How We Sold Our Soul- Operation Condor

The Articles in the Category cover a vast range of history not only in our country but in the world as well. The category is entitled “How We Sold Our Soul”. In many cases our history has hinged on compromises being made by the powers at be. They say hind-sight is 20/20, which is why I am discussing these land mark decisions in this manner. The people that made these decisions in many cases thought they were doing the right thing. However in some instances they were made for expediency and little thought was given to the moral ramifications and the fallout that would result from them. I hope you enjoy these articles. The initial plan is to discuss 10 compromises, but as time progresses I am sure that number will increase.

Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America

During the 1970s and 80s, eight US-backed military dictatorships jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of their political opponents. Now some of the perpetrators are finally facing justice

The last time Anatole Larrabeiti saw his parents, he was four years old. It was 26 September 1976, the day after his birthday. He remembers the shootout, the bright flashes of gunfire and the sight of his father lying on the ground, mortally wounded, outside their home in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his mother lying beside him. Then Larrabeiti remembers being taken away by armed police, along with his 18-month-old sister, Victoria Eva.

The two children became prisoners. At first, they were held in a grimy car repair garage that had been turned into a clandestine torture centre. That was in another part of Buenos Aires, the city that their parents had moved to in June 1973, joining thousands of leftwing militants and former guerrillas fleeing a military coup in their native Uruguay. The following month, in October 1976, Anatole and Victoria Eva were taken to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and held at the military intelligence headquarters. A few days before Christmas, they were flown to a third country, Chile, in a small aircraft that climbed high above the Andes. Larrabeiti remembers looking down on snowy peaks from the plane.

Young children do not usually make epic journeys through three countries in as many months without parents or relatives. The closest thing they had to family was a jailer known as Aunt Mónica. It was probably Aunt Mónica who abandoned them in a large square, the Plaza O’Higgins, in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, on 22 December 1976. Witnesses recall two young, well-dressed children stepping out of a black car with tinted windows. Larrabeiti wandered around the square, hand-in-hand with his sister, until the owner of a merry-go-round ride spotted them. He invited them to sit on the ride, expecting some panicked parents to appear, looking for their lost children. But nobody came, so he called the local police.

illo for Long Read on Operation Condor by Giles Tremlett - final web version

No one could understand how the two children, whose accents marked them as foreign, had got here. It was as if they had dropped from the sky. Anatole was too young to make sense of what had happened. How does a four-year-old who finds himself in Chile explain that he does not know where he is, that he lives in Argentina, but is really Uruguayan? All he knew was that he was in a strange place, where people spoke his language in a different way.

The next day, the children were taken to an orphanage, and from there they were sent on to separate foster homes. After a few months, they had a stroke of luck. A dental surgeon and his wife wanted to adopt, and when the magistrate in charge of the children asked the surgeon which sibling he wanted, he said both. “He said that we had to come together, because we were brother and sister,” Larrabeiti told me when we met earlier this year in Chile’s capital, Santiago.

Today, he is a trim, smartly suited 47-year-old public prosecutor with hazel eyes and a shaven head. “I have decided to live without hate,” he said. “But I want people to know.”

What Larrabeiti wants people to know is that his family were victims of one of the 20th century’s most sinister international state terror networks. It was called Operation Condor, after the broad-winged vulture that soars above the Andes, and it joined eight South American military dictatorships – Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador – into a single network that covered four-fifths of the continent.

It has taken decades to fully expose this system, which enabled governments to send death squads on to each other’s territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies – real or suspected – among their emigrant and exile communities. Condor effectively integrated and expanded the state terror unleashed across South America during the cold war, after successive rightwing military coups, often encouraged by the US, erased democracy across the continent. Condor was the most complex and sophisticated element of a broad phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people across South America were murdered or disappeared by military governments in the 1970s and 80s.

Most Condor victims disappeared for ever. Hundreds were secretly disposed of – some of them tossed into the sea from planes or helicopters after being tied up, shackled to concrete blocks or drugged so that they could barely move. Larrabeiti’s mother, Victoria, who was last seen in an Argentinian torture centre in 1976, is one of them. His father, Mario, who was a leftwing militant, probably died in the shootout when they were snatched by the police. Enough victims have survived, however, to tell stories that, when matched against a growing volume of declassified documents, amount to a single, ghastly tale.

In the past two decades, Larrabeiti’s story has been told and retold in half a dozen courts and tribunals around the world. In the absence of a fully formed global criminal justice system, the perpetrators of Condor are being taken to court through a piecemeal process. “The trouble with borders is that it is easier to cross them to kill someone than it is to pursue a crime,” says Carlos Castresana, a prosecutor who has pursued Condor cases and the dictators behind them in Spain. Those seeking justice have had to rely on a judicial spider’s web of national laws, international treaties and rulings by human rights tribunals. The individuals they pursue are often decrepit and unrepentant old men, but a tenacious network of survivors, lawyers, investigators and academics, rather like the postwar Nazi-hunters, has taken up the challenge of ensuring that such international state terror does not go untried.

The process is painfully slow. The first major criminal investigation focusing on Condor – with victims and defendants from seven countries – began in Rome more than 20 years ago. It still has not ended. On a sweltering day in July 2019, a judge in the Rome case handed life sentences to a former president of Peru, a Uruguayan foreign minister, a Chilean military intelligence chief and 21 others for their role in a coordinated campaign of extermination and torture. The defendants are appealing, and a final verdict is due within a year.

Much of what we now know about Condor has been unearthed or pieced together in Rome, Buenos Aires and in dozens of court cases – large and small – in other countries. Further evidence comes from US intelligence papers dealing with Argentina that were declassified on the orders of Barack Obama. In 2019, the US completed its handover of 47,000 pages to Argentina. These documents show how much the US and European governments knew about what was happening across South America, and how little they cared.

When he was seven, Anatole Larrabeiti discovered his true identity, thanks to his tenacious paternal grandmother, Angélica, who tracked the siblings down. Stories had appeared in the Chilean press when they vanished in 1976, though headlines claimed they were abandoned by unidentified “red terrorist parents”. Over the next few years, word of the missing children’s whereabouts spread from one humanitarian organisation to another, before eventually reaching the Brazilian human rights group Clamor, which had activists in Valparaíso, the city in Chile where Larrabeiti and his sister were living. After a tipoff, the activists secretly photographed the children on their way to school and sent pictures to Angélica. She immediately recognised her grandchildren. “My sister was a replica of my mother as a child,” explained Larrabeiti. “And I have her lips.”

