The Condor Years (5 page)

A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms:

To extremists in the military, people like Manuel Contreras and others later placed in charge of security forces, Kissinger and the CIA sent an even more dangerous message that would echo later in Condor operations. The CIA “agreed with” and supported plans by military plotters to kidnap the top commander of the Chilean Armed Forces, an action considered “an essential step in any coup plan.” The officer, General René Schneider, was shot to death in the operation. Schneider’s offense, according to the CIA, was excessive devotion to democracy: “Schneider was a strong supporter of the Chilean constitution and a major stumbling block for military officers seeking to carry out a coup to prevent Allende from being inaugurated.”

According to declassified documents, the CIA provided three submachine guns to one group of plotters at 2
A.M.
on the day of the kidnapping. The CIA has always insisted that the weapons were never used and that a different group killed Schneider. Weapons and money were also promised to that second group but were never delivered, according to the CIA. The distinction between the two groups seems insubstantial, however, since the CIA never abandoned the tactic of kidnapping the army chief and was providing support to plotters on the same day it actually happened.

The United States thus gave its operational endorsement to acts of terrorism in furtherance of the cause of anti-Communism. It was okay to remove a moderate leader who became a “stumbling block” to the removal of a perceived Communist threat. The message could only have been reinforced when the agency a few weeks later sent $35,000 to one of the kidnappers who had escaped. The reason given: “to keep the prior contact secret, maintain the good will of the group, and for humanitarian reasons.”

The U.S. message about acceptable operational tactics was received directly by some of those who later used those tactics in the Condor Years. Among the members of the group plotting to kidnap Schneider was a former Chilean Naval Academy student, Enrique Arancibia Clavel. In 1974, Arancibia became DINA’s operational liaison with Argentine intelligence and organized the murder of another military commander who had become a stumbling block, Pinochet’s predecessor General Carlos Prats González.

In my interviews with military officers from Condor countries there was a consistent refrain, “The United States was our leader.”

Now, a quarter century later, the countries of the Southern Cone continue
to struggle with the events of these years. Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia have all enjoyed at least a decade free of military rule. But constitutional government and rule of law are without exception under a shadow cast by the military crimes of the past. That has been the shadow of impunity.

With few exceptions, those responsible for the thousands upon thousands of executions and disappearances, for the systematic use of torture that affected tens of thousands more, and for the international assassinations that are at the core of the Condor system have been able to evade justice. Amnesty laws, accepted by incoming civilian government as the price of military withdrawal from power, were used to shortcircuit even the most cursory judicial investigation of the crimes. The laws protected the military from being charged and even questioned. No officer of state in any country, neither military commander, judge, nor head of government, had the authority to demand that officials tell what they know about the human rights crimes of the past.

As a result, the first and most enduring human rights casualty was the truth. In the absence of official, credible investigations by competent authorities endorsed by democratic legitimacy, the historical record of those years was a matter of political preference. Victims’ families and their allies among political and human rights organizations did their best to investigate based on the testimonies of those who suffered, but their conclusions were subject to easy denial by the accused and those on the other side of the political divide. So-called “truth commissions” conducted laudable investigations to clarify the legal status of the thousands of disappeared, but were prohibited in many cases from officially naming the names of those who caused the disappearances.

Officers who once were masters of torture and extermination camps were promoted or retired as their age and career required, with honor and the full benefits of rank. Pinochet was lionized abroad as a strong, no-nonsense leader responsible for the “Pinochet Model,” which brought order and economic prosperity. Blatantly illegal international arrangements like Condor were shrouded in secrecy and official denial.

The legal and historical limbo in which the Condor Years were immersed also affected the United States. Having won the Cold War and elicited the peaceful capitulation of its Soviet rival, the United States conferred on itself a kind of de facto amnesty even more encompassing than that enjoyed by its
Latin American allies: no truth commission or any other kind of official investigation was established to look into the human collateral damage of the many proxy wars we supported in Latin America and elsewhere.

Despite the edifice of legal obstacles, however the pursuit of justice never ceased. For more than two decades the investigators, journalists, political activists, human rights workers, and a few indomitable judges worked relentlessly to piece together the facts as they became available and to seize opportunities for judicial advances as they arose.

The successes in the pursuit of justice were few. Then, in October 1998, everything changed. Circumstances, hard work, and luck conspired to put a dictator under arrest in London.

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*
The names of heads of delegations to the Condor meeting are known only through this document. They are, as listed: “Jorge Casas, Navy Captain, chief of delegation, Argentina; Carlos Mena, Army Major, chief of delegation, Bolivia; Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, Army Colonel, Director of National Intelligence, Chile; José A. Fons, Army Colonel, chief of delegation, Uruguay; Benito Guanes Serrano, Army Colonel, chief of 2nd Department, Armed Forces Staff, Paraguay.”

