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Operation Condor - Real Terror Network |
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Written by Xiuhcoatl
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Feb 17, 2006 at 02:07 PM |
Operation Condor (Latin America)
excerpted from the book
The Real Terror Network
by Edward S. Herman
South End Press
Source: Third World Traveler
In 1976 six National Security States of Latin America- Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay- entered into a system for
the joint monitoring and assassinating of dissident refugees in member
countries. The program was directly initiated under the sponsorship of
Chile and its head of the secret police (DINA), Manuel Contreras. Chile
provided the initial funding, organized a series of meetings in
Santiago, and provided the computer capacity and centralized services.
However, the United States deserves a great deal of credit for this
important development, partly as the sponsor and adviser to DINA and
other participating security services, but also because Operation
Condor represented a culmination of a long sought U.S.
objective-coordination of the struggle against "Communism" and
"subversion." In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter stated that "In
order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security
forces within and among Latin American countries, we are...endeavoring
to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the
organization of integrated command and control centers; the
establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint
and combined training exercises." Condor was one of the fruits of this
effort.
Under Operation Condor, political refugees who leave Uruguay and go to
Argentina will be identified and kept under surveillance by Argentinian
"security" forces, who will inform Uruguayan "security" forces of the
presence of these individuals. If the Uruguayan security forces wish to
murder these refugees in order to preserve western values, Argentine
forces will cooperate. They will keep the Uruguayans informed of the
whereabouts of the refugees; they will allow them to enter and freely
move around in Argentina and to take the refugees into custody, torture
and murder them; and the Argentinians will then claim no knowledge of
these events. Under this system, two former Uruguayan Senators, one a
former President of the Senate, Zelmar Michelini and Hector Gutierrez
Ruiz, were kidnapped and murdered in Buenos Aires. We also note, just
to keep the reader abreast of the quality of this cooperative
enterprise, that both Michelini and Ruiz were tortured before being
murdered, and that Michelini's daughter Margarita was also seized and
"disappeared.
By July 1976 some 30 Uruguayan exiles, registered as refugees with U.N.
officials in Buenos Aires, had been taken into custody and disappeared,
surely murdered. Subsequently, several hundred more Uruguayans were
picked up and have not been heard from since. Argentine authorities did
not acknowledge these arrests, in conformity "with the policy of the
security forces to withhold information on arrests involving
investigation of subversion" (Juan de Onis of the New York Times,
parroting the language of fascist terrorism). Many other cross-country
disappearances have also occurred. As reported by de Onis,
"Chilean exiles also were handed across the border to Chilean secret
police and have not been heard of since. Gen. Juan Jose Torres, a
former President of Bolivia, was kidnapped in Buenos Aires and found
dead in an automobile trunk. Gen. Carlos Prats Gonzalez,
commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army under the late President
Salvador Allende Gossens, was killed by a bomb in Argentina. A similar
network of intelligence [sic] operations has also worked between Brazil
and Uruguay. Persons abducted in the southern Brazilian state of Rio do
Sul, with cooperation from local political police, wound up in
Uruguayan jails."
Data are sparse, but the six country murder network toll starts with
abduction-murders of Uruguayans alone numbering in excess of two
hundred. This terror network threw fear into the hearts of the many
thousands of political refugees who had resettled in the Operation
Condor states, as they saw themselves now without a safe haven or any
protection by legal process. They were now benefiting from that
"coordinated employment of security forces" that General Porter
described earlier as one of the prime objects of U.S. efforts in Latin
America. As this extensive and terrible form of transnational terrorism
flowed from U.S. policy efforts and perceived interests, it has not
received much notice in the U.S. mass media.
This murder network soon extended its operations beyond the borders of
the six participating countries. A secret report of an FBI agent
assigned to Buenos Aires, describing Operation Condor, called attention
to "a more secret phase" which "involves the formation of special teams
from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to non-member
countries to carry out sanctions, [including] assassinations, against
terrorists or supporters of a terrorist organization from Operation
Condor member countries." It is worth noting that the FBI agent
reporting on this matter not only approves the enterprise (which he
thought "a good operation") but falls easily into accepting the notion
that the victims of its murder squads are "terrorists." Data are
lacking on the scope of this global phase of Operation Condor, which is
difficult to distinguish from unilateral international terrorism
carried out by the Argentine or Chilean secret police or one of their
contract agents, often members of the Cuban exile terrorist network.
Kidnappings, murders and attempted murders in Mexico and Italy have
been proclaimed by the Cuban Squad Zero from 1975 onward, some surely
under contract with DINA, although others were apparently to divert
attention from the real (DINA) killers. Orlando Bosch has worked for
and been protected by DINA. The Letelier-Moffitt murders in Washington,
D.C. were carried out by a Cuban-Chilean agent team that may have been
part of Operation Condor.
The CIA was well aware of the internal (member country) use and global
extension of Operation Condor and headed off its activities in several
allied countries like France and Portugal by informing the authorities.
The CIA did not head off the Moffitt-Letelier murders, although it knew
that DINA trigger men had entered the United States. Why? It is
possible that the CIA knew of the prospective murders, and let them
happen because it was murder of the right people-people such as
Operation Condor and the Free World's secret police kill daily. It is
also conceivable that the CIA suspected something fishy about to
happen, but chose not to inquire, because of their "faith" in the
choice of their fascist counterpart. It is also possible that the CIA
bungled and made no inquiry, and that Pinochet and DINA murdered on the
streets of Washington, D.C. assuming that Washington would not mind;
after all, both DINA and Operation Condor are U.S. offspring. How was
Pinochet to know that bringing his death squads right into the heart of
the Free World was unseemly?
With its hand forced, and obligated to proceed in the case of a
well-publicized murder in Washington, the U.S. government did a great
deal to subvert the case. Documents were leaked to the press which
linked Letelier to Cuba, effectively smearing him and creating a false
red herring that was used both to justify murder and to divert inquiry
away from our warm friends in Chile. Although the CIA knew from the day
of the murder that DINA agents had come in to do a job, this was hidden
from the press and from other parts of the government as long as
possible, and the false trail of suggestions of a left-terrorist murder
was pushed by people who knew this was a lie. Thus the prosecution of
the murderers was carried out by a government that was so compromised
by its own lies and suppressions and hamstrung by its own involvement
and collaboration with the Cuban and Chilean assassins, that it was
inevitable that the case would be conveniently "lost." The United
States government chose not to interfere with the death squad at work
on U.S. soil before the fact-and it was therefore not going to be able
to prosecute successfully after the fact. The United States was one of
the sponsors of Operation Condor, had trained the Cuban terrorist
trigger man, and had been instrumental in bringing into existence the
Pinochet regime. This set of relationships, with its potential for
"gray-mail," and its connection with our "security interests," means
that the terrorists of Operation Condor, like the Cuban refugee terror
network are our progeny. We are not likely to hurt our own.
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