By agreement with their biological grandparents, the children remained with their adopted parents in Chile. When Victoria Eva turned nine, she was told about her true identity, and the children started to make family visits to Uruguay. “They were good parents,” said Larrabeiti, of the couple who adopted them. “They kept the links with Uruguay and we had psychological support, which I needed when I became a very angry adolescent.”

The crimes committed by Latin America’s military regimes during the cold war continue to haunt the continent. Only a perverse combination of power and paranoia can explain why these regimes awarded themselves the right not just to murder and torture, but also to steal children such as the Larrabeitis. The men perpetrating such crimes saw themselves as warriors in a messianic, frontierless war against the spread of armed revolution across Latin America.

Their fantasies were overblown, but not entirely baseless. In 1965, the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara had waved an emotional goodbye to his comrade-in-arms Fidel Castro, leaving Cuba. He vowed to initiate a new phase of revolutionary activity, extending guerrilla warfare across Latin America. Che was killed while carrying out his mission in Bolivia in 1967, but the US by then viewed revolution in Latin America as an existential threat – recalling how Russian nuclear weapons had reached Cuban soil during the 1962 missile crisis. In a bid to strengthen anti-communist forces, the US pumped money and weapons to armed forces across the region, vastly increasing the power of the military within these states and eventually, as the American journalist John Dinges has written, ending up in an “intimate embrace with mass murderers running torture camps, body dumps, and crematoriums”. In the 70s, as rightwing military coups and state terror swept the continent, an attempt at coordinating an armed response was made via a loose network known as the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR). Formed by groups from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia in 1973, the JCR had grandiose plans to pursue Che’s continental uprising, but lacked funds, friends and firepower. Meanwhile, South America’s military regimes began to collaborate more closely, initially striking bilateral agreements that allowed operatives to carry out their work on foreign soil.

Aurora Meloni, a Uruguayan who had gone into exile in Argentina with her husband, Daniel Banfi, and two young daughters, was one of the first to suspect that South America’s violent right was plotting an international network of terror and rendition. At 3am on 13 September 1974, Meloni and Banfi were at home in a suburb of Buenos Aires when about half a dozen armed men burst through their door. Meloni, then aged 23, immediately recognised one of them as the notorious Uruguayan police inspector Hugo Campos Hermida. Back in Uruguay, Hermida had once questioned Meloni and Banfi – then students of literature and history respectively – after they had taken part in a demonstration back home in support of the leftwing Tupamaro guerrilla movement, to which Banfi belonged. “I remembered how he [Hermida] had hit me,” Meloni told me. “He was very aggressive.”

Meloni could not understand why Hermida was working freely in a foreign country. At that time, Argentina was still a democracy, with rule of law. (The military takeover came later, in March 1976.) Foreign policemen had no right to act there. After their apartment had been ransacked for clues as to the whereabouts of other exiled Tupamaros, Hermida took Banfi away. Aurora assumed she would soon discover which police station or jail he had been taken to, but there was silence.

In September 1974, this was still a bizarre event. “We had never heard of people disappearing in Argentina before. I was sure I would find him,” Meloni told me. Eventually she called a press conference. How could someone vanish like that? The answer came five weeks later, when three bodies bearing torture scars were discovered by police 75 miles away. Car headlights and a group of men had been seen in a remote spot at night, and pile of fresh earth had been left behind. Daniel Banfi was one of three murdered Uruguayans found in the hastily dug grave.

The following month, Meloni left Argentina, and eventually moved to Italy, where, since her father was Italian, she had dual nationality. She returned to Uruguay for three spells over the next 25 years, seeking justice. But, just as in Chile and Argentina, the price of ending dictatorship in Uruguay in 1985 was an amnesty, which ruled that state representatives could not be charged with crimes committed during the regime’s 12 years in power. It seemed nothing could be done.

It wasn’t until the end of the century that cracks in the legal status quo began to appear. In the late 90s, a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garzón began testing a previously ignored law that obliged Spain to pursue any alleged human rights abusers anywhere in the world, if their own countries refused to try them. Garzón and a group of progressive prosecutors opened investigations for genocide and terrorism against Argentina’s former military junta and Pinochet’s regime, and “a criminal conspiracy” between them.

Since the accused did not live in Spain, Garzón’s quest was viewed as quixotic. “People laughed at us,” the Spanish prosecutor who brought these cases, Carlos Castresana, told me in Madrid recently. On 16 October 1998, however, Pinochet was arrested by police at a London clinic after a minor hernia operation. He was a frequent visitor to the city, taking tea at Fortnum & Mason and popping in on his old friend and ally Margaret Thatcher.

Augusto Pinochet after his arrest in London in 1998. Photograph: Reuters

Amid the headlines and the flurry of paperwork sent to London over the following days, few people noticed that the initial warrant for Pinochet’s arrest was based on a Condor case. It named a Chilean victim who disappeared in Argentina, Edgardo Enríquez, and stated that “there is evidence of a coordinated plan, known as Operation Condor, in which several countries took part”.

Pinochet was held for 17 months while Britain’s law lords twice approved extradition to Spain. Labour party home secretary Jack Straw stymied the extradition, instead sending Pinochet home to Chile on health grounds. On his return, the former dictator made a mockery of that justification by stepping out of his wheelchair to wave joyfully at supporters. Yet something major had changed, as prosecutors, judges and activists realised that South America’s dictators and their henchmen were no longer untouchable.

In 1999, inspired by Garzón, Aurora Meloni brought a murder case in Italy against Uruguayan security officials who were suspected of killing Banfi and others. Families of other Condor victims with Italian citizenship joined Meloni, and the case broadened to cover Condor crimes in several countries. From her home in Milan, Meloni – now aged 69 – has kept the case alive ever since. “It has taken a long time,” she told me. After last year’s sentencing in Rome, the plaintiffs were delighted, but Meloni points out that until we know the outcome of the appeals, the story isn’t over.

