The Condor Years (43 page)

All of these elements were present in the U.S. alliance with Condor countries in their war on terrorism. We aligned ourselves with our ideological, geopolitical allies. We divided the world into those who are with us or who are with the terrorists. We ended up in intimate embrace with mass murderers running torture camps, body dumps, and crematoriums, and who brought their terrorist operations to our own streets.

The history of the Condor Years is not one we are condemned to repeat.

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Menem also pardoned 277 other officers who had been convicted for human rights crimes, misconduct in the Falklands War, and participation in the military revolts.

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Operation Colombo was primarily a propaganda operation that should be included among the precursors to operation Condor. Arancibia and other Chilean participants in Colombo later had roles in Condor operations, but there is little evidence of formal participation by Argentine security forces.

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The complete archive is housed in the eighth floor of the Palace of Justice in Asunción and is maintained by a small, dedicated staff, under the supervision of the Paraguayan Supreme Court. Its official name is Centro de Documentación para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, directed by Luis María Benítez Riera and Rosa Palau Aguilar. The author initiated contact with the archive in 1999 and, with National Security Archive analyst Carlos Osorio, conceived of a project to catalog, microfilm, and digitize the complete collection. The project, in collaboration with Paraguay’s Catholic University, received funding from AID and was launched in 2001. When completed, a catalog of 60,000 key documents will be available over the Internet. A preliminary Web site, sponsored by UNESCO, is:
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/paraguay/documentos.html

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Martín Almada was awarded the 2002 Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as “the Alternative Nobel Prize,” “. . . for his outstanding courage and persistent efforts to expose and bring to account the torturers and to set his country on a new course of democracy, respect for human rights and sustainable development.” Almada has traveled extensively in recent years and has testified in all of the major Condor investigations, including those in Spain, Rome, Paris, and Argentina described in this chapter and in Chapter 3. The prize committee said “the ‘Archive of Terror’ has proved the most important collection of documents of state terror ever recovered. It is important not just for Paraguay but for the whole of Latin America and, indeed, for the world.”

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Rogers, of the powerful Washington law firm of Arnold and Porter, represents Kissinger in fending off a lawsuit brought by the family of assassinated General René Schneider. As assistant secretary for Latin America, he was with Kissinger in the meeting with Pinochet in June 1976. In a statement seemingly at odds with the declassified record and other officials’ statements, he said it was “not at all” U.S. policy to support and defend Pinochet at that time.

At midmorning on January 4, 2005, a representative of investigating judge Juan Guzman Tapia and two policemen entered the walled compound surrounding the former dictator’s estate on the Pacific Coast. The visit took only five minutes. The official read out loud an order from Guzman placing Augusto Pinochet under house arrest on charges of aggravated kidnapping and murder in connection with his leadership of Operation Condor.

From that moment forward, even after a subsequent court order granting bail, Chile’s Pinochet was subject to the jurisdiction of the court. Additional appeals were likely in the complicated Chilean judicial system, but never before had criminal charges against Pinochet advanced so far.

Pinochet had escaped previous prosecutions—first in London on charges from Spain, and then in an earlier separate case brought by Judge Guzman—on grounds of his advanced age and mental fragility. This time a trial seemed inevitable, and with it the opportunity at long last for the evidence against
Pinochet compiled over long years by many investigators to be tested in the official crucible of Chilean justice.

Judge Guzman began the Condor investigation that led to Pinochet’s indictment without fanfare and without even naming Pinochet as a suspect in 2003. It was intended as perhaps the final human rights case the crusading judge would bring before his planned retirement. At the age of 63, the energetic Guzman would have preferred an appointment to the Supreme Court to retirement, but his relentless pursuit of one human rights case after another had made him too controversial.

