Part I of this series discusses the history and conditions leading up to the military coup d'etat in 1976. Part II reveals the mechanisms and pervasiveness of brutal torture and murder by the state during the dictatorship.
In a mystery novel, the reader has an encompassing point of view unavailable to the detective and other characters. We see someone skulking around the library in the dark of night; we listen to the whispered conversation between the gamekeeper and the retired actress; we watch the disinherited nephew pour tea for the lord of the manor, who suffers a fatal heart attack some hours later. No one in the book has observed all of this; only we, the readers, are aware of strange doings and possibly sinister motivations.
In our tale of the dictadura (military dictatorship) of Argentina, agents other than the Argentine military and security forces played critical roles but, as in a novel, the protagonist—the Argentine people—knew nothing of their activities and goals.
So just like when the detective gathers everyone and reveals all of their secrets, relationships, and activities, it is time to reveal the hidden players, background subplots and undisclosed relationships of this sobering saga of a nation gone mad.
In Part I we learned about the events and conditions in Argentina that led to the military coup. Our story, however, really begins thousands of miles from Argentina and decades earlier in time.
Taking charge of "America's backyard"
One could say that it really starts way back in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine, the claim that the United States made to being a sort of godfather or patron of independent nations emerging from the crumbling Spanish and Portuguese empires. The reality is that America was not yet a dominant world power and could not have enforced its edict; moreover, South America was just too far away and U.S. businesses had little direct investment there with which to pressure our government to intervene on their behalf when problems arose.
In the latter part of the 19th century, American investment increased dramatically in Central America. The largest and historically most important regional enterprise was the United Fruit Company, of Chiquita banana fame. Its extensive land holdings, international trade and overall economic clout made it a dominant force in the economies and governments of a number of Central American countries. Working in tandem with corrupt governments and the elite gentry, United Fruit was virtually a regional government in all but name. On numerous occasions, the United States sent in the Marines and Army to quell peasant revolts, remove anti-United Fruit governments and install dictators to ensure that the profits kept rolling in.
By the time World War II erupted, America had a long history of mistreating Central America as its bastard stepchild, as the repugnant saying goes. Worried about possible Nazi agents and sympathizers gaining influence in our hemisphere, American military leaders and intelligence agencies reached out to their counterparts in Central and South America, promising resources, training and shared intelligence in the quest to stamp out possible Nazi infiltrations.
Before the war even ended, the American government worried about a new threat: the spread of international communism. Tighter coordination and expanded benefits were arranged, to prevent any indigenous efforts toward socialism or communism.
Socio-economic conditions in Latin America fell far below American standards and the peoples there naturally wanted to better their lot in life. However, any protest by peasants for land reform, any strike by workers for better labor conditions, or any popular demand for improved social services and more representative government was interpreted by Washington as impending revolution instigated by communist agitators. The fall of Cuba to Fidel Castro's revolutionaries in 1959 spiked American fears of budding communist takeovers in our self-assumed sphere of influence.
The plan to secure South America
It was against this background that a meeting was held in 1960 in the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone of Panama. General Theodore Bogart invited military and intelligence leaders of Latin American nations to an informal conference to discuss hemispheric security issues. This turned into a yearly event, the Conference of American Armies (CAA), and out of it grew a secret plan to ruthlessly eliminate subversives, reformers and dissidents who might threaten the existing orders of the participating nations: Operation Condor.
The first part of Operation Condor was joint efforts to freely share intelligence among the security forces of the area known as the Southern Cone (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia)—a glance at the map shows the resemblance to the frozen treat, with the ice cream being the nations above the cone. Through shared intelligence, the agencies not only learned about the techniques, strategies and organizational details of potential or actual subversives in allied countries but they also created a joint database of suspects and persons of interest. That let them assist each other through direct action: "enemies" of one state, should they travel to another—to seek refuge, to consult with affiliates or to garner funds and supporters—could be arrested or clandestinely executed by security forces.
