and that Operation Condor murdered some 50,000 political opponents in Latin America (30,000 of them disappeared) and imprisoned around 400,000. ANSA cable, published on the cover of the morning paper ABC Color, from Asunción, reported on December 2, 2012 that it was not a "accident" the discovery of the "Archivos del Terror," but rather a consequence, belated due to the difficult political conditions in Paraguay, of the counterintelligence operations reported by Alberto Nadra that involved journalists from the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Soviet agency Tass and a high official of the Paraguayan Army residing in Asunción.
According to these files, other countries such as Peru cooperated to varying degrees, providing intelligence information in response to requests from the security services of the Southern Cone countries. Although Peru was not present at the secret November 1975 meeting in Santiago de Chile, there is evidence of its collaboration with the regimes of the Southern Cone. For example, in June 1980, it was known that the government of Peru collaborated with Argentine agents from the 601 Intelligence Battalion in the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of a group of Montoneros who were in exile in Lima.
The "archives of terror," recovered by Argentine judges, revealed that Operation Condor was characterized by a cover-up of cross-border operations directed against opponents of the governments that were part of the plan.
Economic policies
During this period of neoliberal policies, the level of indebtedness contracted by the military dictatorships reached a considerable increase compared to previous governments. Under Ronald Reagan's proposal, defining that the State is not the solution, but rather the problem, the United States together with the IMF carried out a tactic to implement the economic model in Latin American countries, usually described as liberal or neoliberal, since They had numerous resources and national assets that meant a lot of value for private companies and that, appropriating them, they would put their capitalist model to work throughout the continent. In Chile, the constitutional government of Salvador Allende was a great danger to the economic interests of the US government, since Chile planned to nationalize the assets of the territory and began strong economic relations with the USSR.
LAFTA played an important role in the incorporation of Latin America under the leadership of the United States, an important event that would define the strategy of implementing economic liberalism/neoliberalism, in the region was in 1969, the Commission met in Asunción Advisory Committee on Business Affairs, the highlight was the reaffirmation of "the orientation of the Latin American economy, in the sense that the economic integration of the Zone must be achieved based on the development of private companies, fundamentally" The lack of a joint regulation for foreign investments promoted complementarity between the subsidiaries of multinational companies operating in Latin America, instead of complementing the economies of the region in an integral manner, thus deepening the already existing asymmetries between the countries (data from INTAL-BID, 1974: 20), generating "productive islands", to the benefit of foreign capital and to the detriment of Latin American integration, even within each country (data from Tavares, 1998).
In Brazil, the United States embassy had directly participated in the 1964 coup. Documents from those days show that the coup had planned material support from the United States, with weapons and a "task force& #3. 4; of support sent in March of that year to the South Atlantic. The denationalization of the economy by the Government of Castelo Branco left national capital factories in inferior conditions, since Instruction 289 of early 1965 allowed foreign companies to obtain loans outside the borders of 7 to 8% interest, while national companies paid close to 50% interest on loans. Roberto de Oliveira Campos, Minister of Planning of the dictatorship and architect of the IMF's policy in Brazil, justified his policy by arguing that “Obviously, the world is unequal. There are those who are born intelligent and there are those who are born stupid. There are those who are born an athlete and there are those who are born crippled. The world is made up of small and large companies. Some die early, in the prime of their life; others drag themselves criminally through a long useless existence. There is a fundamental basic inequality in human nature, in the condition of things. The credit mechanism does not escape this. To postulate that domestic companies should have the same access as foreign companies to foreign credit is simply to ignore the basic realities of the economy."
Bolivia was cornered by the conditions set by international organizations and credits from the United States, since it denied Bolivia to accept offers from the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Poland for the creation of a petrochemical industry that would help said nation. Given this, Bolivia was forced to agree to import products exclusively from the United States.
It was also a process of bank invasion, which diverted Latin American resources and savings to North American companies and at the same time strangled national companies due to lack of credit. AID helped in the implementation of these liberal/neoliberal policies leaving the way for American capitalists in various ways.
In Argentina, the economic policy of José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, Minister of Economy of the dictatorship, implemented as of April 2, 1976, marks the beginning of a process of destruction of the productive apparatus and an increase in debt with the IMF for that country. Short-term financial speculation flourished, while chronic tax evasion and budget deficits remained high. Frequent wage freeze decrees continued to depress living standards overall, and income inequality increased.
During Martínez de Hoz's tenure, Argentina's foreign debt quadrupled, and the disparities between the upper and lower classes became much more pronounced. The period ended with a tenfold devaluation and one of the largest worst financial crises in Argentine history. In the book Your Money or your Life ("Su dinero o su vida"), the historian and political scientist Éric Toussaint writes:
Most of the loans granted to the Argentine dictatorship came from the private banks of the US. We must highlight the total agreement of the US authorities. (whether the Federal Reserve or the American Administration) with this debt policy. The government, in order to obtain loans from private banks, demanded that Argentine companies be in debt with international private banks. Public enterprises thus became the fundamental lever for the denationalization of the State, and the loss of national sovereignty.
Eduardo Galeano writes in his book Las venas abiertas de América Latina, about IMF policies:
Its formulas have not only failed in stabilization and development, but have also intensified the external strangulation of the countries, the misery of the big dispossessed masses has increased, putting social tensions alive red, and have precipitated financial economic denationalization, influencing the sacred commandments of the freedom of movement of capital.
