Operation Condor: Setting precedent from one 'war on terrorism' to the next. Story highlights. One reporter writes that 'subversion has grown to include nearly anyone who opposes government policy.' In countries where everyone knows that subversives can wind up dead or tortured, educated people have an understandable concern about the boundaries of dissent. The chain of secrecy and unaccountability must be broken, and transparency restored, illuminating today's practices as well as yesterday's. Operation Condor - Download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online. Operation Condor (Spanish: Operaci The final verdict is due in a landmark human rights trial in Argentina arising from Operation Condor, a campaign of state-sponsored terror by South American dictatorships in the 1970s. Irene Caselli reports. Sign up for our NACLA Update for announcements, events, the latest articles, and more! Manage my subscriptions. Operation Condor 1991A car- bomb explodes in the streets of Washington, DC. The security forces of several non- democratic states are . It involves the military regimes of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The words used to describe it here are those of Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman, in a secret memorandum sent to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on August 3, 1. Between 1. 97. 6 and 1. It was, to date, the most visible and high- profile Condor operation. In the explosion, Orlando Letelier, a Chilean citizen and vocal opponent of the Pinochet regime, and his colleague (and American citizen) Ronni Moffitt, were both killed. Claims of waging war on terrorism The Shlaudeman memorandum is entitled . Thus, Shlaudeman explains that . Nonetheless, in the memorandum such forms of violence are mostly referred to through euphemisms, as when the author writes about Argentina: . They have precedents to guide them, and the terrorists have no handy refuge in neighbouring countries. Until the mid- 1. Condor was an FBI cable from late September 1. This is how its author described the program. In addition, operation Condor provides for joint operations against terrorist targets in member countries of 'Operation Condor.'. Thus, being able to claim to be fighting a . It is important to their ego, their salaries, and their equipment- budgets to believe in a Third World War. At best, when Argentina stabilises, we can hope to convince them that they have already won. The warriors will not like this. One reporter writes that . As John Dinges, probably the foremost American expert on Condor, notes, . Indeed, Letelier's presence in the capital was due to his efforts to lobby Congress into stopping US aid to Chile. Following Letelier's assassination, Chilean Ambassador Manuel Trucco immediately condemned it as an . Following the confession of Michael Townley (an American citizen who worked for the Chilean intelligence services, the Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional or DINA) the US indicted three high- level members of DINA, including its former director (and Augusto Pinochet's right- hand) Manuel Contreras. Chile rejected US extradition requests, in turn leading President Jimmy Carter to cut all aid to that country. The aid would resume under President Reagan. Ambassador Truco's shocked denials highlight a central aspect of Condor and of the Latin American regimes' purely domestic modes of repression: secrecy. Indeed, these programs were implemented fully covertly, thus giving these regimes . Operation Condor 2 MovieIt is this system of shadows, of illegal activities fully visible but denied by the authorities, of supposedly . Playing the terrorism card then and now. Operation Condor Trial Tackles Coordinated Campaign by Latin American Dictatorships to Kill Leftists. It was kind of a typical one, even though it didn’t actually kill anybody, luckily. Operation Condor’s targets were activists, organizers, and opponents of the dictatorships. Operation Condor was a covert, multinational “black operations” program organized by six Latin American states (Argentina. In his recent interview with Charlie Rose, President Bashar al- Assad repeatedly referred to the opposition forces fighting against his regime as terrorists. Similarly, the Egyptian military has been quick to, in the words of Paul Pillar, . As Pillar pointedly notes, it seems clear that . But it is just as evident that . Countless states and governments have used the concept of terrorism to delegitimise their enemies (and the cause they claim to fight for) and thus justify the use of often profoundly immoral methods against them. Pillar mentions Russia and Chechens, China and the Uighurs, or Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki in Iraq. To this list one could add, among many others, France and the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) in the 1. South Africa and Nelson Mandela's African National Congress from the 1. Operation Condor is yet another such case, a fascinating example of a group of states insisting that they are fighting terrorism while operating what can only be described as an international terrorist network of their own. Secrecy is fundamentally inimical to democratic rule, as it erodes trust while distorting and polluting public discourse. The chain of secrecy and unaccountability must be broken, and transparency restored, illuminating today's practices as well as yesterday's. Operation Condor also warrants special attention because of the central place that Latin America played in the birth of the American discourse on terrorism in the 1. Indeed, when Reagan decided, for the first time, to put the . In doing so, the Republican president essentially imported the discourse. In El Salvador, military aid went to a regime with intimate ties to the infamous death squads and whose extraordinarily gruesome methods clearly amounted to terrorism. In Nicaragua, the CIA mined harbours, produced torture manuals and funded, trained and armed the . In sum, and just as the Condor states had done before, during the 1. US claimed to be fighting terrorism while resorting, directly and indirectly, to terrorism. Secrecy and impunity: setting bad precedents All over Latin America, various Truth Commissions and high profile trials have brought some level of legal and historical accountability. Former leaders have been convicted of a variety of extremely serious crimes, and have served long prison sentences. To a great extent, these developments were made possible by ambitious declassification projects undertaken under Presidents Bill Clinton (Chile) and George W Bush (Argentina.)However, no US official has ever been held accountable for his (or her) role in Latin America. For example, Kissinger has been called to testify several times by Latin American judges. These demands have all been rejected by the US. Last March, Argentina opened a major trial into Operation Condor. For John Dinges, the US should welcome this trial as an opportunity to learn the right lessons from history. As he explains after observing some troubling similarities between the Letelier assassination and the logic that appears to underlie certain targeted killings practices of the Obama administration, . During a visit to France in May 2. Kissinger received a summons to appear at the Palais de Justice in Paris to answer questions about his role in Condor. The next day, he was on a plane back to the US. None of this was covered in the American media, while the US government continues to block the declassification of hundreds of documents related to Condor. Similarly, over the last few years, legal scholars as well as major civil rights and human rights organisations have strongly criticised President Obama for the lack of transparency and accountability that have so far characterised many of his . They have also expressed the fear that current US practices may . Shlaudeman notes that the Condor states themselves made mention of such a precedent in order to justify their counter- terrorism operation: . Regrettably, when President Obama's suggested, in January 2. The chain of secrecy and unaccountability must be broken, and transparency restored, illuminating today's practices as well as yesterday's. Only then can we hope to avoid the setting of dangerous precedents. Only then can we hope to make sure that the past represented by Condor was not simply a prologue of things to come. Dr R. Follow Remi Brulin on Twitter: @RBrulin. Source: Al Jazeera.
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