When Daniel Banfi was murdered in late 1974, Condor did not yet formally exist. His death can be seen as a precursor, or trial run. Hermida Campos was one of a handful of Uruguayan security officials who were secretly testing ways of hunting down exiles with their Argentinian counterparts.

Another of those preparing the rendition programme with Argentina, which would later be absorbed into Condor, was the Uruguayan navy lieutenant Jorge Tróccoli. Now a grey, jowly 73-year-old, Tróccoli was the only defendant present at the Rome trial. He had moved to Italy and was arrested in Salerno, near Naples, in 2007. In the 90s, Tróccoli wrote two semi-autobiographical novels about how Uruguay’s military had embraced torture, murder and repression. In La Hora del Depredador (The Predator’s Hour), a torturer who appears to act as a proxy for the author (though Tróccoli insists this is fiction) declares: “When this is over, we will have to make peace. And that won’t happen if we use methods like this … What’s more, you will begin to feel bad about it as the years go by.” Yet, in court, Tróccoli showed no remorse, claiming innocence. “He sat beside me one day,” Meloni told me. “He was angry, not ashamed.”

Most of what we know about Operation Condor only emerged years after it was over. Formal coordinating offices existed in several countries, and the network generated considerable paperwork as documents and encrypted cables were sent back and forth over a dedicated communications network called Condortel. But at the time the victims did not understand the scale of the international conspiracy.

For more than a decade, public knowledge of Operation Condor was largely limited to an obscure FBI note quoted in a book, published in 1980, by John Dinges and fellow journalist Saul Landau. They were investigating the murders of a former Chilean ambassador and his American assistant, who were killed in Washington DC in 1976 by Pinochet’s agents. In a cable sent shortly after the killings, an FBI officer wrote: “Operation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning leftists, communists and Marxists which was recently established between the cooperating services in South America.” The note went on to mention “a more secret phase” of Condor, which “involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to travel anywhere in the world to carry out sanctions, [including] assassinations”.

Beyond that, relatively little was known. It was in Paraguay where the first major breakthrough took place. In 1992, a young magistrate, José Agustín Fernández, received a tipoff on the whereabouts of the secret police archive of the country’s former strongman Gen Alfredo Stroessner, who grabbed power in 1954 and stayed until 1989. At dawn, three days before Christmas, Fernández made a surprise visit to a police station outside the capital city, Asunción. With a caravan of television cameras as company, but armed only with a warrant signed in his own hand, the magistrate forced Paraguay’s once-untouchable police to hand over the documents. “The journalists had to lend us a truck to take it all back to the court house,” Fernández told me. “Perhaps the most shocking thing were the photographs. They included people who were disappeared by Condor.”

Fernández’s haul became known as the Archive of Terror. Here, buried among half a million sheets of paper detailing three decades of domestic repression under Stroessner, was the story of how Operation Condor was created, and by whom. It was not what Fernández had originally sought, and he was shocked. “We had heard the stories about it, but here was written proof,” he told me.

The documents established that Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Pinochet’s spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to the Army War Academy on La Alameda, Santiago’s central avenue. Pinochet welcomed them in person. “Subversion has developed a leadership structure that is intercontinental, continental, regional and sub-regional,” Contreras told them, referring to organised resistance from opponents of the continent’s military regimes. He proposed a sophisticated network linked by “telex, microfilm, computers, cryptography” to track down and eliminate enemies.

The club, with the first five countries as members, came into existence on 28 November. Brazil joined the next year, while Peru and Ecuador joined in 1978. At its height, Condor covered 10% of the world’s populated land mass, and formed what Francesca Lessa of Oxford University calls “a borderless area of terror and impunity”.

The Archive of Terror documents were revealing, but they were largely dry, bureaucratic records. Behind them lay a reality of the kidnap, torture, rape and murder of at least 763 people, according to a database that Lessa is building. Yet it was only after the archive was found – and especially after Condor was named in Garzón’s Pinochet case – that the disconnected stories of the victims began to cohere into a bigger story.

Laura Elgueta lives in a small house in La Reina, a tranquil suburb of Santiago where purple jacaranda trees blossom. She is one of Condor’s survivors. Her friend Odette Magnet – whose 27-year-old sister, María Cecilia, disappeared in Argentina in 1976 – lives a five-minute walk away. “When I was looking for somewhere to move to, I wanted to live near her,” Magnet explained as we made the walk to Elgueta’s home. Together, the two women have long shouldered the burden of explaining Condor to Chileans at human rights conferences and in the media.

Although Condor operatives hunted down targets in all member states, their work focused on Argentina in particular, which was a refuge for exiles escaping military dictatorships across the continent before it, too, fell under military control. Condor squads dispatched to Argentina from Uruguay and Chile used a series of makeshift jails and torture centres provided by their hosts. The first was the abandoned car repair garage, Automotores Orletti, where Anatole Larrabeiti was held and his mother Victoria was last seen alive. Larrabeiti still recalls seeing a jar of glittering metal in the garage, in which victims’ wedding rings were kept.

Later, Condor victims were taken to Club Atlético, a codename for the basement of a police warehouse in Buenos Aires. This is where a blindfolded, 18-year-old Laura Elgueta arrived in July 1977 with her sister-in-law, Sonia, after armed Chileans and Argentinians snatched them from her home nearby. At the time, Elgueta’s Chilean family – part of which was now exiled in Argentina – was still searching for her activist brother, Kiko, who had disappeared in Buenos Aires the previous July. “We knew he had been kidnapped, but that was all,” Elgueta told me.

In the car, the sexual, physical and verbal abuse began. It continued at Club Atlético – where the women were stripped, handcuffed, hooded and given their numbers, K52 and K53. “Whoever walked past would insult you, or beat you, or throw you to the ground,” Elgueta recalled. They could hear fellow prisoners walking in chains. The Chilean torturers made no attempt to disguise their nationality, and Elgueta and Sonia’s interrogation focused solely on Chile’s exile community in Argentina. The women were taken to the torture room by turns. Beatings, more sexual abuse and electric shocks followed. “They’d say: ‘Now the party can really start.’ Despite all we know and have read, you cannot imagine what human beings are capable of. It was a house of horrors,” Elgueta told me. “When my sister-in-law came out of one session, they had given her such strong electric shocks that she was still trembling.”

