How long did operation condor last

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. 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. 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 , 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 missile crisis.

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. At 3am on 13 September , 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. 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 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 , this was still a bizarre event. 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. It seemed nothing could be done. On 16 October , however, Pinochet was arrested by police at a London clinic after a minor hernia operation.

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.

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. W hen Daniel Banfi was murdered in late , 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. He had moved to Italy and was arrested in Salerno, near Naples, in 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 , by John Dinges and fellow journalist Saul Landau.

Beyond that, relatively little was known. This page memo was written by Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman, who had been following the reporting on intelligence coordination in recent months and had several times solicited reports on the subject from the ambassadors.

He combines the information on Condor and other disturbing trends in a report addressed directly to Secretary of State Kissinger. Shlaudeman states that the Southern Cone governments see themselves as engaged in a Third World War against terrorism and that they "have established Operation Condor to find and kill terrorists … in their own countries and in Europe.

Document 6: State , "Operation Condor", drafted August 18, and sent August 23 to the embassies of all the countries known to be members of Condor. This is an action cable signed by Secretary of State Kissinger. It reflects a decision by the Latin American bureau in the State Department to try to stop the Condor plans known to be underway, especially those outside of Latin America.

Kissinger instructs the ambassadors of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay to meet as soon as possible with the chief of state or the highest appropriate official of their respective countries and to convey a direct message, known in diplomatic language as a "demarche.

He has met with the CIA station chief Stewart Burton and deputy chief of mission Thomas Boyatt and they have decided that Pinochet would be "insulted" if the Ambassador raised the issue of assassinations with him. Popper than writes: "Please advise. This heavily redacted memo concerns the CIA-State Department meeting on Condor which followed Kissinger's cable instructing the ambassadors to take action.

Most of the substance of this important discussion is redacted, but two points are clear: Shlaudeman reports on the concerns that led to the drafting of the Kissinger cable and the strategy of "making representations concerning Operation Condor" which, according to interviews, was a strategy originally advocated by Undersecretary of State Philip Habib.

The second point is that Shlaudeman announces that "we are not making a representation to Pinochet as it would be futile to do so. Writing to his deputy, William Luers, Shlaudeman orders him to "instruct the ambassadors to take no further action. The crucial cable to which Shlaudeman is responding, referenced as "State ," has been somehow "lost" from the State Department filing system. These documents are the reports by Ambassador Robert Hill of his first meeting with military ruler, General Videla, on September 21, It would have been Hill's opportunity to present the demarche warning about Operation Condor, if that instruction had been still in force.

But these cables provide no evidence that such a representation was made. The discussion on human rights is notable for another reason. In the second cable, Hill presents strong criticism of the recent murder of a priest and what appeared to be mass killings at a nearby town and reminds Videla that the US Congress is taking a strong stand against governments perceived to be human rights violators. Videla dismissed the criticism by pointing to the recent visit by his foreign minister to Washington: "President said he had been gratified when Fonmin Guzzetti reported to him that Secretary of State Kissinger understood their problem and had said he hoped they could get terrorism under control as quickly as possible.

Videla said he had impression senior officers of USG understood situation his govt faces but junior bureaucrats do not. Document State , October 4, , "Operation Condor". Dated 13 days after the Letelier assassination, this cable from Assistant Secretary Shlaudeman to ambassador Popper is the long belated reply to Popper's "Please advise" cable of August The six week delay in replying to Popper is unexplained. And it is further mystifying that this cable, concerning a warning about Chile's reported plans to kill dissidents abroad, would make no reference to the actual assassination of Letelier only a few days before.

Two additional documents establish that there were other channels of intelligence indicating that Condor countries Chile and Uruguay may have been planning operations in the United States. This document is an FBI transcript in English of a telex message sent by Contreras, identified as "Condor One," to his counterparts in Paraguay, seeking their assistance. The Paraguayans provided false passports to two Chilean agents who intended to use them to travel to the United States.

Part of his political activity included a leadership role in the Christian Democratic Youth, and he later joined the Peronist movement. He belonged to the Argentine General Confederation of Labor CGT in Spanish , and during the dictatorship from to he was a banking trade union leader. 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 , Marcelo was killed. 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. 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, 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 She remained in captivity until December of that year.

The Argentine poet Juan Gelman found his granddaughter, Macarena, in Bernardo was born in Montevideo on August 20, There were three of them, but she only recalled two names: Cordero and Gavazzo.

He would spend two or three days with her and then leave. Bernardo Arnone disappeared on October 1, in Buenos Aires. She managed to get out of Argentina, flee to Sweden and save her own life. They had one daughter, Mariana. This month Mr. You were born in , as Operation Condor was winding down. What drew you in? My granddad died before I was born, but my grandmother, when we were on vacation we would listen to these amazing stories and adventures, first clandestinely for the Portuguese Communist Party and then as political prisoners.

So I was born with all that baggage and had to deal with it. As a result, when I started to work in the early s, I decided to go after the subject here in Portugal. And in I started to work a lot in Latin America, where the political prisoner question was an issue and still is. When I made my first trip to Argentina, the military dictatorship [which had ended in ] was still a big thing, a big trauma.

That was , also the year of my first trip to Brazil. So I slowly started to understand what had been the reality in South America. Eventually, I did go to New York to do photojournalism and documentary photography at school. This was after I had already produced my work in Portugal, and people in New York and elsewhere were slightly amazed by it.

Nobody knows about this. Well, my first concern is who do I want to represent here? Who do I want to address and who do I want to talk about? That was my main goal: how do I link all six countries together? So the first thing I did was to understand the history of each country and to select victims, meaning people who survived, families of people who disappeared, which is a big issue in the region, as you know, and the places where things happened — the concentration camps, the different places where torture was practiced, the places where a person was last seen.

I also had places where people think other people are buried, like in the Araguaia [River region of the Brazilian Amazon] or the Atacama [desert of northern Chile]. I wanted to show these fairly normal places, some of which are actually pretty creepy because they have been abandoned for a long time.

The idea was to share those places and show the memories that are still there.