Those that do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it:
Declassified U.S. documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) show that the U.S. government had detailed knowledge of collaboration between the Peruvian, Bolivian and Argentine secret police forces to kidnap, torture and “permanently disappear” three militants in a Cold War rendition operation in Lima in June 1980—but took insufficient action to save the victims.
The Archive’s documents are part of a sweeping Italian investigation of Condor that has issued arrest warrants for 140 former top officials from seven South American countries and, in the words of today’s New York Times, has “agitated political establishments up and down the continent.”
The documents address what has become known as “the case of the missing Montoneros,” a covert operation by a death squad unit of Argentina’s feared Battalion 601 to kidnap three members of a militant group living in Lima, Peru, on June 12, 1980, and render them through Bolivia back to Argentina. (A fourth member, previously captured, was brought to Lima to identify his colleagues and then disappeared with them.) “The present situation is that the four Argentines will be held in Peru and then expelled to Bolivia where they will be expelled to Argentina,” a U.S. official reported from Buenos Aires four days after Esther Gianetti de Molfino, MarÃa Inés Raverta and Julio César RamÃrez were kidnapped in broad daylight in downtown Lima. “Once in Argentina they will be interrogated and then permanently disappeared.”
The case was first detailed at length in The Condor Years, a book by National Security Archive board member John Dinges. In his own book, The Pinochet File, Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh identified the Montonero operation as “one of the last recorded cases of a Condor operation.” Condor was founded in November 1975, in Santiago, Chile, by the Pinochet regime, which became known as “Condor One.” Operation Condor became infamous for terrorist activities after Chilean agents, in collaboration with Paraguay, planted a bomb under the car of former ambassador Orlando Letelier in September 1976, killing him and his colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington D.C.
Peru’s former military ruler, General Enrique Morales Bermudez, has admitted authorizing the Montonero kidnappings but continues to deny that Peru was a member of Operation Condor. But a secret CIA report, dated August 22, 1978, and titled “A Brief Look at Operation Condor” described Condor as “a cooperative effort by intelligence/security services in several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion. The original members included services from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. Peru and Ecuador recently became members.” (Emphasis added) A Chilean intelligence document confirms that Peru formally joined Operation Condor in March 1978.
A State Department cable dated several weeks after the kidnapping stated that “there seems to be little doubt that the Peruvian army, acting in concert with its Argentine counterpart, resorted to the kinds of illegal repressive measures more familiar in the Southern Cone” than Peru.
Italy’s indictments include General Morales Bermudez and his military deputy Pedro Richter Prada, among 138 other military officers from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay who were involved in the kidnapping, torture and disappearances of 25 Latin Americans who had dual Italian citizenship. The indictments, in a 250-page court filing by Italian judge Luisianna Figliolia last December, come after a six-year investigation by investigative magistrate Giancarlo Capaldo, who drew on hundreds of declassified documents provided by the National Security Archive’s Southern Cone project. “These documents provide hard evidence of Condor crimes,” according to project director Carlos Osorio, “that almost 30 years later still demand the resolution of justice.”
The New York Times story, “Italy Follows Trail of Secret South American Abductions,” noted that the Italian effort at universal jurisdiction “deals not only with individual cases involving Italian citizens but also with the broader responsibilities of Condor’s cross-border kidnapping and torture operations.” The story also suggested that Condor’s allied effort to track down, kidnap, and secretly transport targets to third countries, according to historians, was “reminiscent of the United States’ modern terrorist rendition program.”
When I hear Michelle Obama say that she hasn’t always been proud of America, this is the type of thing I think about. We whitewash our history and attack anyone that suggests there might be something dark and less than praiseworthy in how our elites have conducted our foreign policy over the last, say, fifty years.
The one thing that Obama is saying that resonates most powerfully with me is that we need to get away from the mentality that got us into the war in Iraq. I think that is so spot-on. One way Obama has expressed this seems fairly tame. He’s talked about meeting with our enemies without preconditions. It’s easy to nitpick this stance. Even I don’t think Obama should meet with Raul Castro or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without a period of preparatory negotiations (either through the State Department or the National Security Council, or both). But it is the principle that we should stop doing business in the old ways that appeals to me.
I think we can develop excellent and mutually beneficial relations with both Cuba and Venezuela, but only if we get completely away from the mindset that led us to countenance policies like Operation Condor.
We may need to maintain a harder stance towards states like Iran and North Korea, primarily because they represent legitimate threats, especially through potential nuclear proliferation. But even there, we cannot maintain an effective non-proliferation policy unless we have a consensus on that policy from the UN Security Council members and other nuclear powers. It seems to me like we need to work on reestablishing, or establishing, the trust of China, India, and Russia just as much as we have to focus on intimidating Pyongyang and Tehran.
It’s definitely Obama’s fresh look at foreign policy that gives me the most hope for a visionary and successful presidency.
