The Condor Years (44 page)

The Army, under the leadership of a new generation of officers, signaled it was ready to abandon the stonewalling on human rights of the past. Commander in Chief Juan Emilio Cheyre, in a speech a few days before the Torture Commission report was released, acknowledged for the first time that the Army as an institution was responsible for the abuses of the past, and that the human rights crimes could not be explained as the individual “excesses” of soldiers acting alone. Nor could the tortures and killings be justified by the geopolitical circumstances of the Cold War, he said. His condemnation was unequivocal: “Violations of human rights never and for no one have ethical justification.” He stopped short of what many thought was the next logical conclusion: that under Pinochet, the deaths, tortures, and disappearances were explicit policies of state and were implemented as military doctrine through the Army chain of command.

The statements of Cheyre nevertheless signaled that the Army had in effect abandoned its past efforts to deny, minimize, and justify the actions of its officers and soldiers. After Cheyre’s statement there could be no doubt that the military would no longer defend its former commander in chief, Pinochet, as it had done in the past, even with threats of military intervention. When it came time to arrest Contreras, the Army not only failed to come to his aid, but instead participated in the effort to persuade Contreras to drop his resistance to serving his sentence.

In other Condor countries there was modest but significant progress, associated
with the coming to power of left-of-center presidents. In Argentina, President Nestor Kirchner declared he intended to annul the laws his predecessors had used to pardon the former military leaders and limit investigations. Hundreds of cases continued to proceed through the courts.

Uruguay elected leftist president Tabaré Vásquez, who put together much the same coalition of centrist and leftist parties that ran in the 1970s before the military takeover. A coalition of partners included the Movement of National Liberation-Tupamaros. The Vasquez government was unlikely to find a way around the ironclad “ley de caducidad” which prevented human rights prosecutions. But he vowed to open newly vigorous investigations of past crimes to arrive at the truth of the events of the period of dictatorship.

Why in the final analysis does it matter to put Pinochet or other dictators on trial? Why do we care about what happens in the last years of an increasingly frail ex-dictator? It is a question that should be explored.

As far as is known, Pinochet did not apply the electric pincers to anyone himself. He did not hold the prisoners’ heads underwater in the torture known as “the submarine” (a method later sanctioned by the Bush administration for use in Afghanistan and Iraq). He did not tie the pieces of iron railroad track to prisoners and throw them from helicopters or tugboats to their deaths in the sea. It was not Pinochet who traveled to Argentina or Paraguay to pick up Condor prisoners for transport back to Chile.

Most simply put, the argument for the trial of Pinochet is that without his leadership the systematic commission of crimes against humanity in the Southern Cone would not have happened. Military regimes undoubtedly would have used repressive measures as they had in the past, but the systems of torture and mass murder can be seen as originating with Pinochet. The case can be most forcefully made in consideration of the dramatic facts of Operation Condor.

As expressed in the case developed by Judge Guzman, the international military alliance that is Operation Condor could only have been the product of planning and authorization at the highest level of the government, and of necessity involved the head of state himself. Condor provides the strongest evidence that the assassinations were the actions of an institution and cannot be explained as the excesses or abuses of individual military personnel who “went too far.” A subordinate officer cannot authorize and organize an international alliance of security forces in six countries.

I argue further that without the authorship of Pinochet, the Condor alliance
of six countries would never have come into existence. Pinochet epitomized the turning back of the anticommunist threat. With the clear endorsement of the United States, which was widely perceived as having helped him come to power and was unquestionably supporting his hardline offensive against his adversaries, Pinochet was in a unique historical position to unite his neighbors in what they called “The Third World War.”

