The Condor Years (8 page)

The United States exhibited deep ambivalence, but not outright opposition,
to the events in London. The Democratic Clinton administration carried with it the political legacy of the human rights policies of President Jimmy Carter, which had done much to sever the Cold War alliance behind which the Latin American dictatorships had masked their atrocities during the Condor Years.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright mapped a position that avoided criticism of the actions in London and Spain while basically coming down on the side of Chile.

The U.S. position was hashed out in late November in a marathon meeting in Albright’s ballroom-size office on the seventh floor of the State Department. Present were twenty-five high officials representing all parts of the State Department. The first legal hurdles in London had made clear that there would be no quick resolution and that Pinochet could stay in custody indefinitely. There was no sympathy for Pinochet expressed in the room, but the proposition that the United States should say something in support of the Spanish extradition request was quickly raised and dismissed. Almost as quickly it was agreed that “deference” to Chile’s democracy would be the cornerstone of U.S. policy on the Pinochet issue.

The discussion turned to an action that would please both the Chilean government and those who favored vigorous prosecution of Pinochet. Spain had asked for the release of U.S. classified documents. Chile also favored the full disclosure of U.S. actions in Chile during the Allende and Pinochet periods. It was an elegant middle position. A document release would avoid the pitfalls of taking a position for or against Pinochet’s extradition, yet it was an unequivocal step in the direction of historical disclosure and would provide evidence that
could be used against Pinochet and others accused in any legal proceedings, whether in Spain, London, or elsewhere.

In a low-key announcement on December 1 in answer to a reporter’s question, a State Department spokesman said, “Due to the interest in this case the Administration is conducting a review of documents in its possession that may shed light on human rights abuses during the Pinochet era. We will declassify and make public as much information as possible consistent with U.S. laws and the national security and law enforcement interests of the United States.” The action neatly bypassed the hitherto stubborn opposition by all U.S. government agencies to declassifying new documents in response to Spain’s request under the mutual legal assistance treaty.

It was a momentous decision, whose importance was belied by the nonchalance of the announcement. President Clinton, on the recommendation of Secretary of State Albright and National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger, issued an executive order requiring an unprecedented release of the most secret documents on Chile, including files about CIA operations to prevent Allende from taking power in 1970 and to support the successful rightist campaign to orchestrate his military overthrow in 1973.

The first 5,800 documents were released in June 1999. In all, some 60,000 pages of secret U.S. files on Chile were made public. In September 2002, a smaller collection of State Department documents on Argentina was released. There were still to be arguments about documents withheld or partially blacked out. But the majority of the documents were released without excisions.

When Joan Garcés began his legal pursuit of Pinochet, he didn’t dare dream of arrest and trial, but he thought he had a good chance of getting at the truth. The veil of impunity would be removed and replaced by the clear pane of public disclosure. It would be a measure of justice, he reasoned, to find out what had happened to so many victims of the Condor Years. His expectations were far too modest. Garcés’s pursuit and that of dozens of other lawyers, judges, and human rights investigators succeeded far beyond the realism of legal action.

Even as Pinochet arrived back in Chile to the euphoria of his die-hard supporters, he had ceased to wield any real power. Politically, he was damaged goods, his impunity in tatters. Indeed, within months, the international legal dragnet widened against Pinochet and other former dictators. New prosecutions based on the Pinochet precedent were opened naming Pinochet and
other dictators in Rome, France, Switzerland, and Belgium. Judges in Chile and Argentina, bypassing the amnesty laws, opened new cases, forcing a parade of hundreds of military officers to appear as witnesses or as accused. Pinochet was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and resigned as senator. The trickle of truth, once released, produced a flood of new information. Documents became available from the bowels of the secret police organizations and were open to the arduous but rewarding detective work of those willing to put together the pieces of the puzzle. It is that new information that has finally allowed the full story of those years to be told.

These momentous events in international law had as their common and primary target the crimes of the Operation Condor conspiracy, which in turn stood at the apex of anti-Communist state terror in Latin America. In its conception, Condor was the logical next step for the governments that had come to power for the purpose of fighting the reality and perceived threat of Communist revolution. It is to those days of revolution that we must return to comprehend the story of Condor.

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*
Joan is a variation of the Spanish name Juan.

One improbable fact must be grasped about South America at the time of our story: radical social revolution was a real possibility for millions of people, coloring everyday life with hope or dread depending on the circumstances and political views of each individual. Masses of people were in the streets—supporting change or opposing it, often united not by ideology but by support for a populist strongman. Then, in many of the countries in the continent, the upheaval in the streets was driven underground by the even more violent reality of military counterrevolution.

These were times when, in Chile, for example, half a million people (out of a population of 10 million) would pack Santiago’s main avenue, La Alameda, for more than a mile to hear President Allende’s speeches. When throngs exceeding 1 million people pressed for the return of perennial populist dictator Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina. When, at one such rally, to welcome their exiled leader home from Spain, Peronists from leftist and rightist factions
fought a pitched gun battle with dozens of casualties. In these times in Bolivia, a “people’s assembly” made up of miners and peasants threatened to displace Bolivia’s parliament during the brief rule of left-leaning general Juan José Torres. Peru’s military government also defied stereotypes by proclaiming progressive income distribution and land redistribution policies, then turning to the Soviet Union for military aid and equipment. Those experiences demonstrated that not even the region’s military were immune from the contagion of radical ideas.

