Operation Condor: Dirty War, Death Squads and The Disappeared

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Operation Condor: Dirty War, Death Squads and The Disappeared

"These military regimes hunted down dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, intellectuals, students and teachers and other people not just guerrillas (who, under international law are also entitled to due legal process). These illegal military regimes defied international law and traditions of political sanctuary to carry out their ferocious state terror and destroy democratic opposition forces."

“Operation Condor…involved the intelligence agencies…in a joint effort to eliminate perceived enemies of those regimes throughout the world.”

-- Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, USA.


Operation Condor was the name given to a secret union of intelligence services of six US-supported, South American military governments- Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, which operated during the 1970s into the early 1980s.

Under Operation Condor the intelligence agencies were to use their joint resources to round up thousands of people who were suspected of involvement with leftist groups and imprison them in camps or secret detention centres. Many were tortured, interrogated, then executed and secretly buried, becoming known as the disappeared. Those that escaped their own dictatorship’s security services were often captured and tortured in other Condor countries and eventually returned from where they fled to be executed. Condor agents also located and killed dissidents in operations outside Latin America, in several European nations and the USA.

The most active period of this multinational secret police and army cooperation against leftwing and other opposition was between 1975 to 1978. The overall result of this massive political repression and terrorist dirty war, was that an estimated 35,000 people were murdered, many disappearing without a trace. Hundreds of thousands of others were imprisoned and tortured.



http://freethoughtmanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/02/operation-condor-dirty-war-death-squads.html

[anaxarchos]

1. I had a drink with a guy in a bar on Liberty Day in Portugal...

... a few weeks ago. He was a remote acquaintance of a friend of mine, a "guide" who had been in Africa for many years and had only been back in Portugal since the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The conversation shifted to Liberty Day which celebrates the overthrow of Fascism in Portugal in 1974. I mentioned that I had been in Lisbon shortly after that event. My drinking companion stated matter-of-factly that he had left the Portuguese Army six months before the Revolution and that if it had occurred one year earlier, it would have entirely altered his life.

He had been a lowly under officer in one of the "special" branches of the Portuguese Army and had served four years in the guerrilla war in Guinea-Bissau. "It was madness. How could a little country of 10 million people field an army of 500,000 for so long? It was madness. So many died. The money came from the Americans but the blood was all ours... an entire generation... madness."

After my companion left the army, he "worked" throughout Africa. He was in Cabinda, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa. In short, he was a tour "guide" where no tourist in their right mind would have ever dared to go. Nothing was mentioned but we both understood the conversation. I mostly just listened and then got up to leave. My companion put a hand on my shoulder.

"When I was still in the Portuguese Army, I made 30,000 Escudos." Escudos then were probably 25 or 30 to one dollar.

"The Americans tried to recruit me for Vietnam." I presumed he meant as a contract killer for Operation Phoenix.

"They offered me 750,000 Escudos... but I wouldn't do it. Work for the Americans? I couldn't make myself do that."


He was telling me that even monsters have scruples.

[mojowork_n]

3. Maybe he'd read last month's issue of Harper's Magazine

The story, 'Confessions of a Juarez Hit Man' was incredibly awful. The Hit Man is a former cop, on the run.

[maryf]

6. even monsters have scruples...

wish some American one's did...

[Orwellian_Ghost]

10. The Role Of The United States

The Role Of The United States

“Operation Condor” is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning socalled “leftists,” communists and Marxists, which was recently established between cooperating intelligence services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in the area. In addition, “Operation Condor” provides for joint operations against terrorist targets in member countries…A third and most secret phase of Operation Condor involves the formation of special teams from member countries who travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions up to assassination against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations.” This September 28, 1976 cable marked “secret foreign political matters” and with lines deleted is from the FBI’s legal attache` in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer. For a long time it was the only released document that mentions Condor, the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency recently declassified a more complete version of the above information. Also other material has come to light about the US role.

The declassification of long-secret files is confirming US government agencies more actively cooperated with the Condor regimes repressive activities than had previously been acknowledged. These files confirm the US not only knew about Condor but aided and facilitated Condor operations as a matter of secret and routine policy. In 2001, Prof. J. P. Mc Sherry of Long Island University who has written articles on Condor discovered a document that she described as “another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that US military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor.”

The State Department cable dated October 13, 1978 is from US Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White, to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. “ On October 11, I called on chief of staff General Alejandro Fretes Davalos… he read me the …minutes resulting from the visit of General Orozco, chief of Chilean intelligence to Asuncion…The document is basically an agreement to coordinate all intelligence resources in order to control and eliminate subversion…They keep in touch with one another through a US communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone Which covers all Latin America. This US communications facility is used by student officers to call home…but it is also employed to coordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries. They maintain the confidentiality of their communication through the US facility in Panama by using bilateral codes… obviously this is the Condor network which all of us have heard about over the last few years.”

In a final comment White makes a recommendation, “The two FBI agents here tell me there is likelihood Condor will surface during Letelier trial in the US. If General Fretes Davalos is accurate in describing the communications it uses as an encrypted system within the US communications net… it would seem advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in the US interest.”

With Latin American officers using American facilities to transmit intelligence, this would have clearly provided US officials with the opportunity to closely monitor Condor activities and know exactly what operations were undertaken. Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, said the cable implied “foreknowledge, cooperation and total access to the plans and operations of Condor. The degree to which the USA knew about and supported these operations has remained secret until now, the layers of the onion are peeling away here,” he said.

<snip>

http://freethoughtmanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/02/operation-condor-dirty-war-death-squads.html

[leftstreet]

2. Memorial Day is a fitting time to remember the death of The Left n/t

K&R

[Judi Lynn]

5. In South America they are still there, but driven into silence by relentless terrorism against them.

So many people dropped from airplanes into the ocean, lakes, rivers, even mountain tops.

Chilean torturer, Osvaldo Romo said during a taped interview with a Miami reporter that they made use of Chile's volcanoes for dropping some of their political prisoners.

Have heard that this throwing of victims from helicopters was common in Viet Nam, as well.

What a desperate shame. Learned not too long ago about some nuns from France who were tortured and dropped into the ocean when an officer from the Argentinian Navy infiltrated a group they attended to support mothers whose daughters had been tortured, had been forced to give birth since they were pregnant when arrested, then their children stripped from them, given to favored military officers, etc. and the mothers taken immediately to airplanes and dropped chained to each other into the ocean. The two French nuns' bodies were found long after they had been murdered, and finally the "Angel of Death" who got them killed was tried.

The truth about US connectedness to ALL the right-wing military coups, juntas, dictatorships in Latin America MUST become more publicly known if there is ever to be any justice at all in this world. It's so wrong for it to have been simply swept under the rug while the government maintained its pious, but wholly false face to the rest of the world. What has happened in Latin America has been absolutely evil.

Thanks for this thread, and thanks to the poster for the comments on the Portuguese under-officer and his experiences.

[maryf]

4. K&R how many others? nt

[blindpig]

7. k&r n/t

[armyowalgreens]

8. But Pinochet was such a great guy to the Chilean people...

And definitely better than those evil socialists...


:sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[TBF]

9. K&R n/t

[JoseGaspar]

11. How long will it take before there is an accounting?

"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood."

—John Brown's last words, written on a note
handed to a guard just before his hanging

[maryf]

12. I thought I kicked this last night...kick again nt