Transnational Terror & the Latin American Dictators
Bill Koehnlein
Havana, Cuba
Number 142, October 8, 1999
Transnational terror
Marina Menendez Quintero
Summary: Histories merge together, the life and death
of tens of thousands of Chileans, Argentines,
Uruguayans, Paraguayans... Latin Americans trapped in a
kind of shadowy spider web marked by long sessions of
horror.
Almost two decades after the silent massacre carried
out by the dictatorships on the pretext of stamping out
communism, the past returns, or rather, it is revealed
in all its crueltybecause...it has always been present.
The laws forged by the new democracies of the 80s
favored the impunity of the guilty in the eyes of the
law, but had the opposite effecton the people. Far from
bringing about forgetfulness with the pardon issued to
those who had waged genocide, they kept alive the
rejection by survivors of torture and panic. The laws
validated their demands for justice and the need to
know the truth.
The detention of Augusto Pinochet in Great Britain
stirred these feelings, explicit in many, hidden in so
many others who had come out alive but scarred by the
terror, or even worse, manipulated in the guise of the
struggle against subversion with which the assassins
had covered up their crimes.
As this edition goes to press we still do not know even
if the Chilean ex-general will be extradited in spite
of the good will of the Home Office Minister Jack
Straw. Still less, therefore, can we foresee whether he
will finally undergo any punishment for the crimes of
torture or conspiring to commit torture which have been
committed since November 1988.
This is the date to which the House of Lords is
limited, due to the fact that it was then that Great
Britain signed the Convention against Torture. The
ex–dictator is presently being held in Great Britain,
where he lives in luxury.
The legal proceedings that have been initiated so far
could be held up for years. But analysts agree that the
case against him argued by the Spanish judge, Baltasar
Garzon, has already achieved something important: it
has mobilized public opinion, beaten the fear of somany
years and removed the cover of lies for those who were
deceived.
OPERATION CONDOR
The seven months of legal proceedings against Pinochet
have not only served to polarize Chilean society, in
the country and within the exile community, opening up
the yawning gap people tried to close after the
Pinochet dictatorship, between those who love "My
General..." and those who cannot forgive him.
Together with the tens of new cases presented by Garzon
to consolidate his arguments, more links in the chain
that connected the Latin American dictators in a
sinister extermination plan have appeared.
The military kept files on suspects and passed these
names from one country to another. They themselves
traveled to interrogate and torture.
Operation Condor, we now know, was a kind of
international terror that with Augusto Pinochet as the
craftsman, the brains, the promoter.
This is what Gladys Marin, secretary of the Chilean
Communist Party affirms, in her book Return to Hope.
Defeat of Operation Condor first published in Buenos
Aires and later in Santiago.
According to the communist leader, Pinochet and the
ex-chief of the Chilean DINA, Manuel Contreras, were
the most important leaders in the plan involving 120
agents of other nationalities, whose labor led to, she
says, 119 deaths.
Among the ringleaders whose names and surnames she
gives figure 40 Argentines, 38 Chileans, 14 Bolivians,
13 Uruguayans, four Paraguayans and six Italians.
According to lawyer Martin Almada, himself a victim of
Operation Condor when only a teacher in the suburbs of
Asuncion, in Paraguay, believes that there are official
documents that testify to the participation of around
46 thousand Latin Americans of various ranks in the
hunt. But, he assures us, unofficially this figure
could be doubled.
The present-day president of the American Association
of Jurists, agrees with Gladys Marin in giving Pinochet
the credit for Operation Condor. The Paraguayan
ex-dictator Alfredo Stroessner closely collaborated in
the execution of the plan.
Almada has custody of the so-called Terror Files, five
tons of paper and ten thousand photographs that make up
the secret police documentation, discovered in Asuncion
in 1992, after many years of searching and with the
collaboration of an informer "whose name will never be
given to the press".
In these bundles of paper he found documents which
proved the links between Pinochet and the torture of
twenty Spanish Jesuits and which he delivered to the
Spanish judge Garzon in order to substantiate the case
against the Chilean ex-dictator.
The Paraguayan lawyer, who asked for the extradition of
Stroessner from Brazil, affirms that he "was a
confidential friend of Pinochet, collaborated in the
overthrow of Allende and put the Paraguayan Foreign
Office at the disposal of the Chilean dictator for the
assassination of the Allende Foreign Minister".
Furthermore, he is sure that Pinochet gave Stroessner
the files he found 20 years later.
He also accuses the Argentine ex-general Rafael Videla
and Hugo Banzer, one-time leader of a coup d’état and
the present day Bolivian constitutional president,
among other figures of Latin American political and
military life, of implementing the Condor plan.
According to Martin Almada, INTERPOL was involved as
well, as was the CIA, which was not only responsible
for providing information, but also for supporting the
dictators.
The most terrible part, Almada assures us, is that
"today the Condor continues to fly". In statements he
made to the Buenos Aires press, the President of
American Jurists said that he had in his possession a
document dated July 10th, 1997, in which a Paraguayan
colonel replies to his counterpart in Ecuador "at your
request I send you the list of Paraguayan subversives".
After his interview with Garzon in Madrid, Almada
traveled to Barcelona. According to sources close to
Almada, he proposed to visit various Latin American
cities to build up support for his demand for the
extradition of Stroessner and for justice to take its
course.
IN THE FLESH
The workings of the Machiavellian machinery of torture
and killing cannot only be found in documents, although
these constitute the only type of evidence usually
valid to try cases.
