The Condor Years (41 page)

The document collections and the dogged investigations of pursuers like González, Almada, and human rights researchers in each of the countries laid the groundwork for an unprecedented series of human rights victories beginning in the mid-1990s. The first was in Rome. Investigating Judge Giovanni Salvi had been working since the early 1980s on the assassination attempt that left Bernardo Leighton and his wife seriously injured. Among the early leads was a 1979 article by the author, based on DINA sources in Chile, revealing for the first time that DINA had harbored a group of Italian terrorists, one of whom was identified as Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had organized the Leighton assassination attempt. Judge Salvi prosecuted Delle Chiaie and the Chilean suspects through three trials over more than a decade. His was the first judicial investigation of DINA’s European network, and he persuaded several of Delle
Chiaie’s rightist comrades to testify. He also traveled to Chile and Argentina. In Chile, he interviewed more than a dozen DINA personnel. In Buenos Aires, he became the only judge to enter SIDE headquarters, and came away with a complete copy of the Arancibia papers. The first trial, against Delle Chiaie, was premature—it was attempted without direct testimony from Michael Townley—and resulted in acquittal. Finally, Salvi reached an agreement with U.S. authorities to allow Townley to testify; during several days of secret depositions in 1992 and 1993 and personal testimony in Rome in 1995, Townley identified Delle Chiaie and his other coplotters in court for the first time. In June 1995, the court convicted Manuel Contreras and Exterior Department head Raúl Iturriaga Neumann in absencia and sentenced them to twenty and eighteen years respectively.

Chile refused the Italian extradition request, as it had done in response to earlier petitions from the United States in the Letelier case. But with a civilian government in power in Chile, the situation was changing quickly. After intense negotiations, the United States agreed to drop its extradition requests, dating from 1978, and Chilean courts began the first serious prosecution of the assassination case in Chile. The Letelier murder was the sole explicit exception to the amnesty law Pinochet’s government had left in place. The trial, conducted by prosecuting Judge Adolfo Bañados, relied heavily on the evidence developed by the FBI, the testimony of Townley, and new evidence developed in Italy. In response to a Chilean
exhorto
—a request for cooperation—Judge Salvi delivered the voluminous body of testimony and documentary evidence he had gathered. The trial in Chile lasted four years, ending in spectacular public hearings in May 1995 and convictions of Contreras and operations chief Pedro Espinoza. Pinochet, still commander in chief of the armed forces, had rattled sabers against the civilian government before to prevent civilian action against the military, but this time he turned his back. After a few dramatic days of hiding out in military bases, Contreras gave himself up and began to serve a seven-year sentence in a special prison facility. Espinoza was locked up in the same facility to serve a six-year sentence. The prison was comfortable, but it did not mask the reality: for the first time, two of Pinochet’s closest collaborators were serving time behind bars.

The Leighton and Letelier prosecutions were major tremors opening up cracks in the fortresses of military impunity, but the real shifting of the tectonic plates of international justice came with the arrest of retired general Pinochet
in London in October 1998. That event is examined in detail in
Chapter 3
. Although Pinochet himself was able to slip away from personal accountability by claiming advanced age and mental disability, the Spanish case was followed quickly by other energetic prosecutions, first in Europe and finally in South America.

Judges in Rome and Paris fashioned investigations around carefully selected cases of binational victims—those with French or Italian passports in addition to their Latin American citizenship. The French judge, Roger Le Loire, centered his investigation, opened less than three weeks after Pinochet’s arrest, on the disappearance of Jean Yves Claudet Fernández, one of the earliest Condor victims and part of the string of Condor kidnappings that started in Paraguay and included the capture in Argentina of MIR leader Edgardo Enríquez. Le Loire issued international arrest warrants for Pinochet and seventeen other Chilean and Argentine officials, including Batallion 601 operative José Osvaldo Riveiro, the “Colonel Osvaldo Rawson” of the Arancibia documents. Le Loire worked hand in hand with two other pursuers, lawyers William Bourdon and Sophie Thonon, representing the families of the victims. The judge brought his wide experience in espionage and terrorism prosecution to the investigation. He earlier had handled the questioning of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—Carlos the Jackal—after his capture in Sudan in 1994. In May 2001, Le Loire served papers on Henry Kissinger, who was in Paris for a meeting, asking him to testify about his knowledge of Condor. Kissinger refused, but subsequently curtailed his international travel to avoid additional subpoenas.

Operation Condor was also the focus of the Italian case. Judge Giancarlo Capaldo, the Italian federal investigating judge, opened the case at the request of the Italian Justice Ministry within a few months of Pinochet’s arrest in London. He was asked to investigate evidence of other crimes against Italians committed by Pinochet, but he soon expanded the investigation to include the top military leaders and security force personnel of four Condor countries—Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. The new case, in effect, was the continuation of Judge Salvi’s Leighton assassination case trials, and all of the evidence arduously gathered by Salvi—whose office was in the same court facility—was turned over to Capaldo.

The Rome investigation involved three Phase Two Condor operations: the Uruguayan-Argentine action against leaders of the Uruguayan Party for Victory
guerrilla group in Buenos Aires in 1976; the 1977 Paraguayan-Argentine-Uruguayan interrogations of a group of Uruguayans and Argentines captured in Asunción and subsequently delivered by plane to Argentina; and the Argentine-Brazilian operation in 1980 to capture Montoneros trying to smuggle themselves back into Argentina (see descriptions of these cases in
Chapter 13
). The case was brought on behalf of eleven victims, all of Italian ancestry.