While Pinochet’s DINA did not kill as many people as their counterparts in Argentina, Pinochet stands as a giant in historic and symbolic importance. His was the first military government to introduce systems of mass murder, disappearance, prison camps, and torture calculated to eliminate for generations the radical political movements that—in his analysis—democracy had allowed to flourish. (Even Brazil’s dictatorship, already nine years old when Pinochet came to power, fell far short of Chile’s system both in quantity and totalitarian thoroughness.) Pinochet’s success in Chile legitimized his extreme methods. And Argentina, facing even more intense guerrilla resistance than Chile, used Pinochet’s system as a model for its own repressive apparatus. Argentina endeavored to “improve” on the Pinochet model by relying almost exclusively on secret detention centers and disappearance to avoid the adverse publicity Pinochet had attracted in the early months of his regime. Even today, Argentina’s minimum 22,000 victims evoke far less international outrage than Pinochet’s 3,197 dead and disappeared.

There are thus right reasons and wrong reasons to advocate Pinochet’s trial and conviction (if the evidence is found to be sufficient). The wrong reason is political payback, in a word revenge, for the overthrow of Chile’s progressive, democratic government of Salvador Allende. The examination of the Allende period, and what can serve as a model or lesson for future experiments should go forward independent of Pinochet’s fate in the courts—likewise, the debate over how much credit Pinochet’s government can claim for Chile’s remarkable economic success.

The right reason to try Pinochet is to delegitimize once and for all the Pinochet rationale for a state policy of systematic repression, torture, and mass killing. If only officers are to go to jail, and the evidence against Pinochet is never to be tested at trial, Chile’s final accounting with its past will remain unresolved. And Pinochet’s grand idea will stand: that the threat of terrorism and extremism is sufficient reason to justify torture, murder, and the derogation of judicial systems protecting individual liberties.

We should care, even three decades later, because Pinochet and the Condor era he shaped and presided over represents the very darkest side of South America’s darkest era. History’s final word on Pinochet and that era should not be ambiguous, a continuation of the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand discussion of his legacy, as if crimes against humanity can be put in a scale with economic development statistics to see which comes out ahead.

A final verdict should instead come from society’s highest and only mechanism to judge matters of fact and morality: the courts. As imperfect as that system may be, it has the power to accept or reject the notion that the legacy of dictatorship shall be impunity.

In the streets of Santiago a popular verdict is already being shaped in the hard facts of bricks and mortar. Last October, a construction crew dismantled the most grandiose symbol of the military government, the so-called Altar of the Fatherland (Altar de la Patria), that dominated La Alameda in front of La Moneda presidential palace. The centerpiece, a constant fire called “the Flame of Eternal Liberty,” meant to memorialize the actions of September 11, 1973, was moved and relighted in a less public place—behind the walls of a military installation. How long it will continue to burn there, along with the ideas that inspired it, will be the quandary of a future generation.

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*
The victims in Judge Guzman’s Operation Condor case, with date and place of detention: Jorge Fuentes Alarcon, May 16, 1976, Asunción, Paraguay; Manuel Jesús Tamayo Martínez, Luis Gonzalo Muñoz Velásquez, and Juan Humberto Hernández Zazpe, April 3, 1976, Mendoza, Argentina; Edgardo Enríquez Espinosa, April 10, 1976, Buenos Aires; Alexei Vladimir Jaccard Siegler, May 16, 1977, Buenos Aires; Jacobo Stoulman Bortnik and his wife Matilde Pessa Mois, May 29, 1977, Ezeiza airport, Buenos Aires; Julio Valladares Caroca, detained July 2, 1976, in Bolivia, turned over to Chile, November 13, 1976; Ruiter Correa Arce, May 27, 1977, body found in Santiago, Chile. See pages 88–89 (Fuentes), 142–143 (Enríquez), 225–226 (Stoulman, Pessa, Correa, Jaccard).

BOOKS

Martín Almada.
Paraguay: la carcel olvidada, el pais exiliado
(Panama: Asunción, 1978, 1993).

Martin Edwin Andersen.
Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War”
(Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1993).

Ariel C. Armony.
Argentina, The United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984
(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997).