Next, the operatives of the Condor nations needed to learn how to effectively suppress dissent and revolt in their countries. For that, the United States provided training to military, intelligence, and paramilitary officers at the now infamous School of the Americas. Ostensibly the education they received was standard code of conduct-compliant training in military and counter-terrorism operations; our military and CIA denied that participants were taught torture techniques, anti-democratic methods to infiltrate groups and manipulate them to violence, ways to suppress civilian populations, and more. Subsequent congressional investigations and leaks of the training manuals, in the late 1980s and 1990s, proved that all of the charges were true. In fact, knowledge about Operation Condor was so widespread at the CIA in the early 1970s that whenever an agent travelled to South America employees joked that it was because he could "fly like a condor." [1]
Then, cross-border privileges were implemented. This meant that suspected guerillas or terrorists could be pursued during flight across often porous borders. Forces of the pursuing nation could follow and exterminate their opponents while forces of the host nation blocked all possible escape routes. As the first nation's forces melted away back across the border, the second nation could plausibly deny involvement and publicly put it down to intra-group fighting or phantom banditry.
Black op and execution squads were permitted to operate inside participating nations. A dissident or revolutionary in another nation was not safe from reprisal by his own country; teams entered, as part of the Condor agreements, to assassinate their targets or kidnap family members, while local authorities looked the other way.
The CIA fomented the overthrow of governments deemed insufficiently anti-communist, both via proxy groups and direct action by its own agents. State Department policies were enacted that imposed sanctions meant to destabilize the economies of unfriendly regimes, such as that of the democratically elected Socialist, Salvador Allende, in Chile. One by one, the democracies of the Southern Cone fell, replaced by military dicatorships: Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. All became inter-locked in a mutual scheme to totally repress their populations and ensure that no opposition or dissent would arise, aided and abetted by the American military, the CIA, and the Department of State.
Apologists attempt to distance the United States from the inhumane activities of the Operation Condor regimes, claiming that our government knew little and aided and abetted even less. The truth is that we were in on the plan up to our eyeballs.
An Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact in 1976 that the CIA had been deeply involved in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states. A former Bolivian Condor agent told a journalist in the early 1990s that an advanced system of communications had been installed in the Ministry of the Interior in La Paz, along with a telex system interlinked with the five other Condor countries. He said that the CIA had made a special machine to encode and decode messages especially for the Condor system.
… U.S. forces also gave the Condor organization access to the U.S. continental communications system based in the Panama Canal Zone. [2]
The United States saved South America from communism by helping to destroy democracy there. When Ronald Reagan said his famous line about the most frightening words in the English language, he might have been correct had he addressed them to the people of Latin America. He should have said "We're from the U.S. government and we're here to help your country." Our help resulted in at least 80,000 deaths and "disappearances" and 400,000 interrogations under torture in South America. [3]
Saints and sinners
Presidents, military leaders, spies, Cabinet officers, and many others were bad actors directly involved in Operation Condor or the unjust and criminal actions that transpired due to its successes. Compiling a list of wrongdoers would be beyond my abilities and, indeed, no one else has managed to create a full accounting either. Nevertheless, we should note a few of those people who either had a high public profile or played a significant role, for good or evil.
Henry Kissinger was President Nixon's National Security Adviser and later the Secretary of State of both Nixon and Ford. In those offices, he acted as the eminence grise to the very worst of the reactionary generals, dictators, paramilitary groups, death squads and other unsavory characters of the era. His support of Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew President Allende in Chile and initiated a police state there for the next seventeen years, was legendary. Even when Chilean operatives—including Michael Townley, a CIA assassin who had already murdered other opponents of Pinochet—assassinated a Chilean dissident in Washington, DC by order of Pinochet and killed an American citizen in the process as well, Kissinger refused to so much as address the issue with the dictator. As long as Pinochet kept communism out of Chile, Kissinger tacitly or overtly abetted his crimes.