After eight hours, Elgueta and her sister-in-law were released. Their torturers had realised the two women knew nothing about Pinochet’s political or armed opponents. “As I left, the one [torturer] who had decided I was his girlfriend was there shouting: ‘Don’t take her away. I want to be with my girl!’” Elgueta was still blindfolded when she was driven away and dumped on a street corner near her home.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2020/09/archive-zip/giv-3902VbqsWJQfnwvq/

Although Elgueta and Magnet had campaigned for Operation Condor to be investigated in Chile for years, they say that the media and politicians there only became interested after Pinochet was arrested in London. “Countries did not want to recognise that they had allowed armed units from other countries to operate on their territory,” Elgueta told me. “The ignorance about Condor here was incredible.”

Awareness of Condor is now more widespread, and many deaths are finally being investigated by the courts, but that does not mean all Chileans think it was a bad idea. In fact, just as in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, a small but significant part of Chilean society defends the dictatorship and its enforcers.

One March afternoon in Santiago, I walked to La Alameda, the broad main avenue, which is officially called Avenida Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins, where daily battles were raging between rock-throwing protesters and teargas-armed police. Protests demanding reforms to the neoliberal state and constitution imposed by Pinochet had rumbled on since October 2019, reflecting broad anger at hangovers from that era – including allegations of police abuse under the conservative government of billionaire president Sebastián Piñera – the country’s fifth-richest man, whose brother served as a minister under Pinochet. Alleged victims, many of whom were demonstrators, talk of torture, rape, killings and attempted killings. “We never thought we would have to come back to Chile under these circumstances,” declared José Miguel Vivanco, of Human Rights Watch, when it presented a report that counted injuries to more than 11,000 people in protests up to November 2019. “We thought this was history.”

On the avenue, an empty teargas canister lying among freshly-hurled stones bore, by coincidence, the name “Condor” – a company that has long supplied the Chilean army and police. Protesters claimed these were being shot directly at people’s faces, helping account for more than 400 eye injuries. Piñera at first condemned protesters as being “at war against all good Chileans”, but has since ordered investigations and replaced his interior minister Andrés Chadwick (a former Pinochet supporter and cousin of Piñera), who was then punished by parliament with a ban from holding public office for five years. A referendum on constitutional change, which had been postponed because of Covid-19, is now scheduled for 25 October.

On the outskirts of the city, Magnet took me to Villa Grimaldi, a detention centre in a former restaurant complex where victims were sometimes locked for days inside tiny wooden boxes. It is now a museum that includes drawings by the English doctor Sheila Cassidy, who was tortured there after treating a wounded leader of the armed opposition to Pinochet. Cassidy later told of how women prisoners were given electric shocks to the vagina and raped, including by dogs. On display at Villa Grimaldi is one of the concrete beams to which victims were tied before they were taken to be dropped into the sea from helicopters.

Magnet and I looked for her sister María Cecilia’s name among the 188 small ceramic plaques set down beside rose bushes to commemorate each of Pinochet’s female victims. Magnet’s sister had been an active part of the exiled opposition. “Sometimes I wish she hadn’t been so brave, and had fled from Argentina before this happened, as others did,” said Magnet. Eventually we found María Cecilia’s plaque, beside a bush of pale yellow roses.

Although many of the men who carried out Operation Condor were alumni of the US army’s School of the Americas – a training camp in Panama for military from allied regimes across the continent – this was not a US-led operation. Recent revelations, however, show just how much western intelligence services knew about Condor.

Shortly before I travelled to Chile in March, startling news emerged about a Swiss company that had, for decades, supplied cryptography machines to military, police and spy agencies around the world. The company, the Washington Post revealed, had been secretly owned by the CIA and West Germany’s BND intelligence service. Any messages sent via its cryptography machines could, unbeknownst to the users, be read by the US and West Germany. Among the company’s clients were the regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. As the Washington Post put it, the CIA “was, in effect, supplying rigged communications gear to some of South America’s most brutal regimes and, as a result, in [a] unique position to know the extent of their atrocities”.

The new information about the rigged cryptography machines follows the revelations, from a declassified document handed to Argentina by the US last year, that West German, British and French intelligence services even explored the possibility of copying at least part of the Condor method in Europe. A heavily redacted CIA cable from September 1977 is headed: “Visit of representatives of West German, French and British intelligence services to Argentina to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversive organization similar to Condor”. The visit coincided with cross-frontier terror campaigns by Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army. According to the cable, the visitors explained that “the terrorist/subversive threat had reached such dangerous levels in Europe that they believed it best if they pooled their intelligence resources in a cooperative organization such as Condor”.

There is no evidence that this plan went any further, but we know that by that point, Condor countries were planning a Europe-wide assassination campaign. Chile had already independently carried out attacks in Europe, including an assassination attempt in Rome, in October 1975, on the exiled Chilean politician Bernardo Leighton. Now Condor teams were to kill people of any nationality living in Europe who they deemed terrorist leaders – though “non-terrorists also were reportedly candidates”, a CIA report from May 1977 reveals. The report states that “leaders of Amnesty Internation[al] were mentioned as targets”.

Fortunately for those on the hit list, the blustering nationalism of generals in different Latin American countries, who had spent much of their careers preparing to fight each other – rather than “subversives” at home – came to a head in 1978, when Chile and Argentina fell out over their maritime frontiers in the Beagle Channel. The quarrelling made military cooperation between them impossible, and eventually provoked the collapse of the wider Condor network, putting paid to the campaign in Europe. Just a few years later, Chile would secretly assist Britain in the Falklands war, which would, in turn, lead to the fall of Argentina’s military junta in 1983.

The dictatorships fell, one by one, during the 80s. In the wake of these upheavals, attempts to prosecute human rights abusers in Condor countries were either nonexistent, or easily stalled, amid widespread fear that the military would rebel and reimpose dictatorship. Argentina’s former junta leaders were tried and found guilty of human rights abuses in 1985, but soon pardoned – and an amnesty law introduced. In Uruguay, an amnesty was approved in 1986, hours before Condor officers and others were due in court for the first time. It seemed that some of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century were destined to go unpunished.

