The Condor Years (15 page)

The Prats operation was Chile’s first foray into international assassination. It succeeded despite what we now know were massive intelligence leaks, most likely the result of the clumsy coordination with the Argentine participants. It bears noting how different were the actions of the intelligence agencies receiving the leaks. The French and East German agencies immediately set in motion actions to prevent the assassination. The CIA, learning of the planned assassination in Buenos Aires, could easily have arranged a discreet but visible show of U.S. interest and support of Prats—a luncheon or a visit from the U.S. defense attaché. Nothing was done.

Future operations would improvise and improve on the model. The next targets were located not only in Latin America, but in Europe as well.

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*
Concentration camps: According to Peace Committee tracking, the number of prisoners in the publicly recognized concentration camps declined to 10,000 by March, and to 7,000 by September 1974. In addition, approximately 5,000 mostly Latin American political refugees who had sought asylum in embassies and international organizations were allowed to leave the country under protection of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

*
The interview was conducted by journalist Amaro Gómez-Pablo in June 2002, using questions on Operation Condor and the CIA provided by the author.

*
Stewart D. Burton was chief of station at the time. In another interview,
La Tercera
, September 21, 2000, Contreras identifies Burton as the CIA official with whom he was dealing in 1974.

For the left and their democratic allies, 1975 was to be a year of regrouping and counteroffensive. Prominent Chilean moderates were establishing bases of operation in the United States and Europe. Socialist leader Orlando Letelier worked in Washington, D.C., Carlos Altamirano was in Paris and East Berlin, Christian Democrat Bernardo Leighton was in Rome, and Gabriel Valdés, a former foreign minister, was in New York. Their strategy: build an international coalition of democratic countries to ostracize the dictatorships. Political leaders of Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay continued even after the Prats assassination to base themselves in Argentina, taking advantage of its proximity to their countries and the openness of the Peronist government.

The extreme left, now organized in the JCR, began to see on the horizon the realization of their dream of military victory, of “many Vietnams,” as Roberto Santucho liked to say. There was apparent success in Argentina. The ERP’s “Compañia del Monte Ramón Rosa Jimenéz”—the mountain guerrilla offensive in Tucumán Province—was launching hit-and-run operations that were confounding the government’s clumsy counterguerrilla operations. The guerrilla force never exceeded ninety fighters, including ten women, but by January, the ERP units were operating in almost one-third of the province.

The other members of the JCR sent soldiers to Tucumán to gain combat experience. Of ten soldiers from Chile’s MIR, four were killed in action. MIR’s imported arms factory went into production in Argentina using plans, tools, and technicians brought over from Chile. By April, the first nine-millimeter submachine guns, christened the
“JCR Uno,”
were delivered to the Tucumán fighters, and finished parts for 4,000 other units had been machined and were ready for final assembly. Two radio transmitters were smuggled into Tucumán to complete Roberto Santucho’s vision of a Vietnam-like liberated zone from which the revolution would spread.

The PRT/ERP newspaper,
El Combatiente
, was published from a fully appointed printshop in the vaulted chambers of a tunnel—another page from the Vietcong playbook. Tucumán was the beginning, Santucho wrote in a tone of triumph. “We are living a situation of a mass uprising toward Socialism in all the Latin American countries. . . . If it is to find an adequate channel, it must depend on the role of the revolutionary vanguard in building up parties and mass military and political forces. It is in this perspective that we understand the true importance of the JCR and its strategic importance, and [we comprehend] the role of the liberated zones, whose concrete possibility is beginning to be seen.”

Yet, the revolutionary war that Santucho and the other leaders of the Revolutionary Junta hoped to ignite in Latin America remained a series of brush fires, despite their efforts to will it into a continental conflagration. “Voluntarism” is the special term in the revolutionaries’ lexicon for the error of a leader who allows optimism for victory to blind him to the realities on the ground. The desire, the sheer will to bring the revolution becomes the basis for actions and decisions. In proclaiming the success of his fledgling guerrilla war, he was following Che Guevara’s maxim that the mere presence of a small
foco
or pocket of fighting will ignite revolutionary action in a much wider area as soon as people learn of its existence. In other words, propagating the news of success is as important as military success itself.