Even before Pinochet arrived back in Chile, courts in Argentina and Chile began to act with unprecedented vigor, resurrecting old cases and finding loopholes in the amnesty laws. The Prats murder investigation, taken over by a politically astute judge, María Servini de Cubria, cast its net across the Andes to Chile for the first time. Servini asked Chile to extradite Contreras and Espinoza, later adding DINA Exterior Department Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga, Iturriaga’s brother, and DINA officer José Zara Holger. She included Pinochet in the list of suspects and asked for his extradition as a material witness. Arancibia, who had been in jail on Prats murder charges since 1996, was convicted in late 2001 and was sentenced to life in prison.

Chile’s courts, which had hitherto ignored the Prats murder, were thus forced to give the case a fresh hearing. In December 2002, the Chilean Supreme Court ruled that the extradition case presented by Servini had merit. Instead of extradition, however, the court ordered the five defendants to be tried in Chile for the Prats murder. The court also found that the defendants could appeal for protection neither to Pinochet’s amnesty law nor to the statue of limitations—referred to as “prescription” in Chilean law. Contreras and Iturriaga were immediately jailed.

By mid-2003, the amnesty in Chile had become an empty shell. The church sponsored human rights organization, FASIC, counted 247 separate ongoing prosecutions on human rights charges and was keeping track day to day on its Web site of which officers were currently in jail. Stopping short of a declaration of victory, the organization proclaimed:

Meanwhile, in Argentina an even bigger case was launched, tailored to investigate the crimes of Operation Condor under organized crime statutes and to prosecute its perpetrators as members of an illegal criminal association. The case, under the direction of federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, was far and away the most comprehensive judicial investigation of military crimes that had ever been attempted in Latin America. Its defendants were the top military leaders and intelligence officials of five of the six Condor countries (only Brazil was excepted). The list of victims, initially five, grew to include seventy-two people who disappeared in Condor operations in Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. The charges went beyond the litany of crimes against humanity—torture, disappearance—to include violations of the right of asylum, extradition laws, and violations of each country’s sovereignty. In addition to Argentine law—subject to the
Punto Final
laws restricting prosecution of Dirty War crimes—the Condor case established jurisdiction over the defendants in all the countries by citing the Nuremberg principles and other international precedents establishing universal jurisdiction in human rights cases.

In establishing the basic narrative of the creation of Operation Condor, the judge (citing as his source an article by the author in
La Nación
in August 1999) described the arrest of Jorge Fuentes and Amílcar Santucho in Paraguay in 1975 and how the three-country collaboration in that case can be traced with documents to the meeting in Santiago at which the security forces joined together in the new organization. The case continued to expand, adding the Michelini-Gutiérrez murders in late 2002, which had languished with little or no investigation either in Uruguay or Argentina for more than a decade.

In August 2001, Canicoba submitted an official request to the U.S. Justice Department, in accord with the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) with the United States, seeking the testimony of Henry Kissinger on Operation Condor. (Kissinger’s reply is analyzed below, p. 249.)

By indicating all of the top military leaders and seeking their extradition, the Condor case had the effect of nailing them in place in their own countries. None of the defendants could travel outside their own counties without fear of arrest on international warrants. The case also has a powerful, embarrassing effect on neighboring Uruguay, which was the one country that had conducted no human rights trials. Judge Canicoba demanded the extradition of four Uruguayan officers identified as working inside Argentina, in Condor operations based at Automotores Orletti, but Uruguay refused even to provide
information. In addition to the Michelini-Gutiérrez case, the largest group of victims were the members of the Party for Victory who had been kidnapped in mid-1976 in Argentina. In late 2002, an Uruguayan judge finally allowed a criminal investigation of the Michelini and Gutiérrez murders to be opened. These were just the most important international investigations. Several other European countries (including Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland) opened investigations of their own citizens killed in the Condor countries.

The number of international warrants for military officials from the Condor countries had surpassed 200 as this book went to press. Retired military officers, even younger and lower-ranking officers pursuing lucrative business ventures, were at risk whenever they traveled abroad. In a major follow-up to the Pinochet precedent in June 2003, a Mexican court extradited a former Argentine navy officer, Ricardo Cavallo, to face charges of genocide and terrorism in Judge Baltasar Garzón’s court in Spain. Cavallo had been running a small business in Mexico until his arrest in 2000. He was identified as a notorious torturer known as “Serpico” at the Navy’s ESMA camp in Argentina. The legal procedure for his case was the same as that pioneered by Garzón in Pinochet’s arrest in London, except that Cavallo was actually turned over to face trial in Spain. It was the first case in human rights law of a person arrested in one country being extradited to a second country for crimes committed in a third.

Condor, in its new incarnation as the central target of multicountry judicial investigations, had become the vehicle to ruin the peace and prosperity the military leaders were expecting in their declining years. Officers from Uruguay, where impunity still reigned at its most blatant, were prevented from taking the short trip to Argentina, and thus were cut off from their country’s most active partner for business, cultural, and family connections. It became hard to keep track of which officials had been indicted in which countries, and who was currently in jail or under house arrest. As the cases advance from investigations to formal indictments, an increasing number of officials have actually found themselves in jail. Those consequences are a measure, albeit imperfect, of justice. In a larger perspective, there is a deep historical irony in the two incarnations of Condor. It once was the primary destroyer of international protections. Now two decades later its legal prosecution is the catalyst for a pioneering new era of international law. As a result of the Pinochet precedents set in Spain, followed by far-reaching prosecutions in the other countries,
human rights protections were greatly strengthened, and for the first time since World War II, courts began to routinely honor the concept of universal jurisdiction as the last resort to prosecute the most powerful violators of human rights—those who enjoy impunity in their own countries. Just as Condor was created to mirror the international coordination of the JCR, Condor’s international activities made it vulnerable to a multinational legal strategy to prosecute its leaders and operatives.