Notable cases
The assassination of the Chilean general Carlos Prats in Argentina and the former minister of the government of Salvador Allende, Orlando Letelier in the United States, were part of the operation, in addition to the attack to assassinate Bernardo Leighton in Rome, organized by the Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who was a member of Operation Gladio. The person who activated the machine gun that seriously wounded Bernardo Leighton and his wife was the Cuban-born terrorist Orlando Bosch Ávila. In Madrid they tried to kidnap leaders of the Chilean MIR while in Rome they operated against Argentine political dissidents.
The agents of Operation Condor acted in Latin American countries as well as in the United States and Europe. With Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the Italian Stefano Delle Chiaie has spoken about the murders of Prats and Letelier; according to him, the US citizen Michael Townley, a former CIA agent, participated in the two operations. The Cuban-American terrorist Luis Posada Carriles also participated in the meeting in which it was decided to assassinate Orlando Letelier, who had gone into exile in the United States. In addition, according to current investigations, it may be that Eduardo Frei Montalva was killed by poison created in Colonia Dignidad.
In Argentina
On September 30, 1974, in Buenos Aires, retired Chilean Army General Carlos Prats was assassinated along with his wife Sofía Cuthbert, outside their own apartment, by a remote-controlled bomb, hurling the remains into the balcony on the ninth floor of the building opposite. According to the investigations of the Uruguayan writer Fernando Butazzoni, Townley's wife, the Chilean writer Mariana Callejas, actively participated in the attack.
According to secret documents handed over to the press, DINA agent Juan Morales Salgado was monitoring the details of the life of Prats and his wife. Days before the attack, Prats and his wife had begun secret procedures to leave the country. The material author of the attack was the American citizen Michael Townley, a CIA agent
However, the operations were not always about assassinations, they also dealt with the capture and surrender of people considered "seditious" or "subversive" by the different dictatorial regimes. A case of important repercussion was that of the Zaffaroni couple, who were kidnapped and disappeared in Argentina on September 27, 1976. Both were taken to the Automotores Orletti clandestine center and later transferred to Uruguay. This case became relevant in 1998 when the daughter of the couple, Mariana Zaffaroni, who had been seized by an agent of the Intelligence Secretariat.
In Brazil
The fact that there was no need for a prominent action or intervention by the United States in Brazil prevailed after a tradition on the part of this last military dictatorship preserved and settled in power from Castelo Branco, going through the most repressive years with Emílio Garrastazu Médici, until the democratic opening carried out towards the end of the João Figueiredo dictatorship in 1985.
In Brazil, the National Truth Commission, created by Law 12528/2011 for the purpose of investigating serious crimes against Human Rights, from September 18, 1946 to October 5, 1988, in The framework of Operation Condor examined a set of documents obtained from archives in Brazil, Argentina, the United States and Paraguay that confirm the participation of organs and agents of the Brazilian dictatorship that served to prepare clandestine operations that resulted in serious violations of human rights of Brazilian citizens abroad, as well as foreigners in Brazil.
Kidnapping of the Uruguayans
The event with the greatest international recognition was the repression of Uruguay in Brazil in an event that occurred in November 1978 and, later known as the "O sequestro dos uruguaios», that is, "The kidnapping of the Uruguayans". On that occasion, with the consent of the Brazilian military dictatorship, senior officers of the Uruguayan army secretly traveled to Porto Alegre, capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. There they kidnapped a couple of members of the Uruguayan political opposition, Universindo Rodríguez Díaz and Lilian Celiberti, along with their two children, Camilo and Francesca, 8 and 3 years old.
The operation failed when two Brazilian journalists --reporter Luiz Cláudio Cunha and photographer João Baptista Scalco, from the Porto Alegre branch of Veja magazine -- alerted by an anonymous phone call, went to the apartment where the couple lived, in the Menino Deus neighborhood of the capital of Rio Grande do Sul. There, confused with fellow Uruguayans, the journalists were received by armed men who were holding Lílian. Universindo and his children had already been clandestinely taken to Uruguay.The unexpected arrival of the journalists broke the secrecy of the operation, which was quickly dismantled to also take Lílian to Montevideo.
In 1980, two inspectors from the DOPS (Department of Political and Social Order, an official branch of the police in charge of political repression during the military dictatorship) were convicted by the Brazilian Justice, the armed men who had detained journalists in Lilian's apartment in Porto Alegre. They were João Augusto da Rosa and Orandir Portassi Lucas (a former soccer player known as Didi Pedalada), both identified as participants in the kidnapping operation by journalists and the Uruguayan couple, which undoubtedly confirms the involvement of the Government of Brazil in Operation Condor. In 1991, through the initiative of Governor Pedro Simón, the State of Rio Grande do Sul officially recognized the kidnapping of the Uruguayans and compensated them for it, inspiring the democratic government of President Luis Alberto Lacalle of Uruguay to do the same one year later.
João Goulart and the unclear circumstances surrounding his death
After his overthrow, João Goulart became the first Brazilian president to die in exile. He died in his sleep in the Argentine city of Mercedes on December 6, 1976 of an alleged heart attack. It would take more than three decades for his body to be subjected to an autopsy. On April 26, 2000, the former governor of Rio de Janeiro, Leonel Brizola, maintained that former Brazilian presidents Joao Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek were assassinated as part of Operation Condor, and called for the opening of investigations into their deaths. Juscelino Kubitschek died in a car accident.
