Operation Condor on Trial in Argentina

[Judi Lynn]

Source: IPS News

Operation Condor on Trial in Argentina
By Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 5 2013 (IPS) - The trial over a campaign of terror coordinated among the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America in the 1970s and 1980s began Tuesday in Buenos Aires with former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla as one of the main defendants, along with another 24 former military officers.

Under Operation Condor, as the coordination between the military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay was known, opponents of the regimes were tracked down, kidnapped, tortured, transferred across borders and killed – including guerrilla fighters, political activists, trade unionists, students, priests, journalists or mothers demanding to know what had happened to their missing sons and daughters.

“This is the first time in Latin America that a trial is being held over Operation Condor, to prosecute those responsible, above and beyond trials held in some countries for specific cases,” lawyer Luz Palmas of the Fundación Liga Argentina por los Derechos Humanos (FUNLADDHH), a human rights organisation, told IPS.

The 25 defendants include Videla and other former generals like Reynaldo Bignone and Luciano Benjamín Menéndez. Uruguayan general Manuel Cordero, prosecuted for the role he played in the illegal detention centre at Automotores Orletti in Buenos Aires, was extradited from Brazil for this trial.

Read more: http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/operation-condor-on-trial-in-argentina/

[Orrex]

1. I was totally hoping that this was about Jackie Chan

Another disappointment...

[Coyotl]

5. I was totally hoping that this was about George Bush

George Bush Sr. May Face Charges: Conspiring to Kidnap and Murder Political Activists
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2459135

[Comrade Grumpy]

2. I wish those people talking about the horrible Chavez dictatorship knew some Latin American history.

[Judi Lynn]

3. It defies common sense. They are driven to offer the opinions someone gave them. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

4. Operation Condor" Was No Mystery to Washington

Operation Condor" Was No Mystery to Washington
by Ángel Páez
www.ipsnews.net/, January 12, 2008


The intelligence services of Peru and Argentina kept Washington informed in real time about a 1980 joint clandestine operation in which four alleged members of Argentina's Montoneros guerrilla movement were "disappeared," according to documents declassified in the United States.
The incident forms part of the case opened in December by Italian Judge Luisianna Figliola, who issued arrest warrants for those responsible for this and other actions carried out in the framework of Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, torturing and eliminating left-wing opponents.

Townsend B. Friedman, political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, revealed in a secret Aug. 19, 1980 memo to Claus Ruser, the ambassador's number two man, details about the operation involving the supposed Montoneros in Lima, and the fatal outcome.
In that memo, which has now been declassified thanks to the efforts of the National Security Archive, an independent Washington-based non-governmental research institute, Friedman told his superior that an Argentine intelligence official had provided them with details of the Lima operation on Jun. 16, 1980.

The date is key: the joint action by the Batallón 601, a special Argentine army intelligence unit, and Peru's Army Intelligence Service (SIE) was recorded four days earlier, and the purported Montoneros were turned over by Peruvian agents on Jun. 17 to Bolivian military personnel, in the presence of agents from Argentina.
The documents show that the U.S. government was fully aware of what was happening, at the time it was occurring, and that it knew ahead of time that the alleged Montoneros would be killed.

More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/OperCondor_NoMystery_US.html

[Coyotl]

6. and it was coordinated using the communications capabilities of the U.S. Southern Command.

The U.S. was far more than just "aware" of Operation Condor. But that part is covert, of course.

[AntiFascist]

11. The National Security Archive goes pretty far, in this declassified cable report...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010306/

On March 6, 2001, The New York Times reported the existence of a recently declassified State Department document revealing that the United States facilitated communications among South American intelligence chiefs who were working together to eliminate left-wing opposition groups in their countries as part of a covert program known as Operation Condor.

The document, a 1978 cable from Robert E. White, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, was discovered by Professor J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University, who has published several articles on Condor. She called the cable "another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S. military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor."

...

"This document opens a pandora's box of questions on the U.S. knowledge of, and role in, Operation Condor," said Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project.

[Coyotl]

13. Just another case of a covert operation remaining covert.

These hints should be enough to tell us the truth, that the operation was US sanctioned, sponsored, and coordinated. One day someone in Latin America is going to reveal the truth.