Despite knowledge of Operation Condor and its operatives' plans for murdering opponents not just in the Southern Cone but as far afield as Europe and North America, Kissinger took no action to thwart them. The chiefs of Operation Condor in the various countries were permitted to continue using a special U.S. military communications system in the Canal Zone in order to coordinate their plans and hatch their plots. So it should come as no surprise that Kissinger approved of Argentina's bloodthirsty generals and their illegal assumption of power.
Kissinger was a cheerleader for the junta from the beginning, although he was well aware of the state terror tactics in Argentina. His only concern was that the regime should expedite the torture and slaughter before the American Congress might learn of it and meddle in the relationship between Argentina and its U.S. allies in government. As he said to Argentina's foreign minister, just a couple of months after the coup,
If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures. [4]
As the two dignitaries discussed Argentina's methods and intentions for dealing with subversives, Kissinger promised not to get in their way and to provide them support.
We want you to succeed. We do not want to harass you. I will do what I can… [4]
Well aware of Pinochet's murderous record in Chile, Kissinger knew that Argentina's security forces were engaging in criminal behavior at least as bad.
"Their theory is that they can use the Chilean method," Kissinger's top aide on Latin America Harry Shlaudeman informed him, "that is, to terrorize the opposition - even killing priests and nuns and others." [4]
For Kissinger, it was all merely collateral damage, unimportant as long as American security interests were being aided. Even though he and the State Department knew, within months of the coup, that American citizens had been arrested and tortured (and some were later murdered), the ends justified the means. [5]
Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" were the financial architects of Pinochet's plan to transform the Chilean economy. Dozens of young economists, trained at the University of Chicago by way of a special exchange program, applied Friedman's neoliberal ideas. Though the long term results were mixed, Friedman and his supporters hailed their program as a "miracle."
Although the Chicago Boys are associated primarily with Chile, economists who studied under Friedman or his colleagues also assumed direction of the economies of Argentina and other Condor regimes. Their programs of privatization of state resources, austerity and cutbacks of social programs, free trade and deregulation could successfully be imposed on societies where all protest and dissent was eliminated. Indeed, pre-dictatorship adoption of some of the neoliberal policies and programs created so much economic pain in the lower classes that it led many to support the rising left-wing movements which would later be viciously exterminated.
The unsurprising result was widening income inequality and concentration of economic power in the hands of the elite and powerful corporations, including American multinationals. In Argentina, his neoliberal policies failed to control inflation and the regime took on enormous foreign debt, which had a disastrous effect years later on the newly restored democracy.
Friedman was well aware of the atrocities committed in Chile but nevertheless visited Chile to meet with Pinochet and proclaim his satisfaction at the excellent progress his erstwhile students were achieving. Had Friedman and his protégés not pushed their neoliberal ideas on South American countries nor convinced American administration officials that only their version of capitalism could produce the positive effects to prevent a turn to communism, it is possible that some or all of the nations of the Southern Cone might have found peaceful economic and social solutions to their problems on their own.
President Jimmy Carter could be described as our first "human rights" president. Some of his predecessors were concerned about civil rights within our borders but Carter looked beyond to work on behalf of the rights of citizens of other nations as well. His record may not have been perfect, given the ongoing Cold War circumstances of the times, but he nevertheless made an effort to curtail many of the abuses by our overly adventurous military and intelligence agencies.
When he assumed the presidency, Carter appointed an Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights to examine accusations of international human rights violations: Patricia “Pat” Derian. She became a severe critic of the Argentine junta, confronting its leaders directly about their crimes. Speaking with Admiral Massera, one of the ruling triumvirate in 1977, she bluntly said:
You and I both know that, as we speak, people are being tortured in the next floors. [6]
The Carter administration tried a carrot-and-stick approach, approving some purchases or transfers of military equipment in exchange for Argentina reducing the number of prisoners it held and improving the treatment of those who remained. When that didn't work, the U.S. used the stick: cutting off equipment, technology, international loans, agricultural trade and travel visas for members of the Argentine military and government.
