The Condor Years (39 page)

A Paraguayan general was willing to talk frankly about the effectiveness of Condor. “There had been cooperation of one sort or another before,” said retired General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos, who was chief of the Paraguayan general staff during the Condor years. “The difference was it [Condor] worked. It was very successful. It made short work of the international subversion. Otherwise we might have had communist governments in all our countries.”

______

*
Koch and another State Department source remember a different version: that Siracusa said Koch would be as safe in Uruguay as he was on the streets of New York—a not-too-subtle jab at the city’s then rampant muggings and high murder rate.

*
The Senate Report on Activities of Certain Foreign Intelligence Agencies states, “The plot was foiled . . . The CIA warned the government of the countries in which the assassinations were likely to occur—France and Portugal—which in turn warned possible targets (the CIA was aware of the identity only of Carlos) and called in representatives of Condor countries to warn them to call off the action. They did—after denying that it had ever been planned.”

*
Leandro Sanchez Reisse, a civilian employee for Intelligence Battalion 601, said he had spent many nights drinking with security officers at Los Años Locos. Since most of the kidnapping operations occurred after midnight, the agents spent a lot of time at the bar drinking before the operations, and then would return to continue drinking and trading war stories after the operations were finished. Some nights, he said, he saw agents drinking at the restaurant with blood splatters on their clothes.

*
Also spelled Stoulman in court documents.

The Condor years demonstrated, two decades after the fact, that unresolved crimes of the past do not remain in the past. Operation Condor returned like a painful, inflamed carbuncle to plague the old age of those who conceived it and the officers who carried it out.

Condor’s success turned out to be ephemeral. A decade later, none of the military governments was still in power. The Condor regimes’ secret campaign to eliminate their democratic and guerrilla adversaries eventually was replaced by another kind of pursuit, to bring the military leaders themselves to justice. This time it was a campaign carried out in the light of day and in the arenas of international law.

The pursuit of justice, begun while the crimes were still being committed, would continue and gain strength for more than two decades. It was at first a slow and tedious process that for long years seemed doomed to futility by lingering military influence, legal setbacks, and national indifference. But as this is written, human rights prosecutions were reaching a crescendo, resulting in hundreds of extradition petitions, indictments, and imprisonment for many of the military officers who had enjoyed years of court-protected impunity.

The crimes of Operation Condor became the catalyst for an intense international prosecution that mirrored Condor’s three-continent arena of activity. The cross-border Condor activities had been a relatively small portion of the mass violations of human rights committed by the military governments. Nevertheless, Condor took on unique significance, both symbolically and legally,
in the effort to bring the military leaders to justice. The Condor crimes, by targeting high-profile public figures, especially military leaders and democratic politicians, attracted the extraordinary attention of zealous human rights lawyers, crusading judges, and persistent investigative reporters.

The international nature of the crimes expanded the jurisdictions that could prosecute them. The military leaders left behind amnesty laws, often negotiated with their civilian successors, but Condor presented a special problem. Because the military governments did not admit the existence of the international operations, the amnesty laws were drafted to cover only internal human rights abuses. The Letelier murder, for example, was explicitly excluded from Chile’s amnesty law, passed in 1978. Thus in many cases the Condor operations left military leaders exposed to prosecution in neighboring countries for crimes protected by amnesties at home.

Condor’s operations also left a trail of potential witnesses and other evidence in dozens of countries in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. While the Condor countries were fairly systematic about eliminating incriminating evidence about their own military activities, they were far less efficient in protecting their Condor partners, especially after the alliance had ended and civilian governments were in power. The evidence was of less importance to the country where it was discovered than to the countries it implicated in criminal activity. Thus pursuing investigators were able to uncover rich veins of evidence, including caches of documents in some cases.

Because of its nature as a massive intelligence undertaking, Condor generated a broad paper trail in the U.S. government as well. Condor involved at least six governments’ intelligence services, and as such it was of immediate and crucial interest to the CIA and U.S. military intelligence. While there was no systematic U.S. attempt to gather information on human rights abuses or to place obstacles in the way of those committing them (at least until the Carter administration), intelligence reporting on Condor alliance enjoyed a high priority. It was relevant not only to U.S. policy but to overall counterintelligence and military liaison goals as well. Reporting on Condor was protected at the highest “codeword” level of classification.

To be sure, this is not to say that Condor was the only factor in unleashing of the recent breakthroughs in human rights prosecutions. It is my task here, however, to complete the account of the Condor years by showing how the international crimes of the military governments gave way to an increasingly successful
campaign to document the crimes of the past in courts of law and to bring charges against the authors of those crimes.

No step was easy in the search for evidence and the pursuit of eventual justice.

Still, the first step was gigantic. The FBI investigation of the Letelier assassination led not only to indictments but to the gathering and eventual declassification of an enormous body of evidence about the Pinochet government’s secret police and its international activity. That evidence, contained in thousands of pages of trial transcript and evidentiary documents measured in linear feet, was the first detailed exposure of Chile’s secret apparatus of repression. It was that evidence, in particular the investigative work by the FBI’s man in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, that first publically revealed the existence of Operation Condor, in 1979. We now know, however, as described in
Chapter 11
, that the evidence was carefully selected to conceal crucial details about U.S. intelligence on Condor. Chile maintained an iron wall of silence about its own military crimes as long as Pinochet remained in power, refusing extradition of those indicted in the United States.

