When was operation condor

The declassified documentation available shows that various US government agencies had early knowledge of the scope of the repressive coordination and did not make much effort to stop it until it had reached the third phase, which proved the most problematic because the operations could no longer be kept under wraps. The latter three countries have engaged in joint operations, primarily in Argentina, against the terrorist target.

US reticence with regard to this final phase should not cause us to lose sight of the fundamental role the US played in the consolidation of the previous phases.

Operation Condor ultimately had a computerized databank with information on thousands of individuals considered to be politically suspect, as well as photo archives, microfiches, surveillance reports, psychological profiles, reports on organization memberships, personal and political histories, lists of family members and friends.

The computers for storing all this information were provided by the CIA, since no other country on the continent at that time had the sufficient technological means to do so. In addition, the member countries had at their disposal a protected communications system known as Condortel, the main base of which was located at a US facility on the Panama Canal.

During the trial, the Federal Criminal Tribunal No. In a few cases, the Orletti and Condor victims are the same. Click on the red icon for more information. They had layovers in Panama and then in Caracas, where they boarded a Varig Airlines flight.

They were in the process of organizing a return to Argentina for the second counteroffensive by the Montoneros armed political group. Coincidentally or not , your description leads me to believe that these are the very same people. If not, you will be held responsible for all their lives.

Simple as that. Horacio was married to Pilar Calveiro and had two daughters. Norberto Habegger was secretary of the political arm of the Montoneros. But between August 1 and 6, he was abducted, possibly by agents of the Argentine Federal Police, acting jointly with Brazilian security and armed forces. He was later presumably brought to Argentina. Habegger was assistant director of the newspaper Noticias at the time of the Argentine coup in Part of his political activity included a leadership role in the Christian Democratic Youth, and he later joined the Peronist movement.

He belonged to the Argentine General Confederation of Labor CGT in Spanish , and during the dictatorship from to he was a banking trade union leader. A so-called task force team forced entry into the apartment where she lived with her husband, Marcelo Ariel Gelman.

They were taken to the Automotores Orletti clandestine detention center, where both were tortured. In the absence of a fully formed global criminal justice system, the perpetrators of Condor are being taken to court through a piecemeal process. The individuals they pursue are often decrepit and unrepentant old men, but a tenacious network of survivors, lawyers, investigators and academics, rather like the postwar Nazi-hunters , has taken up the challenge of ensuring that such international state terror does not go untried.

The process is painfully slow. The first major criminal investigation focusing on Condor — with victims and defendants from seven countries — began in Rome more than 20 years ago. It still has not ended.

On a sweltering day in July , a judge in the Rome case handed life sentences to a former president of Peru, a Uruguayan foreign minister, a Chilean military intelligence chief and 21 others for their role in a coordinated campaign of extermination and torture. The defendants are appealing, and a final verdict is due within a year. Much of what we now know about Condor has been unearthed or pieced together in Rome, Buenos Aires and in dozens of court cases — large and small — in other countries.

Further evidence comes from US intelligence papers dealing with Argentina that were declassified on the orders of Barack Obama. In , the US completed its handover of 47, pages to Argentina.

These documents show how much the US and European governments knew about what was happening across South America, and how little they cared. She immediately recognised her grandchildren. By agreement with their biological grandparents, the children remained with their adopted parents in Chile. When Victoria Eva turned nine, she was told about her true identity, and the children started to make family visits to Uruguay.

Only a perverse combination of power and paranoia can explain why these regimes awarded themselves the right not just to murder and torture, but also to steal children such as the Larrabeitis. The men perpetrating such crimes saw themselves as warriors in a messianic, frontierless war against the spread of armed revolution across Latin America.

Their fantasies were overblown, but not entirely baseless. He vowed to initiate a new phase of revolutionary activity, extending guerrilla warfare across Latin America.

Che was killed while carrying out his mission in Bolivia in , but the US by then viewed revolution in Latin America as an existential threat — recalling how Russian nuclear weapons had reached Cuban soil during the missile crisis. In the 70s, as rightwing military coups and state terror swept the continent, an attempt at coordinating an armed response was made via a loose network known as the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta JCR. At 3am on 13 September , Meloni and Banfi were at home in a suburb of Buenos Aires when about half a dozen armed men burst through their door.

Meloni, then aged 23, immediately recognised one of them as the notorious Uruguayan police inspector Hugo Campos Hermida. Back in Uruguay, Hermida had once questioned Meloni and Banfi — then students of literature and history respectively — after they had taken part in a demonstration back home in support of the leftwing Tupamaro guerrilla movement, to which Banfi belonged.

Meloni could not understand why Hermida was working freely in a foreign country. At that time, Argentina was still a democracy, with rule of law. The military takeover came later, in March Foreign policemen had no right to act there. After their apartment had been ransacked for clues as to the whereabouts of other exiled Tupamaros, Hermida took Banfi away.

Aurora assumed she would soon discover which police station or jail he had been taken to, but there was silence. In September , this was still a bizarre event. Eventually she called a press conference. How could someone vanish like that? The answer came five weeks later, when three bodies bearing torture scars were discovered by police 75 miles away. Car headlights and a group of men had been seen in a remote spot at night, and pile of fresh earth had been left behind.

