|
|
ISSN 1060-4189
|
Volume 10, Number 24
|
July 7, 2000
|
|
Copyright 1996, Latin America Data Base (LADB)
Latin American Institute, University of New Mexico
http://ladb.unm.edu
|
Director: Rebecca Reynolds Bannister
|
Editor: Patricia Hynds
|
Staff Writers:
|
Carlos Navarro, Robert Sandels
|
|
In This Issue:
REGION: FORMER MILITARY THROUGHOUT REGION
IMPLICATED IN OPERATION CONDOR CRIMES
* Brazil had a head start on torture
* Argentine military accused of stealing babies
* Chile's Pinochet accused of ordering bombings
* Uruguay's new president willing to confront nation's past
* Bolivia's Banzer unable to shake image of dictator
* Stroessner could be indicted
* Paraguay's Terror Archives
* US complicity questioned
____________________________________________________________
*********************
GENERAL
*********************
REGION: FORMER MILITARY THROUGHOUT REGION
IMPLICATED IN OPERATION CONDOR CRIMES
After nearly two decades, the specter of accountability
is threatening many present and former leaders of the military
regimes that controlled the Southern Cone countries of Latin
America in the 1970s and 1980s. More documentation is coming
to light about the criminal activities of Operation Condor,
the coordinated effort by the military in the various
countries to eliminate their political enemies (see NotiSur,
1998-10-30).
Between 1954--when Alfredo Stroessner took power in
Paraguay--and 1990--when Augusto Pinochet stepped aside in
Chile--de facto regimes ruled the Southern Cone nations
(Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) for
varying periods.
Repression against opponents was most brutal in
Argentina, where official figures list 9,000 victims of the
"dirty war," and human rights groups say 30,000 people were
killed or disappeared by the military government. Hundreds of
political activists, union leaders, and human-rights workers
died in Brazil, more than 3,000 were killed in Chile, and
hundreds more were eliminated in Bolivia, Paraguay, and
Uruguay.
New information is appearing almost daily regarding the
bloody chapter in the region's history, which its military
leaders thought had been closed by the various amnesty laws
and pardons passed as the de facto regimes gave way to
civilian governments.
Documents indicate that Operation Condor was set up in
1975 at the instigation of Pinochet (1973-1990), who two years
earlier had overthrown democratically elected President
Salvador Allende (1970-1973).
Secret files discovered several years ago outside the
Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, which have become known as the
Terror Archives, and files of the Brazilian military could
also shed new light on what US intelligence agencies,
diplomats, and military knew about what went on in the dirty
wars in the region (see NotiSur, 1993-02-16, 1993-09-03).
Many leaders of the military regimes were trained at the US
School of the Americas, then in Panama.
A number of prominent US officials, including former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief and former President
George Bush, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and
officials in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan
administrations could be drawn into several investigations now
being conducted in Latin America if evidence surfaces of their
knowledge or complicity.
Brazil had a head start on torture
Six years before Operation Condor was formalized,
Brazilian intelligence services had begun training foreign
agents in combatting urban guerrillas, reported the Jornal do
Brasil on May 9. Beginning in 1969, Argentine, Uruguayan,
Paraguayan, and Chilean military would come to Brazil to learn
how to repress political adversaries.
"Many Brazilian guerrillas were followed by joint teams
of Brazilian and foreign military in Rio de Janeiro and Sao
Paulo, as were their movements and contacts," said the
article, citing Marival Chaves, a former agent of the army's
National Information Service (Servico Nacional de Informacoes,
SNI). "They watched their houses and gathered data, later
used in the political repression."
Brazil's participation in Operation Condor has raised
issues that had largely remained buried since the end of the
1964-1985 dictatorship. In 1979, the Brazilian military
granted itself an amnesty. In 1995 the democratic government
declared the disappeared dead, paid compensation to the
families, and closed the cases.
At the end of April, however, the Brazilian Supreme Court
ordered the government to cooperate with Argentine Judge
Claudio Bonadio's investigation into the 1980 disappearance in
Brazil of three Argentines: Horacio Domingo Campiglia, Monica
Susana Pinus de Binstock, and Lorenzo Ismael Vinas.
In another recent case reported by the daily O Globo,
Lilian Celiberti, an Italian-Uruguayan citizen, testified in
a case in a Rome court involving the death of Italian citizens
who were detained in Brazil in 1978 and taken to Uruguay as
part of Operation Condor.
In early May, retired Col. Carlos Alberto Ponzi confirmed
Brazil's participation in the coordinated effort.
"It was a dirty and ferocious war. Shouldn't we have
defended ourselves?" said Ponzi, former regional head of the
SNI. "There was a constant exchange of information."
