Operation Condor: the illegal state network that terrorised South America. By Giles Tremlett
During the cold war, 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... 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....
The 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 their mother lying beside him. Then he was taken away by armed police, along with his 18-month-old sister, Victoria Eva.
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century
The 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 their mother lying beside him. Then he was taken away by armed police, along with his 18-month-old sister, Victoria Eva.
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
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....
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/03/operation-condor-the-illegal-state-network-that-terrorised-south-americaVictor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century
