Here's the most comprehensive 1999 article I've found
on the CIA-backed Operation Condor hemispheric assassination program.
You'll never think of Robert Redford as the innocent CIA agent in 'Three Days of the Condor' (1975) again.
Mass murder linked to the name Condor goes back atleast to the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion sent by Hitler to help Francisco Franco's fascists during the Spanish civil war.
No doubt the name stayed in use as hordes of Nazis fled with CIA and Vatican assistance to South America after WWII .
Operation Condor was allegedly formally named in 1975 by DINA's Manuel Contreras but according to this article the CIA and FBI were helping Condor suppress leftists in South America as early as 1974. Chile's DINA intelligence unit was formed shortly after the CIA-backed coup on 9/11/73.
This murderous suppression was done by CIA under other names for years before this as ex-CIA whistleblowers like Philip Agee have documented.
Author-
J. PATRICE McSHERRY is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island
University (Brooklyn Center, 1 University Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11201) and
author of Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina as
well as numerous articles on the military and politics.
http://larc.sdsu.edu/humanrights/rr/PLAarticles/mcsherry.html
Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System.
by J. Patrice McSherry
McSherry, J. Patrice. "Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System." Social Justice, Winter 1999 v26 i4 p144.
*Article used with author's permission. Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Crime and Social Justice Associates
IN THE 10 YEARS SINCE THE COLD WAR'S END, THE WORLD HAS SEEN A GRADUAL
opening up of formerly Secret state archives on both sides of the East-West divide,
as well as truly astonishing developments in human rights and international law.
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon's request for the arrest and extradition of
General Augusto Pinochet in October 1998 was perhaps one of the most
astounding of these developments, not least because this case involved a
former ally of the U.S. government in the Cold War. Clearly, the collapse of
the Communist bloc and the end of the bipolar system were major structural
changes on the international level, allowing concerns with human rights and
justice to emerge with new strength and begin to challenge the limits set by
Cold War geopolitics. In effect, the struggle against impunity is becoming
"globalized," a positive aspect of the larger phenomena of globalization. Yet
profound questions remain. If a new threat to global U.S. interests were to
emerge or a powerful challenge to the hegemony over the Western political and
economic model were to arise, w ould concerns with human rights again be swept
aside in the name of national security? Would the ends again justify the
means?
The arrest of Pinochet refocused world attention on the dirty wars of the Cold
War era in Latin America. A key focus of Garzon's investigation is Operation
Condor, a shadowy Latin American military network whose key members were
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil. Condor represented a
striking new level of coordinated repression among the anticommunist
militaries in the region, and its existence was suspected, but undocumented,
until fairly recently. Condor enabled the Latin American military states to
share intelligence and to hunt down, seize, and execute political opponents in
combined operations across borders. Refugees fleeing military coups and
repression in their own countries who sought safe havens in neighboring
countries were "disappeared" in combined transnational operations. The
militaries defied international law and traditions of political sanctuary to
carry out their shared anticommunist crusade. This article shows that Condor
was a parastatal system that used criminal me thods to eliminate "subversion,"
while avoiding constitutional institutions, ignoring due process, and
violating all manner of human rights. Condor made use of parallel prisons,
secret transport operations, routine assassination and torture, extensive
psychological warfare (PSYWAR, or use of black propaganda, deception, and
disinformation to conquer the "hearts and minds" of the population, often by
making crimes seem as though they were committed by the other side), and
sophisticated technology (such as computerized lists of suspects).
Condor must be understood within the context of the global anticommunist
alliance led by the United States. We now know that top U.S. officials and
agencies, including the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and
the Defense Department, were fully aware of Condor's formation and its
operations from the time it was organized in 1975 (if not earlier). The U.S.
government considered the Latin American militaries to be allies in the Cold
War and worked closely with their intelligence organizations. U.S. executive
agencies at least condoned, and sometimes actively assisted, Condor
"countersubversive" operations. Although evidence is still fragmentary, it is
now possible to piece together information from numerous sources to understand
Operation Condor as a clandestine inter-American counterinsurgency system.
This article draws on a wide variety of data: the "Archives of Terror" in
Paraguay; [1] testimonies of victims in the files of Centro de Estudios
Legales y Sociales [CELS, Argentina]; declassified U.S. documents; Argentine
military documents; reports of the Comision Nacional sobre la Desaparicion de
Personas [CONADEP, Argentina] and the Comision Nacional de Verdad y
Reconciliacion [the Rettig Commission of Chile]; interviews in Chile,
Argentina, and Paraguay carried out between 1996 and 1998; newspapers from
Latin America, Europe, and the United States; and works by scholars and former
CIA agents. The evidence demonstrates that Operation Condor was a
supranational structure of organized state terrorism that went far beyond
targeting "communists."
The article first examines the (scanty) literature on Condor and on state
terrorism to situate the discussion in a theoretical context. Condor's
structures and operations are reviewed and briefly compared with the
"stay-behind" projects in Europe, secret programs designed by the West for
guerrilla warfare and covert operations aimed to undermine Communist and
leftist advances. Finally, the article's conclusion reflects upon the
ideologies and doctrines that gave rise to Condor and the question of ends and
means.
The Literature on Condor and on State Terrorism
Keith M. Slack's (1996) [2] article very cautiously assessed the existence of
Condor and of U.S. involvement. To be fair, much remained shadowy even a few
years ago. New evidence emerged from Garzon's investigation, including a 1976
FBI memo on Condor; U.S. documents released in June 1999 prove Condor's
existence beyond a doubt. Some knowledgeable officials have spoken out. In
1999, a high-ranking Argentine military source familiar with junta secrets in
1976 told an Argentine journalist that Henry Kissinger had assured the Chilean
and Argentine juntas of the Ford administration's support and cooperation for
counterinsurgency operations and for Operation Condor, during an
inter-American meeting in Santiago on June 10, 1976.[3] The journalist
obtained declassified U.S. State Department documents from 1976 to 1978
showing that the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires was well informed about Condor.
Similarly, former Interior Minister Alfredo Arce Carpio of Bolivia told
another Argentine author in 1998, "the coordinatio n among Argentina, Bolivia,
Uruguay, Chile, and Paraguay, known as Operation Condor, existed.... The
military governments of Latin America agreed to have a common project of
intelligence and interchange of prisoners." [4]
nothing contained within the document would, prima facie, constitute a
violation of international law. Governments are not barred...from exchanging
information on what they believe to be criminal elements operating within
their territory... .[T]he arrangement...would be legal under international
law.... The question, of course, is how the information gathered in the
described system would be used - for the legitimate pursuit of persons who had
in fact committed crimes or for the suppression of political dissent?