Daniel Banfi was one of three murdered Uruguayans found in the hastily dug grave. The following month, Meloni left Argentina, and eventually moved to Italy, where, since her father was Italian, she had dual nationality.

She returned to Uruguay for three spells over the next 25 years, seeking justice. It seemed nothing could be done. On 16 October , however, Pinochet was arrested by police at a London clinic after a minor hernia operation.

Labour party home secretary Jack Straw stymied the extradition, instead sending Pinochet home to Chile on health grounds. On his return, the former dictator made a mockery of that justification by stepping out of his wheelchair to wave joyfully at supporters.

Families of other Condor victims with Italian citizenship joined Meloni, and the case broadened to cover Condor crimes in several countries. From her home in Milan, Meloni — now aged 69 — has kept the case alive ever since. W hen Daniel Banfi was murdered in late , Condor did not yet formally exist. His death can be seen as a precursor, or trial run.

Hermida Campos was one of a handful of Uruguayan security officials who were secretly testing ways of hunting down exiles with their Argentinian counterparts. He had moved to Italy and was arrested in Salerno, near Naples, in Most of what we know about Operation Condor only emerged years after it was over. Formal coordinating offices existed in several countries, and the network generated considerable paperwork as documents and encrypted cables were sent back and forth over a dedicated communications network called Condortel.

But at the time the victims did not understand the scale of the international conspiracy. For more than a decade, public knowledge of Operation Condor was largely limited to an obscure FBI note quoted in a book, published in , by John Dinges and fellow journalist Saul Landau.

Beyond that, relatively little was known. It was in Paraguay where the first major breakthrough took place. They included people who were disappeared by Condor. The unpublished letter written by him and Dinges is posted below, along with the declassified documents. As the authors of two books that document what Henry Kissinger's office knew and what it did and didn't do about the network of Southern Cone secret police operatives known as Operation Condor, we believe that the Rogers letter should not be allowed to stand uncorrected.

The focus of the Rogers letter is on the September 21, , car-bombing on Massachusetts Avenue, carried out by agents of Gen. Rogers dismisses Maxwell's assertion that "this was a tragedy that might have been prevented" and scoffs: "by whom, one might ask? The answer is that it could have been prevented by Secretary of State Kissinger's office and by the CIA, both of which had advance intelligence on Operation Condor assassination plots.

The CIA obtained concrete intelligence in early June months before the Letelier-Moffitt assassination took place, that Southern Cone military intelligence officials were coordinating their repression against perceived enemies in Latin America and abroad, and that their operations included international assassinations. The documents show that on July 30, , a CIA briefer told Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman about "disturbing developments" in the "operational attitudes" of an organization codenamed Operation Condor.

The intelligence reports cited by Shlaudeman did not indicate the Condor plans involved the United States. Embassy in Paraguay that two Chilean agents, using false passports and false identities, had requested visas to travel from Asuncion to Washington D.

Congressman Edward Koch in reprisal for his legislative efforts to cut off military aid to that country. The threat, made by an officer now known to have been a Condor operative, was also received in late July, around the same time the CIA was developing its intelligence conclusions about Condor. The declassified record shows that Secretary Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its "murder operations" on August 5, , in a page report from Shlaudeman.

It cannot do us any good. Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche , approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U. He instructed them to express "our deep concern" about "rumors" of "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad.

This cable was dated August 23, four full weeks prior to the bombing that killed Letelier and Moffitt. In effect, Kissinger's warning placed the Condor regimes on notice that the United States had detected their assassination plans and wanted them stopped. It is reasonable to conclude that if the demarche had been delivered to Chile, the Pinochet regime would have aborted the assassination mission that was already underway.

Rogers asserts that "Kissinger's warning was delivered in robust fashion to the Argentine president--there are cables to prove it…and probably to Pinochet's underlings in Santiago. In fact, there are no such cables. In the all-important case of the Pinochet regime, which sponsored the plot to kill Letelier, we have a cable dated August 24 from U.

Ambassador Popper advising against talking to Pinochet because he "might well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots. Although there is an August 30 document indicating that Shlaudeman favored Popper's approach, Popper received no reply, at least not until after the assassination.

This lack of reply is confirmed by available documents and by interviews with those involved. One official, Deputy Chief of Mission Thomas Boyatt, said he has a distinct memory that no reply was received. Boyatt had no explanation for this failure of communication: "This says Shlaudeman has decided by August 30 not to go to Pinochet. So what's the big secret? Why couldn't we be put into action [the next day].

And I don't know the answer to that…. Or at least it might have. In the case of Argentina, there are two memoranda [ Document 10 and Document 11 ] chronicling a conversation that occurred on September 21, between Ambassador Robert Hill and General Jorge Videla. These cables indicate a general discussion of human rights took place but make no mention of Condor or of the serious U.

How could it be that the ambassador ignored specific instructions from Secretary of State Kissinger? The answer seems to lie in a secret cable sent by Shlaudeman from Costa Rica to his deputy in D. The one-paragraph cable is titled "Operation Condor" and is marked for relevance to Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Shlaudeman states: "You can simply instruct the Ambassadors to take no further action, noting that there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme.