Reply #52: Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role

[Octafish]

I understand and appreciate your perspective, otherlander. Both still better than what now squats in Oval Office.



Yet, both have demonstrated to me a very disturbing lack of deep historical understanding in their public utterances. Perhaps we can work with whomever is our candidate to bring Justice -- legal, political and economic -- to our nation. If we don't, it may likely be "Good bye, America!"

This might make a good place to start:

Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role

by J. Patrice McSherry

According to recently de-classified files, the U.S. aided and facilitated Condor operations as a matter of secret but routine policy.

In mid-April, 2001, Argentine judge Rodolfo Canicoba issued path-breaking international arrest warrants for two former high-ranking functionaries of the military regimes of Chile and Paraguay. These two, along with an Argentine general also summoned by the court, are accused of crimes committed within the framework of Operation Condor. Judge Canicoba presides over one of several cases worldwide investigating abductions and murders linked to Condor, a shadowy Latin American military network created in the 1970s whose key members were Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru
and Ecuador. Condor was a covert intelligence and operations system that enabled the Latin American military states to hunt down, seize, and execute political opponents across borders. Refugees fleeing military coups and repression in their own countries were "disappeared" in combined transnational operations. The militaries defied international law and traditions of political sanctuary to carry out their ferocious anticommunist crusade.

The judge's request for the detention and extradition of Manuel Contreras of Chile, former chief of the gestapo-like Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), and former dictator Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, along with his summons for ex-junta leader Jorge Videla of Argentina, represents another example of the rapid advances occurring in international law and justice since the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998. In effect, the struggle against impunity is being "globalized."

As human rights organizations, families of victims, lawyers, and judges press for disclosure and accountability regarding human rights crimes committed during the Cold War, inevitable questions arise as to the role of the foremost leader of the anticommunist alliance, the United States. This article explores recent evidence linking the U.S. national security apparatus with Operation Condor. Condor took place within the broader context of inter-American counterinsurgency coordination and operations led and sponsored by the Pentagon and the CIA. U.S. training, doctrine, organizational models, technology transfers, weapons sales, and ideological attitudes profoundly shaped security forces in the region.

Recently declassified documents add weight to the thesis that U.S. forces secretly aided and facilitated Condor operations. The U.S. government considered the Latin American militaries to be allies in the Cold War, worked closely with their intelligence organizations, and promoted coordinated action and modernization of their capabilities. As shown here, U.S. executive agencies at least condoned, and sometimes actively assisted, some Condor "countersubversive" operations.

What was Operation Condor?

In the 1960s and 1970s, populist, nationalist, and socialist movements emerged throughout the class-stratified nations of Latin America, challenging the entrenched privileges of local oligarchies as well as U.S. political and economic interests. In this context, U.S. national security strategists (who feared "another Cuba") and their Latin American counterparts began to regard large sectors of these societies as potentially or actually subversive. Cold War NationalSecurity Doctrine--a politicized doctrine of internal war and counterrevolution that targeted "internal enemies"--incorporated U.S. and French counterinsurgency concepts and anticommunist ideology. The doctrine gave the militaries a messianic mission: to remake their states and societies and eliminate "subversion." Political and social conflict was viewed through the lens of countersubversive war; the counterinsurgents believed that world communism had infiltrated their societies. During these years, militaries in country after country ousted civilian governments in a series of coups--even in such long-standing democracies as Chile and Uruguay--and installed repressive regimes. The "anticommunist crusade" became a crusade against the principles and institutions of democracy and against progressive and liberal as well as revolutionary forces, and the national security states institutionalized state terrorism.

Operation Condor allowed the Latin American militaries to put into practice a key strategic concept of national security doctrine: hemispheric defense defined by ideological frontiers. The more limited concept of territorial defense was superseded. To the U.S. national security apparatus--which fostered the new continent-wide security doctrine in its training centers, such as the Army School of the Americas in Panama--and most of the Latin American militaries, the Cold War represented World War III, the war of ideologies. Security forces in Latin America classified and targeted persons on the basis of their political ideas rather than illegal acts. The regimes hunted down dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, intellectuals, students and teachers--not only guerrillas (who, under international law, are also entitled to due process).

CONTINUED...

http://www.crimesofwar.org/special/condor.html

Gee. Rendition. No due process. No respect for human rights. That is a scary way to run a democracy.