The Condor Years (27 page)

A short time later in Buenos Aires, Banzer’s most public enemy was eliminated. On the first day of June, Juan José Torres said good-bye to his wife and walked with a friend toward his office. The two men went their separate ways at a downtown street corner. Torres never arrived at his office or at an appointment he had made with an Argentine politician. The next day, on a country road seventy-five miles outside of Buenos Aires, the former president’s body was found under a bridge. He had been shot once in the head and twice in the neck. A blindfold was still wrapped around his head.

The Argentine government denied knowing anything about the crime, as did the Bolivian government. Argentine economics minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz called U.S. Ambassador Robert Hill to assure him of the government’s innocence and to say “he considered that killing was work of leftist extremists killing ‘one of their own’ ” so that the blame would fall on the military government. It was not the first or last time this kind of “martyr theory” would be used to shift blame for international assassinations typical of Operation Condor.

Inside the U.S. embassy it was not an explanation that held water. Legal Attaché Robert Scherrer quickly developed information that the Torres murder was part of the new security force cooperation among the military governments. The embassy’s initial optimism about a moderate military government was dashed on the bloody reality of mounting repression and the assassinations of three prominent figures—Michelini, Gutiérrez, and Torres—who had sought protection in Argentina.

Reporting to Washington the day Torres’s murder was confirmed, Hill wrote that the embassy would reserve judgment pending further information about the crimes, and concluded: “There is no question, however, that it will be widely assumed in Argentina and abroad that the killing was work of GOA [government of Argentina] security forces acting officially, or at least that of semi-official ‘death squad’ which has tacit approval of GOA. Coming on heels of murders of the Uruguayan exiles Michelini and Gutiérrez, it will be taken as indication of campaign to eliminate leftist exile leadership in Argentina and probably to intimidate exile communities here.”

Slowly, among those reading the most secret intelligence traffic about Latin
America—in the embassies, in the CIA, in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and the State Department—there was an awakening to a flow of hard evidence that was soon to become a flood: that the government of Argentina was committing human rights violations on a massive scale never before seen in Latin America, and the six military governments of the Southern Cone were cooperating to assassinate one another’s opponents.

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The CONADEP total remains the most reliable, as a minimum number of disappeared, because it is based on an actual list of names of people whose disappearance has been reported to the commission. New cases added after 1983 brought the total to 9,089 (see Table, p. 139). A widely quoted figure of 30,000 disappeared is based on extrapolations made in the early 1980s by human rights activists. The Battalion 601 calculation of 22,000 is important new evidence to support the claim that the true number is far higher than the CONADEP figure, although still lower than the estimate of 30,000.

On June 8, 1976, in the midst of Chile’s and Argentina’s underground offensive against radical and moderate enemies of the region’s military governments, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger arrived in Santiago. On his agenda: a speech on human rights and a meeting with General Augusto Pinochet.

Henry Kissinger didn’t become one of the most powerful men in the world as an advocate of human rights. Yet it was on his watch as secretary of state that human rights entered the central lexicon of U.S. foreign policy and became enshrined in U.S. laws and government institutions. Human rights was run on two separate and often contradictory tracts, leading to a Manichean gulf of moral ambiguity in the record of U.S. foreign policy under Kissinger’s stewardship. Nowhere are these separate tracks more visible—now that the previously secret documents have been released—than in U.S. actions surrounding Operation Condor and human rights atrocities in the Southern Cone.

It was Kissinger, as national security adviser, who in 1970 chaired the 40 Committee, the secret body of high officials charged with reviewing and approving the covert action program to subvert Chile’s democratic election, and then organizing a military coup to prevent the Socialist candidate Salvador Allende from being inaugurated. The CIA reported only to Kissinger in the White House about its most extreme actions—those so secret they were concealed from the other 40 Committee members and even from the U.S. ambassador—such as the supplying of “grease guns” (submachine guns) to groups plotting to kidnap General René Schneider, the chief of the Chilean armed forces, who stood in the way of a coup. When one of the groups botched the kidnapping and killed the general, Kissinger and the CIA gave contradictory versions of the U.S. role. Kissinger claimed he ordered the coup operation stopped before the kidnapping, but the CIA insisted no such “stand-down” order was received. A Chilean court convicted the leaders of both groups and concluded they were working together throughout the coup plotting, including the kidnapping of Schneider.

