24 former officers linked to Plan Condor convicted in Italy

[sandensea]

An appeals court in Rome convicted 24 former South American officers for their roles in at least 43 deaths of Italian nationals in the 1970s CIA-sponsored anti-subversive campaign known as 'Plan Cóndor'.

The convictions cap a 20-year legal effort that began with an investigation launched into Plan Cóndor-associated Italian deaths by prosecutors in Rome in 1999.

Arrest warrants were issued for 146 individuals in 2006. But due to a lack of cooperation from most of the South American nations involved, only one - former Uruguayan Navy Intelligence head Jorge Troccoli - was ultimately arrested.

Troccoli, 70, had emigrated to Italy, and was arrested in Salerno in 2007. Of the 24 defendants from Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, he was the only one present at the trial.

He had been acquitted of all charges by a local Roman court in 2017; but was convicted in today's appeals court ruling. Extradition requests have been filed against the others.

Cóndor then and now

Plan Cóndor, formally established in November 1975 as a secret pact between the military intelligence heads of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, led, according to Paraguayan military documents, to the deaths of at least 50,000 dissidents over the next decade.

Through numerous Italian operatives, Cóndor was closely linked to the NATO-sponsored Operation Gladio, which sought to foment a "strategy of tension" in Italy during the 1970s as a means of undermining communist support there.

To many political observers in South America, Cóndor has a direct parallel to the recent wave of often unfounded charges against former officials in many of the center-left administrations that governed the region from 2003 to 2016.

These include those against former Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, who was revealed in February to be the main target of a wide-reaching, Argentine Intelligence-run extortion and coercion scheme against contractors and her former officials. And that of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who remains in prison despite a lack of proof and despite recently-published recordings showing a coordinated, politically-motivated prosecution against him.

Both countries are now governed by hard-right - and unpopular - presidents who've expressed their desire to see Kirchner and da Silva in prison, and who work closely with the magistrates involved in their cases.

"I must say, for those who do not know, that Operation Condor never ended," Argentine exile Julio Frondizi, whose father, Professor Silvio Frondizi, was murdered by the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (which carried out the first stage of that country's Dirty War) in 1974.

"It goes on."

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=wT&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pagina12.com.ar%2F205121-condenan-a-perpetua-a-24-represores-sudamericanos-en-italia-

Former Uruguayan Navy Intelligence head Jorge Troccoli (left) during his trial in Rome.

Troccoli was one of 24 former South American dictatorship officials convicted in today's ruling. But due to lack a lack of cooperation from most of the countries involved, the other 23 remain at large.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Excellent, unexpected news!

Had heart years ago they went all over the world in pursuit of leftists they wanted to eliminate.

They have had so much support at various times, and wielded far more power than most people would be able to imagine.

Can't imagine what it means if they are trying to round them up, when they have been used so freely to murder people for politics.

This is something to think over, and to remember. Hope there will be more developments, and we can see changes which would have seemed impossible in the past.

Very mysterious to think of this happening in the time of Macri, and Bolsonaro, and Trump, etc. Don't know how to understand the timing, but it is needed progress.

Here's an article which mentions the Cuban exile, CIA operative, terrorist and murderer, Luis Posada Carriles. The Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance is mentioned in it:

The Dirty War on Cuba

. . .

Posada had established his contacts in the Argentine government when he worked for the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, a paramilitary death squad, in the mid-1970s. CORU was strongly implicated in the assassination of Orlando Letelier in September 1976, when Posada was indicted as a conspirator. CORU was founded at a 1976 meeting in the Dominican Republic, primarily to provide "external support" for the Argentine and Chilean governments, with the understanding that those governments would reciprocate with support for anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

More:
https://www.ibiblio.org/prism/jan98/cuba.html

On edit:

One can only imagine how the close supporters of the previous Presidents who have been harmed by these guys are feeling...

[Judi Lynn]

2. Don't forget Uruguay requested the services so many years ago, of the US "torture specialist"

Dan Mitrione, who was delivered to Uruguay to teach torture techniques to Uruguayan cops.


Daniel Anthony "Dan" Mitrione (August 4, 1920 – August 10, 1970) was an Italian-born[1] American U.S. government advisor for the CIA in Latin America. He taught torture techniques to the Brazilian and Uruguayan police. He was killed by the Tupamaros guerrilla group in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Career
Mitrione was a police officer in Richmond, Indiana, from 1945 to 1947 and joined the FBI in 1959. In 1960, he was assigned to the U.S. State Department's International Cooperation Administration, going to South American countries to teach "advanced counterinsurgency techniques." A. J. Langguth, a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon, claimed that Mitrione was among the U.S. advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without killing them.[2] Langguth also claimed that older police officers were replaced "when the CIA and the U.S. police advisers had turned to harsher measures and sterner men"[3] and that under Mitrione as the new head of the U.S. cynically named Public Safety program in Uruguay, the United States "introduced a system of nationwide identification cards, like those in Brazil… [and] torture had become routine at the Montevideo [police] jefatura."[4]

From 1960 to 1967, Mitrione worked with the Brazilian police, first in Belo Horizonte then in Rio de Janeiro. He returned to the U.S. in 1967 to share his experiences and expertise on "counterguerrilla warfare" at the Agency for International Development (USAID), in Washington D.C. In 1969, Mitrione moved to Uruguay, again under USAID, to oversee the Office of Public Safety (OPS).

Mitrione was also in the Dominican Republic after the 1965 U.S. intervention.[5]

Uruguayan posting and death

In this period the Uruguayan government, led by the Colorado Party, had its hands full with a collapsing economy, labor and student strikes, and the Tupamaros, a left-wing urban terrorism guerrilla group. On the other hand, Washington feared a possible victory during the elections of the Frente Amplio, a left-wing coalition, on the model of the also-Cuban-supported victory of the Unidad Popular government in Chile, led by Salvador Allende, in 1970.[4] The OPS had been helping the local police since 1965, providing them with weapons and training. It is claimed[by whom?] that torture had already been practised since the 1960s, but Dan Mitrione was reportedly the man who made it routine.[6]

Former Uruguayan police officials and CIA operatives stated Mitrione had taught torture techniques to Uruguayan police in the cellar of his Montevideo home, including the use of electrical shocks delivered to his victims' mouths and genitals.[7] He also helped train foreign police agents in the United States in the context of the Cold War. It has been alleged that he used homeless people for training purposes, who were executed once they had served their purpose.[8]

As the torture allegations grew and the tensions in Uruguay escalated, Mitrione was eventually kidnapped by the Tupamaros on July 31, 1970. They proceeded to interrogate him about his past and the intervention of the U.S. government in Latin American affairs. They also demanded the release of 150 political prisoners.[9]

The Uruguayan government, with U.S. backing, refused and Mitrione was later found dead in a car, shot twice in the head and with no other visible signs of maltreatment (beyond the fact that during the kidnapping, Mitrione had been shot in one shoulder, a wound that had evidently been treated while in captivity).

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione

(Reminds a person of rewriting a beautiful R & B soul song: "I've been loving you too long to stop now" with the substitution of "killing" instead.)

Think of it as the anthem of the Operation Condor hitmen who have been seemingly everywhere.