On January 27, 2008, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo published a story with a statement by Mario Neira Barreiro, a former member of the intelligence service of the Uruguayan dictatorship, stating that Goulart was poisoned, making Brizola's suspicions his own. The order to assassinate Goulart, according to him, came from Sérgio Fleury, director of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (Department of Political and Social Order) and the license to kill came from President Ernesto Geisel himself. In July 2008, a special commission of the Legislative Assembly of Rio Grande do Sul, Goulart's state of origin, released a document that says that "the evidence that João was intentionally killed, with the knowledge of the Geisel government, is strong".
On November 13, 2013, at the request of his family in an attempt to clarify the circumstances of his death, Brazilian authorities exhumed his remains. Laboratories from Brazil, Portugal and Spain collaborated in the tests, accompanied by specialists from Uruguay, Argentina and Cuba. More than a year after the studies began, on December 1, 2014, the press made the results public. These are not conclusive, since on the one hand no traces of poison were found, but its use was not ruled out either, given the chemical changes that the body has undergone in the elapsed time.
In Chile
When Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 in response to Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón's request for his extradition to Spain, information regarding Operation Condor was revealed. One of the lawyers who requested his extradition spoke of an attempt to assassinate Carlos Altamirano, leader of the Chilean Socialist Party: Pinochet was claimed to have met Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie during Franco's funeral in Madrid in 1975 to assassinate Altamirano. But as with Bernardo Leighton, who was shot in Rome in 1975 after a meeting the same year in Madrid between Stefano Delle Chiaie, former CIA agent Michael Townley and anti-Castro Virgilio Paz Romero, the plan ultimately failed.
General Carlos Prats and his wife were assassinated by the Chilean DINA on September 30, 1974 in a car bomb attack in Buenos Aires, where they lived in exile. In Chile, the investigative judge in this case, Alejandro Solís, definitively determined an end to the persecution of Pinochet in this particular case after the Supreme Court of Chile rejected a request to revoke his judicial immunity in January 2005. DINA leaders, including Chief Manuel Contreras, former head of the operation, and retired General Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, his brother Roger Iturriaga, and former brigadiers Pedro Espinoza Bravo and José Zara, are accused in Chile of this murder. DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel was convicted in Argentina for the murder.
Another target was Orlando Letelier, a former minister in the Allende government who was assassinated by a car bomb explosion in Washington on September 21, 1976. His assistant, Ronni Moffitt, a US citizen, was also killed in the explosion. Michael Townley, General Manuel Contreras, a former DINA chief, and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo, also formerly of DINA, were convicted of the murders. In 1978, Chile agreed to hand over Townley to the US, in order to reduce tension over the Letelier assassination. Townley, however, was released under the witness protection program. The US justice system is waiting for Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza to be extradited.
In an article published December 17, 2004 in the Los Angeles Times, Francisco Letelier, son of Orlando Letelier, wrote that his father's assassination was part of Operation Condor, which is described as "an intelligence-sharing network used by six Southern dictators at the time to weed out dissidents". Francisco Letelier, declared: "The murder of my father was part of the Condor." Michael Townley has accused Pinochet of being responsible for the death of Orlando Letelier. Townley confessed that he had hired five anti-Castro Cuban exiles to plant the bomb in Letelier's car.
In Paraguay
The long dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner became a contemporary of the dictators Jorge Rafael Videla and Augusto Pinochet. The Paraguayan Horror Archives of 1992 constitute one of the most powerful evidence of the repressive Paraguayan dictatorship.
According to the Terror Archives discovered by Martín Almada, in the city of Lambaré, Paraguay, in 1992, the Condor Plan left a balance of 50,000 dead, 30,000 disappeared and 400,000 imprisoned.
In Uruguay
Coincidentally, in the 1970s, in accordance with the usual procedures of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone in their declaration of de facto rulers, Juan María Bordaberry declared himself dictator, prohibiting the rest of the political parties from existing. In this country, the coup d'état took place in 1973 and lasted until 1985, a period in which a large number of people were murdered, tortured, imprisoned, kidnapped and disappeared, under the argument of the fight against "subversion". Prior to 1973, there were already CIA agents advising the Uruguayan security forces, the best known example of which was Dan Mitrione, who taught methods of torture to the police in Uruguay. He had previously taught these methods to South American military commanders in the School of the Americas located in Panama. In relation to its population, Uruguay was the country that had the largest number of political prisoners during Operation Condor. The CNT of Uruguay (National Central of Workers) maintained a general strike for 15 days as a result of the coup.
In mid-2022, given the lack of progress in the investigation and clarification of the facts, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances urged the Uruguayan authorities to establish as soon as possible &# 34;(...) a State policy (...) that breaks the silence and contributes to improving the collection of information from both human and documentary sources" and noted that "It is imperative that the State assume its responsibility and reverse immediately" inaction on the issue.
In Bolivia
The history of military governments in Bolivia (1964-1982) and political instability facilitated a military dictatorship in Bolivia such as that of Hugo Banzer Suárez promoted in the early 1970s. As in other Latin American countries, this regime was established after the overthrow of the left-wing dictator Juan José Torres with American help.
In Peru
Peruvian legislator Javier Diez Canseco declared that he and twelve of his compatriots (Justiniano Apaza Ordóñez, Hugo Blanco Galdós, Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, Valentín Pacho, Ricardo Letts Colmenares, César Lévano, Ricardo Napurí, José Luis Alvarado Bravo, Alfonso Baella Tuesta, Guillermo Faura Gaig, José Arce Larco and Humberto Damonte), all opponents of the dictatorship of Francisco Morales Bermúdez, were expatriated and handed over in 1978, after being kidnapped in Peru, to the Argentine armed forces in the city of Jujuy. He also affirmed that there is declassified documentation from the CIA and cable information disseminated by Wikileaks, which show the links between the government of Morales Bermúdez and Operation Cóndor. In July 2019, the Italian court sentenced to prison Life sentence to Morales Bermúdez, along with Prime Minister Pedro Richter Prada and General Germán Ruíz Figueroa, for the disappearance of Italian citizens.
