Pinochet's murder plan exposed

As the Chilean dictator's PR campaign takes off, his supporters demand that national sovereignty is respected. Patricia Isasa, Argentine architect and human rights researcher, tells LLB how little the general respected it in power.

Operation Condor was the code name given to the collaboration and information exchange between the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s.

In 1971, General Hugo Banzer led a military coup in Bolivia and in the same year the Uruguayan parliament ceased functioning when the President Juan Maria Bordaberry decided to close it and set the country on the road to a dictatorship. On 11th September 1973, General Augusto Pinochet carried out a coup against the oldest democracy in Latin America and killed the elected president, Salvador Allende. Lastly, on 24th March 1976, Jorge Videla, Emilio Massera and Ramon Agosti organised the military coup in Argentina.

So, within five years, the whole of the southern cone of Latin America changed from democracies to dictatorships, and fierce repression against dissidents began. According to the records of Amnesty International, the Organisation of American States and the United Nations, this hunt for human victims left 50,000 people murdered, 30,000 "disappeared" and 400,000 imprisoned. Among the dead and disappeared were 3,000 children. There are still no reliable figures for the numbers exiled.

Within this framework, the dictatorship of General Pinochet designed the "Condor Plan", which involved the collaboration of the different intelligence organisations to persecute dissidents and those in opposition across the whole region. The aim was "in the first phase to exchange information about the enemy (a euphemism for political exiles), in the second phase to investigate them, and in the third to arrest (kidnap) them and send them to their home country or the one requesting them". This is taken from a text that forms part of a case in the Spanish Court 5.

This plan was supervised by General Contreras, and carried out by agents of the DINA, the Chilean secret service, as revealed in the legal case in which Contreras and Pedro Espinosa were condemned for homicide. The exchange of prisoners took place directly between the intelligence services. The military attaches in each embassy acted as links. Other documents confirm that they carried intelligence information (such as a witness statement by Anibal Miranda, who was involved, made in 1993). This operation respected no frontiers or passports.

On 12th September 1973, in front of witnesses, Jorge Rios Dalenz, a Bolivian citizen, was arrested at his home in Santiago, Chile. Two days later his body appeared, shot six times. In September 1974 the Chilean ex-Minister of Defence under Salvador Allende and his wife, Sophia Cuthbert, were murdered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, when a bomb placed under their car exploded. The Argentine authorities never investigated the case. On 2nd November, the British/Chilean citizen, William Beausire, was arrested at Ezciza airport by the Argentine police and handed over to the DINA. They took him to Chile, a thousand kilometers away, where he was seen in various detention centres: Jose Domingo Ca¤as, Villa Grimaldi, and the Discotheque, from which he disappeared on 2nd June 1975. In all, 93 people of different nationalities were kidnapped in Argentina and taken to Chile and murdered.

On 16th May 1975, two Chileans, Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcon and Amilcar Santucho, were kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From there, they were taken 1,300 kilometres to Asuncion in Paraguay, from where, after being tortured, they were taken to Santiago de Chile, where they were seen several months later, still alive, in Villa Grimaldi, from which they disappeared.

In October 1975, the Chilean Christian Democrat leader, Bernardo Leighton, who had been Allende's vice-president, along with his wife, survived an attempted assassination in Rome. The Italian investigators found an international network which linked the Latin American intelligence services with Avanguardia Nazionale, an Italian neo-fascist group, and especially with Stefano delle Chiaie, who met Pinochet in Madrid a month after the attempt.

Jean Yves Cluadet Fernandez, a French/Chilean national, was kidnapped on 1st November 1975 in the Liberty Hotel in Buenos Aires, and killed in Argentina, with the help of the Chilean DINA, according to the documentation that forms part of the extradition case against Pinochet. In September 1976, Allende's ex-minister of defence and foreign relations, Orlando Letelier, along with his US assistant, Ronni Moffit, was assassinated on Embassy Row, Washington. The bomb was placed in his car by Michael Townley, a DINA agent working with a group of anti-Castro Cubans. Two years later, the case got to the US courts and they were found guilty of murder. The first proofs of "Operation Condor" appeared in this trial.

Today, the ex-dictator, Augusto Pinochet, is accused of committing crimes of international terrorism. He respected no rights, no nationalities and no frontiers. The Spanish state demands his extradition to try him for the crimes of state terrorism, genocide and torture. On 31st October 1998, the Spanish Supreme Court, by unanimous decision of all eleven judges, declared itself competent to try these appalling crimes. Switzerland and France also demand his extradition. With this new legal precedent, a new stage in the fight against impunity, the fight for and by the victims of dictatorships, opened up.

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