It had been Guzman who had enunciated the legal doctrine in 1999 that resulted in the shattering of the amnesty protection Pinochet had created for those who had implemented his policy of systematic torture and disappearance in the period 1973–1987. Guzman reasoned, and obtained Supreme Court endorsement for his doctrine, that disappearance—capture and presumed execution of a dissident whose body was never recovered—was in reality a “continuing crime” of aggravated kidnapping (“sequestro calificado” in Guzman’s terminology), and therefore not covered by the Amnesty period.

By the end of 2004, Guzman and other judges had used the doctrine to bring charges against 160 officers in 365 separate cases. It was the “military parade” before the court that Pinochet’s supporters began to denounce shortly after Pinochet returned from his seventeen-month house arrest in London. Until the Condor investigation, however, the doctrine had never been used successfully against Pinochet.

Guzman’s Condor investigation also at first excluded Pinochet, naming only DINA chief Manuel Contreras, his director of operations Pedro Espinoza, and chief of the Exterior Department Cristoph Willeke. The case was built around the most important Chilean victims of Operation Condor, including MIR and JCR leaders Edgardo Enriquez, Jorge Fuentes, Jean Yves Claudet Fernandez, and others whose stories are told in this book. (Judge Guzman requested a copy of the freshly published book
The Condor Years
as soon as it was available. In January 2004, and again in April, he interviewed the author several times about the book’s investigative conclusions.)

Then in May, instead of retiring as he had told colleagues he would, he brought his investigation to a head and filed charges against Pinochet himself. The first step was to request that the higher court remove Pinochet’s “fuero,”
or immunity from prosecution as a former head of state. Guzman outlined the charges in a long filing in late May. He stated that Pinochet’s immunity should be removed so that he could be indicted for the creation of the “criminal conspiracy” that was Operation Condor, which included crimes of aggravated kidnapping and torture.

Guzman argued that he had evidence that “all the victims of the so-called Operation Condor were illegally detained in foreign countries, kidnapped as part of a vast operation of international coordination of the secret services of the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone, . . . on the basis of explicit and secret agreements adopted by these regimes at the initiative of the dictatorship headed by the accused.” He said it was “impossible” that such high-level meetings and agreements could have taken place without the authorization of Pinochet.

The Appeals Court approved Guzman’s request. The Chilean Supreme Court, by a vote of nine to eight, ratified the lifting of immunity. Guzman immediately ordered medical and psychiatric exams for Pinochet, who was approaching his 89th birthday. In a previous case that had reached this point, involving the Caravan of Death killings in the weeks after the military coup (see page 30), charges against Pinochet were dismissed on health grounds, and Pinochet’s lawyers were confident the same would happen in the current case.

But in early December, Guzman reviewed the examinations and ruled that Pinochet was fit to stand trial. The higher court, again by a closely-split verdict, ratified Guzman’s finding. What had changed since the decision two years prior? Pinochet had decided to give a valedictory interview to a Spanish language television station in Miami known for its conservative politics. In the November 2003 interview, Pinochet held forth with subdued eloquence about his career, his success in defeating his leftist enemies, and his conviction that he had done no wrong.

“Everything that I did, I would do again, everything was thought through,” Pinochet said. He had nothing to apologize for. If anyone should apologize, it should be the Marxists. “I’m a good person, I feel like an angel,” he concluded.

It was an action of extraordinary hubris, and one that made a decisive impression on the courts. The interview was introduced as evidence, allowing Guzman and the higher court to hold that, “It can be observed, without doubt, [that Pinochet possesses] perfect discernment and ability to discriminate
clearly between the important and the useless, . . . between good and evil and, finally, between what incriminates him and that which does not incriminate him.”

The formal indictment, dated December 13, was attached to the finding of fitness. Pinochet was charged with the disappearances of eight people captured by Condor in Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia, and in the murder of a tenth whose detention was linked to other cases but whose body was found in Santiago.
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Pinochet’s formal arrest and arraignment followed after the holidays.