Revolution was seen as possible. And for those who believed in a Marxist theory of history, it was inevitable. Back then, revolution was concrete reality. It was Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba, in which a small guerrilla army outfought a corrupt dictatorship and brought land reform, expropriations, and unbridled idealism. Revolution was an idea for the immediate future. It was Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s idea that a
“foco,”
a concentration of a few dedicated fighters in the mountains, could set the fuse of countrywide, even continent-wide, uprisings of the poor and middle classes. It was a revolution that would spread and spread, by example, by ideology, by house-to-house and factory-to-factory organizing, and—most of all—by what they called
la lucha armada
, armed struggle.

Tens of thousands of young people in South America became the militants in this armed struggle. They adopted for themselves the lofty title of “revolutionaries,” and strove to live up to the challenge of Che—their dead, Christ look-alike hero, who told them, “The first duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution.” Uruguay’s Tupamaros were the most successful. They brought clandestine warfare to the cities, carrying out bold strikes that included arms raids and the kidnap-killing of a U.S. security adviser, Dan Mitrione, who had been accused of teaching torture techniques. Groups all over the continent—the largest in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina—translated Che’s call to arms into new tactics adapted to city streets as well as mountain paths.

General Pinochet’s military takeover in Chile was a crushing blow for those on the side of revolution, but the ultimate outcome was not yet decided. In fact, for the most radical revolutionary groups, Pinochet’s coup had an ironic silver lining. By destroying Allende’s “
via pacifica
,” the peaceful road to Socialism, Pinochet had legitimized its opposite. Pinochet had proved the revolutionaries
right. The violence of the overthrow served to confirm what they had been saying all along: that true revolution would triumph not by the gradualism of elections and social reforms but by the force of arms.

There was a further irony in Pinochet’s victory. His soldiers swept up tens of thousands of factory workers, peasants, and party members whose radicalism consisted in their vote and public activism in support of Allende’s democratic revolution. But the repression barely touched—at first—the revolutionary leaders advocating armed struggle. They had already gone safely underground before the coup.

Those groups prepared to fight on in Chile. With long-standing organizational bases in Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia, like-minded groups took the Pinochet coup as their mandate to internationalize the South American armed revolution for the first time.

Chile’s group was the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (
Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria
), known as MIR. Its leaders had come out of the student movements of the 1960s and had established an important base of support in a few unions and in the shantytown communities surrounding Santiago. They considered themselves a vanguard and advocated a Leninist model of party-led Socialist revolution—meaning that after the revolution, a country would be run by a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” President Allende’s nephew, Andrés Pascal Allende, was a top MIR leader, and one of the most vociferous in criticizing his uncle’s government as timid and reformist.

MIR never carried out armed actions while Allende was president. Nevertheless, in the months preceding the September 1973 coup, they embarked on an aggressive military strategy: its main element was an attempt to organize resistance to coup plotting inside the Chilean armed forces. MIR had also stockpiled arsenals of light weapons and conducted military training in the hills outside Santiago. MIR central committee chief Miguel Enríquez had publicly called on soldiers to defy orders: “Non-commissioned officers, rank and file and policemen should disobey the orders given by officers involved in a coup, and in that case [of a coup in progress] all forms of struggle will be legitimate,” he said in July.

It was not a traditional guerrilla strategy to defeat the armed forces but
rather to burrow from within. Commented Andrés Pascal: “We called the military part of the organization the ‘central force,’ but it was almost like a school. We had some weapons, sure, but it was more like propaganda. The principal military work was inside the armed forces; that is, it was political work directed at the armed forces, to try to recruit, to win people over inside the armed forces to oppose a coup.”

MIR’s contacts inside the military provided good intelligence about the coming coup. MIR leaders prepared a contingency plan: friendly troops would allow them to break into military arsenals and distribute weapons to loyalist troops as a preemptive strike against the officers’ plotting.

From the point of view of Chile’s military establishment, no more hostile and dangerous action could be imagined than MIR’s attempt to split the military from within. No political group had ever attempted to infiltrate the military. For the officers corps, on both sides of the coup plotting, such a split meant civil war and the specter of military killing military.

It was to avoid such a scenario that General Carlos Prats, Chile’s commander in chief and an Allende loyalist, resigned under pressure from his fellow officers. He stepped down in the certain knowledge that, in the name of military unity, he had removed the last obstacle to a military takeover.

So it happened. Pinochet took command when Prats resigned; the military remained united and brutally eliminated the troops and officers who had been prepared to take up arms against their brother soldiers to defend the Allende government. Pinochet had come late to the coup plotting, according to most accounts, but once in charge had transformed it from a so-called “soft coup”—to throw out one civilian government and install another—into a unique historic project to physically eliminate all possibility of another Allende in the future.