Operation Condor

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Participants in the state terrorist , multinational secret service operation Operation Condor
Green: participating states,
light green: partially participating states,
blue: supporting states. To date, the role of the USA is not nearly completely cleared up.

Under the code name Operation Condor ( Spanish Operación Cóndor ) , the secret services of six South American countries - Argentina , Chile , Paraguay , Uruguay , Bolivia and Brazil - operated with the support of the United States in the 1970s and 1980s , with the aim of creating left-wing political forces and persecute and kill opposition forces worldwide. The intelligence services of Peru , Ecuador and Venezuela were also involved in the actions to a lesser extent . Almost all of the countries involved were ruled by military dictatorships or right-wing authoritarian regimes at the beginning of the secret operation . In the individual countries it ended at the latest with their transition to democracy . The effective legal processing of these crimes only started a few years ago and continues to this day.

procedure

As far as we know so far, the representatives of the six states decided on cross-border cooperation on November 25, 1975 at the suggestion of the then Chilean secret service chief Manuel Contreras . The agreement coincided with the 60th birthday of the then Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet . The Spanish dictator Franco had died five days earlier . The countries cooperated in the exchange of information and in the persecution and killing of political opponents classified as enemies of the state in neighboring countries and abroad. A common information center was set up at the headquarters of the Chilean secret police , DINA .

Internally, the secret activities were justified with the elimination of opponents of the regime and as a fight against international terrorist elements. The secret services put their agents on the trail of opponents of the military regime , left-wing politicians, priests, trade unionists, members of the opposition and representatives of human rights organizations . As a rule, the victims were arrested or abducted without justification or legal basis and then often murdered (Spanish: Desaparecidos , '[the] disappeared' ; see also enforced disappearance ).

Several times were also abroad, u. a. Attempted assassinations in the United States, Italy, France, and Portugal. Among other things, the fatal assassination attempt on the former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington in September 1976 (car bomb attack) is linked to agents of Operation Condor. DINA boss Manuel Contreras was charged for this act in a US court (see role of the USA ). In 2004 he was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment in Chile for "violent deportation of people" (see legal review ).

Victim

Memorial march with photos of the disappeared on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup in Argentina, March 24, 2006

According to the current status of the official investigation and the evaluation of documents, at least 200 people fell victim to the cooperation between the states during Operation Condor. However, the far greater number of victims is due to direct measures taken by national governments against their own citizens. In Argentina alone, around 30,000 people are considered to have disappeared permanently , in Chile 2,950. But according to human rights organizations, the record of Latin American repression policy is much higher: around 50,000 people were murdered, 350,000 people disappeared and 400,000 prisoners.

Legal processing

The secret service operation became known by chance when research by the Paraguayan attorney Martín Almada in December 1992 discovered documents relating to Operation Condor in a police station in the suburbs of the capital Asunción . These so-called terror archives led to intensive investigations by the public prosecutor's offices in the now democratically governed countries.

Paraguay's former dictator Alfredo Stroessner was charged on several counts with Operation Condor - but he died in exile in Brazil protected from prosecution. On December 13, 2004, a Chilean court brought charges against the Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet , but he died before conviction. Most of the accused politicians, who have so far commented on the allegations, deny any responsibility for Operation Condor and the bloody repression in their countries and accuse the national police services. In the meantime, however, a number of those involved have been legally convicted, including the Chilean DINA boss Manuel Contreras, several Chilean and Argentine officers and, in 2010, the former junta boss of Argentina, Jorge Rafael Videla . Contreras was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a Chilean court in April 2003. In January 2004, an appeals court upheld the guilty verdict but reduced his sentence to 12 years. It was the first conviction for " violent deportation of people " during the military dictatorship in Chile. Numerous lawsuits are pending in the affected countries.

In 2009 Sabino Montanaro returned to Paraguay after years of exile . Montanaro was first head of the Paraguayan secret police and later from 1966 Minister of the Interior under dictator Stroessner . He was assigned a leading role in Operation Condor. In 1989 he fled to Honduras with a diplomatic passport . Whether charges should be brought was initially unclear, as he appeared too sick and old to be heard in court. Montanaro finally passed away in 2011 before a conviction could result. At this point in time there were seven lawsuits pending against him for various human rights violations, including the forced disappearance of people.

At the end of May 2016, a total of fifteen former military personnel were sentenced in Argentina for their involvement in the operation. The country's former military ruler Reynaldo Bignone was sentenced to twenty years in prison for participating in more than a hundred murders. Jorge Videla, who was originally also accused, died in the course of the more than three-year trial.

In 2017, the 95-year-old ex-president of Peru Francisco Morales Bermúdez was sentenced to life imprisonment in Rome.