The reality facing the revolutionaries in mid-1975, however, was stark. More than a year following the creation of the JCR, international guerrilla activity remained sporadic. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars were being spent to build and maintain revolutionary infrastructure in the four JCR member countries. Once the fighting in Tucumán got underway, JCR strategy called for the opening of simultaneous fronts elsewhere. “The idea was
that Argentina would not be the only battle front, that there would also be armed action in Chile and in Uruguay, even in Bolivia,” said Luis Alemany, the Tupamaro military chief at the time. But it wasn’t happening according to plan.

Alemany, from his base in Argentina, was preparing Tupamaro units for an ambitious counteroffensive scheduled for May Day, 1974. The attack was to include a wave of kidnappings and a prison break, using airplanes and a ship, to free the Tupamaro leadership. Uruguayan police discovered safe houses and plans before the operation got off the ground, however, and the plan was aborted. The leadership, disillusioned by the failure, split into factions and by the end of 1974 the Tupamaros ceased to exist as an effective military force. They had also been penetrated. The safe house where they held their final, fiery meeting was bugged and Argentine agents received transcripts of the debates that preceded the breakup.

MIR in Chile had the strongest military capacity outside of Argentina. Santucho was particularly galled at what he considered a dangerous excess of caution, even timidity by the Chileans. In meetings and exchanges of letters, Santucho cajoled and criticized, but MIR continued to postpone its planned counteroffensive against the Pinochet regime. Instead, DINA now was on the offensive in Chile. In October 1974, tortured MIR suspects had led a DINA commando to the hideout of MIR leader Miguel Enríquez, and he was killed in a furious gun battle.

In Bolivia, the ELN had reorganized, at the urging of their JCR comrades, as the Revolutionary Workers Party of Bolivia (
Partido Revolutionario de Trabajadores de Bolivia
—PRTB). JCR support helped them successfully reinfiltrate to establish organizational bases in miners unions, peasant organizations, and among other remnants of the followers of former president Juan José Torres. A mass protest supported by armed guerrillas in Cochabamba Province was short-lived, but it put dictator President Hugo Banzer on notice that he faced an international threat. His foreign minister and army chief began to ask the U.S. ambassador to provide U.S. intelligence reports on terrorist activity beyond Bolivia’s borders.

There had been incipient military action even in quiet Paraguay, where Stroessner’s twenty-year-old dictatorship was thought to have long since stamped out all overt resistance. An eclectic group of disgruntled former Colorado party members, radical students, and Argentine-trained Marxists embarked on a plan to assassinate Stroessner with a car bomb. The group had ties
to ERP and Montoneros, but was not formally allied in the JCR. The younger members of the group had been trained by ERP while they were students at the University of La Plata in Argentina. Two surviving members disclosed in interviews that the bomb intended for Stroessner was built by Montoneros in Argentina and smuggled into Paraguay by the group’s leader, Augustín Goiburú. Twice, the group positioned the bomb in a van along the route frequented by Stroessner, and twice the bomb failed to detonate. Finally, in November 1974, Stroessner’s security police arrested a militant who had tried—in an act of colossal foolhardiness—to purchase fresh explosives for the bomb from a navy officer. After being tortured, he led the police to the group’s safe house, and dozens were arrested. A CIA report on the plot noted that, “Despite the stupid blunder that produced the mass arrests, the game plan to blow up Stroessner’s automobile was the most sophisticated of many attempts to oust the President since he came to power twenty years ago.”