Brazilians exiled in Chile who were arrested but later
escaped have said that Brazilian security agents participated
in the torture of political prisoners in Santiago, especially
at the National Stadium, converted into a massive prison
following the coup.
Brazil's new, civilian-run Defense Ministry said in May
it would order all branches of the military to search their
files for information relating to extraterritorial military
activities since 1964. And Brazil's Minister of Institutional
Security Gen. Alberto Cardoso said he would open the files of
the various intelligence offices regarding that country's
involvement in Operation Condor.
But human rights leaders said on June 1 that neither the
military nor the government really intend to open files on the
kidnapping, torture, and killing of pro-democracy activists by
past military rulers.
"I think there is a pact of silence between the military
governments and the civilian ones," said Marco Rolim, head of
Congress' human rights commission. "I have my doubts. The
government does not want to open the files, and so far there
has been no indication that it will do so."
On May 12, Brazil's Camara dos Deputados named a special
commission to investigate charges by former Rio de Janeiro
Gov. Leonel Brizola that his brother-in-law, former President
Joao Goulart (1961-1964), was poisoned as part of Operation
Condor. Goulart was elected president in 1961, deposed in a
military coup on March 31, 1964, and exiled to Argentina.
The 58-year-old Goulart died in his sleep of an apparent
heart attack Dec. 6, 1976, in Mercedes, Argentina. At the
time, he had been given a clean bill of health by doctors,
although, in letters to his family, he said he was taking
blood pressure medicine. Suspicions of assassination arose
when authorities would not permit an autopsy nor allow his
body to be returned to his home in southern Brazil.
Now, nearly 24 years after Goulart's death, the
congressional panel will investigate Brizola's charges. The
ex-president's son, Joao Vicente Goulart, said he hopes new
technology can determine whether his father was poisoned or
his medication switched with a drug that provoked a heart
attack.
Brizola also alleges that Operation Condor is responsible
for the death of another former president, Juscelino Kubitchek
(1956-1961), who died four months after Goulart in a
suspicious traffic accident.
Argentine military accused of stealing babies
In 1984, former members of Argentina's military juntas
were tried and convicted, but were later granted a
presidential pardon by former President Carlos Saul Menem.
But in the last several years, judges have charged active-duty
and retired officers in connection with the kidnapping and
illegal adoption of children of political prisoners (see
NotiSur, 1998-07-31, 1999-01-29, 1999-11-12, 2000-03-24). At
least a dozen former high-ranking military, including former
de facto President Jorge Videla (1976-1979), are now in jail
or under house arrest.
Chile's Pinochet accused of ordering bombings
Several bombings that killed opponents of Pinochet are
also alleged to have been part of Operation Condor. They
include the assassination of former army chief Gen. Carlos
Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974, the attempted assassination of
Chilean Sen. Bernardo Leighton and his wife Anita Fresno in
Italy in 1975, and the 1976 car bombing on Washington's
Embassy Row that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister
Orlando Letelier and his US aide Ronni Moffitt.
Unanswered questions about the Letelier case include
whether high-ranking US officials knew of a Pinochet role in
the bombing, but continued to support him as part of US anti-
communist strategy in South America (see NotiSur, 1991-12-11,
1992-11-17, 1993-11-19, 1995-10-27).
Argentine Judge Maria Servini de Cubria said the
investigation into the killing of Prats and his wife Sofia
Cuthbert includes leads to Pinochet as well as to Argentine
intelligence and the CIA. "It's all like a jigsaw puzzle, a
huge jigsaw puzzle," said Servini.
In May, Servini notified Pinochet that he should name
legal representation in Argentina to defend him against the
charges in the Prats case.
Prats sought exile in Argentina following the 1973 coup.
He and his wife died after a bomb planted under their car went
off, which Argentine authorities blamed on Pinochet's secret
police (Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA). One DINA
agent, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, has been detained in
Argentina since 1996 and will be tried later this year (see
NotiSur, 1996-01-26).
Former Gen. Manuel Contreras and former Brig. Gen. Pedro
Espinoza, now serving sentences for the assassination of
Letelier, are also implicated in the Prats' case, as are
retired Chilean generals Raul Iturriaga Neumann, Jose Zara
Holger, and Armando Callejas, former civilian DINA agent Jorge
Iturriaga Neumann, writer Mariana Callejas, and US citizen
Michael Townley, who confessed to placing the bomb.
In statements to Judge Servini in May 1999 in the US,
where he is part of the federal witness-protection program,
Townley implicated Pinochet and other military leaders in the
assassination of Prats. He said the orders to kill Prats came
from Contreras, then head of the DINA.