The various plans to oust Allende were referred to as “Track I” and “Track II,” depending on their level of secrecy and degree of criminal activity. This duality of approach, with its accompanying elements of confusion, obfuscation, and cover-up, would continue to characterize Kissinger’s actions during later years. When General Pinochet finally accomplished the U.S. policy goal by overthrowing Allende in 1973, Kissinger and the CIA became personally invested in the success of General Pinochet’s government. As secretary of state after September 1973, Kissinger sent signals to his subordinates that advocacy of human rights was a low priority, and discouraged reports from Santiago about Pinochet’s abuses. When the new ambassador to Santiago, David Popper, reported to Washington that he had initiated a discussion of human rights in a high-level meeting, Kissinger scrawled on the cable, “Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures.”

Embassy officers in Santiago and desk officers in Washington learned quickly the danger of passing negative news about Pinochet up to the Secretary of State. When two embassy political officers wrote a description of empty streets in Santiago during the second anniversary celebration of Pinochet’s coup, the report was excised from cables sent to Washington. An officer’s eyewitness account of a concentration camp met a similar fate. State Department officers learned to use “weasel words” in writing about Chile, according to one
key officer. Another officer working on Chile from State Department headquarters summed up Kissinger’s policy toward Pinochet in three words: “Defend, Defend, Defend.”

Yet even Henry Kissinger had to face the rising international pressure on human rights. During questioning in his confirmation hearings to be President Nixon’s secretary of state, Kissinger framed human rights as a value to be subordinated to strategic goals: “In our bilateral dealings we will follow a pragmatic policy of degree. If the infringement on human rights is not so offensive that we cannot live with it, we will seek to work out what we can with the country involved in order to increase our influence. If the infringement is so offensive that we cannot live with it, we will avoid dealing with the offending country.” Kissinger drew a distinction between “aggressive totalitarianism”—the Communist nations and their allies—and the governments who were trying to resist Communism. Chile and Argentina under anti-Communist military rule were clearly in the category of regimes the United States could “live with” because they were engaged in a higher struggle whose ultimate goal—in Kissinger’s view—was the preservation of freedom.

By early 1976, however, Kissinger’s “see-no-evil” approach to Pinochet had become untenable in the wake of worldwide condemnation of Chile and rising outrage inside the United States over abuses of the new military governments in Latin America. Congressional leaders such as Senators Ted Kennedy and Alan Cranston and Representatives Donald Fraser of Minnesota, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Edward Koch of New York were accomplishing in Congress what the Executive Branch refused to do: use the leverage of U.S. economic and military aid to put pressure on human rights violators. The congressional pressure was holding up the planned sale to Chile of a fleet of U.S. F-5E fighter airplanes Pinochet had ordered as part of his military buildup against his neighbor to the north, Peru, which was threatening to reopen a century-old territorial dispute.

Thus Kissinger had human rights on his mind as he prepared for his first visit to South America, a region he privately disparaged as culturally irrelevant and economically insignificant. Only on the strategic canvas of the struggle against the Soviet Union did the Latin countries merit his attention. Pinochet had done an enormous service, in Kissinger’s view, by stopping the advance of Allende’s democratic but pro-Communist movement before it could become a showcase for non-capitalist solutions to social problems in the region. Now,
Pinochet needed Kissinger’s help. Kissinger had been working hard, devoting extraordinary Saturday morning briefing sessions to the Chile problem. Ever pragmatic, Kissinger had decided that human rights was to be a tool toward the goal of breaking the barriers to the airplane sale and to improving Pinochet’s image.

The occasion of Kissinger’s visit to Chile was the annual meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS). At Kissinger’s behest, the United States and its allies had lobbied to hold the prestigious meeting in Santiago as a way of raising Pinochet’s profile among the few non-military governments still remaining in the northern tier of the continent, Central America and Mexico.

The OAS meeting was held in the massive conference center that had been built by Allende’s government for the 1972 world meeting of the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development. Having bombed Chile’s traditional presidential palace in the 1973 coup, Pinochet took over the conference complex as his government headquarters, rechristening it for a nineteenth-century military hero, Diego Portales.

Kissinger commented on the “beautiful building” when he arrived at noon on Tuesday, June 8 at Pinochet’s office on the twenty-second floor. Pinochet began by saying he was “grateful” that Kissinger had come to the conference.

The account of what was said at the meeting between Pinochet and Kissinger was shielded in secrecy for more than twenty years until a transcript was finally declassified in 1998. These excerpts are from that document: