The Condor Years (26 page)

Campos said an Uruguayan army major gave him a firsthand account of the operations that led to Michelini’s and Gutiérrez’s murders. He said the orders came from the commander in chief of the Uruguayan military, General Gregorio Álvarez. The plan initially was to kidnap the two political leaders with the help of Argentine security operatives and bring them back to Uruguay. Álvarez then changed the order, sending a liaison officer to request that the Argentines kill them in Argentina.

Campos Hermida said the military thought that Michelini and Gutiérrez were providing “support” for the Tupamaros in Argentina. He said the Uruguayan team in Buenos Airges was also involved in the kidnapping and murder a few weeks later of two men from the Cuban embassy who were Michelini’s “contacts” with the embassy.

Campos denied that he himself participated in any of the Argentine operations. (His story must be evaluated as self-serving, however, because he faced charges in an Argentine court for participation in other Uruguayan operations in Argentina not linked to the Michelini-Gutiérrez murders.) He said he was able to identify both the officer who participated in the kidnapping and the officer who was sent to transmit the order to kill Michelini and Gutiérrez. He said he wanted to testify in a judicial investigation because he wanted to clear himself and because he considered the murders “a monstrosity.”

The other source, who worked for 601 Intelligence Battalion at the time, told the story of the execution of four people in a car that fits many of the circumstances of the Michelini case. He said he was having drinks and exchanging war stories with a federal police officer, Subcommissioner Miguel Angel Trimarchi, who was trying to impress him about how quick he was to follow orders. Trimarchi said he picked up four people and drove them to the enclosed parking lot of Federal Police headquarters. Trimarchi didn’t say where he picked them up; presumably it was at other detention centers. He went into the
building to ask what he was supposed to do with the four prisoners. The source said he remembered Trimarchi saying, “They said I should kill them, so I went right downstairs. I got in the car, shoved one of them aside”—he makes a gesture with his elbow—“I shot all four.”

Another detail coincides with what we know about the murders of Michelini and the others. According to the source, Trimarchi also arranged for the four bodies to be discovered by dispatching a patrol car to the place where the car and the bodies had been left. When the patrolman arrived at the scene, he radioed back that he didn’t see four bodies. By radio, Trimarchi told him, “Look in the trunk, you’ll find two more.” Trimarchi also told the source he was involved in kidnapping “the couple” from their apartment, and that they had just celebrated someone’s birthday when the police arrived. The account is intriguing, but must remain in the category of an unconfirmed investigative lead until it can be established that the four people allegedly killed by Trimarchi were the Uruguayans. The source for this account said he is willing to testify about these and other crimes he learned about.

The spectacular murders had the intended effect of sending shockwaves of terror through the large Uruguayan community in Buenos Aires. Indeed, although few realized it, the roundup of Uruguayan leftists had begun within days of the Argentine coup, and involved operations in Bolivia and Uruguay as well as Argentina. The sweeps targeted not only Tupamaros and moderates like Michelini and Gutiérrez, but members of a new organization, the Party for the Victory of the People (
Partido por la Victoria del Pueblo
—PVP), and its armed wing, usually referred to as the OPR-33. The PVP, with anarcho-syndicalist roots, had been overshadowed by the Tupamaros in Uruguay, but in exile in Argentina had gained in members, money, and audacity. Financed by a $10 million ransom from a successful kidnapping of a businessman, the group was on the cusp of launching a major offensive to reestablish guerrilla opposition in Uruguay when the Argentine coup occurred. A few days after the coup, three Uruguayan PVP activists attempted to enter Uruguay from the north driving a camper. They were captured at the border. Within days the arrests began in Argentina, with clear signs that the actions in Argentina were being coordinated with intelligence gained by security forces in Uruguay. Scores of PVP activists were rounded up in the coming weeks, including several of the top leaders who had been living underground. Michelini’s daughter, Margarita,
a member of the PVP, was arrested in early July. Survivors later reported that a unit of at least five Uruguayan officers was operating for weeks at a time in Argentina, taking part in interrogations and supervising kidnapping operations that were carried out by Argentine commandos. There could be no doubt that the combined actions of Uruguayans and Argentines had penetrated the network of safe houses that sheltered the underground organization and were kidnapping people almost at will.