Contreras said Townley's statements about the Letelier
and Prats murders were lies designed to "cover up his own
crimes and protect the intellectual authors" of the murders.
He cited a document indicating that Venezuelan agents met in
May 1976 with agents of the US CIA and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), as well as members of Cuban anti-Castro
groups in the Dominican Republic to plan Letelier's murder.
Townley took part in that meeting, said Contreras.
"I never met Townley, and he was never a DINA agent,"
said Contreras. "He was a CIA agent."
Uruguay's new president willing to confront nation's past
In 1986, the Uruguayan parliament issued an amnesty
affecting the military implicated in human rights violations
during military rule (1973-1985), and voters approved the
amnesty in a 1989 referendum. After the country returned to
democratic rule, a legislative committee established that 164
Uruguayans (118 men, 38 women, and eight children) had
disappeared in other countries during the military regime. Of
that total, 127 were kidnapped in Argentina, 32 in Uruguay,
three in Chile, and two in Paraguay.
Immediately after he took office, Uruguayan President
Jorge Batlle began to try to resolve the cases of the
disappeared and heal the wounds left from the dirty war (see
NotiSur, 2000-05-12). Batlle has asked Argentina's
cooperation in investigating the cases of Uruguayan children
who were taken from their mothers and given to other families.
Batlle has told the Uruguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires to
coordinate efforts between the two governments.
Bolivia's Banzer unable to shake image of dictator
Bolivia's Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos de
Bolivia (APDHB) has implicated President Hugo Banzer Suarez in
the activities of Operation Condor during the time he headed
a military government (1971-1978). During that period, 200
Bolivians disappeared (see NotiSur, 1999-03-19).
In February 1999, the APDHB gave documentation to Spanish
Judge Baltasar Garzon, who headed efforts to extradite
Pinochet to Spain and who is also investigating other Latin
American military for killing foreign citizens. The APDHB
information involved the cases of six Bolivians assassinated
in Chile, another 23 who disappeared in Argentina, six
Argentines detained in Bolivia and turned over to the
Argentine military, and three Chileans detained in Bolivia and
turned over to the Chilean military, all in the 1970s.
Banzer, elected president in 1997, dismissed the
accusations, calling them the work of "international extreme
leftists."
Stroessner could be indicted
On May 10, Paraguayan Judge Ruben Dario Frutos declared
Stroessner "an uncooperative witness and in contempt of court"
in an investigation into the disappearance of Agustin Goiburu.
Frutos said it was the first step toward issuing an
international arrest warrant, which could be followed by an
extradition request to Brazil.
Goiburu, a doctor at a police clinic in Asuncion, was
persecuted for opposing the Stroessner regime (1952-1989) and
for his membership in the Communist Party. In 1959, Goiburu
refused to sign death certificates listing natural causes for
victims who died while being tortured. He finally went into
exile, and on Feb. 9, 1977, was kidnapped as he left the
Hospital San Martin in the Argentine city of Parana, across
the border with Paraguay. He was never seen again. Judge
Frutos' document states that his kidnapping and disappearance
was the work of Operation Condor.
Paraguay's Terror Archives
Much of what is known about Operation Condor comes from
the Terror Archives, five tons of documents uncovered in
Paraguay through the efforts of human rights activist Martin
Almada. Almada and Judge Jose Fernandez found the files in
December 1992 during an inspection of a police station in the
Asuncion barrio of Lambare (see NotiSur, 1993-02-16, 1993-09-
03).
Almada was kidnapped in 1974 and tortured by security
forces in Paraguay. He recently went to the US to request
that the US State Department make public its documents
relating to the Stroessner dictatorship, which he said would
make clearer the coordinated repression among the region's
security forces.
"I was interrogated and tortured by officers from those
countries," said Almada. "Col. Jorge Oteiza Lopez of the
Chilean Air Force and police inspector Hector Garcia Rey of
Argentina interrogated and tortured me."
During the three years that he was held in a detention
center in Paraguay known as The Sepulcher, Almada says he saw
more than 1,200 people who were tortured, many of them from
neighboring countries.
Although discovered six years ago, the files remain the
only extensive collection of public records of Operation
Condor.
"This documentation might exist in other countries as
well, but it's hidden, while in Paraguay they didn't manage to
hide it all," said Chilean lawyer Juan Garces. "It proves
that an organization with a structure and discipline existed
that didn't only exchange information but committed criminal
acts."