Role of the US and France

The role of the US government and US intelligence agencies in Operation Condor has not yet been fully clarified. US intelligence documents published in 2000 and 2001 suggest that the FBI and the American CIA were aware of the activities, tolerated them, and provided logistical and technical support. According to the documents, they provided technical aids and gave training courses to the agents. The School of the Americas military training center in the Panamanian Canal Zone played an important role in this .

French veterans from the Algerian war trained officers of the military regime in the so-called French doctrine , which is a comprehensive instrument for the suppression of opposition members and includes, among other things, the systematic torture and murder of suspects.

According to an internal CIA investigation report, the agency maintained close contact with the head of Operation Condor, Manuel Contreras, from 1974 to 1977. The CIA also confirmed that it had made payments to Contreras at least at one point, the amount was not disclosed. When Contreras was indicted by a US federal grand jury for the murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976 , the CIA withheld this information; it did not become public until 2000.

The US documents released in 2000 included a telegram from the then US ambassador to Panama to the US Secretary of State from 1978. In it, the sender reports that a US intelligence center in Panama was used for the exchange of information by Condor agents serve. He expressed concern that disclosure of this fact could throw a bad light on the role of US authorities in the murder of Orlando Letelier, which was the subject of criminal proceedings in the US at the time.

Above all, the US security advisor (1969-1973) and Secretary of State (1973-1977) Henry Kissinger is accused on the basis of documents that he actively supported the action , as he feared communist revolutions in Latin American countries ( domino theory ) and the dictatorial rulers as an ally of the United States in the fight against communism.

background

In South America in the 1970s and 1980s, almost all countries were ruled for a long time by right-wing military dictatorships, mostly supported by the USA . Almost all of them used violence to suppress the mostly left-wing opposition. A common means of doing this was the secret kidnapping ( disappearance ) of unpopular people by members of the security forces who remained anonymous. The victims were mostly tortured and humiliated while imprisoned in secret prisons and, in many cases, were subsequently murdered (see Desaparecidos ). During the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 alone, up to 30,000 people disappeared in this way without a trace. After the transition of states to democracy, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, the prosecution of such crimes was prevented for years in many countries by general amnesty laws for the perpetrators. In recent years, however, these have been retroactively repealed in several countries , so that numerous former dictators and torturers have now been punished or are still on trial.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [Languth, Hikden. Terror. Pantheon, New York, 1978]
  2. ↑ Cóndor también acecho en Venezuela. El Nacional, Caracas, May 21, 2005, quoted on johndinges.com
  3. ^ Predatory States. Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America / When States Kill. Latin America, the US, and Technologies of Terror ( Memento June 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Daniel Brandt: Operation Condor: Ask the DEA. latinamericanstudies.org, December 10, 1998
  5. ↑ Virtual Truth Commission: Reports by Topic: Operation Condor ( Memento January 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), June 27, 1999
  6. ↑ National Security Archive : RENDITION IN THE SOUTHERN CONE: OPERATION CONDOR DOCUMENTS REVEALED FROM PARAGUAYAN 'ARCHIVE OF TERROR' , December 21, 2007
  7. ^ "Operation Condor" ( Memento from September 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) - Terror in the name of the state. tagesschau.de, September 12, 2008
  8. ^ Ailing Stroessner Henchman Returns to Paraguay. In: Latin American Herald Tribune. May 4, 2009, accessed May 5, 2009 .
  9. ↑ Jan Päßler: Ex-Interior Minister Montanaro died last night. ( Memento of December 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) The weekly newspaper, Asunción, September 11, 2011
  10. ↑ South American military dictatorships: Argentina condemns the military for "Plan Cóndor". Spiegel Online, May 27, 2016, accessed on the same day
  11. ↑ National Security Archive: Chile: 16,000 Secret Documents Declassified. CIA Forced to Release Hundreds of Records of Covert Operations , Nov. 13, 2000
  12. ^ Marie-Monique Robin: Death Squads - How France Exported Torture and Terror. (No longer available online.) In: Arte program archive. September 8, 2004, archived from the original on July 21, 2012 ; Retrieved January 13, 2009 .
  13. ↑ Christopher Hitchens : The Case Against Henry Kissinger . In: Harper's Magazine . February 2001, p. 37 ( online [PDF]). Online ( Memento from August 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ^ Telegram from the US ambassador to Panama on the use of US facilities by Condor agents (PDF; 48 kB), October 20, 1978, source: George Washington University
  15. ↑ Christopher Hitchens: The Case Against Henry Kissinger . In: Harper's Magazine . February 2001, p. 2–3 and penultimate page ( online [PDF]). Online ( Memento from August 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )