The Condor Years (25 page)

Enríquez was sighted inside a secret army detention center. Argentine intelligence reported the capture to Chile’s DINA using the new Condor telex system. At DINA’s Villa Grimaldi compound, Luz Arce, a former Mirista turned collaborator, was working as staff assistant to one of the DINA officers. She opened a folder in her in-box and discovered a secret cable that she knew was not meant for her eyes. It was a telex from Argentine intelligence, marked
“via Cóndor,”
giving notice that Enríquez was in custody and was being placed at Chile’s disposal. She quickly closed the misfiled folder and gave it to her boss.

U.S. intelligence was closely following the capture of Enríquez, using both Argentine and Chilean military sources. DINA sources told a CIA officer that when Enríquez was captured, he was preparing to smuggle himself back into Chile, with ERP help, to assume the leadership of MIR, which had split into two factions. CIA and Embassy cables quoted an “impeccable Chilean Navy source” who informed the U.S. officers on May 7 that Enríquez was dead. The embassy in Argentina also reported Enríquez’s death. French and Brazilian officials
later made inquiries with the Argentine government on behalf of the Enríquez and Marcondes families and were told the same thing: Argentina had turned them over to Chile. A later CIA report stated it as an established fact: “Chilean leftist leader Edgardo Enríquez, who was arrested by Argentine security forces on April 10, was subsequently turned over to the Chileans and is now dead.”

An investigation by Chile’s National Truth and Reconciliation Commission also concluded in 1991 that Enríquez and Marcondes were transported to Chile under the Condor system and executed there. In 1998, when Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón was looking for a case epitomizing Condor’s methodology to document his request for the extradition of General Augusto Pinochet from London, he chose the Enríquez capture.

Enríquez was what the military called
un pez gordo
—“a big fish.” His capture effectively ended any semblance of a reliable MIR and JCR infrastructure in Argentina, at least one that could be depended on to support and protect the hundreds of smaller foreign fish who had been working in Argentina since going into exile from their own countries. The intelligence systems of five countries, with Argentina’s eager cooperation, combined their resources to dry up the system of safe houses, financial support, and aboveground employment the foreign guerrilla activists depended on.

As the JCR was being eradicated in the weeks following the Argentine coup, it became frighteningly clear that underground guerrillas were not the only, or even the principle, targets of Condor.

In addition to the activists actually involved with the underground organizations, thousands of political refugees from the surrounding countries were living in Argentina at the time of the coup. Many of them were registered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which was headquartered in a Catholic church facility. The UNHCR estimated there were 15,000 such refugees; 10,000 were Chileans, and most of the rest were Uruguayans. In a confidential briefing to the U.S. embassy after the coup, a UNHCR official gave his assessment that “about 1,000 of the Chileans and 300 to 400 of the others could be considered to be in danger from the security forces or rightist extremists, either of Argentina or their native country.” A combined force of Chilean, Uruguayan, and Argentine security forces raided the church office
and carted off UNHCR records stored there. Two days later, twenty-four Chilean and Uruguayan refugees, whose addresses were in the stolen files, were arrested, tortured, and interrogated by officers from their own countries.

The Chileans associated with MIR and the Uruguayans linked to Tupamaros or other factions were in the greatest danger. Before the coup, a scramble ensued to evacuate those in most danger. Edgardo Enríquez had given the order to abandon most MIR operations in Argentina. His lieutenant, Patricio Biedma, had already gotten the wives and children of MIR operatives on flights out of the country before the coup. Biedma’s wife, Luz, said she got help from an official at the Cuban embassy to arrange her safe departure. The Cubans were part of an informal network, which included prominent democratic political leaders and officials from the Mexican and Swedish embassies, to provide money, airline tickets, and safe passage for the most desperate cases.