In Mexico
The case of Mexico is very peculiar; Although it was not part of the "Plan Condor", it was indirectly involved in its financing and even in its planning, and unlike the South American countries, the country was not controlled by a military junta, but instead It was governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), of which its rulers applied a set of measures of military and political repression, aimed at dissolving political and armed opposition movements against the Mexican State. This period, which occurred between 1952 and 2000, is known as the "Dirty War".
Since the government of Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), the repression of political dissidents and social movements became evident, such as the railroad strike of 1959 or the assassination of Rubén Jaramillo in 1962. To this, it was followed by the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970), in which events occurred such as the Assault on the Madera barracks, Chihuahua in 1965 and the student movement of 1968. At the time, the "hypothesis" that the movement was promoted by the Mexican Communist Party, with the support of Cuba, China and the Soviet Union; so a campaign was implemented in the media to reinforce the idea of the "communist conspiracy" among the population, tending to justify a large-scale repression that would exterminate, then, a movement characterized as a risk to "National Security" and to sovereignty.
U.S. interference played a prominent role in the course of the movement, as CIA-Mexico Station Chief Winston M. Scott created a program known as "LITEMPO" (The word LI stands for CIA operations in Mexico), which operated from 1956 to 1969, to exchange information between the CIA and "high officials and select officials" from Mexico, such as Díaz Ordaz and López Mateos himself, the then Secretary of the Interior Luis Echeverría Álvarez, and Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, the then head of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS). Such was the political tension, that according to the words of Miguel Nazar Haro (director of the DFS from 1978 to 1982), the US ambassador to Mexico Fulton Freeman offered to the Secretary of National Defense Marcelino García Barragán, to carry out a coup: & #34;General Marcelino García Barragán did not want to carry out the coup (d'état). He sent the ambassador (Fulton Freeman) to hell & # 34;. With the student movement they were alarmed (in Washington), that they were going to make a revolution, and the United States ambassador went in to see Don Marcelino and told him: 'give a coup d'état and take over the Presidency to calm the situation'. The general replied: 'I am not going to go down in history as a traitor to the country'".
This whole wave of events unleashed the "Operación Galeana", which culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico City on October 2, 1968, with Díaz Ordaz becoming the mastermind, along with Luis Echeverría and General García Barragán, for the murder, detention and disappearance of several hundred students. The Ministry of the Interior, the Mexican Army, the DFS and the Olimpia Battalion participated in the operation.
During the government of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976), the "dirty war" was at its peak. On June 10, 1971, the "Halconazo" or the Corpus Thursday Massacre, perpetrated by a paramilitary group known as the "Halcones". Said organization was created by the head of the Presidential General Staff (EMP) Luis Gutiérrez Oropeza and General Manuel Díaz Escobar under the orders of General Alfonso Corona del Rosal (head of the Department of the Federal District from 1966 to 1970), and whose members, under the orders of General Carlos Humberto Bermúdez Dávila, acted as snipers in Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968. President Echeverría ordered the repression, although he publicly distanced himself from the facts and consequently requested the resignation of the then head of the Department of Federal District (DDF) Alfonso Martínez Domínguez. General Díaz Escobar was an employee of the DDF until 1973, when he was sent as a military attaché to Chile to replace General Mario Ballesteros Prieto, who died in January of that same year. Generals Ballesteros Prieto and Díaz Escobar were pieces in the anti-communist chess that the United States played during the Cold War. Between 1972 and 1973, in Chile, the professional histories of these Mexican generals would be key in the planning and development of Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état. Díaz Escobar was a faithful supporter of Pinochet and would be a collaborator of Manuel Contreras, director of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).
Faced with the massacres of 1968 and 1971, various left-wing groups assessed that the peaceful and institutional means had been exhausted, and they saw that the Mexican State was determined to put an end to the movements, so they decided to go underground and opt for for the guerrilla's armed option in the face of the political assessment that it would be impossible to democratize power through peaceful means. The most important guerrilla organizations that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s were: Lucio Cabañas' Party of the Poor (PDLP) in 1967, Genaro Vázquez Rojas' National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR) in 1968, the Movimiento Revolutionary Action (MAR) in 1969 and the September 23 Communist League (LC23S) in 1973. The way these groups acted was through the principle of "prolonged people's war", bank robbery, planning kidnappings of officials and/or prominent businessmen (the famous case is the attempted kidnapping of businessman Eugenio Garza Sada in 1973 at the hands of the LC23S, or the kidnapping of Guerrero governor Rubén Figueroa Figueroa in 1974 at the hands of the PDLP) and attempted of popular insurrection with "Foquismo" tactics, such as Operation "Asalto al Cielo" of the LC23S in 1974.