Argentina was the first country to attempt real investigations and real trials. The junta generals tumbled from power after an abortive invasion in April 1982 to wrest the bleak Falkland Islands off the southern coast from Great Britain. The armed forces that had pursued so relentlessly the war against terrorism against Argentina’s own citizens were routed when their bluff was called by Britain’s counterattack. Thousands of ill-equipped and badly led Argentine troops were captured with barely a fight, and at least 1,000 were killed. Junta president Leopoldo Galtieri resigned in disgrace. The new military leader, General Reynaldo Benito Bignone, was forced to begin the process of restoring civilian rule.

There was an immediate campaign, fiercely resisted by the military, to prosecute the crimes of what everyone now called the Dirty War. The newly elected president, Raúl Alfonsín, who had been a courageous human rights activist during military rule, created a commission, headed by writer Ernesto Sábato, to investigate the fate of the disappeared. The Sábato Commission conducted a hurried investigation and delivered its report, titled
Nunca Mas—
Never Again—in less than a year. It listed 8,961 names of disappeared, the bedrock minimum of documented victims of the regime’s network of secret prisons and extermination centers.

The task of naming and trying the perpetrators was left to the courts. The Alfonsín government pushed through legislation sweeping aside the military government’s “Self-Amnesty” decree enacted just before leaving power. Trials of the members of the military juntas lasted from April to December 1985 and ended in the conviction of the five top leaders, including Videla and Navy chief Emilio Massera, who received sentences ranging from life to five years in prison. The trials created explosive anger among other military officers, who understandably concluded that they might be next to face trials. In fact, at least 1,700 additional prosecutions were in preparation in the months following the conviction of the top leaders.

For the next several years, the country roiled in unresolved conflict, including four armed rebellions by military units known as the
carapintados
for the camouflage paint they used on their faces. Alfonsín was forced to back down on prosecuting the lower ranking military. He agreed to set a deadline—called the
Punto Final
—after which no further charges could be filed against the military for human rights atrocities. Finally, in 1989, after a final bloody military revolt, Alfonsín’s successor, Peronist President Carlos Menem, bought peace with the military by issuing presidential pardons for Videla and the other junta members.
*

In the midst of the turmoil surrounding the trials and pardons, a young Chilean investigative reporter, Mónica González, arrived in Buenos Aires in pursuit of information about Chile’s most famous unsolved murder: the 1974 assassination of Pinochet’s predecessor, General Carlos Prats. There had been a perfunctory judicial investigation at the time that was quickly squelched by pro-military judges. González, a freelance reporter for a weekly magazine, wanted to study the Prats case files for a book she was writing.

After a frustrating week roaming the hallways of the majestic federal court building in downtown Buenos Aires, she had managed to read the official file of the case, but learned little. Most of the court employees and judges were holdovers from the military era, and the atmosphere in the court offices was unremittingly hostile.

By making herself and her quest visible, she finally got a break. A man she assumed was a court employee approached her in the hallway. “Señora, if you
want to find something, don’t waste your time [with the Prats case file],” he said. “Just look for the espionage trial of Enrique Arancibia Clavel, for when they arrested him in 1978. Just get ahold of those files.”

González knew the name. Enrique Arancibia was a notorious right-wing civilian who had fled Chile in 1970 because of involvement in terrorist bombings around the time of the elections that brought Allende to power. After the coup, he had gotten a job in the Buenos Aires branch of the Chilean Banco de Estado. There had been a brief flurry of publicity surrounding his arrest as a spy in 1978, during a tense period in which Chile and Argentina had both mobilized their forces in a military standoff over disputed territory in the southernmost tip of the continent, known as the Beagle Channel. But when the crisis between Chile and Argentina abated, thanks to papal mediation, the charges were dropped, and Arancibia resumed what appeared to be a quiet life as a restaurant owner. He was one of the people González had on her list to interview.

González learned that at the time of his arrest, Argentine police had searched Arancibia’s apartment and his bank office and confiscated extensive files documenting his work as a Chilean agent. González looked up the case and located the judge in charge. The court files were supposed to be public records, but the judge had absolute control over who would be allowed to see them. He refused to give her access to the archive, or even to talk to her.

González had been ignored, brushed off, lied to, and threatened on this reporting trip, and she was no longer willing to take no for an answer. She decided to make herself a nuisance. She found out where the judge lived and set up a vigil, arriving by bus at 7
A.M.
each morning on the street outside his house. For a week, she was there as he left his house in his chauffeur-driven car, trying to get his attention. The judge’s wife came out and surveyed the spectacle with irate impatience.

“I heard her tell him,
‘Nada mas’
—‘No more.’ This has to stop,” González recalled. “Finally he had his driver pull up beside me. He just said, ‘Get in,’ and never said another word to me.” The judge took her to his office and instructed a secretary to show her where the Arancibia documents were archived. She was allowed to read the documents, but she couldn’t make copies.

The court archive was a sea of disorder. Ringed binders with ancient labels were arranged haphazardly on shelves. Boxes full of filings from long-forgotten cases covered most of the floor. The room appeared not to have been
cleaned in years. The secretary located three closed boxes with files labeled
“Causa 949, Enrique Arancibia Clavel y otros
. . . ,” and left González alone.

González jerked the lid off one of the boxes, and let some of the loose contents spill out onto the floor. One of the first things that caught her eye was a small stack of Chilean identity cards. She recognized some of the names. They were Chilean political prisoners who had disappeared. In other boxes there were hundreds of pages of correspondence—original letters received from Santiago, and carbon copies of letters from Buenos Aires to Santiago. The correspondence started in October 1974, only a few days after the Prats assassination, and was arranged in chronological order up to the time of Arancibia’s arrest in November 1978.