[Octafish]

7. Los Amigos de Bush

Thank you for the heads-up, Judi Lynn. May all the mass murderers and warmongers face justice for what they have done in this life.

There are many in this country who should also face justice for their roles in CONDOR:

Know your BFEE: Wake up and smell the sulfur

[Judi Lynn]

8. Argentina: Trial for Operation Condor

Argentina: Trial for Operation Condor
By Karafillis Giannoulis | March 6, 2013 - 10:01am

Argentina's former junta leader Rafael Videla, and Reynaldo Bignone, are scheduled to stand trial. The remaining 23 defendants originate from Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. A prosecutor told news agency AFP, that this is the first trial to focus on Condor Crimes and it will seek to reveal the coordinated efforts across borders.

The lawyer who represents victims from Argentina and Uruguay said, “what we must now prove is the existence of an illicit association between the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to pursue and eliminate opponents in any of those countries, with the support of the United States.”

Lorena Balardini, research coordinator for the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a local human rights group, told Interpress that this trial “is the biggest to be held so far in the region over Operation Condor, and could serve as an impetus for other countries where there have been delays or backsliding.”

The Operation Condor trial could stretch on for up to two years.

http://www.neurope.eu/article/argentina-trial-operation-condor

[The Magistrate]

9. Good That This Is Being Done, Ma'am

My only regret is that it is not possible for these vicious creatures to suffer the full measure of pain they deserve to, even on conviction.

[Judi Lynn]

10. By the time you learn they were throwing political prisoners out of airplanes

into the Pacific, or into the rivers, etc. you realize they had become monsters beyond anyone's wildest reckoning, and with the faithful support of Henry Kissinger throughout.

Speaking of monsters, this is a man whose name horrified masses, who also worked for the Operation Condor people, next door in Chile, as an employee of General Pinochet. I just remembered him a moment ago, and felt any continent-wide movement with torturers whose names are reckognized is a movement which should have been snuffed out rather than encouraged.

From Wikipedia

Osvaldo Romo Mena (c. 1938 – July 4, 2007) was an agent of the Chilean Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) from 1973 to 1990, during the rule of Augusto Pinochet. Involved in the forced disappearance of more than a hundred persons (among which the Spanish priest Antonio Llidó Mengual, member of Cristianos por el socialismo (Christians for Socialism) and MIR members Diana Aron Svigilsky, Manuel Cortez Joo and Ofelio Lazo), he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but several of these sentences were suspended by the Chilean Supreme Court.[1]

[edit] Life

Osvaldo Romo made himself known in working classes' neighborhoods before Pinochet's coup in 1973 as a leftist activist, member of the Partido Socialista Popular and sympathizant of the MIR.[1] Following the coup, he reappeared in these neighborhoods with a military uniform, arresting his friends and contacts. Left-wing circles still debate to know if he suddenly changed political orientation or if he always was a mole for the security services.[1]

Known as Guatón Romo ("Fatso Romo&quot or Comandante Raúl, he was one of DINA's most important torturers, operating among others centers in Villa Grimaldi.[1] On April 11, 1995, in an interview televised by Univisión, he commented in great detail, and evidently without remorse, on the techniques that had been used. These included the application of electricity to women's nipples and genitals, the use of dogs, and the insertion of rats into women's vaginas.[1]

—Would you do it again? Would you do it the same way?
—Sure, I'd do the same and more. I wouldn't leave anybody alive (...) That was one of DINA's mistakes. I was always arguing with my general: don't leave that person alive, don't let that person go free. There are consequences.
—As for throwing the corpses of the prisoners into the sea...
—I think it could have happened. (...) Throwing them into the crater of a volcano would be better... (...) Who'd go looking for them in a volcano? Nobody.
—On the day you die... what would your epitaph say? "Here lies the hangman, the torturer, the murderer..."
—Logical, logical. I accept that. But for me it was a positive thing. (...) I am at peace with my conscience and my beliefs.

— Extract from the interview,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osvaldo_Romo

[center]

Osvaldo Romo Mena [/center]

[Solly Mack]

12. K&R