The activities of these organizations represented a latent danger to the security of the country, so, in order to dismantle these "terrorist organizations," Counter-insurgency techniques and State Terrorism actions were carried out. In 1971, the Secretary of National Defense, Hermenegildo Cuenca Díaz, announced the beginning of the “Plan Cobweb”, which had as its objective the annulment of the influence and capacity of political challenge to the regime by the PDLP and the ACNR. The Mexican Army involved nearly 3,000 troops in this operation that took place in all the municipalities of the state of Guerrero. The national security groups not only acted in that state, but also in Mexico City, where they carried out arrests and disappearances. As part of the plan, Generals Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro and Francisco Quirós Hermosillo implemented the famous "Flights of Death," a method that appears in the Torture Manuals of the School of the Americas and that was used by the military governments of South America during the 1970s and 1980s. Another example is that of the LC23S, this group operated mainly in the most important urban areas of the country, such as Guadalajara, Monterrey, Culiacán, Durango, San Luis Potosí, Morelia, Puebla, Toluca, Cuernavaca, the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico, among others; In addition, it had a more organized military and political structure, for which its annihilation was urgent. For this, infiltration, espionage, surveillance, persecution, kidnapping, torture and the murder of militants of this organization were required. Also, the creation of "death squads" to counteract the combat capacity of the LC23S, such as the General Headquarters against Subversion in Nuevo León in 1973 and the White Brigade in 1976, created by Nazar Haro, Acosta Chaparro, Quirós Hermosillo and Arturo "el Negro" Durazo, head of the General Directorate of Police and Traffic of the Federal District (DGPTDF) from 1976 to 1982.
Already in the government of José López Portillo (1976-1982), the "Operation Cóndor" was carried out, which was promoted by the CIA and the DEA and took place mainly in the area known as the "Golden Triangle" in the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua between 1977 and 1983. It was the first joint operation between the Mexican Army and institutions such as the Attorney General's Office (PGR), the Federal Judicial Police and the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), whose objective was the "eradication of marijuana and poppy crops" through the massive use of herbicides. It was directed by Alejandro Gertz Manero (at that time a Senior Officer of the PGR) and the Secretary of National Defense Félix Galván López, and executed by generals José Hernández Toledo, Roberto Heine Rangel and Manuel Díaz Escobar, the attorney Óscar Flores Sánchez and Miguel Nazar Haro. The operation turned out to be one of many counterinsurgency measures applied by the Mexican government, since there were large displacements of peasants and cases where soldiers and agents of the DFS and the White Brigade committed arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, forced disappearances, rapes, torture and extrajudicial murders of social activists, political opponents and militants of guerrilla organizations; and they even protected drug traffickers like Pedro Avilés Pérez and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. Between 1978 and 1989, the Guadalajara Cartel would emerge, which together with the CIA, would be involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and in the kidnapping, torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar in 1985 (this fact being a prelude to of the War on Drugs in Mexico).
Other cases
Edgardo Enríquez Espinoza, a Chilean leader of the MIR, was disappeared in Argentina. Jorge Fuentes, another leader of the movement, was arrested in Paraguay. Alexei Jaccard and Ricardo Ramírez were kidnapped in Buenos Aires in May 1977, and he himself year a support network for the communist party in Argentina was dismantled. Cases of repression in the country against Germans, Spanish, Peruvians and Jews were also denounced. The assassination of Juan José Torres, and those of former Uruguayan deputies Héctor Gutiérrez and Zelmar Michelini in Buenos Aires in 1976 were also part of the Condor operation. DINA contacted Croatian terrorists (that is, Ustasha emigrants and descendants), Italian neo-fascists and the Shah's SAVAK to track down and assassinate dissidents in exile.
Operation Condor was at its height in 1976. Chilean exiles in Argentina found themselves threatened again, and had to go into hiding or exile. Cuban diplomats were also assassinated in Buenos Aires in the famous Automotores Orletti clandestine detention center, one of the 300 clandestine prisons of the dictatorship. These centers were managed by Task Group 18 headed by the convicted armed robber Aníbal Gordon, who reported directly to the general commander of the SIDE, Otto Paladino. "Automotores Orletti" It was the main base for the foreign intelligence services involved in Operation Condor. One of the survivors, José Luis Bertazzo, who was detained there for two months, identified Chilean, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Bolivian prisoners who were interrogated by agents from their own countries. It is there that the 19-year-old daughter-in-law of the poet Juan Gelman was tortured along with her husband, before being transferred to Montevideo where she gave birth to a baby (Macarena Gelman), who was immediately stolen by Uruguayan army officers.
According to John Dinges' book The Years of the Condor, Chilean MIR detainees at the Orletti detention center told José Luis Bertazzo that they had seen two Cuban diplomats, Jesús Cejas Arias, 22, and Crescencio Galañega, 26, tortured by Gordon's group and interrogated by a man who was traveling from Miami to question them. The two Cuban diplomats, in charge of protecting the Cuban ambassador in Argentina, Emilio Aragonés, had been kidnapped on August 9, 1976 at the corner of Arribeños and Virrey del Pino streets by 40 armed SIDE agents who blocked the street. with their Ford Falcons, the vehicles used by the security forces during the dictatorship. According to Dinges, the FBI and the CIA were informed of the arrests. The author cites a cable sent by Buenos Aires FBI agent Robert Scherrer on September 22, 1976 in which he mentioned in passing that Michael Townley, later convicted of the September 21, 1976 murder of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, he had taken part in the interrogations of the two Cubans. The former head of DINA confirmed to Argentine federal judge María Servini de Cubría in Santiago de Chile on December 22, 1999 that Michael Townley and Cuban Guillermo Novo Sampoll were present at the "Automotores Orletti" center, after of having traveled from Chile to Argentina on August 11, 1976, and "cooperated in the torture and murder of the two Cuban diplomats". The Cuban anti-Castro and terrorist Luis Posada Carriles also boasted in his autobiography, Los caminos del guerrero, about the murder of the two young men.
