The Condor Years (16 page)

For the trip to Paraguay and beyond, the commission chose two second-ranking figures, Amílcar Santucho, Roberto’s older brother, and Jorge Fuentes, who had been MIR’s factotum in Buenos Aires since early 1974. Santucho and Fuentes were the organization and money men of the JCR. Fuentes’s main job for MIR was to keep a steady flow of cash going across the border to meet MIR’s needs in Chile.

Amílcar Santucho, already in his fifties, with five grown children, did not fit the profile of an underground revolutionary. He was a well-known and successful criminal trial lawyer with longtime membership in the Argentine Communist Party. The oldest of eight Santucho brothers and two sisters—four of whom were leftist activists—Amílcar joined his brother Roberto in 1973 to work full time in the PRT/ERP after deciding—according to younger brother Julio—that “Robi had matured a lot politically” and his organization held promise for revolutionary success.

“I remember exactly the objectives of the trip by Amílcar and Fuentes,” said Luis Mattini. “It was an incursion as well as an informational trip to carry out a survey of the level of determination (
voluntad
) of the Latin American revolutionaries. It was like a preliminary probe. Afterwards they were supposed to deliver a report and then go out again to cement alliances or memberships [in the JCR] . . .”

One of their duties, according to two sources, was to explore the feasibility of moving JCR headquarters to another Latin American country. Lima, Peru, and Caracas, Venezuela, were on their itinerary. They were to bring $5,000 in
cash to the Peruvian group, the Popular Army of Peru, which years later was renamed for the Indian hero Tupac Amaru and in 1996 carried out the spectacular siege of the Japanese embassy in Lima. In Colombia, in addition to following up the contact with Bateman’s M-19, they were going to meet representatives of FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The night before departing with Santucho, Fuentes met for a farewell drink with his closest MIR colleagues, Edgardo Enríquez and René Valenzuela. To an observer in the bar they would have appeared to be three neatly dressed office workers getting together for a few beers and a few laughs after work.

Fuentes no longer looked like the gregarious student radical he had been in Chile, where he was widely known as “El Trosko”—a nickname he gained because of his vociferous opposition to Trotskyist influence in MIR. He had been elected president of the Federation of Chilean Students, the country’s most important student organization. The son of an army sergeant, he was an achiever, one of the many young people from lower-class backgrounds who took advantage of the opportunities for education and advancement offered by Chile’s decade of progressive governments.

After the coup, he had escaped via Peru to Cuba, where Castro’s tradecraft specialists trained him in underground activity and changed his appearance. False teeth changed his recognizable smile, and his distinctive black hornrimmed glasses were replaced by contact lenses. Valenzuela tried to talk Fuentes out of going by bus to Paraguay. “I told him, Why don’t you take a plane. You are a professional, a sociologist. Someone of your status wouldn’t travel by bus. They would fly.”

But Fuentes was not a person to make decisions based on status, and his attention to the details of security was lax at best. He preferred to travel in the company of a comrade. So early the next morning, Friday, May 16, he boarded the Buenos Aires-Asunción express bus with Santucho for the nearly ten-hour ride. Both had false passports, but in another violation of tradecraft, the two men sat side by side. When the bus arrived at a point twenty miles south of Asunción, it was transported across the Paraguay River on a small ferry, to the port of Itá Enramada on the other bank, where Paraguayan border police checked passports.

How police were alerted is not known, but they boarded the bus with the clear objective of arresting the older revolutionary, Amílcar Santucho, who was immediately taken into custody and taken off the bus. Fuentes, apparently undetected,
was allowed to continue his journey to Asunción. U.S. intelligence showed keen interest in the police action. The most detailed account available is in a cable from the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, presumably based on Paraguayan and Argentine intelligence sources: “A Paraguayan national noticed Santucho’s unusual behavior at border crossing point where he appeared to be signalling for a contact with a folded copy of ERP newspaper. Paraguayan police were informed when bus entered Paraguayan terroritory . . . He was also carrying a false bottom suitcase which contained ERP documents and contact information regarding other leftists in various other Latin American countries. Santucho and Chilean MIR companion, Jorge Isaac Fuentes, were evidently transiting Paraguay for a meeting in Peru of
Junta Coordinador[a] Revolucionario
(JCR).”

It is hard to believe that Santucho would make such a stupid move as to display a clandestine newspaper while on a secret mission. The embassy’s intelligence sources may have invented that detail to hide the fact they had Santucho under surveillance. Several other sources confirm that Santucho was carrying JCR documents in a hidden compartment in his suitcase, and one source who talked to Santucho said he was carrying a large quantity of cash.

Arriving in Asunción, Fuentes remained free only long enough to check into a hotel and send a postcard. The next day Paraguayan security police, the Department of Investigations of the Police of the Capital, arrested him at the Hotel España in downtown Asunción.