Pinochet’s impunity has never been far from Joan
*
Garcés’s mind. It has been that quiet man’s burning passion since September 11, 1973, when as a young aide with Socialist ideals he had been forced to evacuate Chile’s presidential palace, La Moneda, before the air attacks that enveloped it in flames. That day, for Garcés, saw the death of the dream of building a just, Socialist society using democracy rather than violent revolution.

Garcés, a Spaniard, had come to Chile a few years earlier to write a thesis on Chilean politics, for his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he stayed to become—still only twenty-six years old—one of Salvador Allende’s closest political confidants. That last day Allende ordered him to abandon the besieged presidential palace because “Someone has to recount what happened here and only you can do it.”

“I was a witness to the great national and collective hope [of the Allende experiment], expressed in a democratically impeccable way. And I was also a witness to the human and social tragedy into which Chile was submerged three years later. My best friends left their lives there, defending their commitment
to the freedom and dignity of their people. This is something you don’t ever forget,” he said, looking back.

After the coup, Garcés returned to Spain to a career in law, writing and teaching. He wrote a book on the failed but noble experiment of the “Chilean road to Socialism,” one of the first insider accounts of the chaotic political maneuvering of Allende’s three years in office. He made the case that Allende was committed to inviolate respect for the law and Chile’s constitution.

Impeccable democracy. The rule of law. Applied to the service of the poor, as in no other country of the world before or since. Those were the values that Garcés took away from Chile. Instead, the region began a long journey through a swamp of dictatorship, arbitrary military rule, and violations of individual rights. And the military leaders like Pinochet seemed to be getting off scot-free. Even as the years unfolded and the military governments gave way finally to constitutional rule, the new political leaders—despite their democratic impulses—chose not to prosecute the crimes of the past. Protection of those who had committed unspeakable crimes was the price of peace with a still powerful military. Impunity, sanctioned by the democratic governments, was the rule in Chile and the other Condor countries.

As a sideline to his successful commercial law practice in Madrid, Garcés became one of the respected pioneers in the emerging field of human rights law. One day in the spring of 1996, on the one-hour flight from Barcelona to Madrid after a business trip, Garcés read a short newspaper article that would again return Chile—and the pursuit of Pinochet—to the center of his life. A criminal court in Madrid had begun the prosecution of former members of Argentina’s military junta for alleged human rights crimes committed in Argentina two decades before.

“As you can imagine, in a matter of seconds I made the extrapolation,” Garcés said. When he landed in Madrid, Garcés made inquiries about the case. It had begun with a hypothetical question discussed by a group of public prosecutors: If Argentina was not able to prosecute its generals for human rights crimes, would Spain have jurisdiction? The prosecutors concluded that Spanish law, combined with international law precedents going back to the Nazi trials at Nuremberg, allowed such charges to be brought in Spain as long as the crimes involved could be considered crimes against humanity.

The prosecutors resolved to test the theory by bringing a case to court, acting not in their official capacity as prosecutors but in a private capacity allowed
under Spanish law. On March 28—within days of the twentieth anniversary of the coup that brought the Argentine military to power in 1976—the association’s secretary general, Carlos Castresana, drafted and filed a formal accusation (
denuncia
) charging the members of the Argentine junta with genocide and terrorism against ten victims of Spanish nationality. The case had been assigned to a special court in Madrid, called the
Audiencia Nacional
, and to investigating Judge Baltasar Garzón. Garzón had earned a reputation as a press-savvy, crusading judge for his relentless prosecutions of drug traffickers and of police abuses against the Basque separatists, ETA, a group that frequently used terrorist tactics.

Garcés went to talk to Castresana. “Look, I told him, you have the same juridical foundation to bring a case for the same kind of crimes in the country next door,” he said. Castresana was interested. He considered Pinochet to be in the same category as the Argentine generals. Garcés offered to provide the factual material for a parallel case against Pinochet. He had the recently published report of Chile’s National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, known as the Rettig Report, which contained the country’s most complete human rights investigation, conducted in the first year after Chile’s return to democracy in 1990.

Using the information from the report, the prosecutors’ association—this time represented by association President Miguel Miravet—presented a second formal accusation, on July 4, naming Pinochet and the other members of the Chilean military junta as the presumed authors of crimes against humanity in Chile, including torture, kidnapping, and disappearances. Seven victims were named, all Spanish citizens.

In a separate, meticulously detailed filing on his own behalf, Garcés linked the Argentina and Chile cases in a way that was later to prove crucial. He charged that the leaders of Chile and Argentina had committed human rights crimes together, as participants in a criminal conspiracy. Little was known in 1996 about that alleged conspiracy, except its name, Operation Condor.

He wrote:

As evidence, Garcés cited the only authoritative document known at the time, an FBI cable published in the author’s 1980 book on the Letelier assassination.