Intervention of other countries
The role of the United States
Declassified files of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report that Manuel Contreras, head of the DINA in Chile, was invited in 1975 to the CIA headquarters in Langley for 15 days. After that visit, Contreras appears as "creator" of Operation Condor. The journalist and researcher Christopher Hitchens points to Henry Kissinger as the ideologue of said operation. In June 1976 in Buenos Aires, Robert C. Hill, US ambassador, upon discovering that Kissinger had given the Argentine generals a "green light" for state terrorism junta at an OAS meeting in Santiago (in the Hotel Carrera, later known as the Hotel Cabrera, in the movieMissing), Hill was quick to try to make back down from Kissinger's decision, although Kissinger's aides told him that if he continued, Kissinger would likely get him fired. During that meeting with Argentine Foreign Minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally.
A 1978 cable from US Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was published on March 6, 2001 by The New York Times. The document was released in November 2000 by the Clinton administration under the Chilean Declassification Project. In the cable, Ambassador White reports a conversation with General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos, Chief of Staff of the Paraguayan Armed Forces, who lets him know that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Cóndor "remained in contact with each other through a US facility in the Panama Canal Zone covering all of Latin America " and that she was "employed to coordinate intelligence information from the countries of the Southern Cone". According to Patrice McSherry (Univ. of Long Island) the US military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated as secret partners or sponsors."
USA The US was a key member, providing the "organization, intelligence and financial assistance to the operation." it was also a key provider of economic and military assistance to the Videla regime during the earliest and most intense phase of the repression. In early April 1976, Congress approved a request from the President of Gerald Ford, written and endorsed by Henry Kissinger, to award $50,000,000 to the junta. In late 1976, Congress awarded an additional $30,000,000 in military aid and the Ford administration's recommendations to increase military aid to $63,500,000 the following year were also considered by Congress; military assistance, training, and sales to the Videla regime continued throughout Jimmy Carter's successive presidency until at least on September 30, 1978, when military aid was officially stopped under section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act.
In 1977 and 1978, the United States sold more than $120,000,000 worth of military manufacturing to Argentina and in 1977 the Department of Defense was awarded $700,000 to train 217 Argentine military officers. At the time the Education program and international military training (IMET) was suspended in Argentina in 1978, the total costs of training in the United States for Argentine military personnel totaled $1,115,000. Reagan, whose first term began in 1981, asserted that the previous Carter administration had weakened United States diplomatic relations with allies in Argentina and reversed the previous administration's official condemnation of the junta's human rights practices. The reestablishment of diplomatic relations allowed the collaboration of the CIA with the Argentine intelligence service to train and arm the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista government. The 601 Intelligence Battalion, for example, trained Contras at Lepaterique in Honduras.
The French Connection
French journalist Marie-Monique Robin found in the Quai d'Orsay archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs the original document attesting to a 1959 agreement between Paris and Buenos Aires that created a " permanent French military mission" of officers who had fought in the Algerian war of independence, and which was located in the offices of the Chief of Staff of the Argentine Army. It continued until the socialist François Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981. The journalist demonstrated how the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing secretly collaborated with the military dictatorships of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The first Argentine officers, including Alcides López Aufranc, traveled to Paris to attend two-year courses at the Ecole de Guerre military school in 1957, two years before the Cuban Revolution and when there was no Argentine guerrilla movement. "In practice," Robin told Página/12, "the arrival of the French in Argentina led to a massive expansion of intelligence services and the use of torture as the main weapon of war against subversion in the concept of modern warfare". The "annihilation decrees" signed by Isabel Perón were inspired by texts in French. During the Algerian war of independence, the police forces were placed under the authority of the Army, and in particular the paratroopers, who generalized interrogation sessions, the systematic use of torture, and disappearances.
On September 10, 2003, the deputies of the French Green Party Noël Mamère, Martine Billard and Yves Cochet requested the constitution of a Parliamentary Commission on "the role of France in supporting military regimes in Latin America 1973-1984" before the Foreign Relations Committee of the National Assembly, chaired by Edouard Balladur. The only newspaper that reported on this was the daily Le Monde. However, the deputy Roland Blum, in charge of the Commission, refused to listen to Marie-Monique Robin, and in December 2003 published a 12-page document described by Robin as being in the most bad faith possible. He claimed that the agreement would not have been signed, despite the fact that the document was obtained by Robin at the Quai d'Orsay.
When French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin traveled to Chile in February 2004, he stated that there had been no cooperation between France and the military regimes.
The journalist Marie-Monique Robin told the newspaper L'Humanité: "The French have systematized a military technique in the urban environment that is copied and passed on to the Latin American dictatorships.". The methods used during the Algerian war of independence in 1957 were systematized and exported to the Escuela Superior de Guerra in Buenos Aires. Roger Trinquier's famous book on the fight against insurgency had a strong influence in South America. South. Robin says she was surprised to learn that the French intelligence agency Direction de surveillance du territoire (DST) was providing DINA with the names of refugees returning to Chile ("Operation Return" 34;), all of whom were killed. "Of course, this puts the French government on the bench, along with Giscard d'Estaing, then President of the Republic. I was very shocked by the hypocrisy of the French diplomatic authorities who, at the same time, welcomed political refugees with open arms, and collaborated with dictatorships."
