Thursday, April 1, 2010

More from "The Dirty Wars" Yesterday and Today

                           


More from the hidden crimes of Kissinger and Rumsfeld


Uruguay's ex-ruler Bordaberry jailed for 30 years -BBC


At the same time, Ortiz reports that "the opposition groups, the leaders of which are in hiding, are in a state of shock over the suddenness and the sweeping nature of the Government's moves." According to Amnesty International and many other human rights organizations, between 1973 and 1976, Uruguay became the country with the highest number of jailed and of tortured dissidents in Latin America.

Amidst a flurry of suspicious deaths of Chilean guerrillas in Argentina, the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires reports to the Department of State that the U.S. "Legatt [Legal Attaché] advises that police and especially the military establishments of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile are well inter-connected… Also, assassination operations are known to be carried out by these governments' security agencies for one another, though never provable." The reports by FBI liaison in Argentina, Legal Attaché Robert Scherrer, on the collaboration of the Southern Cone security agencies, will eventually disclose the existence of Operation Condor in 1976.

"[Operation] Condor is still flying"


Hernán Scandizzo
Interview with Paraguayan lawyer Martín Almada

Renditionss from the Southern Cone


In May 1975, the Paraguayan border police detained Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcón, a Chilean courier for the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta, an umbrella group of militant organizations in the Southern Cone, along with an Argentine named Amílcar Santucho.  This five-page report by the Investigations Department of the Asunción Police is among the first of many internal records relating to their detention. “Group to investigate,” read the details about detainees numbers 15 and 16: “Amílcar Latino Santucho Juárez, Argentine… Detained on 16-V-75… a leftist Argentine newspaper was found among his belongings … At the authorities’ request, he used the false name of Juan Manuel Montenegro.” And “Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcón or Ariel Nodarse Ledesma, Chilean… Detained on  17-V-75… because he was fellow traveler of Amílcar Latino Santucho Juárez.”  Santucho, brother of the Argentine guerrilla leader of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), would remain in prison in Paraguay for many years, and  Fuentes Alarcón, a high ranking leader of the Chilean Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), was subjected to torture during interrogation, and then turned over to agents of the Chilean secret police to be transported back to Chile where he was disappeared. Their cases became a study in collaboration among the Southern Cone secret police services, and the catalyst for formalizing that coordination into an official alliance against leftist "subversion" called Operation Condor.
List of Detainees at the Department of Investigations, June 7, 1975
Deputy Chief of Mission Frank Ortiz sends an update to the Department of State regarding the situation in Montevideo after the coup. "A decisive stage has been reached in Uruguay... The executive acting with and at the b[ehest of the armed forces] has now taken steps such as the dissolution of the congress and of the powerful communist-dominated labor confederation (CNT)…" The cable suggests that "there is a disposition to accept the assurances of the president that the illegal measures taken were necessary and temporary and that there will be a return to the traditional democratic forms."

Sources -GWU national Archives

And still these men walk free in the country


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