Poet's Granddaughter Seeks Killing Probe

[Judi Lynn]

Poet's Granddaughter Seeks Killing Probe
By RAUL GARCES and DANIEL ZADUNAISKY – 50 minutes ago

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) — The granddaughter of Argentine poet Juan Gelman urged Uruguayan courts to reopen a probe into the 1976 disappearance of her dissident mother on Wednesday, weeks before her grandfather is to receive the Spanish-speaking world's most prestigious literary prize.

Macarena Gelman's mother was pregnant when she was abducted in Buenos Aires in 1976 and sent secretly to Uruguay, where she disappeared under the custody of dictatorship-era security forces, Argentine court officials charge.

Gelman was born in captivity and raised by a military family who adopted her without knowing her true identity, she said.

"I found out in 2000 that I was really the daughter of Maria Claudia" Irureta Goyena, she told a news conference on Wednesday. "If anyone has any information about where the remains of my mother are, please say."



Ms. Gelman, her mother, María Claudia García Irureta Goyena, and father, Marcelo Ariel Gelman.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Daughter Demands Truth in Uruguay

Daughter Demands Truth in Uruguay

Montevideo, Feb 26 (Prensa Latina) Macarena Gelman will ask Uruguayan justice on Wednesday to reopen the investigation of the disappearance of her mother, Maria Claudia Garcia, a victim of the Condor Operation in 1976.

Ms. Gelman's attorney Jose Luis Gonzalez explained on Tuesday this will be the first time that Macarena herself will request reopening the case; earlier her grandfather, Argentine writer Juan Gelman had done so.

The young woman's parents, Marcelo Gelman and Maria Claudia Garcia, were kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Argentina in August 1976, and confined in the notorious Automotores Orletti detention and torture center.

Gelman's request to the Uruguayan court will be based "on facts originated from investigations into the second flight from Orletti in October 1976," when Maria Claudia was supposed to be transferred from Buenos Aires to Montevideo.

Marcelo was assassinated and thrown to the Tiger Delta in a barrel, while Maria Claudia was transferred to Uruguay and confined in the Information and Defense Service headquarters.

The young woman gave birth to a girl, Macarena, on November 1. The baby was given to the family of a Uruguayan police agent until her grandfather Juan found her in the year 2000, when she was 23.

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[Judi Lynn]

2. To refresh your memory on Operation Condor via declassified papers:

March 6, 2001
On March 6, 2001, The New York Times reported the existence of a recently declassified State Department document revealing that the United States facilitated communications among South American intelligence chiefs who were working together to eliminate left-wing opposition groups in their countries as part of a covert program known as Operation Condor.
The document, a 1978 cable from Robert E. White, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, was discovered by Professor J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University, who has published several articles on Condor. She called the cable "another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S. military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor."

In the cable, Ambassador White relates a conversation with General Alejandro Fretes Davalos, chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, who told him that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Condor "keep in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers all of Latin America." This installation is "employed to co-ordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries." White, whose message was sent to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, is concerned that the U.S. connection to Condor might be revealed during the then ongoing investigation into the deaths of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt who were killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. "It would seem advisable," he suggests, "to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in U.S. interest."

The document was found among 16,000 State, CIA, White House, Defense and Justice Department records released last November on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent coup that brought his military regime to power. The release was the fourth and final "tranche" of records released under the Clinton Administration's special Chile Declassification Project.

"This document opens a pandora's box of questions on the U.S. knowledge of, and role in, Operation Condor," said Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project.

The Archive published a second document - a page from a CIA cable regarding Brazil's role in Operation Condor - that Kornbluh said contained information that could shed light on this issue. The undated page refers to "CondorTel" - the "communications network established by the Condor countries." Kornbluh pointed out that the entire next line has been censored by the CIA.

The National Security Archive called on the U.S. Intelligence Community - NSA, CIA, DIA and other Defense Department bureaus at the U.S. Southern Command - to fully divulge their files on communications assistance to the military regimes in the southern cone.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010306/