Argentine admiral Luis María Mendía, who theorized the practice of "death flights," testified in January 2007 before Argentine judges that a French intelligence agent, Bertrand de Perseval, had participated in the kidnapping of the two French nuns, Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon, who were later murdered. Perseval, who now lives in Thailand, denied any link to the kidnapping, but admitted to having been a member of the OAS, and to having escaped to Argentina in March 1962 after the Evian Accords that ended the Algerian War of Independence. (1954-1962). Referring to Robin's documentary titled "The Death Squad - The French School" (Les escadrons de la mort - l'école française), Luis María Mendía petitioned the Argentine courts that former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, former French Prime Minister Pierre Messmer, the former French ambassador in Buenos Aires François de la Gorce, and all officials in his place at the French embassy in Buenos Aires between 1976 and 1983 were summoned to court. In addition to this "French connection", Mendia He has also accused former Argentine head of state María Estela Martínez de Perón and her former ministers Carlos Ruckauf and Antonio Cafiero, who had signed the "decree against subversion" before the 1976 coup. According to ESMA survivor Graciela Daleo, this is another tactic to claim that these crimes were legitimized by the 1987 Law of Due Obedience, and also covered by the "decree against subversion" of Isabel Perón (who ordered the annihilation of the actions of the subversive organizations). Alfredo Astiz also referred to the courts about the "French connection". Many of the officers who participated in Algeria were officers of the SS Charlemagne Division, which were enlisted in the French armed forces after the war. They were fully aware of the Nacht und Nebel Decree, which was the origin of forced disappearances as a political weapon.
Consequences
Operation Silence
Operation Silence was an operation to hamper the investigations of Chilean judges by eliminating witnesses, which began about a year before the "archives of terror" They were in Paraguay.
In April 1991 Arturo Sanhueza Ross, linked to the assassination of MIR leader Jecar Neghme in 1989, left the country. According to the Rettig Report, the death of Jecar Neghme was carried out by Chilean intelligence agents. In September 1991 Carlos Herrera Jiménez, who killed trade unionist Tucapel Jiménez, also left the country. In October 1991 Eugenio Berríos, a chemist who had worked with DINA agent Michael Townley, is accompanied from Chile to Uruguay by Operation Condor agents, to escape to testify in the Letelier case. He used Argentine, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Brazilian passports, raising concerns that Operation Condor was not dead. In 1992, Berríos was found dead in El Pinar, near Montevideo, his assassins having tried to make it impossible to identify his body.
In January 2005, Michael Townley, who now lives in the US under the witness protection program, admitted to Interpol agents the links between DINA and the Colonia Dignidad detention center, which was founded in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, a Nazi, arrested in March 2005 in Buenos Aires, and convicted on charges of rape of minors. Townley also provided information on Colonia Dignidad and the Army's Germ Warfare Laboratory. This last laboratory would have replaced the old DINA laboratory on the Vía Naranja, where the chemical murderer Eugenio Berríos worked with Michael Townley. The toxin with which they allegedly killed the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva in 1982 could have been made in this new laboratory in Colonia Dignidad, according to the judge investigating the case.
Counterpropaganda
Before and after the 1976 coup and under the coverage of the TASS (former Soviet Union) and Prensa Latina (Cuba) news agencies, information on murders, kidnappings, disappearances and combined operations were concentrated in Buenos Aires from the intelligence services of the Latin American dictatorships, coming from the Communist Parties of the region and from other organizations, to then send them to Prague, Berlin, Sofia, Havana and Moscow. Radio Moscow was the medium that led the counter-propaganda, since it issued weekly or daily bulletins with information and denunciations from Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, or Brazil. The best known, which seriously worried the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, was "Listen to Chile", in the voice of the multi-award-winning writer and journalist José Miguel Varas and Katya Olévskaya. Researcher Alberto Nadra suggests that in some broadcasts keywords were inserted that contained messages about resistance actions.
Reactions
Democratic countries in the region repeatedly rejected and opposed Operation Condor, offering asylum to politically persecuted and receiving thousands of exiles from dictatorships.
In 1973, the Congress of Venezuela approved a motion to repudiate the «cuartelario coup carried out against the constitutional government of President Salvador Allende», expressing that it meant «the ignorance of the sovereign popular will expressed in free elections and the legitimate right they have majorities to find the government that best suits national interests." the dictatorship to deliver it. Quinteros had been detained on June 26 at the "300 Carlos" torture center, and on the morning of June 28, she was driven to the vicinity of the Venezuelan embassy under the pretext of "delivering" a contact, when she managed to escape. and enter the Venezuelan embassy. Quintero asked for asylum in the embassy and the Venezuelan personnel sought to help her, but Uruguayan police and military forces took her away with the complicity of the police in charge of guarding the embassy. She was taken to Infantry Battalion No. 13, identified as No. 2537, and subjected to torture, according to the testimonies of other political prisoners detained there. The Venezuelan ambassador in Uruguay, Julio Ramos, communicated by telephone with the Uruguayan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and denounced the fact to the undersecretary Guido Michelin Salomón, since the minister Juan Carlos Blanco was not at the ministerial headquarters. The Venezuelan government formally echoed the protest immediately.