In early May, an Argentine task force launched a major operation on behalf of their Uruguayan Condor partners. The first targets were not the active guerrilla fighters, but rather the Tupamaros who had abandoned armed struggle and were cultivating a political relationship with exiled civilian political leaders. They went after former Tupamaro leader Efraín Martínez Platero, who narrowly avoided capture and accomplished a hair-raising escape from Argentina. Martínez Platero was one of the founders of the JCR, and the JCR’s emissary to Fidel Castro and to Europe. After receiving a lukewarm reception for the JCR idea of revolutionary war, Martínez Platero had returned disillusioned to Argentina in 1974 and soon resigned from the Tupamaro leadership. He had once been the highest ranking Tupamaro in Argentina, but had been inactive for more than a year.

At the time of the coup, he was living in a working-class suburb of Buenos Aires, doing odd jobs. He and his wife had two small children and she was nine months pregnant. He was planning to get out of the country but had hoped to wait until the baby arrived. One day returning home to his apartment, he turned away just as he was about to enter, indulging the survival instincts he had honed over a decade of clandestine life. He later learned that security agents were waiting for him in the apartment. They had already kidnapped his brother.

His wife and children, by a stroke of luck, were visiting at his father’s house in the city of Mar de Plata. Martínez Platero immediately gathered them up and brought them to Buenos Aires to try to find a way out of the country. Arriving
in a city under total military control, they feared even going to a hotel. They had little money and dubious documents, and Martínez Platero—if his true identity were known—was among the top names on Uruguay’s most wanted list. The first day in Buenos Aires, his wife went into labor. She gave birth under emergency conditions in a clinic run by nuns. Terrified, the nuns turned the family out on the street again only hours after the baby was born.

With a newborn, a wife weakened from childbirth, and two small children, Martínez went to an address at Calle Florida and Corrientes Avenue to find a man he knew would help him. Senator Zelmar Michelini had been one of Uruguay’s most powerful political leaders when the military closed down parliament in 1973. In exile, he lived in the slightly shabby Liberty Hotel. Since the coup he spent much of his time interviewing people needing help, often using a desk in the lobby. Sometimes there was a line of people waiting to see him. Michelini gave Martínez Platero a contact at the Mexican embassy, to help arrange exit documents and air tickets. And with that bare veneer of diplomatic protection, the family got a room in a nearby hotel and waited. It was the middle of May.

On May 15, Michelini had another visitor at the Liberty, who brought him the news that another Tupamaro veteran had disappeared. William Whitelaw, his wife, Rosario Barredo, and her three small children had been kidnapped two days before from their apartment in Buenos Aires. The news left Michelini profoundly shaken. Whitelaw, like Martínez Platero, was one of the founders of the JCR. He and others had formed a splinter group, Nuevo Tiempo, which had abandoned the Tupamaro’s guerrilla tactics in favor of forging alliances with centrist political forces. More importantly, Whitelaw was Michelini’s principal channel of communication to the underground Tupamaro groups in Buenos Aires. Since the coup, Whitelaw and Michelini had been working in coordination to get people out of the country. Whitelaw’s kidnapping had occurred within twenty-four hours of the unsuccessful operation to capture Martínez Platero.

Zelmar Michelini didn’t focus on personal danger to himself and probably would have scoffed at the idea that the Uruguayan government would see him as a target. The father of ten children, he had the kind of Kennedyesque good looks and political charisma that made him one of the top two or three names mentioned as possible presidents should there be a return to democratic government in Uruguay. Indeed, Michelini was part of elaborate maneuvering involving
a possible rapid transition to new elections. He and two other prominent Uruguayan leaders—Camara of Representatives President Hector Gutiérrez Ruiz and former presidential candidate Wilson Ferreira Aldunate—were in discussions with a representative of the military government, Minister of Economy Alejandro Vegh Villegas, who had met with them separately in Buenos Aires.

Michelini was a peacemaker, a channel of communication among a broad range of political players, including those who had taken up arms. His daughter quoted him as saying around this time, “I’m the only one who talks to everybody. I talk with Wilson, I talk with the communists, with the Tupamaros. I talk with all the forces, and they all respect me.” Ferreira and Michelini also had been exchanging letters and phone calls with members of the U.S. Congress to arrange a visit to Washington to testify about conditions in Uruguay.

