Operation Condor - The Cold War Conspiracy That Terrorised South America - Espionage - The Guardian

4/10/23, 8:54 PM Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America | Espionage | The Guardian
News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle
The long read
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
by Giles Tremlett
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/03/operation-condor-the-illegal-state-network-that-terrorised-south-america 1/17
Illustration: Sr.Garcia/The Guardian
T
Thu 3 Sep 2020 01.00 EDT
he 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.
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.
W
hen 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.
Argentine special forces in operation in Buenos Aires in 1982. Photograph: Daniel García/AFP/Getty
Images
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.
I
t 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.
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

Augusto Pinochet after his arrest in London in while Britain’s law lords twice
1998. Photograph: Reuters 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.
W
hen 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 “Archives of Terror”, papers relating to Operation Condor, seized in Paraguay in 1992.
Photograph: Norberto Duarte/AFP/Getty Images
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”.
T
he 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.
Although Elgueta and Magnet had

Cross-border state-terror
campaigned for Operation Condor to
atrocities in South America, 1969-
81 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
18 12 18 territory,” Elgueta told me. “The
Peru Bolivia Brazil
ignorance about Condor here was
9 incredible.”
Paraguay
23 Awareness of Condor is now more

Chile widespread, and many deaths are
129 finally being investigated by the
Uruguay
courts, but that does not mean all
Chileans think it was a bad idea. In
544 fact, just as in Argentina, Uruguay
Argentina and Brazil, a small but significant
part of Chilean society defends the
dictatorship and its enforcers.
Guardian graphic. Source: Francesca Lessa/Database on

South America’s Transnational Human Rights Violations
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.
A
lthough 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.
T
he 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”.
Former Argentinian junta president Reynaldo Bignone (right) and former general Santiago Riveros
(centre) at their trial for crimes against humanity in 2012. Photograph: Leo la Valle/EPA
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.
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.”
Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long
read weekly email here.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would
consider taking the step of supporting the Guardian’s journalism.
From Elon Musk to Rupert Murdoch, a small number of billionaire owners have a
powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches the public about what’s
happening in the world. The Guardian is different. We have no billionaire owner or
shareholders to consider. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest –
not profit motives.
And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to
please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. While
fairness guides everything we do, we know there is a right and a wrong position in
the fight against racism and for reproductive justice. When we report on issues like
the climate crisis, we’re not afraid to name who is responsible. And as a global news
organization, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective on US politics – one
so often missing from the insular American media bubble.
Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism
because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you.
Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to
everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
If you can, please consider supporting the Guardian today. Thank you.
Betsy Reed
Editor, Guardian US
Single Monthly Annual
$5 per month $7 per month Other
Continue Remind me in May
Most viewed

Operation Condor - The Cold War Conspiracy That Terrorised South America - Espionage - The Guardian

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Operation Condor - The Cold War Conspiracy That Terrorised South America - Espionage - The Guardian

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

4/10/23, 8:54 PM Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America | Espionage | The Guardian

News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

The long read

Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy

During the 1970s and 80s, eight US-backed

Illustration: Sr.Garcia/The Guardian

Today, he is a trim, smartly suited 47-year-old public prosecutor with hazel

By agreement with their biological grandparents, the children remained with

Amid the headlines and the flurry of

Pinochet was held for 17 months

Another of those preparing the rendition programme with Argentina, which

Fernández’s haul became known as the Archive of Terror. Here, buried

The documents established that Condor was formally created in November

Laura Elgueta lives in a small house in La Reina, a tranquil suburb of Santiago

Although Elgueta and Magnet had

23 Awareness of Condor is now more

Guardian graphic. Source: Francesca Lessa/Database on

One March afternoon in Santiago, I walked to La Alameda, the broad main

On the avenue, an empty teargas canister lying among freshly-hurled stones

On the outskirts of the city, Magnet took me to Villa Grimaldi, a detention

Shortly before I travelled to Chile in March, startling news emerged about a

In Argentina, the trial of one of Elgueta’s Chilean kidnappers, for a separate

By 2011, with most amnesties cancelled or deemed largely inapplicable,

By the standards of human rights investigations, where progress is often

Fear of rightwing extremist violence still stalks South America, especially

As we finished talking, Larrabeiti admitted that he had

Single Monthly Annual

$5 per month $7 per month Other

Continue Remind me in May

You might also like