Venezuela became one of the main destinations for exiles from dictatorships in the Southern Cone, including those exiled during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Between 8,000 and 9,000 Uruguayan exiles fled to Venezuela, including several mathematicians, and an estimated 11,000 to 15,000 Argentine exiles arrived in Venezuela during the country's last military dictatorship. By 1971, there were only about 3,000 Chileans in the country; after the coup, the number rose to 24,000 exiles by 1980, and Venezuela ended up receiving approximately 80,000 exiles in total. After being detained in the basement of the Air Force War Academy and in the camp de Ritoque, Orlando Letelier (Salvador Allende's former foreign minister) was released thanks to the efforts of Diego Arria, governor of Caracas, who was a close friend of Letelier's. On November 20, Orlando took a direct plane with his family to Maracaibo, and they went into exile in Venezuela for a few months before traveling to the United States in February. Orlando Letelier was assassinated on September 21, 1976 in Washington D.C. by an agent of the Chilean National Intelligence Directorate, by becoming a staunch opponent of the Pinochet dictatorship and the other autocracies in the region. Since Pinochet refused to let Letelier be buried in Chile, Diego Arria offered him his place and arranged for the transfer of his body to be buried in Venezuela.
Victims
Under the so-called Operation Condor, the dictatorial regimes of the Southern Cone targeted, disappeared, tortured and killed not only prominent leaders, but also hundreds of lesser-known militants. It is difficult to specify the number of victims of Operation Condor considering that it is necessary to verify the coordination of at least two of the security forces deployed in the Southern Cone. In the book «Operation Condor. 40 years later", there is a list of 377 confirmed victims of the direct history of the operation and of Condor itself with various data (names, surname, sex, age, militancy, kidnapping data, final condition and if there was transfer to another country). Some of the characteristics of the list of victims published in 2015 are detailed below: 10 nationalities (177 Uruguayans, 72 Argentines, 64 Chileans among others), 219 disappeared, 38 murdered, 126 illegal transfers between countries and 12 stolen children recovered their identity.
Trials
Argentina
The case began in 1999 based on complaints from relatives of foreign citizens who had been victims of forced disappearance. The first presentation was promoted by a group made up of, among others, Emilio Mignone, Raúl Zaffaroni, David Baigun, Alberto Pedroncini and Martín Abregú.
After more than a decade of investigations, on March 5, 2013, the trial finally began against 18 accused of committing crimes against humanity within the framework of the Condor Plan, to the detriment of 105 victims (45 Uruguayan, 22 Chilean, 13 Paraguayans, 14 Argentines and 11 Bolivians). Admiral Antonio Vañek, the former head of Campo de Mayo Santiago Riveros, the former Intelligence agent Miguel Ángel Furci and the Uruguayan ex-military officer Manuel Cordero, the only non-Argentine defendant. Of a total of 32 defendants, only 17 would reach the sentence as defendants.
The Argentine investigations also led to the indictment of other people suspected of having committed these crimes, such as the former dictators of Chile and Bolivia, Augusto Pinochet and Hugo Banzer, and the Uruguayan soldiers José Nino Gavazzo, Jorge Silveira and Julio Vadora, which were rejected. In a parallel case, Judge Norberto Oyarbide also ordered on February 2, 2012 the international capture and extradition of the Peruvian dictator Francisco Morales Bermúdez, accused of participating in the well-known Plan Cóndor and of committing crimes such as illegal deprivation of liberty and torture during his de facto mandate (1975-1980), carried out in May 1978, against thirteen citizens of that country who were transferred to Argentina within the framework of the Condor Plan.
For the Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights of Mercosur:
The Condor Plan trial is a historical fact that allows us to prove of rigor that there was an illicit association for the enforced disappearance of persons, the illegal deprivation of liberty and the elimination of political opponents; whose headquarters was in Chile where an intelligence network was established that coordinated crimes against humanity. Throughout the process, both complaint and prosecution agreed at a main point: that the Condor existed, developed and entered into crisis with the fall of dictatorships.
On May 27, 2016, in what has been considered a historic event, the Federal Oral Court No. 1 handed down the ruling condemning fifteen of the seventeen defendants who arrived at that time. The highest sentences were of 25 years in prison and were applied to Santiago Omar Riveros, Miguel Ángel Furci and the Uruguayan Cordero Piacentini. Former dictator Reynaldo Bignone was sentenced to 20 years, as was former director of the Rodolfo Feroglio Cavalry School. The former head of the Patricios Humberto Lobaiza Regiment was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Former general Eugenio Guañabens Perelló and the then head of ESMA Antonio Vañek were sentenced to 13 years. Former soldiers Luis Sadi Pepa, Néstor Horacio Falcon, Eduardo Samuel, Felipe Jorge Alespeit were sentenced to 12 years. Former general Federico Antonio Minicucci was sentenced to eight years. Carlos Horacio Tragant and Juan Avelino Rodríguez were acquitted.
The ruling defines the Condor Plan as "an illicit association" of regional scope, and registers the active participation in it of the United States.
Italy
In February 2015, a trial began in Italy for crimes against humanity committed against 23 Italian citizens within the framework of the Condor Plan. Of the 33 defendants, 11 are former members of the Chilean military junta, 1 from Bolivia, 4 from Peru and 16 from Uruguay. Twelve of them were already detained for other processes followed in their countries.
In 2017, the courts ruled in the first instance, sentencing eight of the defendants to life imprisonment, among them the Bolivian dictator Luis García Meza, and his Minister of the Interior, Luis Arce Gómez, the former Peruvian president Francisco Morales Bermúdez and his prime minister Pedro Richter Prada and the former Uruguayan Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Blanco, among others.
The initial sentence was appealed and in July 2019 the Italian court sentenced 24 repressors in absentia and in second instance to life imprisonment, including former Peruvian President Francisco Morales Bermúdez, former Uruguayan Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Blanco and several former military officers.
Contenido relacionado
972
Saddam Hussein
1070