THE BOLIVIANS

The Bolivian left also had its center of operations in Argentina around former president General Juan José Torres. Torres had brought revolution to Bolivia during his brief ten-month government in 1971, channeling a broad coalition of radical miners, peasants, and progressive military officers in an attempt to end the domination of Bolivia’s landowners and mining companies. Some of the military around Torres had been radicalized by their experience of tracking down and capturing Che Guevara and his guerrilla force in 1967. Officers told stories of staying up all night in intense political discussions with the captured guerrillas, knowing that many, including Guevara, would be executed the following day. Guevara’s guerrillas, the National Liberation Army (ELN), were defeated militarily, but survived as the enduring symbol of possible revolutionary victory in the future. In exile in Argentina General Torres, likewise defeated militarily and ousted by rightist military leader General Hugo Banzer, remained the single unifying figure around which the opposition was organized.

A short, square man whose indigenous features attracted the loyalty of Bolivia’s majority Aymara population, the soft-spoken and gentle Torres was nevertheless an authoritarian who had little confidence that traditional democratic politics would be able to solve Bolivia’s problems. He was organizing on two levels: leading a public coalition of opposition groups called the Alliance of the National Left (
Alianza de la Izquierda Nacional
—ALIN), while at the same time working underground to ignite an armed uprising among miners and peasants. In this clandestine strategy, Torres was working closely with the revived ELN and the JCR. The ultimate aim was to set off a military coup to return Torres to power.

His chief political and military aide was Major Rubén Sánchez, who had
served with him during his government and followed him into exile first to Chile and then to Argentina. Sánchez had participated in the founding of the JCR, as the representative of the ELN. As one of the few people with formal military training, Sánchez was valued as an instructor at the JCR training camps that were set up in Chile and Argentina. Like Torres, Sánchez had little patience for ideology and the fine points of Marxist theory that stimulated so much debate among the would-be guerrilla fighters. An Argentine trainee remembers Sánchez cajoling them to spend more time learning to read maps and less time formulating grand strategies.

The Bolivians had been among the most successful in actually implementing their part in the JCR’s plan for continental revolutionary war. In mid-1975, the ELN had reestablished itself in Bolivia as the armed wing of a new organization, the PRT-B—the Revolutionary Workers Party of Bolivia, with a nod to the Argentine ERP’s political wing, the PRT. Major Sánchez led a small group of guerrilla leaders back into Bolivia with the goal of preparing for General Torres’s return. “At that moment, we all were in favor of taking power through armed action,” Sánchez said in a 1996 interview. His leadership corps was international: he was accompanied by ERP veteran Luis Stamponi from Argentina and Tupamaro Enrique Lucas and their wives, both of whom were guerrilla operatives as well. According to the JCR strategy, agreed upon at a meeting in May 1975, the Bolivian guerrilla offensive was timed to coincide with the Argentine military campaign, already underway, in the mountains of Tucumán Province. MIR’s long-planned offensive in the south of Chile was supposed to begin late that same year. By May 1976, both the Chilean and Argentine efforts had fizzled, but the Bolivian campaign organized by Sánchez was gathering strength among miners and peasants in Cochabamba Province.

Sánchez and his group had 150 men under arms, and had organized a larger group of committed and tough miners ready to fight with a lethal weapon that combined ancient Inca and modern technology: sticks of dynamite launched from slingshots. Torres received word that the moment was fast arriving for him to return to Bolivia to lead the uprising. The miners union was threatening a general strike in defiance of the military dictatorship and demanding pay raises of more than 200 percent to offset rampant inflation. Torres had also been meeting secretly with retired Bolivian military officers in an attempt to lay the groundwork for a military coup in response to the planned uprising in Cochabamba. According to the investigative account of these events by journalist
Martín Sivak, Torres decided to make his move around the time of the Argentine coup. Torres sent a secret letter to Sanchez saying that he planned to get his family out of Argentina to Venezuela. He then intended to travel to Peru and enter Bolivia clandestinely by crossing the scantily guarded border of desert and mountains in Peru’s Tacna Province. Once in Bolivia, he would use the ELN intelligence and security network to establish a clandestine command center in the Siglo XX mining complex of Cochabamba, where he could count on the protection of the powerful mining union.