Slack's reading of the Paraguayan Archive evidence is rather narrow and
legalistic, nonetheless. Despite his valuable categorization of the Archive's
evidence of Condor, he finds most of the material ambiguous. Yet it includes
plentiful documentation of coordinated operations among the military states to
seize each others' "subversives" and transfer them secretly to clandestine
prison systems. [5] Slack also places too much weight on finding references to
the word "condor" ("adding to this ambiguity is the fact that there are very
few documents...that use the word "condor" specifically"). He understates the
brutal nature of the military regimes in question when he analyzes the key
1975 document in which Chile's Colonel Contreras invites his counterparts to a
meeting to coordinate counterinsurgency strategy:
However, at the time it was well documented that these states were committing
massive human rights abuses. Slack allows that "the information accumulated
and disseminated by this system quite conceivably was used to violate human
rights," and concludes that the Archive "strongly suggests the existence of
formal, organized repression across international borders, but the definitive
'smoking gun' is not contained within the archive..." (Slack, 1996: 506).
Seeking smoking guns is understandable, but intelligence services consider
plausible deniability a major priority. A recently declassified U.S.
assassination manual from the 1950s, for example, stated: "No assassination
instructions should ever be written or recorded" (Weiner, 1996; Doyle, 1997).
As scholars such as Michael Stohl and William Stanley have observed, state
violence and state terrorism are thorny subjects for U.S. scholars. They do
not fit neatly into conventional theoretical frameworks, and, additionally,
the concept of terrorism is ambiguous and fraught with analytical
difficulties. [6] Liberal theories of pluralism and democracy do not explain
the use of terrorism by states, as Stanley (1996) shows. These theories assume
that states are legitimate expressions of the preferences of citizens or
interest groups, thus offering few conceptual tools with which to explain
state violence against them. Marxist theories often fall short. John McCamant
(1984) argues that the emphasis of Marxist theories on oppression,
particularly economic oppression by elites, often neglects an analysis of
repression by states. Stanley posits that the use by a state of a grossly
disproportionate level of violence against unarmed citizens, which may
mobilize new popular opposition, seems to challenge Realist ass umptions about
the state's rational use of force. [7] Stohl (in Slater and Stohl, 1988: 160),
on the other hand, argues that Realism implies that states are obliged to use
whatever means necessary to protect national security and state survival. The
evidence in this article lends weight to the latter proposition. Stohl (Ibid.,
1988: 155-205; in Stohl and Lopez, 1984: 43-58) points out that states,
particularly superpowers, may choose to employ terrorist methods or what he
identifies as "surrogate terrorism" to achieve strategic objectives, and he
provides numerous examples of such U.S. and Soviet practices during the Cold
War. He argues that "the strategies and tactics of terrorism have become
integral components of the foreign policy instruments of the modern state"
(Stohl and Lopez, 1984: 55).
E.V. Walter's (1969) classic analysis of 19th-century political terrorism is
still one of the best in terms of explaining the objectives of states that use
terrorism. Walter argued that state elites manipulate fear as a means of
controlling society and maintaining power. Terror is used to engineer
compliant behavior not only among victims, but also among target populations.
Walter's differentiation between victims and larger targets is key. While
victims suffer direct consequences, the targets -- larger sectors of society
-- understand the message. The underlying goal of state terrorism, Walter
suggests, is to eliminate potential power contenders and to impose silence and
political paralysis, thereby consolidating existing power relations. The
proximate end is to instill terror in society and the ultimate end is control.
Not only are there methodological obstacles to scholarly investigations of
state terrorism (primarily the difficulty of obtaining credible information),
there are also issues of acute political sensitivity, especially when one
begins to touch upon U.S. policy and operations. "Terrorism" is an acceptable
term when applied to foreign governments, but to apply it to one's own
government borders on taboo. As Stohl and Lopez (1984: 3) note, analysis of
state terrorism may be dismissed as "`skewed,' 'biased,' 'ideological,' 'not
in the mainstream of the literature.'" Much of the English-language literature
on terrorism focuses on individual and small-group terrorism rather than on
state terrorism (for a notable exception, see McPherson, 1999: 621-632).
Some (not all) of the militaries in Latin America had used torture and other
elements of state terrorism before the Cold War era. The national security
states institutionalized state terrorism, however, creating qualitatively new
systems. U.S. "modernization" of military, intelligence, and police forces
during the Cold War served to strengthen the forces engaged in repression.
Martha Huggins (1998: ix, x) shows that U.S. financing, training, and advice
to police in Brazil were designed to ensure U.S. influence within, and access
to, the force, to promote pro-U.S. attitudes, and to develop U.S. "assets" --
personnel loyal to U.S. interests. She demonstrates that foreign police
training -- and similarly, for our purposes, training of military and
intelligence forces -- by a powerful modern state is designed to advance the
offering country's own security agenda. Although U.S. officials claimed that
assistance to the Brazilian police would promote professionalism, democracy,
and justice, in actuality it had the opposite effect. Police that employed
terrorism, torture, death squads, and the like continued to receive U.S.
assistance, financing, and cooperation. Huggins' book provides a rich case
study of the ways in which U.S. security assistance centralized Brazil's
internal security services and made them more militarized and authoritarian.
Many Condor operations dovetailed with U.S. countersubversive policy as well.
[8]
In recent years we have learned much about U.S. sponsorship of terrorism
during the Cold War, including assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and
campaigns of terror such as Operation Mongoose in Cuban territory; [9] the
CIA-led Phoenix Program in Vietnam, a computerized counterinsurgency program
that used assassination, terrorism, and psychological warfare against
civilians; [10] and the financing of right-wing paramilitary and terrorist
groups like Patina y Libertad in Chile and the Nicaraguan contras. [11] The
infamous School of the Americas and CIA training manuals released in the
mid-1990s proved that army and CIA instructors taught Latin American officers
methods of torture, including use of electroshock against prisoners, the use
of drugs and other means to induce psychological regression, assassination,
and coercion against family members to compel compliance. [12] The CIA trained
Honduran intelligence unit Battalion 3-16-- which carried out torture -- in
interrogation, surveillance, and psycho logical manipulation in the 1980s.