That began to change with Pinochet’s arrest in London. “It was Garzón who woke the world up to this,” Laura Elgueta told me. As Pinochet’s arrest highlighted, amnesty laws did not provide universal protection, and Condor was a weak spot. In retrospect, those who expected lifelong impunity for their involvement in Condor made three key mistakes. First of all, they stole children, a crime that even amnesties did not cover. Second, they wrongly assumed that amnesties would cover crimes committed on foreign soil. Finally, they hid their killings by making victims disappear – thereby turning those crimes into ongoing, unresolved kidnappings, which, unlike a murder where a body is found, cannot be covered by a statute of limitations or an amnesty for past events. These errors allowed a bold group of prosecutors and judges to bypass amnesty laws in a handful of carefully selected cases. These, in turn, revealed such ghastly truths that some governments were shamed into voiding the amnesty laws.

In Argentina, the trial of one of Elgueta’s Chilean kidnappers, for a separate assassination in 1974, produced a 2001 court ruling that statutes of limitations did not apply to crimes against humanity – which include torture, murder and kidnapping. As these were crimes routinely committed by a military regime that had “disappeared” more than 20,000 of its citizens during the so-called dirty war, this ruling undermined the Argentinian amnesty laws, and they were annulled in 2003. Uruguay’s amnesty law, meanwhile, was voided in 2011 at the behest of the Inter-American court of human rights in Costa Rica, after it had investigated the case of a kidnapped baby who had been held with Anatole Larrabeiti and his sister at the military intelligence headquarters in Montevideo.

Chile’s amnesty law still stands but, by 2002, a series of court decisions had left it almost toothless, declaring that it could not be applied to operations abroad, forced disappearances or cases with child victims. Of the major Condor countries, only Brazil conserves its amnesty law intact, and it remains the country where least progress has been made in pursuing crimes committed by its military dictatorship.

By 2011, with most amnesties cancelled or deemed largely inapplicable, Condor cases could finally be investigated more freely – and information began to flow between investigators in multiple countries. Two long-running cases – the one instigated by Aurora Meloni in Italy, along with another in Argentina – have come to sentencing in the past five years. In 2016, the trial in Argentina, which centred on 109 Condor victims from six countries, ended with 15 prison sentences – including for former junta president Reynaldo Bignone, who was then 87. Seven other accused men died during the three-year trial. The sentence was the first to recognise “a transnational, illegal conspiracy … dedicated to persecuting, kidnapping, forcefully repatriating, torturing and murdering political activists.” Argentina, it added, had become “a hunting ground”.

The Rome case extended the investigation to suspects from Peru, Bolivia and Chile. As in Argentina, it required unprecedented – if sluggish and sometimes failed – collaboration between countries, but the conclusion was the same: Condor was an illegal international network of state terror. Both sentences provided not only justice but, in their detailed investigation and description of what had happened, a telling of history as well.

Thanks also to dozens of smaller cases across eight countries, many Condor victims have had their day in court. Francesca Lessa has counted a total of 469 Condor victims during its most coordinated phase, between 1976 and 1978, and a further 296 in the years of more bilateral operations immediately prior to and after the main Condor period. They include 23 cases involving children, and at least 370 murders. Almost 60% of those cases have gone through court, or are in the process of doing so – with 94 people handed jail sentences (though often to men who can’t be extradited from their home countries to serve them).

By the standards of human rights investigations, where progress is often slow and halting, that is good work. Yet given the enormity of the crimes, it is hard to feel that justice has truly been served. Only a few dozen people – mostly elderly men who are already in jail – have been found guilty. Many others, such as Campos Hermida, died without having to justify their actions. No one has begged forgiveness or revealed where bodies are buried. “Nobody here has confessed,” said Uruguayan prosecutor Mirtha Guianze, whose country has the most victims but only a handful of convictions.

Fear of rightwing extremist violence still stalks South America, especially among survivors. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s defence of his county’s dictatorship is especially worrying. The idea that a network similar to Condor might one day reappear is not fanciful. The best shield against that is to ensure perpetrators of state terrorism go to jail, even if that takes decades. “It would be presumptuous to claim that tyranny will stop because of this,” Pablo Ouviña, the prosecutor who led the Buenos Aires trial, told me. “What we can show, however, is that if it does reappear, it will be probably be tried in court later on.” That is the gift victims of Operation Condor can leave for future generations.

Anatole Larrabeiti is nearing the end of his personal judicial marathon. “It has been continuous over almost my whole adult life,” he said. He and his sister first took their case to a civil court in Argentina in 1996, as a way of determining the truth of what had happened to them and receiving compensation. After two decades of fruitless attempts to find redress, and constant rebuffs from Argentinian courts, in 2019 their case was taken up by the Inter-American court of human rights – which can call on states to pay compensation and change laws. “I’m pretty sure we will win,” Larrabeiti said. The court’s decision could oblige Argentina to change the way it handles cases like this, and set precedent for other countries. It may also mean that Larrabeiti and his sister finally receive compensation. But that is not what matters most to him. “Up to now, the task of finding evidence has too often been on us. We want that changed,” he said.

At the airport, Roberto Kozak assists a leader of the MiR to go into exile.

As we finished talking, Larrabeiti admitted that he had felt his voice cracking while he delved through his memories, thinking of his parents or the other stolen children. “Did you notice? It was in my throat,” he said. “My sister was very young, and unlike me she has no concrete memories of our parents, but that does not mean there are no emotional scars.” Justice in court is important for preventing a repeat of the past, he believes, but so too is memory. “We can contribute to that,” he said.

Anatole himself has chosen to live without bitterness, swallowing down the rage that he once felt – even towards his biological parents and the dangers to which they exposed the family. “I was furious. Why did they have children? Then I realised – it was an act of faith,” he told me. “Just as it is an act of faith to talk about it now, even though people may think it impossible that something like this could ever have happened.”

coordinated repression

Operation Condor was a formal system to coordinate repression among the countries of the Southern Cone that operated from the mid-1970s until the early eighties. It aimed to persecute and eliminate political, social, trade-union and student activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.

Operation Condor was officially founded on November 28, 1975 in Santiago, Chile during the closing session of the First Meeting of National Intelligence, and it was signed by intelligence representatives from Argentina (Jorge Casas, Navy captain, SIDE−the Argentine State Intelligence Secretariat), Bolivia (Carlos Mena, Army major), Chile (Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, head of the DINA−the National Intelligence Office), Uruguay (José Fons, Army coronel) and Paraguay (Benito Guanes Serrano, Army coronel).