By any measure the capture of Santucho and Fuentes was an intelligence bonanza. Documents they were carrying included address books and lists of JCR contacts. Most were protected by only the flimsiest codes. In their heads they carried the names, positions, and pseudonynms of hundreds of underground activists—although compartmentalization procedures ensured that they knew very little about the physical location of the activists. They had attended the most secret meetings of the PRT/ERP, MIR, and JCR, and Santucho had served as official note taker. They knew plans, strategy, infrastructure, financial transmissions, and a wealth of detail about past guerrilla operations. Paraguayan security police quickly realized that these two men could provide a roadmap of JCR military activity in the Southern Cone. They also knew details of the JCR structure in a half-dozen European countries and of the solidarity infrastructure being set up all over Latin America, Europe, and the United States.

It was intelligence of vital interest to all of the security forces and intelligence agencies operating in South America. Traditionally wary of intelligence sharing, the agencies began to collaborate in unprecedented ways. The handling of the Fuentes-Santucho case created the mold into which six months later Operation Condor was poured.

One of the first to share in the bonanza was the FBI. The Bureau’s man on the ground in South America was Robert Scherrer, whose official title was legal attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, In fact, he was a one-man intelligence station whose sources in all of the Southern Cone countries were the envy of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence. A red-haired Brooklyn native of Irish-German descent, Scherrer didn’t try to blend into the Latin culture, despite his near perfect Spanish. His official assignment included police liaison with Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia in addition to Buenos Aires. He had had almost six years to build up his sources and network of contacts in those countries, and he had devoted special attention to Paraguay—a backwater country that could have given birth to the term. He traveled there regularly, sometimes taking his wife, Rosemary.

Scherrer knew General Benito Guanes, head of G2, the intelligence department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. He was on a first-name basis as well with Pastor Coronel, head of DICP (Department of Investigations of the Police of the Capital)—who was holding Fuentes and Santucho at his headquarters in downtown Asunción. Most likely it was one of them who had tipped Scherrer to the capture of the two revolutionaries. It is also likely that Scherrer flew to Asunción. Top-secret intelligence work of this nature was not conducted by phone. In any case, by the first week of June, Scherrer had been briefed on what Fuentes and Santucho were telling their interrogators under torture. He was filing reports, writing letters, and beginning a follow-up investigation on possible U.S. links to the JCR. His report to FBI headquarters in Washington, released to the author under the Freedom of Information Act, is dated June 6.

The FBI officer went a significant step further and thus became—to the extent that documentary proof has come to light—the first documented case of U.S. official participation in the multicountry operations against the JCR. Scherrer sent a letter informing his main police source in Chile, General Ernesto Baeza, about the JCR arrests. Chilean and Argentine security force interrogators also soon arrived in Asunción, and the interrogations of Fuentes and
Santucho became the preoccupation of three countries in the ensuing weeks and months. But before we continue with that story—which culminates in the formal creation of Operation Condor at year’s end—we must follow the action of the FBI investigation of the JCR as it took a detour to the United States.

Scherrer’s letter to the Chilean police officer eventually was turned over to the official human rights investigators, the Rettig Commission, who stored it in the commissions “reserved” or secret section. There, the author was allowed to read and copy the letter, reproduced here in translation:

Scherrer’s report to FBI headquarters has similar language, although it is heavily redacted. It confirmed the U.S. investigation. “The bureau is requested to instruct the Dallas, New York and San Juan offices to conduct appropriate investigation,” he wrote.

When the existence of the Scherrer letter first came to light, in a
New York Times
story by reporter Tim Weiner, the FBI was quoted as calling the investigation a “routine and traditional form of cooperation,” and the reporter was told the FBI could not find the people cited in the letter.

That wasn’t true. Not long after Scherrer’s report, Fuentes’s sister, Sonia Fuentes Bacicalupo (the correct spelling), was teaching her grade school class
at St. Phillips Catholic school in a Dallas suburb. She said a priest came to her classroom and told her an FBI agent was looking for her. The agent wanted to know when she had last seen her brother, Jorge, and whether he had ever lived with her in the States. She said she hadn’t seen her brother since she’d left Chile several years before the coup. The agents gave her no information about his arrest in Paraguay; it would be many months before she would find out the fate of her brother.

Scherrer, who died in 1995, discussed the Fuentes and Santucho arrests in interviews with the author in 1979 in the context of Scherrer’s key role in the FBI investigation of the Letelier assassination. He raised the Paraguay arrests of the JCR operatives on his own initiative as an example of international intelligence coordination against terrorism that was formalized in Operation Condor. In that interview, he talked about the brutality of the Paraguayan police and their use of torture, but he did not reveal that he had been briefed on the interrogation of the two men nor that he had shared the information with his Chilean counterpart, General Baeza.

Scherrer said he considered it part of his job to exchange information with the South American police in their pursuit of “terrorists”—and he considered Fuentes and Santucho to fit into that category. “They should be rounded up. But they should be tried, not slaughtered,” he said. The military governments in the region considered the United States a “haven for terrorists” under the guise of human rights activists, and Scherrer said that in 1975 the governments formally proposed that the FBI have a “more open exchange of information with them” about the activities of people they considered “terrorists” in the United States.