[13] In 1997, General Eladio Moll of Uruguay testified before parliament that
during the 1970s U.S. national security officers urged their Uruguayan
counterparts to execute prisoners after interrogation, something the
Uruguayans generally did not do. [14] Another Uruguayan intelligence officer
said in 1981 that U.S. training manuals listed 35 nerve points where
electrodes could be applied during torture. [15] Retired Army Major Joseph
Blair, who participated in the Phoenix Program, has criticized the School of
the Americas repeatedly for teaching torture, assassination, and extortion.
[16] The historical record is clear, if unnerving, that use of surrogate
terrorism was U.S. policy during much of the Cold War. This record must be
faced squarely, not only for its ethical and moral implications, but also
because it meant that Condor intelligence units and military states knew they
had the "green light" for their operations. [17]
Condor's victims included guerrillas and militants as well as political
leaders, activists, and dissidents who denounced social injustice, organized
political opposition, or challenged the military states. In Walter's terms,
the larger targets of Condor were rebellious sectors of society and popular
movements demanding democratic or social change. The Argentine and Chilean
juntas specifically sought to "change the mentality" of their people. Radical
demands characterized much of the region in the 1960s and 1970s as new
aspirations for equality and social justice swept the Third World. Several
policy responses could have been chosen, but in the polarized conditions of
the Cold War, the national security states chose repression.
Operation Condor in the Inter-American Context
Operation Condor was a top-secret arrangement among South American military
intelligence agencies so united in their ideological convictions that they
continued to cooperate even when their own military governments were close to
war. [18] Condor was a highly sophisticated system of command, control,
intelligence, exchange of prisoners, and combined operations. It allowed the
militaries to act with impunity in associated countries, and to utilize
clandestine structures parallel to the state apparatus to avoid accountability
and maintain maximum secrecy. Suspects who were legally arrested could be
passed into the covert Condor system, at which point all information available
to the outside world about the person ceased. The person "disappeared" and the
state could deny responsibility and knowledge of the person's whereabouts.
Condor employed complex infrastructures and covert elimination mechanisms
(such as burning bodies or throwing them into the sea). The Condor apparatus
bypassed the official state judicial and penal structures that remained
functioning during the military regimes.
Condor was formally launched in 1975 by then-Colonel Manuel Contreras of
Chile's fearsome state security agency, the National Directorate of
Intelligence, or DINA. Condor's countersubversive operations extended into the
rest of South America, Central and North America, and Europe. [19] The most
secret aspect of Condor ("Phase III") was its capability to assassinate
political leaders especially feared for their potential to mobilize world
opinion or organize broad opposition to the military states. Victims included
former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier -- a fierce foe of the Pinochet
regime -- and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, D.C.;
Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife, in Rome;
nationalist ex-president of Bolivia Juan Jose Torres, in Buenos Aires; and two
Urugunyan legislators known for their opposition to the Uruguayan military
regime, Zelmar Michelini and Hector Gutierrez Ruiz, also in Buenos Aires. In
the first two cases, DINA assassination teams "co ntracted" local terrorist
and fascist organizations to assist in carrying out the crimes. Clearly,
Operation Condor was an organized system of state terrorism with a
transnational reach.
Condor allowed the militaries in the Southern Cone to put into practice a key
strategic concept of Cold War national security doctrine: hemispheric defense
defined by ideological frontiers. The more limited concept of territorial
defense was superseded. To the U.S. national security apparatus--which
fostered the new continent-wide security doctrine in its training centers --
and to many Latin American militaries, the Cold War represented World War III,
the war of ideologies. Security forces in Latin America classified and
targeted persons on the basis of their political ideas rather than illegal
acts. [20] The regimes hunted down dissidents and leftists, union and peasant
leaders, priests and nuns, intellectuals, students, and teachers -- not only
guerrillas (who in any event were also entitled to due process).
The 1992 discovery of the Paraguayan Archives of Terror [21] provided new, and
rare, documentation of the functioning of Condor, confirming earlier
testimonies of victims and hitherto incomplete evidence. Intact secret
archives from the national security states have been uncovered in only two
countries, Paraguay and Brazil (Davis, 1996; Pereira, 1998). The files
document the workings of an integrated system of repression that operated
through official government channels. Although such a system had been widely
perceived earlier, it is important to recall that until very recently,
military commanders had argued that the regimes were not responsible for
disappearances, or that torture and assassination were not systematic, but
only isolated "excesses." Condor was truly a well-kept secret of the Cold War;
in fact, the extent of U.S. knowledge of Condor was unclear until June 1999.
The U.S. government sponsored and collaborated with DNA and with the other
intelligence organizations forming the nucleus of Condor, despite the fact
that the military dictatorships were killing and torturing thousands of
people. In the Paraguayan Archives there were official requests to track
suspects to and from the U.S. Embassy, the CIA, and FBI. The CIA provided
lists of suspects and other intelligence information to the military states.
The FBI searched for individuals wanted by DINA in the United States in 1975.
[22] In June 1999, the State Department released thousands of declassified
documents [23] showing for the first time that the CIA and the State and
Defense Departments were intimately aware of Condor; one Defense Department
intelligence report dated October 1, 1976, noted that Latin American military
officers bragged about it to their U.S. counterparts. The same report
approvingly described Condor's "joint counterinsurgency operations" that aimed
to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities"; Arg entina, it noted, created a
special Condor team "structured much like a U.S. Special Forces Team." [24] A
CIA document called Condor "a counter-terrorism organization" and noted that
the Condor countries had a specialized telecommunications system called
"CONDORTEL." [25] In fact, an Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy
contact that the CIA was privy to Condor and had played a key role in setting
up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six
Condor states. [26]
Declassified U.S. documents and documents in the Archives show that FBI
officer Robert Scherrer, stationed in Argentina, was collaborating with Condor
operations in 1975. He apparently did not report Condor to his Washington
superiors until 1976, however, when he linked it to the recent assassination
of Letelier and Moffitt. [27] Apparently, DINA held discussions with the CIA
in 1974 about opening a Condor headquarters in Miami. [28]
The Army School of the Americas (SOA) and the Panama base of the U.S. Army
Southern Command served as a center for the continental anticommunist
alliance, and there are indications that the planning of covert operations
took place there. Certainly, many officers who designed and implemented
military terrorism in Latin America were graduates of the SOA. One military
graduate of the School said, "the school was always a front for other special
operations, covert operations." [29] Garzon has asked the United States for
any documentation linking the School with Condor. [30]
Whether Condor was the brainchild of the U.S. national security apparatus
remains unclear, but significant in itself is the accumulating evidence that
collaboration with Condor operations to target and seize leftists was U.S.