A UN Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) mission is trying to preserve the documents as
"property of humanity." Some of the incriminating documents
have already disappeared, with alternate rumors blaming the
CIA or sales by corrupt Paraguayan officials.
"It is important that our collective memory return," said
Alain Touraine, a French academic who is leading the UN
mission. The Terror Archives must at least be filmed and
scanned, he said, adding that, in the best case, they would be
moved to a secure location for study (see NotiSur, 1993-03-
02).
Touraine said that, although UNESCO usually preserves
statues and buildings, "we are getting to a moment of possible
democratization [in the region] and addressing the past is not
only a sign or proof of a democratic process, but an
instrument or tool to form a democratic conscience."
The documents purportedly show that Brazil supplied arms
to help Banzer overthrow civilian President Juan Jose Torres
in 1971. Torres was murdered in Buenos Aires in 1976,
allegedly as part of Operation Condor.
The documents also reveal Brazil's role in helping the
Pinochet regime establish its secret police, the DINA.
Thousands of Brazilians fled to Chile after the military took
over, only to be detained and interrogated by the DINA in the
1970s, often with Brazilian agents in the room.
The Terror Archives document a torture-training school at
Manaus in Brazil's Amazon jungle. Newton Cruz, a former head
of the SNI, denied that Operation Condor existed and said the
Manaus facility was used just for jungle-warfare training.
"The Brazilians had a head start" on terror, said David
Fleischer, a Universidade de Brasilia political science
professor.
US complicity questioned
The Terror Archives do not detail Washington's role in
the repression in Latin America, but along with documents
surfacing elsewhere, they suggest that US officials backed
Operation Condor nations with both military aid and
information. The documents also suggest that the US
government and its security agencies were aware of, and
sometimes accomplices in Operation Condor excesses.
Professor John Dignes of Columbia University in the US
and an expert on Operation Condor, said that the CIA chief in
Santiago facilitated the cooperation between Brazil's SNI and
Manuel Contreras in Chile, who set up the DINA.
In 1999, the FBI defended sharing information with Chile
as a standard practice among law-enforcement agencies of
governments friendly to Washington. A State Department
spokesperson declined to comment on US cooperation with South
American dictatorships, saying it was "ancient history."
But a memo found among documents declassified by
President Bill Clinton in 1998 said the CIA "may have played
an unfortunate part" in the killing of two US citizens, Frank
Teruggi and Charles Horman, in Chile shortly after the 1973
coup. "At best, it was limited to providing or confirming
information that helped motivate his murder by the government
of Chile. At worst, US intelligence was aware the government
of Chile saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials
did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of government of
Chile paranoia."
An affidavit made public earlier this year gave testimony
from Andre Van Lanker, a Belgian prisoner at the National
Stadium, who described the death of Teruggi, his cell mate.
He said Teruggi was so severely tortured that Chilean
officials decided to "finish him off with bullets."
On June 30, the US government released 500 more pages of
newly declassified documents with some additional details
about the deaths of the two US citizens. The latest documents
show that the FBI gathered intelligence on Teruggi.
In a December 1972 report from one informant, the FBI
said that Teruggi had attended a "conference on anti-
imperialist strategy and action" held by former Peace Corps
volunteers who, the FBI said, "espouse support of Cuba and all
third world revolutionaries."
Though Chilean authorities have never confirmed that
Teruggi was executed, he was arrested at his apartment days
after the coup and tortured at the National Stadium. His body
was discovered in the morgue 10 days later, riddled with
bullet holes.
The latest released documents disappointed members of the
dead men's families and human rights activists. While
offering some new details, the documents revealed little about
the circumstances under which the two died. The only new
insight came from an informant who told the US Embassy in 1987
that Horman had been killed in the National Stadium the night
of Sept. 19, 1973, for being a "foreign extremist." On
learning that the man they had killed was a US citizen,
officials panicked and dumped his body on the streets, he
said.
About half the newly released documents involve another
US citizen, Boris Weisfeiler, who apparently was picked up by
the military while hitchhiking in Chile in 1985. His body was
never recovered. [Sources: Associated Press, 05/06/00; El
Nuevo Herald (Miami), 05/10/00; Clarin (Argentina), 05/09/00,
05/11/00, 05/13/00, 05/15/00; Reuters, 05/13/00, 05/17/00;
Notimex, 05/04/00, 05/17/00, 05/18/00; The Miami Herald,
05/12/00, 05/18/00; Spanish news service EFE, 02/17/99,
05/12/00, 05/15/00, 05/31/00; Inter Press Service, 05/11/00,
06/19/00; CNN, 05/09/00, 06/30/00; The New York Times,
04/03/99, 08/11/99, 07/01/00]