Derian understood the brutality of the regime and knew that it was being supported by our own military and CIA, contrary to President Carter's policy. The soldiers and spies cynically believed they knew better than their titular boss and simply moved their operations "off book" and lied to the president about their involvement. As Ms. Derian put it,
It is widely believed by our military and intelligence services that the human rights policy emanates only from the Department of State, is a political device and one with a short life due to its wide impracticality, the naiveté and ignorance of individuals in the Administration and to the irresponsible headline grabbing of members of Congress. [6]
Assistant Secretary Derian acquired much of her knowledge of the regime's abuses from the dangerous work carried out by Allen "Tex" Harris, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. Several months after he arrived in Argentina, he was tasked with collecting data about disappearances, instances of torture, and murders of political prisoners.
He bravely went down to stand in front of the Casa Rosada (presidential palace) where the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo equally bravely marched with photographs of their missing loved ones. He handed out his business cards and requested them to come to the embassy and tell him about their children. Along with his other research, the Madres' (Mothers) stories helped him compile massive lists to supply the State Department with thousands of actual names and facts about victims of disappearance, torture, and murder, triggering official sanctions against the junta.
Harris was repeatedly threatened by the regime, apparently confident enough about its support elsewhere in the U.S. government to risk accosting an accredited diplomat:
There were three attempts at scaring me. Once, I was driving back from a party, and eight men stopped me with guns on an empty road for questioning. I thought it was over. Another time, when I was outside my house in Martínez, a few guys tried to grab me and put me in their car, saying they wanted me to come with them. And another incident that I recall was when two guys in military uniforms rang my doorbell, and then said oops, wrong house. [7]
Just as with the duplicity of the U.S. military and the CIA, there were elements within the State Department who tried to thwart Carter's efforts to rein in the mad generals. The American ambassador tried to block Harris' reports to Derian and he was marked as uncooperative by higher-ups at State, passed over for promotions for years to come.
The spooks and the gung-ho military brass continued to covertly support the regime and bided their time, soon to arrive with the election of Ronald Reagan.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the human rights policies and sanctions of the Carter era came to an end. Reagan promptly invited General Roberto Viola, the new head of the Argentina junta, to the United States for a state visit. The CAA, and its subset of Operation Condor coordinators, met that very year in Washington, DC. The hawkish Red-hunters brought into power with Reagan's election were frantic that a "communist" government controlled Nicaragua (in reality, the Sandinistas were democratic socialists and pursued relations with both Western and Communist states).
The tale of the Iran-Contra scandal is too long to explore here and most readers already know that the Reagan administration committed crimes in order to illegally arm and aid the right-wing rebels. Less known is that our government recruited Argentina's regime to train the Contras and provide logistical support for them as an expansion of Operation Condor.
Under the new scheme—known as Operation Charly—whose roots stemmed from Condor, Contra leaders were taught the techniques of torture, interrogation, and subjection of civilian populations that had been mastered by Argentine intelligence officers. They engaged in a program of murder, rape, and destruction of homes and villages as a campaign to intimidate the people and eliminate supporters and sympathizers of the lawful government, with Argentine troops covertly fighting alongside the Contra soldiers.
Back in Buenos Aires, U.S. military and intelligence officers were once against visiting Argentina and providing advice and support to the regime. The Reagan administration cancelled the prohibitions against loans to the country and lifted embargoes against weapons and military technology sales and exports. [8] These were critical steps not just in support of Argentina's murderous government, but also to facilitate a key component of Operation Charly: passing cash and weaponry through Argentina to the Nicaraguan rebels and death squads in a way that would stymie congressional scrutiny and journalistic investigations. [9]
The cozy relationship between Argentina's dictators and Reagan might have continued indefinitely. However, the regime was losing control at home, spinning the economy into a maelstrom of debt and inflation, and barely containing a seething populace. As has so often happened in history, they decided to manufacture a crisis that would appeal to patriotic nationalism and provide the people with an external enemy on which to focus their anger: the United Kingdom.