policy (if secret). Condor certainly exemplified documented U.S. priorities in
Latin America. U.S. officials worked to centralize military and police command
structures and intelligence systems, modernize communications, and foster
strategic and operational coordination in the struggle against Communism. The
United States played a central role in financing, organizing, and training the
police, military, and intelligence forces of Latin America, modernizing and
professionalizing them, and increasing their technological capabilities. We
now know that Pentagon and CIA training manuals taught methods of population
control, coercive interrogation, censorship, infiltration, surveillance,
torture, assassination, use of drugs on suspects, and other repressive
techniques. Although the documentar y record is still fragmentary and many
sources remain classified, emerging evidence on Condor and the European
stay-behind armies suggests that there was an "underside" of the Cold War that
was fought secretly, using clandestine operations and parallel armies that
escaped democratic control and violated basic human rights.
Again, Operation Condor must be understood within the broader context of the
Cold War and the security architecture shaped by the United States after World
War II. The Condor system takes on deeper meaning when viewed alongside the
European stay-behind projects discovered in 1990, part of a U.S.-led, covert
effort to set up authority structures parallel to (and often, opposed to)
elected governments and democratic institutions. [31] Like the stay-behind
armies, Condor was a clandestine component of a regional anticommunist front
and part of a covert strategy of the states involved, known only to select
officials. Operation Condor operated inside of, or parallel to, formal
military alliances such as the Rio Pact and the Conference of American Armies,
as the stay-behind programs operated secretly within NATO. (A NATO Experts
Working Group on Latin America kept close tabs on developments in Latin
America in the 1970s.) [32] Finally, there is evidence that the stay-behind
program in Italy, known as Operation Gla dio, was linked to Condor.
Comparing Condor to the European "Stay-Behind" Projects
After World War II, top U.S. national security strategists grew increasingly
alarmed by the advances of Communism in Eastern Europe and in the Far East.
U.S. national security specialists embarked on a secret, multibillion-dollar
project to develop global covert warfare [33] and propaganda machinery to wage
the Cold War against Communism. National Security Council Directive 10/2 of
June 1948 authorized a vast program of clandestine:
propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action including sabotage,
anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures...subversion against
hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements,
guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous
anti-Communist elements... [to be done so that] any U.S. government
responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if
uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility... (Church
Committee Report, Book IV, 1976:29-31, cited in Simpson, 1988: 102).
The earliest uses of targeted U.S. covert operations were in the Greek civil
war and in the Italian elections of 1948, in which the Communist Party (PCI)
stood poised to gala power. Respected domestically for its central role in the
Italian antifascist resistance, the PCI was subject to a covert U.S. campaign
of political manipulation, paramilitary action, and propaganda to undermine
its popularity. The Italian operation, which was considered successful, set a
precedent for CIA covert operations and dirty methods that became standard
practice. [34]
Throughout Europe, U.S. and British officials, operating within NATO, set up
secret stay-behind armies to prepare for a Communist invasion -- and prevent
Communist electoral victories. These paramilitary forces incorporated fascists
and former Nazis (Searchlight, 1991). One NATO source told Searchlight (a
British nongovernmental organization) that the two-pronged strategy of
Britain's Stay Behind was "to destabilize any left-leaning government, even a
Social Democratic one, and in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack to function as
a guerrilla army using classical guerrilla tactics" (Ibid.). [35] The U.S.
pushed for a secret clause in the North Atlantic Treaty requiring the secret
services of all joining nations to establish their own branches of the secret
army -- and to oppose Communist influence, even if the population voted for
Communist candidates in free elections (Simpson, 1988: 100-102; Willan, 1991:
27; Rowse, 1994). The covert project (known as Gladio in Italy, Operation Stay
Behind in the U.K., and S heepskin in Greece, among other names) encompassed
all of Europe and Scandinavia, including neutral countries. Agents set up
hundreds of arms caches all across Europe; one was at the U.S. Army's Camp
Derby (Lauria, 1991: 15; Willan, 1991: 170).
Charles deGaulle pulled France out of NATO partially due to the secret
protocol, which he considered a violation of sovereignty, and he regarded the
secret network to be a danger to his government (Willan, 1991: 27; Kwitney,
1992). Discovery of the covert project in 1990 caused a political firestorm in
Europe. In that year, the European Parliament passed a strongly worded
denunciation of the clandestine organization, its antidemocratic implications,
and the terrorist acts associated with it. [36]
Italian investigators discovered connections between the secret Gladio plans
and well-known terrorist acts, attempted military coups, and the undermining
of democratic institutions in the 1970s and 1980s. Later, investigators linked
Gladio with terrorist attacks officially attributed to left-wing guerrillas,
such as the Red Brigades' 1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo
Moro, who was moving to include the Communist Party in a coalition government.