It is also proven by accounts such as that of Almada
himself, kidnapped in Asuncion in 1974 on his arrival
from university in Argentina. There, in La Plata, he
had been noted down for his defense of a thesis in
which he concluded that education in Paraguay only
benefited the rich and accentuated national dependence.
Upon arrival in his country, he was taken before a
secret military tribunal where he was shown photographs
of what were supposed to be prisons of a so-called
urban guerilla group. But the most surprising thing was
not these images, but the different accents of the
Latin American soldiers who made up that Inquisition.
It was still not the custom in Paraguay to use such
torments such as the electric prod, or the hangings
that later characterized the clandestine battle fields
and prisons of Argentina and Uruguay. However, those
that were applied to him in the police station to which
he was later transferred were sufficiently painful and
humiliating. "They pulled out my nails and clipped my
ears and tongue. In a month, I underwent 200 torture
sessions there."
In the Esboscada concentration camp, about 45
kilometers outside Asuncion, he learnt from the
identity of the colonels who had beaten him in the
police station from an imprisoned ex-policeman. They
were Colonel Oteiza, of the Chilean Air Force, and the
Argentine commissary, Hector Ray.
In Emboscada he also found out about other modus
operandi that gave him the idea of the existence of a
network, though he still did not really know what was
involved, or what it was called.
Some people spoke to him about it. Doctor Gladys de
Saneman was one of those who knew most about Condor
among the 400 people, including 100 women and twenty
children, held in that extermination camp. A Paraguayan
of German origin, she had been kidnapped by the
Argentine police and sent to Asuncion, to be returned
again to the Buenos Aires military, or more
specifically, to Alfredo Astiz, the so-called Blond
Angel of Death.
Argentines like the lawyer Amilcar Latino Santucho, the
brother of the famous guerilla, and members of the
Paraguayan Communist Party such as Maidana and Rojas
were his companions in misfortune.
Thus the Latin American military conspired. Thus they
massacred. Thus the Transnational Terror functioned.
NEW LINKS IN THE CHAIN... MORE LIGHT
The recent accusations made in Argentina against
Eduardo Rudolfo Cabanillas, general of the division and
commander of the second army group in Rosario, shed
more light on the way Operation Condor worked in that
country.
This soldier is accused of having commanded the secret
repression center Automotores Orletti, in the capital
of Floresta, during the period of the dictatorship.
Both Argentine and Uruguayan thugs worked there.
Outside it looked like any other workshop. Inside, it
was another place of death under the direction of the
Tactical Operation Base 18. (OT 18)
It was there that the grandchild of the prestigious
Argentine poet Juan Gelman, one of most important of
those who bring accusations against Cabanillas, went
missing.
It was there that Maria Claudia Itureta Goyena de
Gelman was seen alive at the beginning of October 1976.
She was then eight months pregnant, and as a member of
the Vatican Ministry of State later informed the
grandfather, the baby was born in captivity. Juan
Gelman continues to search for his grandchild.
Sara Mendez, an Uruguayan teacher who had gone to
Buenos Aires fleeing from repression in her country, is
also searching. She is the first woman to survive
disappearance, and to demand the return of her baby.
The child was 21 days old when they were kidnapped from
the bed in which they slept together. She was in the
bed itself, and he in a little cradle which rocked when
the soldiers who broke into the house began to beat her
and torture her right there so that she would give them
the name of the father.
They were taken to Automotores Orletti, though the
child was immediately torn from his mother’s arms.
There she found other Uruguayans and witnessed the most
horrible torture, which she has not been able to
forget, "the death by beating and drowning of a kidnap
victim by the name of Santucho".
She came out alive after five years in a prison in
Purita Riales. Much later, when the dictatorship was
over, she found out that a couple related by marriage
to the military chief who had kidnapped her, Major Nino
Gavazzo, of the Uruguayan Army, had adopted a child
with the same distinguishing marks as her lost Simon,
and with a birth date a day after his.
Sara and the father, Mauricio Gatti, who had gone into
exile and also survived, spoke to the couple, but they
refused to let the boy's DNA be tested. The Supreme
Court of Justice left the decision to the young man,
who is now 22 years old. But for him, this story is
rather absurd and of little interest. He promises that
one day he will have the tests, but so far he has
refused to have any contact with his possible parents.
LESS IMPUNITY
In the midst of laws that in one country or other keep
those responsible from condemnation and punishment, the
arrest of Pinochet is a tiny drop of justice for his
direct or indirect victims.... a breath of wind that
raises their spirits and makes them feel less impotent
in the face of those they have lost.
Together with the elderly ex-dictator, yesterday’s
murderers also have less impunity today.
INSETS
It is estimated that 10% of the adult population of
Chile was victim of torture during the years of the
dictatorship, and others were assassinated. The
official figures say that in 17 years 4000 people were
officially "disappeared", a million left the country
fearing repression, hundreds of thousands were held in
secret prisons or repression camps, hundreds were taken
from their places of work, exiled, or executed after
very brief trials or court-martials.
Uruguayan victims of disappearances agree that the most
terrible torture was carried out in Argentina. Human
Rights organizations assure us that the number of
disappeared people reaches 30 thousand.
Today we know that the different branches of the army
had their own systems of repression, and their own
secret prisons. The Navy had its horror center in the
Escuela Superior de Mecanica de la Armada (ESMA) right
on the Avenida del Libertador, under the orders of the
sadly famous General Massera.
It is said that the Navy prepared itself for illegal
repression in the 70s. One of the principal assassins
has confessed that at the end of 1975 two officers
traveled to the United States to perfect the Massera's
theories on how to carry out genocide.
Copyright 1999 Magazine TRICONTINENTAL. La Habana,
Cuba. Todos los derechos reservados.