In Paraguay’s Archive of Terror, a copy was found of the formal invitation sent by the Chilean National Intelligence Office (DINA) on October 29 of that year to General Francisco Brites, Chief of the Paraguayan National Police, “to promote coordination and establish something similar to what Interpol has in Paris, but devoted to subversion.”

The founding document provided institutional coverage for many of the repressive intelligence activities, relationships and practices that these Latin American countries were already developing bilaterally. This document sets forth the beginning of official cooperation among the intelligence agencies of the Southern Cone: “as of this date, bilateral or multilateral contacts are hereby commenced at the will of the respective participating countries for the exchange of subversive information, the respective services opening their own or new background files.“ Although no representative of Brazil signed the inaugural agreement, that country’s cooperation in repressive activities against political opponents of the member countries has been proven.

Within the context of Operation Condor, the coordinated repression passed through different phases:
-In the first, a centralized database was created on guerrilla movements, left-wing parties and groups, trade unionists, religious groups, liberal politicians and supposed enemies of the authoritarian regimes involved in the operation.
-In the second, people considered political “enemies” at the regional level were identified and attacked.
-In the third and final phase, operations were carried out to track down and eliminate persons located in other countries in the Americas and Europe.

The declassified documentation available shows that various US government agencies had early knowledge of the scope of the repressive coordination and did not make much effort to stop it until it had reached the third phase, which proved the most problematic because the operations could no longer be kept under wraps.

Indeed, the detailed description of the different phases of Operation Condor and their scope are made abundantly clear in the analysis of the documentation declassified by the US State Department, which confirms that “’Operation Condor’ is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning so-called ‘Leftists,’ Communists and Marxists, which was recently established between cooperating intelligence services in South America in order to eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in the area. In addition, ‘Operation Condor’ provides for joint operations against terrorist targets in member countries of ‘Operation Condor.’ Chile is the center for ‘Operation Condor’ and in addition to Chile its members include Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Brazil also has tentatively agreed to supply intelligence input for ‘Operation Condor.’ Members of ‘Operation Condor’ showing the most enthusiasm to date have been Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. The latter three countries have engaged in joint operations, primarily in Argentina, against the terrorist target.”

The document explains that this third, extremely secret, phase of Operation Condor “involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions up to assassination against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations from ‘Operation Condor’ member countries. For example, should a terrorist or a supporter of a terrorist organization from a member country of ‘Operation Condor’ be located in a European country, a special team from ‘Operation Condor’ would be dispatched to locate and surveil the target. When the location and surveillance operation has terminated, a second team from ‘Operation Condor’ would be dispatched to carry out the actual sanction against the target. Special teams would be issued false documentation from member countries of ‘Operation Condor’ and may be composed exclusively of individuals from one member nation of ‘Operation Condor’ or may be composed of a mixed group from various ‘Operation Condor’ member nations. (The) European countries specifically mentioned for possible operations under the third phase of ‘Operation Condor’ were France and Portugal.”

US reticence with regard to this final phase should not cause us to lose sight of the fundamental role the US played in the consolidation of the previous phases. Operation Condor ultimately had a computerized databank with information on thousands of individuals considered to be politically suspect, as well as photo archives, microfiches, surveillance reports, psychological profiles, reports on organization memberships, personal and political histories, lists of family members and friends. The computers for storing all this information were provided by the CIA, since no other country on the continent at that time had the sufficient technological means to do so. In addition, the member countries had at their disposal a protected communications system known as Condortel, the main base of which was located at a US facility on the Panama Canal.

condor I, II and III

Operation Condor’s founding document is dated November 28, 1975. It was signed by the intelligence service representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay who met in Chile as of November 25 for the so-called First Meeting of National Intelligence. Although no one from Brazil signed this inaugural agreement, that country’s cooperation with the others for purposes of repression has been proven over the course of this trial.

orletti II

During the trial, the Federal Criminal Tribunal No. 1 took up case No. 1976 brought against “Furci, Miguel Ángel for aggravated deprivation of liberty and torture”, known as Automotores Orletti II.
Because of the links between what occurred at Automotores Orletti − the main concentration camp used to detain Operation Condor victims in Argentina − and Operation Condor itself, the court ruled that the trial would encompass all four cases: Condor I, II, and III and Orletti II.
In a few cases, the Orletti and Condor victims are the same.

some of the stories told during the trial

CELS is part of the unified legal team representing plaintiffs along with Equipo Jurídico Kaos, Fundación Liga Argentina por los Derechos Humanos and attorney Alcira Ríos. We also represent the family members of Horacio Campiglia, Mónica Pinus de Binstock and Norberto Habegger, disappeared in Brazil, and Marcelo Gelman and María Claudia García Irureta Goyena, disappeared in Argentina and Uruguay, as well as the relatives of Uruguayan national Bernardo Arnone, disappeared in Argentina. Previously we represented the family members of María Emilia Islas Gatti and Juan Pablo Recagno Ibarburu, who died as the judicial process advanced.

Monica Pinus de Binstock and Horacio Campiglia

Mónica and Horacio traveled on March 8, 1980 from Mexico to Rio de Janeiro. They had layovers in Panama and then in Caracas, where they boarded a Varig Airlines flight. Mónica was traveling under the name María Cristina Aguirre de Prinssot, and Horacio as Jorge Piñero. They were on their way to meet Edgardo Binstock, Mónica’s husband, who had arrived just days before. They were in the process of organizing a return to Argentina for the second counteroffensive by the Montoneros armed political group.

Mónica and Edgardo Binstock met in 1971, were married in 1974 and had two children, a daughter and a son. They were both sociology students at the University of Buenos Aires and activists in the Juventud Peronista (Peronist Youth) movement.

The judicial case incorporated two Brazilian news articles − taken from the book Fuimos Soldados, by Marcelo Larraquy − that pinpoint the moment of capture: “On the runway, soldiers speaking Portuguese set up an isolation cordon and separated the Montoneros from the other passengers, and both Pinus and Campiglia yelled out their identities and denounced that they were being kidnapped.” After being abducted from the Galeao Airport by members of the Argentine security and armed forces, with support from the Brazilian armed forces, they were transferred to Argentina and taken to the Campo de Mayo military base.

