The Condor Years (40 page)

Note taking was too slow. González took out her tape recorder and spent the rest of the day reading the documents verbatim onto cassette tapes. She returned the next day and continued recording. It was astounding material of the kind few reporters or human rights investigator had ever seen. Arancibia had served as DINA’s man in Buenos Aires for almost four years. The letters contained the day-to-day instructions from his superiors in Santiago as well as his intelligence reports back to DINA. There were code names and aliases, references to operations in Chile, Argentina, and Europe. There were long lists of names of people who had been kidnapped in Argentina and Chile. Some of it made sense. Much of it was uncharted territory. She didn’t have time to record every document before time ran out.

Back in Chile, still under Pinochet’s rule, she transcribed the material and turned it over to the Catholic Church’s human rights organization, the Vicariate of Solidarity, which presented it as new evidence to keep the courts from closing the investigations of hundreds of cases of disappeared persons. González’s most important story, in
Analysis
magazine and later in
La Nación
newspaper, was an exposé of one of DINA’s pre-Condor propaganda operations, called Operation Colombo.

The operation, organized by DINA’s Exterior Department in 1975, was intended to create a cover story for disappearances in Chile. In July 1975, two obscure publications, one in Buenos Aires and the other in the provincial Brazilian city of Curitiba, published lists of 119 Chileans with stories saying they had been killed in guerrilla activity in Argentina or infighting between leftist groups. Other stories showed pictures of dead bodies found in Argentina with placards saying they were MIR members. The ID cards with the bodies
were Chilean, but the bodies were not. They belonged to Argentine victims of the AAA death squad. The stories were provided by an equally obscure Argentine news service and were picked up by Chile’s pro-Pinochet press. One Chilean newspaper headlined its story “Chileans Exterminated like Rats.”

All but four of the names appearing in the stories were of disappeared persons whose cases had been presented in a group habeas corpus filing by the Chilean Catholic Church in early 1975. The lists published in Buenos Aires and Brazil even reproduced the spelling errors contained in the Church’s presentation to the court.

González’s stories cited documents establishing that Arancibia, on DINA orders, had arranged for the publication of the false stories and lists, and that DINA Exterior Department officers had provided identity cards to be planted on the scene where the bodies were discovered. “Operation Colombo” was DINA’s own name for the scheme.
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The Arancibia documents provide exclusive internal information on the whole range of security force activities from 1974 to 1978, and constitute a virtual road map of the joint operations between Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay that led to the formalization of Operation Condor. The documents were known publicly only in the form of González’s transcripts for many years. Alerted to their existence, however, a Roman judge, Giovanni Salvi, traveled to Buenos Aires and obtained a complete copy from the court as evidence in his investigation of the assassination attempt against Bernardo Leighton. The author also obtained a complete set of the documents for use in this investigation—the only copy available outside judicial archives.

Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil all returned to civilian government in 1984 and 1985. In 1989, Paraguay’s army unceremoniously dumped General Stroessner in a bloodless coup and called elections. Pinochet was also on his way out. He called a plebiscite designed to extend his presidency for eight more years, but was delivered a resounding “No” by the Chilean people. He tried to stop the vote count and reverse the result, but his own fellow junta members refused to go along with what in effect would be another military coup to prolong the dictatorship.
The loss meant that free elections were allowed to go forward in December 1989, and Christian Democrat Patricio Alywin, backed by a coalition of parties that including Allende’s Socialist Party, won a decisive victory.

Finally, all the Condor countries had shaken off the long military nightmare. Still, none had grappled successfully with the legacy of the past. Like Argentina, Uruguay had briefly attempted to investigate the crimes of the military junta, in a congressional commission, but the effort was aborted by an airtight amnesty law, ratified by majority vote in a national plebiscite. Uniquely among the Condor countries, Uruguay’s Amnesty, called
“la ley de caducidad,”
renounced the right even to conduct criminal investigations of the human rights crimes.

Paraguay was the scene of the next major breakthrough in the pursuit of truth about the past.

Martín Almada was an accidental human rights hero. He was a teacher and fervent Colorado Party activist with a bright future. He studied at the University of La Plata in Argentina, and became Paraguay’s first PhD in education. He returned to Paraguay in 1974 with the well-founded expectation he would advance in the small world of Paraguayan politics. He headed the local chapter of the teachers association, and was able to dispense minor patronage through his control of a government-funded project to provide subsidized housing to teachers. He was already asked to be an educational consultant for the government. There was talk of a ministry of education job.

In late 1974, when their lives changed forever, Almada and his wife, Celestina Pérez, were running a small private school in the town of San Lorenzo just outside of Asunción. On November 24, a squad of Paraguayan police came to his house and placed him under arrest. At the office of police intelligence chief Pastor Coronel, he was tortured and interrogated. There had been a car bomb attempt on President Stroessner’s life, and the police had traced the plot to a group of young people, some of whom had studied at the University of La Plata at the same time Almada was there. The group had received training and support from the ERP, and Stroessner’s archenemy, Dr. Augustín Goiburú, had obtained the bomb from JCR contacts in Argentina and smuggled it into Paraguay himself.

Almada was totally innocent, according to those who were involved. One participant said they knew Almada in La Plata but decided not to approach him because he was on a government scholarship and was considered a loyal Colorado.
“It was our fault he was arrested,” said Dimas Piris Da Motta, who was the group’s liaison between Argentina and Paraguay. But innocence was no protection in Stroessner’s jails. Almada was savagely tortured for weeks. At one point he was placed on display in Pastor Coronel’s office in front of a large group of officers, including foreigners, which he later would describe in public speeches as a “Condor tribunal.”