(In 1974, Henry Kissinger and a U.S. intelligence official had warned Moro
against a rapprochement with the Communists, in a meeting that greatly upset
Moro [Willan, 1991: 220].) A parliamentary commission on terrorism concluded
that the infamous 1980 bombing of the Bolognarail station, which killed 85
people and wounded 200, used bomb materials from a Gladio arsenal. [37] One
major neofascist figure, Licio Gelli, was found guilty by an Italian court in
this bombing case, but later the conviction was overturned, causing a national
outcry. According to Arthur Rowse (1991), after collaborating with the Nazis
in World War II, Gelli joined the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. He was
the founder (in 1964) of the global Masonic lodge Propaganda-Due (P-2), an
anticommunist organization with close links to military and intelligence
organizations (notably the CIA) and powerful political figures worldwide. [38]
P-2 was outlawed in Italy in 1981 after it was discovered to have infiltrated
its members into strategic government, military, and intelligence positions,
in preparation for taking over the government. P-2 also wielded significant
influence in Argentina. [39]
A 1992 British Broadcasting Company (BBC) documentary on the Cold War featured
an interview with U.S. Colonel Oswald LeWinter, who asserted that the CIA had
penetrated or controlled right-wing terrorist organizations, including P [2,]
and recruited members on the basis of anticommunism. [40] Gelli was a key
figure linking U.S. officials, the CIA, and Argentine military commanders,
among others, [41] and there was overlap between Gladio and P-2. European
journalists reported that a former NATO operative said that the CIA deputy
station chief in Rome, Ted Shackley, introduced Gelli to General Alexander
Haig, then Nixon's chief of staff and later, from 1974 to 1979, NATO Supreme
Commander. Gladio reportedly received major funding with the approval of Haig
and Henry Kissinger, then head of the National Security Council. [42]
During the investigation of Gladio, former Italian Defense Minister Paulo
Taviani told a judge that the Italian secret services were directed and
financed by CIA officers stationed in the U.S. Embassy. [43] Indeed, General
Giovanni de Lorenzo, who headed the secret service called SIFAR (1956), later
headed the Caribineri (1962), and then became Defense Minister (1964),
conducted secret counterterrorism planning with U.S. officials but did not
inform his own government. [44] SIFAR compiled surveillance information on
tens of thousands of Italians (Statewatch, n.d.). De Lorenzo's Operation Solo
was a plan to take over media networks, arrest politicians, seize the offices
of leftist parties, and even to assassinate Moro. [45] These sorts of
operations are strongly reminiscent of those carried out by the Condor
militaries and they illuminate the key role of the CIA. De Lorenzo was the key
Gladio contact with the U.S. government, and Vernon Walters was a key U.S.
link to De Lorenzo (Rowse, 1994: 3).
In short, evidence suggests that key individuals formed part of a global
anticommunist network that involved P-2, Condor, Gladia, the CIA, and defense
and intelligence personnel in Western countries. Although direct evidence of
CIA involvement in Condor remains scarce, the agency was as deeply involved in
the Latin American military intelligence organizations as it was in Europe's.
[46]
The Origins of Condor
DINA, the Chilean intelligence organization that set up the logistics of
Condor, was created shortly after the September 1973 coup. Its first
incarnation was as the secret DINA Commission, an ideologically extreme and
committed group of army colonels and majors. [47] The junta officially
established DINA in June 1974 as an autonomous intelligence agency reporting
directly to the junta, more powerful than the intelligence branches of the
four armed forces. DINA's mission was to eliminate internal enemies, and the
agency quickly became the main perpetrator of a pattern of terrorist
practices, such as disappearance and torture (Comision Nacional, Rettig
Report, 1991: 449--452). One DINA operative explained DINA's strategy as
follows: "First the aim was to stop terrorism, then possible extremists were
targeted, and later those who might be converted into extremists." [48]
(Similar language was used in 1977 by Argentine General Iberico St.-Jean when
he said: "First we will kill all the subversives; then we will k ill their
collaborators; then their sympathizers; then those who are indifferent....")
[49] These statements reflected the extremist concepts of the national
security doctrine that formed the philosophical foundation of the national
security states.
DINA's Manuel Contreras visualized Condor as an application of modern
technology and communications to the anticorumunist crusade. In August 1975,
Contreras flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with Vernon Walters, the CIA
Deputy Director and a veteran of covert operations. The subject of the meeting
remains secret. [50] A month later, Contreras wrote a memo to Pinochet asking
for an extra $600,000 for "the neutralization of the junta's principal
opponents outside Chile," in Argentina, the USA, Italy, and elsewhere. [51]
Contreras traveled in 1975 to Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil,
and Venezuela to advocate cross-border intelligence cooperation (Dinges and
Landau, 1980:155--157; Brandt, 1998). A letter from Contreras dated October
1975 in the Paraguayan Archives invited General Francisco Brites, chief of the
Paragunyan police, to "a Working Meeting of National Intelligence" to be held
in Santiago under "strict secrecy." The purpose of the meeting was to be the
establishment of "an excellent coord ination and improved action to benefit
National Security." [52] The minutes of the meeting, dated October 29, 1975,
included a proposal for action and an organizational structure. The document's
introduction was worded in the apocalyptic language of the national security
doctrine, and stated that:
Subversion, for some years, has been present in our Continent, sheltered by
politico-economic concepts that are fundamentally contrary to History,
Philosophy, Religion, and the traditions of the countries of our Hemisphere.
This described situation recognizes no Frontiers or Countries, and the
infiltration penetrates all levels of National life.... [I]t is to confront
this Psycho-political War that we have determined that we must function in the
international environment not with a command centralized in its internal
functioning, but with an efficient Coordination that will permit an opportune
interchange of intelligence and experience as well as a certain level of
personal relations among the chiefs responsible for Security. [53]
The document proposed a security system with three elements: an Office of
Coordination and Security that would include a computerized central data bank
of suspects, "something similar to Interpol, but dedicated to Subversion"; an
information center with special communication channels, a cryptology
capability, telephones with scrambling mechanisms, and message systems; and
permanent working meetings. The Chileans offered Santiago as the headquarters
of the system, specifying that the "technical personnel" of the system would
be equally represented by participating countries. These technical personnel
would have diplomatic immunity, and the Chileans proposed that they be from
the intelligence services. It appears that the "technical personnel" were the
intelligence agents who carried out Condor operations, including
disappearances and assassinations, and they were to have free passage in
member countries. (Two Chilean members of the unit who were preparing the
Letelier assassination, for example, acquired fals e passports in Paraguay in
1976 [Dinges and Landau, 1980: 184, 188--193].) The ensuing days of meetings
in Santiago were focused on each country's "situation of Subversion and the
forms of combating it," as well as the construction of the system of
intelligence coordination.
The sanitized technical language masked the nature of the Condor system, which
represented the internationalization of military repressive structures and
operations respecting no civilian or constitutional law. Essentially, the
intelligence organizations "exported" their dirty wars by pooling their
resources to better track and eliminate political opposition across borders.