Horacio, Pilar and their daughters

Army officer Cristino Nicolaides made public statements about an operation that could have been the one targeting Mónica and Horacio. Edgardo Binstock wrote him a letter in July 1981: “My wife and her travel companion were supposed to have met with comrades, all of whom are currently disappeared. Coincidentally (or not), your description leads me to believe that these are the very same people.” He later points out, “As her husband and on behalf of my two children, who, like many Argentine children, are growing up without knowing what happened to their mother, I demand that you make known the names of the detainees, what crimes they stand accused of, before what court the accusations were brought and where they are being tried. If not, you will be held responsible for all their lives. Simple as that.”

After the statements made by Nicolaides, a collective habeas corpus was filed on February 7, 1983 on behalf of numerous disappeared persons, which included Mónica Susana Pinus de Binstock and Horacio Campiglia. Horacio was married to Pilar Calveiro and had two daughters.

Maria Claudia Garcia Irureta Goyena and Marcelo Gelman

María Claudia was kidnapped on August 24, 1976 in the city of Buenos Aires. A so-called task force team forced entry into the apartment where she lived with her husband, Marcelo Ariel Gelman. They were taken to the Automotores Orletti clandestine detention center, where both were tortured.

Two months later, in October 1976, Marcelo was killed. An investigation by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF in Spanish) allowed his remains to be recovered more than 13 years later, after being buried as a John Doe in the San Fernando cemetery.

A witness in the case, who was also abducted and later released during the month of October, declared that Claudia was more than six months pregnant and was last seen just before giving birth. The witness also said that in September of that same year, Marcelo had been transferred.

Captain José Ricardo Arab and Major Manuel Juan Cordero Piacentini took Claudia to an office of the Uruguayan Defense Information Service (SID in Spanish). This was the place where Uruguayan detainees were held after being transferred from Orletti on the first prisoner flight, which took place on July 24, 1976.

While in labor, Claudia was taken to the Military Hospital of Montevideo, where she gave birth between the end of October and the beginning of November 1976. She remained in captivity until December of that year. A former SID soldier, Julio César Barboza Pla, saw her before and after the delivery.

Other former detainees testified that the guards had said they needed “a mattress urgently for a pregnant woman, who was on an upper floor.” One day they heard on the radio that the presence of an “Oscar 5” was requested urgently, because a woman was about to give birth, and they also recalled that the staff asked the women in the place “to prepare a bottle.”

When they were kidnapped, María Claudia was 19 years old and Marcelo, 20. The Argentine poet Juan Gelman found his granddaughter, Macarena, in 2000.

Bernardo Arnone

Bernardo was born in Montevideo on August 20, 1952. He lived in Piedras Blancas and was an activist in the Revolutionary Student Force (FER in Spanish) and the Workers’ Revolutionary Force (FRT in Spanish). He married María Cristina Mihura on July 25, 1974, and in June 1975 they moved to Buenos Aires, where he had a job at a metalworking company and joined the People’s Victory Party (PVP).

María Cristina testified at the trial that they left Uruguay after the coup d’état. Her mother-in-law, Petrona Hernández de Arnone, told her that while they were in Argentina, Uruguayan soldiers had gone to their house on several occasions asking about Bernardo. There were three of them, but she only recalled two names: Cordero and Gavazzo. In Buenos Aires, María Cristina lived in a number of boarding houses; Bernardo assumed another identity. He would spend two or three days with her and then leave.

Bernardo Arnone disappeared on October 1, 1976 in Buenos Aires. His mother, Petrona Hernández, remembers that the soldiers raided the family home on San Cono Street in Montevideo a few days after his disappearance, and dug holes all over the backyard in search of something they never found.

Bernardo and María Cristina were separated at the time of the abduction. She had begun a new relationship with Washington Domingo Queiró, who was disappeared on October 4 of that same year and never found since. She managed to get out of Argentina, flee to Sweden and save her own life.

Maria Emilia Islas Gatti and Jorge Zaffaroni

María Emilia was born in Montevideo on April 18, 1953. She and Jorge were student activists with the Association of Teaching Students in the Student Workers Resistance (ROE in Spanish), and they married in 1973. They had one daughter, Mariana. In 1975, they emigrated to Argentina for political reasons. In Buenos Aires, they participated in the formation of the People’s Victory Party (PVP).

On September 27, 1976, Jorge was kidnapped on the street by a group of people dressed as civilians, with no identification, who belonged to the Uruguayan Coordinating Body for Anti-subversive Operations (OCOA in Spanish). They took him to his home in Vicente López, where they stole everything of value while waiting for María Emilia and Mariana, who was 18 months old. They were all transported to the Automotores Orletti clandestine detention center located in the Flores neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

In 2003, the Uruguayan Peace Commission confirmed in its report that María Emilia “was probably transferred, with her final destination unknown, between October 5 and 6, 1976.” Mariana’s whereabouts came to light in 1983; she had been registered as the daughter of Argentine civilian intelligence agent Miguel Ángel Furci − indicted in this case − and his wife, Adriana González. In 1992, her true identity was restored and Furci was convicted for her appropriation in 1993. María Emilia and Jorge are still disappeared.

Juan Pablo Recagno Ibarburu

The Historical Investigation into Disappeared Detainees and Political Assassinations, presented on June 4, 2007 in Montevideo, revealed a secret document from 1976 from the Uruguayan Junta of Commanders-in-Chief, which gives an account of the procedures carried out in late 1976 against activists belonging to the People’s Victory Party (PVP).

The document indicated that the PVP “suffered, approximately three months ago, the loss of the majority of its best political cadres. Nevertheless, the military arm of the organization remained intact, not having lost a single man or any material resources. The military arm was located in the city of Buenos Aires.” This paragraph refers to the first group of PVP militant activists kidnapped between June 9 and July 14, 1976. All of those abducted were taken to Automotores Orletti, which was actively used as a secret detention center from May 11, 1976 through November of that year. On July 24, 1976, the kidnapping victims were transferred to Uruguay in a special flight (the “first flight”), ordered by the Defense Information Service and flown by Uruguayan Air Force pilots.