There had long been disputes between the two countries over the Falkland Islands (or Las Islas Malvinas, to Argentinos). Small, insignificant islands located about 300 miles east of Argentina in the South Atlantic, the Falklands, their 2,000-something inhabitants, and their many thousands more of sheep had no strategic nor practical value for Argentina (there are oil fields in the surrounding seabed but Argentina had neither the technical expertise nor development funds to exploit them). For that matter, the islands were not strategically important to Britain either but the UK correctly intended to protect the residents, British citizens. As Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges put it, the war was "a fight between two bald men over a comb".
Yet, the islands were close and would give the Argentine people a foreign target for their fury. The regime foolishly believed that Reagan and the American people would side with them rather than the United States' closest ally. Instead, Reagan gave his support to Margaret Thatcher and American aid to Argentina was once again cut off.
The junta ordered an invasion, the islands were occupied, the Brits retook them, and in the process wiped out Argentina's Air Force, sunk one of its few large ships of war, and thoroughly humiliated their military.
Nightfall and the dawn of a new day
Operation Condor officially came to a close after Argentina's disastrous defeat and Argentina's long nightmare of dictatorial rule ended as well: the generals resigned office, elections were held, and democracy was restored in 1983. Its effects, however, can still be felt to this day throughout Latin America: burdensome public debts accumulated by dictatorial regimes, unstable governments in nations with short experience in democracy, and, above all, the millions of lives cruelly snuffed out, haunted by memories of torture, or shattered by the loss of missing or dead loved ones. Its bitter legacy will be a scar on our southern neighbors for a very long time to come.
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the nations of Latin America have sprung forth again in democracies, with varying degrees of success. Operation Condor and the United States may have temporarily stopped the march of progress but the bravery and determination of the peoples of Latin America were never completely crushed. From small seeds, giant forests grow.
I intended to finish and publish this part on Sunday so it is a day late—blame the dogs, my usual suspects. My desk has faced into the center of the room for ages with my back to the wall. My new puppy and my biggest dog have become playmates, biting and chasing and pouncing; in spite of stern lectures, they always keep coming back to play near me. On Sunday morning, they first jiggled the power cord enough to shut off my computer and followed it up by nearly dragging my monitor to the floor. So, I spent most of Sunday cleaning and rearranging—now my desk is against the wall and all of the cables are safely back where rambunctious mutts can't accidentally snag them.
Part IV, where we'll explore the aftermath of Argentina's dictatorship and take a look at the future, will be published on Wednesday.
Update: Part IV is now online.
[1] “Operation Condor”. Latin America: The Thirty Years Dirty War by Pierre Abramovici, Centre for Research on Globalization
[2] The Undead Ghost of Operation Condor by J. Patrice McSherry, Logos Journal
[3] From the Condor Operation to FTAA : globalization and state terrorism by Alex Anfruns and Martin Almada, InvestigAction
[4] KISSINGER TO THE ARGENTINE GENERALS IN 1976 by Carlos Osorio and Kathleen Costar, National Security Archive
[5] Detention and torture of Gwenda Loken Lopez (April 30, 1976), document by U.S. Department of State, Latin American Studies
[6] The Pentagon and the CIA Sent Mixed Message to the Argentine Military by Thomas Blanton and Carlos Osorio, National Security Archive
[7] A US diplomat who faced state terrorism by Santiago Del Carril, Buenos Aires Herald
[8] ARGENTINA RELUCTANT PARTNER The Argentine Government's Failure to Back Trials of Human Rights Violators by Sebastian Brett, Human Rights Watch
[9] The Counterrevolutionaries (The Contras), Understanding the Iran-Contra Affairs Project, Brown University