During one of the torture sessions, the police called Almada’s wife, Celestina. They questioned her and held the phone so that she could hear her husband’s groans. A few days later, she collapsed and died of a heart attack. Almada’s torture and his personal tragedy transformed a small-town schoolteacher into one of the most relentless pursuers of the military leaders of the Condor countries. Almada’s experience gave him a unique vision of the inner workings of Operation Condor. He was in the same prison as JCR couriers Jorge Fuentes and Amílcar Santucho, and heard the story firsthand of their interrogations by Argentine and Chilean officers, and of Fuentes’s transport back to his death in Chile. One of the Chilean officers, Colonel Jorge Otaiza, interrogated Almada at one point.

In 1978, after almost four years in prison, Almada was released and made his way into exile first in Panama, then in Paris, where he got a job as an education specialist in UNESCO. Determined to document what had happened to him and especially to find out how his wife had died, he began to research the personnel and structures of Stroessner’s armed forces and police. When Stroessner fell in 1989, Almada was among the first exiles to return home, and he accelerated his quest for information.

Unlike the other Condor countries, there were no amnesties or special laws to protect the military. Stroessner fled into exile in Brazil and was joined by some of his followers. The most notorious torturers were put on trial and imprisoned, including Pastor Coronel, Police chief General Francisco Alcibiades Brítez, and intelligence chief General Benito Guanes, who had been Paraguay’s representative to Condor. But Almada wanted the truth more than he wanted the punishment of his tormentors. Using a provision called “habeas data” of the newly passed constitution, Almada petitioned the courts for all public records concerning his arrest and imprisonment and the death of his wife. Habeas data was similar to the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act in U.S. law. It provided that any citizen could have access to any public document
about himself or herself. Almada’s petition was the first time the law had ever been used. In the hands of a sympathetic judge, it was a powerful tool.

Almada filed his request with a lower level criminal court judge, José Augustín Fernández, who sent a court order in December 1992 to the Paraguayan police. The police responded that the police archives containing records of Almada’s arrest and imprisonment had been destroyed at the time of the coup against Stroessner.

Almada knew his country well and was undaunted. Among the vast network of people compromised by their work for Stroessner there were many who were jockeying for position with the new power holders, and there were many scores to settle. Almada put out the word in the press. A prominent human rights activist and Liberal Party congressman, Francisco de Vargas also got involved in the search. Within a few days they had some solid leads. A woman who was a friend of de Vargas brought her companion, a former policemen, to see him. The policeman knew where some documents had been hidden after the coup. They were in an obscure police facility outside Asunción, called the “Department of Production,” he said. He had a small quid pro quo in mind. He needed a job for one of his sons. De Vargas was glad to oblige.

The woman also went to see Almada, and gave him a hand-drawn map. Almada arranged with Judge Fernández to go to the facility, in the town of Lambaré, just outside Asunción. The map showed which building at the site housed the hidden documents. Almada alerted a group of reporters and television cameramen, and they drove in a caravan to the police station, arriving at 10:30 in the morning of December 22, 1992. De Vargas lagged behind, nervous that nothing would be found.

With the press crowded behind him, Judge Fernández confronted the police official in charge of the facility. Policemen in Paraguay were used to taking orders only from their military superiors, not from judges. “I am the judge. At this moment I am empowered with the authority given to me by the Constitution, and I order you to let me enter,” Fernández said. “I am your guarantee that nobody will harm you.”

Once inside, Almada followed the map to a room on the second floor at the rear of the the complex of buildings. There was a formidable padlock on the door. Fernández ordered someone to get a crowbar. They broke the lock and pushed open the door, against the weight of something piled against it.

They were amazed by what they found inside. It was a medium-sized office with almost no furniture. Every horizontal surface was covered with stacks of papers. There were hundreds of ringed archive binders, bound chronological volumes of police interrogation reports, boxes of surveillance tapes and photos, jailhouse log books recording the arrival and departure of thousands of prisoners, correspondence with security forces from Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and the United States, “rap sheet” summary reports in alphabetical order with photos and fingerprints of thousands of Paraguayan and foreign prisoners, many of them on the lists of disappeared. Almada’s rap sheet was there, and he also found interrogation reports and numerous other documents on his case.

Acting on another tip, searchers dug up other boxes of documents that had been buried in the courtyard. Among the findings were the yellowed and moldy remains of scores of ID cards of political prisoners who had been executed. The archive was so vast, it had to be transported in borrowed trucks to the Palace of Justice court building, where Judge Fernández had his office.
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Press reports at the time called the collection “The Archive of Terror” and the name stuck. Reporters estimated the weight of the documents at three or four tons. When years later the collection was microfilmed, the number of document pages was put at 593,000. It was quickly determined that the papers were the nearly complete records from the Department of Investigation of the Capital Police (DIPC), headed by Pastor Coronel. They were from Coronel’s DIPC headquarters and jail located on a downtown street only blocks from Parliament. It was the jail where Jorge Fuentes and Amílcar Santucho were held and interrogated after their arrest in 1975, and their case is recorded in dozens of documents. Several telegrams and intelligence reports from 1976
and 1977 were labeled for distribution to “Condor.” The researchers eventually found Manuel Contreras’s original invitation to Paraguay to attend the founding Condor meeting, with the only copy anywhere of the agenda for the meeting. Many of the most important Phase Two Condor operations and prisoner exchanges are documented in dozens of memos and letters exchanged among all the Condor member countries.

Almada’s
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discovery is by far the largest collection of previously secret security force documents from any of the Condor countries. The Paraguay Archive forms a major part of the documentary backbone of this book, together with the Arancibia documents discovered by Mónica González and the declassification of Chile and Argentina documents ordered by the Clinton administration. Without these documents, the history of the Condor years could not be written.