Between August and October 1976, 27 Uruguayan citizens were disappeared in Buenos Aires, which presumably culminated in their secret transfer during a “second flight” to Uruguay. This group of disappeared detainees included Juan Pablo Recagno Ibarburu, who had been abducted on October 2.

Juan Pablo’s nickname was El Colorado. He was a ceramicist and had worked as an illustrator in Buenos Aires for the Joker magazine between 1973 and 1976.

the right to truth

This trial brought to light very significant knowledge of Operation Condor as a criminal system, and that explains its importance in contributing to the truth. In addition, the judges have the opportunity to take up the demand for the right to truth regarding the events denounced by plaintiffs who have died over the course of this long judicial process. Reparation is thus a debt owed to their memory and to society as a whole.

With regard to the construction of knowledge, it must be stressed that hundreds of testimonies by people from all the Operation Condor member countries were given during the trial. The proceedings also included 12 reports from human rights organizations; six reports from international organizations; 423 files from the Argentine National Committee on the Disappearance of Persons, the Human Rights Secretariat and the Registry of Disappeared and Deceased Persons; 90 files and hundreds of documents from the Armed Forces and security forces; and eight documents from the Southern Cone Armed Forces.

Furthermore, tens of thousands of declassified documents from the US State Department were added to this material. In addition to the Chile Declassification Project, the requests from Argentine human rights organizations like Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas and CELS resulted in the Argentina Declassification Project being carried out in 2002, disclosing some 4600 documents. Reports from national and foreign archives were also incorporated into the case, such as those of the former Office of Police Intelligence for Buenos Aires Province (DIPBA in Spanish) and Paraguay’s Archive of Terror, as well as the evidence from 326 legal cases in Argentina and another 46 cases filed abroad.

With regard to recognition of the right to truth, while it was initially considered to be limited to victims and their families, over time it has come to be seen as a right that also belongs to society as a whole. This is how the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has interpreted it, in specifying that even in cases where amnesties are granted, States must adopt the necessary measures to establish the facts and identify those responsible, and that the entire society has the inalienable right to know the truth about what occurred as well as the reasons and circumstances in which the crimes were committed, thus reaffirming the collective nature of this right.

Over the course of these long proceedings, a number of the accused have died or been removed from the process. However, it is our view that the State has an obligation, stemming from cases of crimes against humanity, to investigate and publicly release those facts that can be reliably established, even when it is not possible to convict a responsible party. The unified legal team led by CELS solicited, on grounds of the right to truth, that the court deem the events that caused grave harm to Fausto Augusto Carrillo Rodríguez, Agustín Goiburú Giménez, Norberto Armando Habegger, Horacio Campiglia, Mónica Susana Pinus de Binstock, Luis Enrique Elgueta Díaz, Adalberto Soba Fernández, María Emilia Islas Gatti, Cecilia Susana Trías Hernández, Juan Pablo Recagno Ibarburu, Casimira María del Rosario Carretero Cárdenas, Rafael Laudelino Lezama González, Carlos Alfredo Rodríguez Mercader and Armando Bernardo Arnone Hernández to have been proven in their entirety.

the accused and the victims

Over the course of the hearings we were able to prove that the accused, all of them former military officials, were part of a criminal conspiracy dedicated to the enforced disappearance of 105 people, among other crimes, and that they were responsible for the illegal deprivations of liberty of which they were accused. These defendants were Humberto José Ramón Lobaiza, Felipe Jorge Alespeiti, Bernardo José Menéndez, Antonio Vañek, Eduardo Samuel Delío, Federico Antonio Minicucci, Néstor Horacio Falcón, Eugenio Guañabens Perelló, Carlos Humberto Caggiano Tedesco, Carlos Horacio Tragant, Juan Avelino Rodríguez, Santiago Omar Riveros, Reynaldo Benito Bignone, Luis Sadi Pepa, Rodolfo Emilio Feroglio, Enrique Braulio Olea and Manuel Juan Cordero Piacentini.

Finally, we proved that Miguel Ángel Furci was criminally responsible for the illegal deprivation of liberty of 67 people and the torture they suffered while in captivity at the Automotores Orletti Clandestine Detention Center.

the verdict

For the first time in history a court ruled that Operation Condor was a criminal conspiracy to forcibly disappear people across international borders. The Operation’s scope was proven in its full magnitude. For many reasons this trial had unique characteristics and was of great regional importance: due to the sheer number of evidentiary documents involved; the hundreds of testimonies given either in person or via videoconference from witnesses’ countries of residence; and the vast group of people who were the plan’s victims, which included political, social, trade-union and student activists of various nationalities. All of this made it possible to prove the existence of a formal system of repressive coordination between the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.

In its verdict, Argentina’s Federal Tribunal No. 1 determined that the accused were part of that criminal system and were responsible for some specific Condor operations. For these reasons the court sentenced Santiago Omar Riveros and former Uruguayan military official Manuel Juan Cordero Piacentini to 25 years in prison. Reynaldo Benito Bignone and Rodolfo Emilio Feroglio to 20 years. Humberto José Ramón Lobaiza to 18 years. Antonio Vañek, Eugenio Guañabens Perelló and Enrique Braulio Olea to 13 years. Luis Sadi Pepa, Néstor Horacio Falcón, Eduardo Samuel Delío, Felipe Jorge Alespeiti and Carlos Humberto Caggiano Tedesco to 12 years. And Federico Antonio Minicucci was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

All of the accused belonged to Argentina’s military forces with the exception of Cordero, who was extradited from Brazil for this trial. He had never been convicted of a crime in his native Uruguay. Bignone was the last dictator of the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, but his conviction in this trial refers to actions he took prior to assuming that post.

In addition, the court sentenced Miguel Ángel Furci, a former Argentine intelligence agent, to 25 years in prison for being co-perpetrator of the crime of illegal deprivation of liberty, aggravated by violence and threats, committed against 67 people during their captivity in the clandestine detention center known as Automotores Orletti.

Juan Avelino Rodríguez and Carlos Horacio Tragant were acquitted.

The verdict was handed down on May 27, 2016.

Resources

cels.org, ” Criminal Conspiracy to Forcibly Disappear People”; theguardian.com, “Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America.” By Giles Tremlett;

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

How We Sold Our Soul- Operation Condor

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