Condor Counterinsurgency Operations
In 1974 and 1975, as large numbers of people disappeared and disfigured bodies
began to be found, Latin Americans perceived a terrible new level of death
squad operations. The mutilated bodies of 119 missing Chilean leftists, many
of whom originally had been detained by Chilean security forces and others who
had disappeared, were discovered in 1975, mainly in Argentina, but also in
several other countries. Chilean newspapers printed sensationalist stories
blaming deadly "vendettas" within Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria
(MIR), a revolutionary (but not a guerrilla) organization, and other leftist
organizations. Other stories warned of a dangerous guerrilla army massing in
Argentina and poised to attack Chile. Years later, secret DINA files were
discovered showing that the 119 were disappeared and murdered as part of a
combined Chilean-Argentine security operation called Operation Colombo, linked
to Chilean and Argentine Condor operatives. DNA and Argentine intelligence
organizations had planted the false stories and false identifications of the
victims as part of a PSYWAR campaign designed to obscure and confuse (the best
source is CODEPU, 1994; see also Comision Nacional/Rettig Report, 1991:
482--84; CODEPU, 1996). Clearly, the objectives were to discredit leftist and
human rights organizations opposed to the coup, to create fear and
disorientation, to provide heroic justification for the countersubversive
campaigns of the militaries, and to win support for the Chilean military
regime. (Significantly, Argentina was still under the civilian rule of Isabel
Peros in these years.)
In other cases, some 30 bodies appeared in Buenos Aires, but were so
disfigured by torture that they were unrecognizable. Another 20 bodies washed
up on shore in Uruguay, showing signs of torture, gunshot wounds, and rape;
authorities said the victims were Asians from off-shore fishing boats (Blixen,
1995b: 4). Dozens of Bolivians and Chileans living under the protection of the
United Nations in Buenos Aires were seized and disappeared in 1976 (Comisi6n
Nacional/Rettig Report, 1991: 598-99; Sivak, 1998: 119--122). Bolivian
ex-President Torres was assassinated in Buenos Aires that year, as were the
two Uruguayan legislators opposed to their country's military regime,
Michelini and Gitoerrez Ruiz. The military states made little distinction
between local revolutionary insurgents such as Argentine ERP militants,
Chilean MIR members, and Uruguayan Tupamaros, and unarmed political opponents
of the military states and their families and friends.
Condor's combined operations in the Southern Cone were carried out by
squadrons of two or more South American military and/or police commandos to
abduct victims and bring them to torture centers in police commissaries,
military barracks, or abandoned buildings. Targets were immediately deprived
of any rights, blindfolded, maltreated, and never acknowledged to be prisoners
by the regime. There was no semblance of due process for the prisoners -- and
there were many thousands of prisoners. In Argentina, where Condor operations
were extensive, a former garage called Orletti Motors became a central
clandestine detention center for Condor, holding prisoners from Uruguay,
Chile, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Uruguayan and Chilean intelligence, police, and
military officers operated freely with logistical assistance from the
Argentines.
In CELS microfiches #30 and #31, there are 22 testimonies of the few survivors
of Orletti, which was under the command of the First Army Corps. In 1975,
General Albano Harguindeguy was the subzone commander of the Buenos Aires
area; Orletti was under his jurisdiction, as were six other clandestine
torture centers. After the March 1976 military coup, Harguindeguy became the
junta's Interior Minister. Anibal Gordon -- a civilian who was a former
operative in the notorious Triple A death squad -- was in charge of operations
in Orletti. Uruguayan and Chilean intelligence officers were regularly present
in Orletti, participating in torture and interrogation of prisoners.
Several cases illuminate Condor operations in Orletti. Victor Lubian, who
provided testimony in November 1978, was born in Argentina but moved to
Uruguay at five years of age. He became active in the 1970s in the Federation
of University Students of Uruguay, an organization declared illegal, by
military decree, in December 1973. In January 1974 he returned to Argentina,
but six months later he was detained in his house by a parapolice commando of
Argentines and Uruguayans. He was held in Orletti until July 24, when he was
transferred to Montevideo with other Uruguayans in a Uruguayan Air Force plane
(CELS microfiches 30 and 31). On October 23, 1976, Lubian was charged there
with "assisting a subversive association," and on November 29 was transferred
to Establecimiento Militar de Reclusion number 1, the notorious Libertad
prison.
Lubian described the methods of the torturers in Orletti: "they created a
relation of absolute dependence under an omnipotent and anonymous authority,
one could do nothing for himself, not the most basic thing...a glass of water,
or to be able to go to the bathroom, were worth more than all the money in the
world." Prisoners who collaborated were rewarded with drinks of water and
beaten if they didn't, creating a sense of personal responsibility for
torture. Drugs were some times used on prisoners to disorient them and make
them talk. Lubian testified that some torturers enjoyed using aberrant,
sadistic sexual tortures directed against both men and women. The torturers
all used the same name, Oscar: they called themselves Oscar 1, Oscar 2, and
Oscar 3, etc.; Oscar 5 was a doctor who kept victims alive. Lubian believed
all were Uruguayan army officers. One officer known as "302" was Jose Gavazzo,
the executive chief of operations who operated out of Orletti.
Lubian witnessed members of the Santucho family in Orletti. Mario Roberto
Santucho, the leader of the Argentine guerrilla organization Ejercito
Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), was killed in a military operation on July
18, 1976. Yet afterwards, other members of his family, who were not involved
in politics, were tortured and killed out of pure sadism. In Orletti, brother
Carlos Santucho was hung from a hook over a tub of filthy water and repeatedly
lowered into it. He appeared to have lost his mind from torture, raving in a
delirious manner. Lubian said the guards forced his sister, Manuela Santucho,
to read aloud the newspaper story of Mario's death. Then they tortured and
raped her, using methods that he called "the product of sick imaginations."
Enrique Rodriguez Laretta was a well-known Uruguayan journalist who was seized
because his son was a political militant. He testified that there were
pictures of Hitler on the walls inside Orletti. He recognized the voices of
two Uruguayan union leaders who had disappeared in Argentina. According to
Rodriguez Laretta, the guards were Argentines and his kidnappers were officers
of the Uruguayan army. The Uruguayans participated directly in the torture.
Rodriguez Laretta also described Oscar 1, 2, and 3, and identified officers in
the Uruguayan military intelligence organization SID (Servicio de
Informaciones de Defensa) and OCOA (Organismo Coordinador de Operaciones
Anti-Subversivos). SID was directly under the command of the Urugunyan junta
and one of its commanders was Gavazzo.
Another Uruguayan case was that of Sara Mendez. Late on July 13, 1976, a
15-man commando broke down the door of her Buenos Aires apartment, and seized
and tortured her. She perceived that there were two teams, one Argentine and
one Uruguayan, and she identified Gavazzo. The men took her baby and brought
her to Orletti. She was transferred with the group of Uruguayans to
Montevideo, and was eventually released in May 1981, but she has not been
reunited with her son. In recent years, human rights groups have gathered
substantial evidence that baby trafficking by the militaries was systematic
and well organized across borders, another dimension of Condor operations
(Alganaraz, 1999; Brown, 1999).