Almost as devastating to Pinochet, certainly in terms of his reputation with his supporters, were the revelations of a committee of the U.S. Senate linking him to a money laundering investigation against Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. The bank had allowed Pinochet to deposit large sums using false names and had helped him transfer money out of London at the time of his arrest, thus thwarting the efforts of the Spanish court to sequester his assets. Deposit records and other documents revealed that Pinochet had had at least $8 million in deposits at Riggs, clearly vastly more than he could have saved on his salary as an Army general. The origin of Pinochet’s fortune had not been explained at the time of this writing, but some documents presented by Pinochet to Riggs indicated he received the multimillion-dollar transfers of money from the Chilean Defense Ministry.

An investigating judge was appointed to examine the case for possible criminal charges. In its early stages, the investigation determined that Pinochet had not declared the income on his tax returns, and tax evasion charges seemed likely. In another precedent-shattering development, Riggs bank agreed to pay $9 million to the families of Pinochet’s victims out of the bank’s own funds.

Pinochet was thus stripped of the reputation he had always maintained among his supporters: that he had run a corruption-free government, whatever
his record on human rights. For those willing to wink at the human rights crimes, the exposure of apparently ill-gotten gains from his presidency was the unkindest cut of all.

Meanwhile, other investigations were advancing. A case charging top DINA officers under the aggravated kidnapping doctrine was brought to completion with the conviction and sentencing of Manuel Contreras to twelve years imprisonment. The other officers, Miguel Krassnoff, Fernando Laureani, Marcelo Moren Brito, and Gerardo Godoy, were also convicted and got similar sentences. The landmark case involved the disappearance of a single MIR activist, Miguel Angel Sandoval. It was the first time military officers were completely stripped of amnesty protection, convicted, and jailed for human rights crimes. The four turned themselves in to the court to start serving their sentences on January 28, 2005. But Manuel Contreras refused to go quietly. He denounced the leadership of the Army for failing to protect him, and drew a gun when policemen went to his house to take him into custody. At one point he shouted, “¡Soy un general!, ¡traidores!” (“I’m a general! Traitors!”)

Finally surrendering, he was taken to begin serving his sentence at the Penal Cordillera, a prison located in the hilly eastern outskirts of Santiago, within walking distance of DINA’s most notorious torture camp, Villa Grimaldi, now converted into a memorial park commemorating human rights victims. It was the second time Contreras had seen the inside of a prison cell. Contreras had served a seven-year sentence in the 1990s, for his conviction in the Letelier-Moffitt murders. Then, the weak civilian government had been forced to accept the building of a comfortable detention facility for Contreras and other special prisoners.

This time there was to be no special treatment for the increasingly embittered Contreras. In a series of interviews before his arrest, Contreras pointed the finger at his former chief, Pinochet, who had consistenly maintained that any abuses during his government were the work of his subordinates without his knowledge or approval. Contreras declared Pinochet should have accepted responsibility for what happened under his government, “as corresponds to his rank of general and his position as president of the republic.”

“I’m disappointed that he has not done so,” Contreras said in an interview with Reuters news agency. “Because it would have been logical for him to do it. A military man must always count on his honor, on his dignity, and to maintain them always.”

With the DINA command in prison and Pinochet facing trial, it seemed that the tide had definitively turned in Chile. First the courts, with gradual shifts in personnel and cautious adoption of new legal doctrines, such as the continuing crime thesis and acceptance of norms of international human rights law, had engineered a sea change in jurisprudence. The Chilean government, under Socialist Party president Ricardo Lagos, stayed out of the court cases but contributed to the new climate by careful negotiations with the new military command. Lagos created a commission headed by Bishop Sergio Valech to produce an official report on illegal arrest and torture. Released in May 2004, the report was meticulously documented with some 36,000 interviews with surviving prisoners. The report certified that 27,255 of those who offered testimony had suffered torture, and were eligible for modest government reparations—an annuity of approximately $300 per month for the now aging victims.