Samuel Blixen.
El vientre del Cóndor: Del Archivo del terror al caso Berrios
(Montevideo: Brecha, 1994).

Samuel Blixen.
Sendic
(Montevideo: Trilce, 2000).

Alfredo Boccia Paz, Myrian Angélica González, and Rosa Palau Aguilar.
Es mi informe: Los archivos secretos de la policia de Stroessner
(Asunción-CDE, 1994).

Alfredo Boccia Paz, Miguel H. Lopez, Antonio V. Pecci, and Gloria Gimenez Guanes.
En los Sotanos de los Generales: Los Documentos Ocultos del Operativo Condor
(Asunción, 2002).

Stella Calloni.
Los Años del Lobo: Operación Cóndor
(Buenos Aires: Ediciones Continente, 1999).

John Dinges and Saul Landau.
Assassination on Embassy Row
(New York: Pantheon, 1980).

Mónica González.
La Conjura: los mil y un dias del golpe
(Santiago: Ediciones B Grupo Zeta, 2000).

Seymour Hersh.
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
(New York: Summit, 1983).

Gerardo Irusta.
Espionaje y Servicios Secretos en Bolivia
(La Paz: Todo Arte Servicio Gráfico, 1995).

Peter Kornbluh.
The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability
(New York: The New Press, 2003).

Paul Lewis.
Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).

Nilson Cézar Mariano.
Operación Cóndor: Terrorismo de Estado en el Cono Sur
(Argentina: Lohlé-Lumen, 1998).

Francisco Martorell.
Operación Cóndor: El Vuelo de la Muerte
(Santiago: Lom, 1999).

Pedro Alejandro Matta.
Cuartel Terranova: El Palacio de las Risa
(unpublished manuscript, 1998).

Luis Mattini.
Hombres y Mujeres del PRT-ERP (La Pasión Militante
) (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Campaña, 1990).

Gladys Meilinger de Sannemann.
Paraguay y la Operación Cóndor en los Archivos del Terror
(Asunción, 1993).

Carlos Prats González.
Memorias: Testimonio de Un Soldado
(Santiago: Pehuen, 1985).

Eugene M. Propper and Taylor Branch.
Labyrinth
(New York: Viking 1982).

Lars Schoultz.
Human Rights and U.S. Policy toward Latin America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Maria Seoane.
Todo o Nada: La Historia Secreta y la Historia Publica del Jefe Guerrillero Mario Roberto Santucho
(Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991).

Martin Sivak.
El Asesinato de Juan José Torres
(Argentina: Serpai, 1997).

Alfred Stepan.
Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Pilar Urbano.
Garzón: El Hombre que Veía Amanecer
(Madrid: Plaza James Editores S.A., 2000).

CONGRESSIONAL REPORTS

“Covert Action in Chile 1963–1973: Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.” U.S. Senate, December 18, 1975.

“CIA Activities in Chile.” A report by the CIA to Representative Maurice D. Hinchey (Democrat, NY) and to the House and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, unclassified, September 18, 2000.

“Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: Interim Report of the [Senate] Select Committee on Intelligence Activities.” November 1975.

“Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Activities of Certain Foreign Intelligence Agencies in the United States,” January 18, 1979. Still classified “Secret.” The report was written by committee staff counsel Michael Glennon for a subcommittee chaired by Senator George McGovern. Document in author’s possession.

DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS

Argentina Project. A collection of approximately 4,000 State Department documents that were released in September 2002 in accordance with an order dating from two years
before from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Hereafter, Argentina Project.

Arancibia Collection. Documents confiscated from Enrique Arancibia Clavel by Argentine authorities in 1978 and archived in the Federal Court of Buenos Aires. They are identified by date, folder number and document number as assigned by the court. Documents are arranged in “Carpetas” or folders, IA, IB, II, III, IV, and V, each containing approximately 300 pages of documents in reverse chronological order.