Sergio Lopez Burgos was a Uruguayan unionist who was detained and maltreated
after the June 1973 coup in Uruguay. He moved to Argentina in April 1975 and
became a legal resident, with permission to work. He, with a colleague, formed
a commission-in-exile of the Convencion Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT,
National Convention of Workers), which was dedicated to solidarity activities
with labor unions suffering repression in Uruguay. In July 1976, Lopez and his
colleague, Leon Duarte, were seized in a Buenos Aires cafe by a team of 12 men
in civilian clothes that included Uruguayan army officers, The two shouted to
others in the cafe that they were unionists and that this was a disappearance.
The kidnappers were infuriated and one whipped out an identification and
shouted that this was an Argentine army operation and that people should
remain calm. Lopez had his jaw broken as the squadron dragged him out of the
cafe. He testified that he was taken to Orletti, where he saw Hector Mendez, a
Uruguayan leader of the Congreso Obrero Textil and the CNT. For 12 or 14 days,
the prisoners ate only three times. Lopez reported that he saw a guard raping
a semi-conscious woman prisoner.
All told, 169 Uruguayans disappeared between 1971 and 1981, and an astounding
127 of them disappeared in Argentina (Barahona de Brito, 1997: 48). General
Amauri Prantl, head of the Uruguayan Defense Intelligence Service, supervised
the secret Condor operations, coordinating the actions of police, military,
and intelligence operatives and units under the Oficina Coordinadora de
Operaciones Anti-Subversivas (OCOA). Prantl worked with Argentine General Otto
Paladino -- then head of the State Intelligence Service, or SIDE -- in
coordinating cross-border operations (Ibid.).
There was a curious sequel to the evidence about Uruguayan officers in Condor.
Gavazzo and several other officers based in Orletti were pardoned by Argentine
President Menem in 1989, at the request of Uruguayan civilian president
Sanguinetti, along with Argentine military officers accused of human rights
crimes and sedition. For an Argentine president to pardon Uruguayan officers
was clearly an odd, and constitutionally dubious, move. In 1995, Gavazzo was
jailed in Uruguay for extortion, but he has not admitted to human rights
abuses (Blixen, 1995b: 1; Blixen, 1995a: 3).
Cases of Chileans Who Disappeared
A key case illuminating U.S. involvement in Condor countersubversive
operations was that of Chilean Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcon, who was seized by
Paraguayan police as he crossed the border from Argentina to Paraguay in May
1975. Fuentes, a sociologist who was apparently a courier for MIR, was
traveling with Amilcar Santucho, another brother of the ERP leader. The Rettig
Commission learned that the capture of Fuentes was a cooperative effort by
Argentine intelligence services, personnel of the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires
(who reported the results of Fuentes' interrogation to Chilean police), and
Paraguayan police. Fuentes was transferred to the Chilean police, who brought
him to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious DINA detention center in Santiago. He was
last seen there, savagely tortured (Comision Nacional/Rettig Report, 1991:
595-596; CODEPU, 1996: 78-83).
Recently declassified documents include a letter from the U.S. Embassy in
Buenos Aires (written by Robert Scherrer) informing the Chilean military of
the capture of Fuentes. Scherrer provided the names and addresses of three
individuals residing in the United States whom Fuentes named during his
interrogation, and stated that the FBI was conducting investigations of the
three. [54] This letter, among others, confirms that U.S. officials and
agencies were cooperating with the military dictatorships and acting as a link
in the Condor chain. Perhaps most striking is that this coordination was
routine (if secret), standard operating procedure within U.S. policy.
Another Chilean case was of a man born in Argentina who moved to Chile after
the Argentine coup of 1966. Patricio Biedma married Luz Lagarrigua and had
three children; he also became involved with MIR. After the 1973 coup in
Chile, the family moved back to Buenos Aires. There, Biedma was seized and
disappeared in July 1976, for his activities in Chile. He was held in Orletti
Motors and interrogated by a Chilean intelligence officer. Luz Lagarrigun went
to Cuba and for years had no idea of what had happened to him. In 1983, after
the fall of the military government in Argentina, she returned there to search
for her husband. She learned nothing about his fate, however, and neither did
CONADEP, the Argentine commission on the disappeared. Several years later, a
young man came forward and said he had known her husband in Orletti. He told
her that Biedma was like a father to him in the detention center, teaching him
how to survive and staying close to him. They were together 45 days, but then
the young man was re leased. His family sent him to Spain, where for years he
was afraid to say anything about his experience. [55] Lagarrigun never learned
what finally happened to her husband.
The Paraguayan Archives have actually solved some cases of the disappeared.
One such case involved two Argentine members of the Peronist Youth, Dora Marta
Landi and Alejandro Logoluso, who went to Paraguay after the 1976 coup in
Argentina. They were arrested in Asuncion in March 1977, but the authorities
told their parents they were later freed. The Argentine junta consistently
denied any knowledge of their whereabouts. Official documents found in the
Archives proved, however, that the two had been detained by the Paraguayan
police and then on May 16, 1977, delivered to an Argentine military unit (two
army intelligence officers and one navy officer from an infamous torture
center). They were flown in an Argentine navy plane to Buenos Aires, where the
trail ended. The Paraguayan police report included their photos and
fingerprints and the names of the Argentine officers who took them. [56]
High-Level Assassinations
The first major Condor-style assassination occurred in 1974, before the
official founding of Condor. Chilean General Carlos Prats, a constitutionalist
who was Allende's commander-in-chief and who had opposed the 1973 coup, was
murdered in Buenos Aires along with his wife in a DNA car bombing. In 1975,
Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife were
ambushed and wounded in an assassination attempt in Rome. The assassination in
Washington, D.C., of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt occurred in 1976. DNA
agents contracted fascist terrorists ia Italy -- including several involved in
the Gladio network -- and Cuban exiles in the right-wing Cuban Nationalist
Movement to assist in carrying Out the respective crimes. A U.S. expatriate
and DNA assassin, Michael Townley, links all three cases. In Chile, Townley
claimed that he was a CIA operative, as did his defense attorney during the
Letelier assassination trial in the United States, but the CIA said he was
not. He was a U.S. Embassy informa nt and a militant in Patria y Libertad, the
right-wing terrorist group funded by the CIA. [57]
Townley eventually revealed the details of the Letelier and Moffitt
assassinations in a U.S. court. He and a Chilean officer named Armando
Fernandez Larios obtained false passports in Paraguay, telling diplomats there
they had CIA approval for a secret mission in the United States. Townley and
Ferndndez originally communicated with Colonel Benito Guanes, [58] the
Paragunyan army intelligence chief who since has been linked to Condor. U.S.