In late May, according to Sivak, Torres discussed the situation with a Bolivian comrade. “They are insisting that they are well organized in the mines; I want to get in there however I can,” the friend quoted Torres as saying.

But it was not to be. Coordinated action by Bolivian and Argentine intelligence forces had already detected the guerrilla infiltration and operations were underway that would lead to its defeat, and ultimately to Torres’s death. The Bolivian operational links to Operation Condor are exceptionally well documented. Bolivian author Gerardo Irusta obtained a file of coded and decoded telexes and telegrams, some of which were labeled
“Sistema Cóndor.”
One such telex, dated May 3, 1976, was sent from Bolivia to Chile, informing the Chilean service that Colonel Carlos Mena Burgos had become the chief of military intelligence, SIE (
Servicio de Inteligencia del Estado).
Mena’s promotion was important to the new Condor System because in November 1975, Mena—then the number two man in SIE—had been Bolivia’s representative in Santiago at Condor’s founding meeting.

In the first week of April, security forces raided a safe house in Oruro, Bolivia, where the Tupamaro leader Enrique Lucas—who went by the guerrilla name “Guilli”—lived with his Argentine companion, Graciela Rutila, and their infant daughter, Carla. The raiders missed Lucas by only a few hours. He had departed for Cochabamba to work on the preparations for the miners’ uprising with Sanchez and other leaders, including the Argentine JCR representative Luis Stamponi. A Bolivian agent interviewed by Irusta said Rutila’s capture was an important step in their operation. “It’s true that Graciela Rutila was severely tortured because we were trying . . . to locate the whereabouts of Guilli and in that way cause the fall of the whole urban network of the ELN. That was our objective.”

It is not known how much information Rutila provided under interrogation,
but U.S. documents demonstrate that the Bolivian government was convinced it was under attack by internationally organized Communist forces. Banzer’s Interior Minister, Colonel Juan Pereda Asbun, met twice in early May with U.S. Ambassador William P. Stedman and asked for help. He said Argentine intelligence had informed the government that “fifty armed guerrillas are being prepared to penetrate into Bolivia.” In a secret cable May 11, Stedman reports, “Minister Pereda said that unbeknownst to the local press, Bolivian authorities have captured many subversive documents, broken up safe houses, and taken subversive elements into custody. They believe these are forerunners of a growing attack on Bolivia inspired by Communism from the outside.” (In later cables, Stedman specified that the Bolivians believed the JCR, with its bases of operations in Latin America and Europe, was the source of the international threat.) Asbun asked for an increased flow of U.S. intelligence information, and Ambassador Stedman recommended that Washington approve the request. “I believe the minister’s request for a greater flow of information from us about world-wide Communism would be in our best interests. If it were possible for one of our leading specialists on international Communism to visit Bolivia for conversations with the minister I think that would be highly useful for us.”

Earlier the same day Asbun and Ambassador Stedman met in La Paz, a team of gunmen in Paris shot and killed Bolivia’s ambassador to France, General Joaquin Zenteno. The assassinated general had been Banzer’s partner in overthrowing the leftist Torres regime, but in the ensuing years had been transformed into Banzer’s chief rival for power. Banzer had dumped him as chief of the armed forces and assigned him the Paris ambassadorship as a kind of golden exile. A group calling itself the International Brigade Che Guevara claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the assassination was in retaliation for Zenteno’s role in the capture and death of Che Guevara. A caller to the newspaper
Liberátion
said the attackers were French leftists who created the brigade after the Chilean coup to retaliate against the Latin American military. The caller provided accurate information, later confirmed by French police, about the gun used in the Zenteno killing. The same gun was used in another assassination attempt in October 1975 against the Spanish military attaché in Paris representing the fascist Franco government. The group also claimed responsibility for the assassination of Uruguayan military attaché Colonel Ramón
Trabal in December 1974. French police have never solved any of the assassinations. No evidence was ever developed to settle the lingering question of whether the Paris assassinations were the work of leftist or rightist terrorists.