Italy sentences two former South American leaders to life in prison for Operation Condor murders
A Rome court on Tuesday handed down eight life sentences for the murder of 23 Italian citizens in a conspiracy, known as Operation Condor, in which South American dictatorships hunted down and killed thousands of dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.
It is the first time an Italian court has ruled a conspiracy existed between the governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia to help find and assassinate each others' political opponents.
After a trial that lasted more than two years, lead judge Evelina Canale said eight men were convicted in absentia, including former Bolivian President Luis García Meza, now 87 and serving a 30-year prison sentence in Bolivia for crimes committed during his government, and former Peruvian President Francisco Morales Bermúdez, now 95.
"It's clear that this conviction confirms that Operation Condor existed and that it was a criminal conspiracy," Prosecutor Tiziana Cugini told Reuters after the ruling.
Operation Condor, named after the broad-winged birds that inhabit the Andes, was a Cold War era campaign by U.S.-backed right-wing dictatorships in South America that killed scores of left-leaning opponents between 1975 and 1984.
Last year an Argentine court found 15 ex-military officials guilty of conspiring to kidnap and assassinate dissidents in Operation Condor, including former dictator Reynaldo Bignone, 89, who was given a 20-year sentence.
At: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-murder-condor-idUSKBN1512XR
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who defiled life itself through their atrocities.
Attention should be paid to them now, especially knowing how well these criminals have evaded universal condemnation, as so very few people outside their countries know how evil, how bloody, and sadistic, intense, vicious they have been to human beings just because THEY COULD. As they lived, they illustrated they didn't believe it's right to have power if you don't abuse it.
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former Bolivian President Luis García Meza, as he would want to be seen
former Bolivian President Luis García Meza [/center]
More people should know about Luis García Meza's Cocaine Coup. Interesting learning about these monsters, even long after they should have been stopped short so long ago:
From Wikipedia:
This group pressured President Lidia Gueiler (his cousin) to install General García Meza as Commander of the Army. Within months, the Junta of Commanders headed by García Meza forced a violent coup d'état—sometimes referred to as the Cocaine Coup—of July 17, 1980, when several Bolivian intellectuals such as Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz were killed. When portions of the citizenry resisted, as they had done in the failed putsch of November 1979, it resulted in dozens of deaths. Many were tortured. Allegedly, the Argentine Army unit Batallón de Inteligencia 601 participated in the coup. Former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Michael Levine had arrested the two most prominent leaders of the Roberto Suarez cartel (the primary cartel linked to the coup), and he claims that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intervened to drop charges against one of them and reduce bail for another, allowing both to escape their US trial in 1979; subsequently they returned to Bolivia and participated in the coup, along with the aid of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. Levine has alleged CIA cooperation with the coup.[1] These allegations were the basis for the dismissal of the DEA from Bolivia by current President Evo Morales in 2007.
Dictatorship, 1980-81[edit]
Of rightwing ultra-conservative anti-communist persuasion, García Meza endeavored to bring a Pinochet-style dictatorship that was intended to last 20 years. He immediately outlawed all political parties, exiled opposition leaders, repressed trade unions, and muzzled the press. He was backed by former SS officer and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and Italian neofascist Stefano Delle Chiaie. Further collaboration came from other European neofascists, most notoriously Ernesto Milá Rodríguez (accused of the 1980 Paris synagogue bombing).[2] Among other foreign collaborators were professional torturers allegedly imported from the notoriously repressive Argentine dictatorship of General Jorge Videla.
The García Meza regime, while brief (its original form ended in 1981), became internationally known for its extreme brutality. The population was repressed in the same ways as under the Banzer dictatorship. In January 1981, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs named the García Meza regime, "Latin America's most errant violator of human rights after Guatemala and El Salvador."[3] Some 1,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the Bolivian Army and security forces in only 13 months.[4] The administration's chief repressor was the Minister of Interior, Colonel Luis Arce, who cautioned that all Bolivians who opposed to the new order should "walk around with their written will under their arms."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garc%C3%ADa_Meza_Tejada