Ambassador George Landau became suspicious, however, and informed the CIA;
which told him there was no such mission. [59] Two other DNA agents eventually
traveled on false Chilean passports to Washington, and they sent word to
General Vernon Walters at the CIA when they arrived. Thus, Dinges and Landau
posit that the CIA-under Director George Bush at the time -- knew DNA was
planning a covert operation in Washington, D.C., yet did not notify law
enforcement or Letelier himself. In September 1976, Townley arrived in
Washington and recruited individuals from the Cuban Nationa list Movement, all
but one of whom had been involved in the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs operation
(Landau, 1978: 12; Branch and Propper, 1982: 349-352). They monitored
Letelier, bought explosives, built a bomb, and placed it under his car.
The CIA neglected to inform federal investigators about what it knew for
months after the crime while prosecutors tried to identify the assassins.
Indeed, the CIA promoted the hypothesis that the crime had been committed by
the Left, and insisted that DNA was not involved (Landau, 1978: 33-35; Dinges
and Landau, 1980: 382-398; Corn, 1994: 329). Meanwhile, the Chilean junta
denied responsibility and Contreras blamed the CIA (Valenzuela and Constable,
1991: 105-106). Given the CIA's knowledge of DNA operations, and its close
links to DNA and to Cuban exile groups, its behavior raises suspicions. The
CIA's reaction resembled the classic black propaganda tactic of blaming the
other side in order to deceive and confuse.
Since turning state's evidence in the Letelier case, Townley has been in the
Witness Protection Program. The Clinton administration refused to let Spanish
lawyers interview Townley in 1998 (Vest, 1998). Armando Ferndndez, who was
also accused of a role in the Prats murder, lives in Miami today, also under
federal protection, running an import-export business. He has been sued by the
family of a Chilean economist tortured and murdered by DNA, in a
groundbreaking case (Imerman, n.d.; Kidwell, 1999). Two of the Cubans
convicted in the Letelier hit managed to elude authorities until 1990 and
1991, respectively. Two others escaped conviction on appeal, and in 1990 were
associated with the Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami (Landau and
Anderson, 1998; New York Times editorial, 1990).
DINA operatives and Pinochet himself met with Italian neofascist Stefano Della
Chiaie (who was suspected of involvement in the 1980 bombing in Bologna) in
Madrid and discussed the assassination operation to take place in Rome against
Leighton. [60] Townley, testifying in an Italian court about that crime, said
that it was carried out via "a global anti-Marxist agreement." He admitted
that he met 10 or 15 times with Della Chiaie to organize the attack. [61] In
October 1975, Della Chiaie's terrorist organization, Avanguardia Nazionale,
carried out the assassination attempt (Cuya, 1993). Another Italian fascist
convicted of terrorist bombings, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, testified in court that
members of his paramilitary organization, Ordine Nuovo, were tools of the
secret services (Willan, 1991: 138, 141) and linked to Gladio. Vinciguerra
said Gladio had carried out bombings attributed to the Left, that it was
linked to NATO, and that it recruited among fascist circles. Vinciguerra added
that the network had been u sed for domestic purposes "by national and
international forces...principally the United States of America." [62] He
confirmed that the Leighton attack was arranged by "a secret structure of the
Latin American intelligence services called Operation Condor" (Blixen, 1995c:
3). In 1995, an Italian court found Contreras and other DINA officers guilty
in absentia of the Leighton attack. [63]
Della Chiaie also participated in the 1980 coup in Bolivia, along with former
Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and Argentine military officers, an event that
graphically illustrated the global nature of the right-wing anticommunist
alliance during the Cold War. [64]
The Role of National Security Ideologies and Doctrines
Why did U.S. officials form alliances with antidemocratic and fascist groups
and militaries? The secret 1954 Doolittle Report sheds light on this question.
It made the case that the United States faced a total war against "an
implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination." Echoing the
alarmist National Security Directive/68 (NSC/68) of 1950, [65] it continued:
There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct
do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American
concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.... We must learn to subvert,
sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more
effective methods than those used against us. [66]
As Kathryn Olmsted (1996: 110) observes, this manner of thinking evolved into
a philosophy in which the ends justified the means, giving rise to abuses. The
philosophy formed the basis for a strategic national security doctrine that
was diffused to Latin American militaries. Ia Latin America, doctrines of
internal war emerged during the 1960s that blended the militaries' traditional
organic and authoritarian conceptions of their role with newer U.S. and French
counterinsurgency doctrines. The new national security doctrine encouraged a
concept of countersubversive war subject to no rules or ethics, a "dirty war"
that had to be won at all costs. Moreover, a large part of the civilian
population was defined as potentially or actually subversive; domestic
conflicts were viewed through the East-West prism and "internationalized." The
Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (or Rettig Commission) captured
well the intrusion of the international forces of the Cold War in Chile,
especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and the internationalization of
domestic political conflicts:
The announcement or appearance of [insurgent] "focos" and the idea...that they
corresponded to an inspiration and central direction for Latin America led
many states, and fundamentally the United States, to initiate a
counterinsurgency movement. Like the focos themselves, this movement was
simultaneously local, in each country, and central, exhibiting a certain
coordination among all the Latin American countries. The central coordination
was the charge of the United States, which took advantage of its military
training schools to teach, year after year, generations of military officers
of many countries. Counterinsurgency was a technique...but also seems to have
hidden within it an implicit doctrine or philosophy... (Comision
Nacional/Rettig Report, 1991: 44).
National security doctrines and anticommunist ideologies appear to have been
an important determinant of state terrorism in Latin America, as they
dehumanized whole categories of people and provided a quasi-religious
rationale for their torture and destruction. We now reflect upon the
significance of such ideologies in the international system.
Conclusions and Notes continued in next post due to board software limits
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