In the time since the coup, however, Michelini’s priority was to help people like Martínez Platero and their families get out of the country safely. He made little effort to hide his relationships with current and former Tupamaros like Whitelaw, and had acted as a go-between to get small amounts of money, airline tickets and papers from the network of embassies. His own personal business activities were consistent with his status as a prominent but penurious political exile. He worked full-time as a journalist, writing columns on international issues and editing wire copy for
La Opinión
newspaper.

He lived rent-free in the Liberty Hotel, thanks to his friendship with the owner, Benjamin Taub. There was a sinister side to the Liberty Hotel and its owner. Taub ran a legitimate currency exchange business across the street from the hotel, which was a cover for illegal and far larger money trafficking activities. The Liberty was a favorite stopover point for visiting leftists attracted by its moderate prices and central location. Only six months earlier, JCR courier Jean Yves Claudet had taken a room at the Liberty after arriving from Paris with messages and cash, and had been kidnapped and killed.

The owner Taub appeared to survive by doing business on both sides of the ideological divide. A former Argentine intelligence operative said federal police officers used Taub to launder the large sums of illegal cash they stole from criminals and political prisoners. And, as described in
Chapter 4
, in early 1974, Taub was given the risky but profitable task of handling the $14 million ransom collected from Exxon manager Victor Samuelson—undoubtedly one of his biggest deals ever.

At 5:30
A.M.
on May 18, three Ford Falcon automobiles without license plates pulled up outside the Liberty Hotel. Armed men took positions around the lobby. They exhibited no urgency, communicating loudly with one another and a remote headquarters with radios. Others took the elevator to Room 75, where Michelini and two of his sons were sleeping. “We’re here to get you. Your hour has come,” one said as the men forced their way into the room.

Three hours earlier a similar scene had taken place at the apartment where Congressman Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz lived with his family. Both men were forced into cars and taken away. For two days, family members and friends from as far away as Boston and Washington, D.C., tried to reach contacts inside the new Argentine government to save the two men. But police refused to take a report or even come to the hotel to examine the crime scene, which was replete with fingerprints and other evidence. A government minister attempted to shift the blame by telling two foreign correspondents privately it was an “Uruguayan operation.”

Two days later, a federal police patrol car was told by radio to investigate a car parked under a bridge. The policeman discovered a Ford Torino with the bodies of four people who had been executed with shots to the head and neck. They were identified as Zelmar Michelini, Héctor Gutiérrez, William Whitelaw, and Whitelaw’s wife, Rosario Barredo. Barredo’s three children—Gabriela, age four, and twin one-year-olds Maximo and Victoria—were missing for two weeks, then showed up at a police commissary and were recovered by their grandparents. Gabriela was able to talk about what had happened.
“Sabés, abuela, que yo vi cuando mataban a mamá?”
“Did you know, Grandma, that I saw when they killed mommy?”

The other intended victim of the roundup, Efraín Martínez Platero, under protection of the Mexican and then the Swedish embassies, was eventually evacuated from Argentina with his wife and children.

No serious judicial investigation has ever been conducted to prosecute those who carried out the murders, despite the abundance of evidence available at the time and from testimony gathered over the years. In a relatively short investigation of the case, I was able to find two sources with what appeared to be firsthand information about those who gave the orders in Uruguay and those who carried out the executions in Argentina. The first source was Hugo Campos Hermida, the former head of the intelligence unit of Uruguayan police. His aggressive and successful campaigns against the Tupamaros in 1972 led to
accusations that he headed a police death squad and had committed multiple human rights crimes. Campos was in a unique position to know the inside details of repressive operations even after his police unit was replaced by an even more aggressive army intelligence organization. He talked to me for three hours in October 2001, and expressed his willingness to testify about the murders in an Uruguayan court. A little more than a month after the interview, however, Campos died of complications from lung cancer surgery.