In Tucumán, even as Santucho was proclaiming success, the military campaign was losing momentum. The Argentine army in February pushed aside the cruel but ineffective federal police and began a concerted counterattack called Operation Independence. In April, shortly after the ERP newspaper
El Combatiente
trumpeted that the JCR was manufacturing its own “JCR Uno” submachine guns, the military raided one of the arms factories in a basement in the Caseros neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Then, in late June, the military routed a poorly armed ERP battalion at Manchalá in Tucumán. Soon after the army moved into the capital city of Tucumán to decimate the ERP noncombatant support structures that had been operating undisturbed for more than a year. For the rest of the year the army kept the ERP guerrilla force on the defensive. As one observer commented, the ambushers had become the ambushed, and the guerrilla campaign was “bemired, as had been all of the rural [guerrilla]
focos
in the history of Argentina.”

It was clear that the Tucumán campaign—with its evanescent “liberated zone”—could not long survive in isolation. It needed more international solidarity than it had received so far. If the JCR was ever to prove its strategic value as a regional force, it was at this critical juncture. Until this point, the JCR had established its international network almost exclusively in Europe, with offices and support organizations in Paris, Lisbon, Rome, and Bonn. European Social Democratic parties had received the JCR emissary, Tupamaro Efraín Martínez Platero, with respect and solidarity in early 1974, but flatly rejected the JCR request
for support for the JCR’s guerrilla warfare strategy. European enthusiasm and financial aid was limited to “solidarity” with refugees, political exiles, and other victims of mounting human rights abuses. The guerrilla strategy was embraced by Europe’s many ultra-left extremist groups, but the JCR tried to keep them at arm’s length to avoid alienating the more important Social Democratic support. Surviving JCR leaders—Pascal, Mattini, Martínez Platero—unanimously insist they had no operational ties with the many violent radical groups in Europe, such as the Baader-Meinhof “Red Army” of Germany, although friendly personal relationships were common. Europe provided a rear guard for financial and propaganda operations, they said, but military action was off limits.

The JCR network in its home base of Latin America was less well developed. A curious phenomenon had occurred growing out of the availability of millions of dollars in the ERP war chest. The JCR became a kind of revolutionary funding organization, a crypto-Rockefeller Foundation of the radical Marxist left, receiving proposals and doling out grant money. “We had lots of money. Movements from all over were coming to ask us for money. We gave out $10,000 here, $40,000 there. If they were involved in armed struggle, it was all the more likely they would get the money,” said ERP leader Luis Mattini. For a time the visiting revolutionaries were invited to attend military training courses at the ERP’s clandestine schools. The largest grant was $150,000 to a leftist group getting organized in Portugal to take advantage of that country’s brief military-sponsored revolution. Jaime Bateman, leader of Colombia’s M-19 guerrillas, the most active leftist military force outside of the Southern Cone, sent a representative to Buenos Aires in 1974 to plan regional strategy and to discuss the possibility of joining as a formal member of the JCR.

It was time for the JCR to get serious about creating the “Latin American International” contemplated in the JCR charter. In May 1975, the JCR Executive Commission decided to send two JCR emissaries on a mission to spread the JCR’s message of regional revolution to other countries in Latin America. The first stop was Paraguay. It was a trip that was to intended to spark the expansion of the JCR and its revolutionary strategy. Instead, however, the JCR mission almost immediately became the target of concerted action by the security forces of Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. The FBI also was brought into the intelligence loop and initiated a follow-up investigation of JCR activity in the United
States. One can draw a direct line from the capture and shared interrogation of the two JCR emissaries to the creation of Operation Condor six months later.

The mission to Paraguay was planned in early May. Edgardo Enríquez had taken over leadership of MIR after his brother was killed in the DINA attack the previous September. Edgardo, a dark, gangly man, had been dividing his time among Cuba, Europe, and Argentina, since leaving Chile clandestinely in February 1974. Enríquez had only recently arrived in Buenos Aires from Paris in early May. He came with fresh ideas and a determination to make his way back to Chile, where MIR would finally launch the long-delayed military offensive. In a meeting of the JCR Executive Commission he proposed an immediate mission to recruit new JCR member organizations outside of the Southern Cone.