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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Opening a can of worms
By Faiza RadyEver true to form and spirit, ex-British Prime Minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher blasted the present Home Secretary, Jack Straw, last week for deciding to allow the courts to rule on the extradition to Spain of former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet.
The British government's treatment of Pinochet had "sullied" the country's reputation, said Thatcher, who delivered an impassioned defense of the man responsible for having established a "thriving free-enterprise economy in Chile". Pinochet, claimed Thatcher, was now hounded and vilified because the "organised international Left" was seeking revenge and bent on destroying him.
While consistent with Thatcher's previous public statements on the Pinochet case, the timing of her latest impassioned defense of the former dictator and now Senator-for-life is somewhat surprising. Her statement followed hard on the Clinton administration's release of some 25, 000 pages from 5,800 declassified CIA secret files, documenting the general's early rule of terror from 1973 to 1978.
Did Thatcher then commit a serious blunder? Or is her loyalty to an old friend and ally a mark of her political savvy? The latter may well yet turn out to be the right answer, since the bulky US publication only implicates Pinochet by association, omitting any direct references to executive orders.
The documents are equally unforthcoming regarding the US government's association with Chile. Nowhere do the CIA files explicitly document any high-level American collaboration with the Pinochet regime.
Heavily censored and tailored so as to implicate the US executive only obliquely, the files fail to reveal the extent of American complicity with the junta. Nevertheless, a general picture of the horror it created does emerge.
One letter -- dated 27 September, 1973 -- from Nathaniel Davis, then the US ambassador in Chile, to the secretary of state records a plea for help in establishing a 'detention centre'. "The Chilean minister of defence, Patricio Carvajal, requests assistance of a person qualified in establishing a detention centre for the detainees who are expected to be confined for a relatively long period of time," Davis wrote.
Although the secretary of state's answer to the request has been omitted from the files, the request as such is evidence of significant collaboration between the Chilean and American security forces. In the context of Pinochet's brutal rule, such collaboration implies direct or indirect association with the murder and "disappearance" of at least 3,000 people, and the torture of an estimated 200,000, according to a recently-released report by the Chilean College of Medicine.
The declassified files, in turn, testify to the terror, while maintaining a safe distance between the US government and the junta. Following Pinochet's US-backed 1973 military coup, the CIA reported that "the prevailing mood among the Chilean military is to use the current opportunity to stamp out all vestiges of communism in Chile. Severe repression is planned. The military is rounding up large numbers of people, including students and leftists and interning them. 300 students were killed in the Technical University when they refused to surrender in Santiago, the capital."
Recently-released FBI reports, however, tend to blur the distance between US government agencies and the junta. A case in point is where the FBI files refer to "Operation Condor", a secret agreement between the security forces of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and possibly Brazil. "A most secret phase of Operation Condor involves the formation of special teams who are to travel anywhere in the world to carry out sanctions up to assassination against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organisations from member countries," one report states.
The conveniently-labelled "terrorists" or supporters of "terrorist organisations" were in reality communists, trade-unionists, workers and opposition leaders. "In some cases, refugees from the blood bath unleashed by Pinochet in 1973 were kidnapped [from Argentina], tortured and either executed or returned to Chile to be killed after the Argentine military took power three years later," wrote political analyst Bill Van.
Operation Condor's transnational team of assassins was directed by General Manuel Contreras, commander of the Chilean Security Forces DINA. Contreras and a Central American henchmen of a similar calibre were selected and trained by top US brass. "The links between Latin America's commanders and dictators were forged in places like the US Army School of the Americas and other military schools in the US itself. The ideology that united them was the anticommunist 'national security' thesis propagated by the Pentagon and the CIA," explained Van.
Operation Condor became notorious in 1976, when Michael Vernon Townley, a US citizen, assassinated Orlando Letelier, the minister of defence and foreign affairs in the former government of deposed Chilean President Salvador Allende. Letelier, who had escaped Santiago after the coup and was lobbying to politically isolate the Pinochet dictatorship in Washington, died with his 25-year-old American aide, Ronni Moffet, when a bomb hit their car.
Following Letelier's murder, the US government claimed it had no evidence that DINA was in any way involved in the operation. In fact, then head of the CIA George Bush went to great lengths to whitewash DINA, even citing his high-level contacts with the agency as evidence of their innocence.
However, when the investigation finally led to Townley, who had meanwhile fled to Chile, the junta had no option but to extradite him to the US in 1978. Tried and convicted for murder, it came as no surprise that Townley did not linger long in jail. In exchange for implicating DINA commander, General Manuel Contreras, as the man who had ordered the killings, he was given a reduced sentence and a brand new identity under the Federal Witness Protection Programme.
If the evidence in the Letelier murder pointed to Townley, there was also a trail leading from Townley to the CIA, thus connecting the agency to Operation Condor. "There is ample evidence that the CIA, at the very least," had advance notice of the assassination plot and was thoroughly familiar with Townley and his accomplices, who were drawn from the same anti-Castro exile circles that the agency used in its operations against Cuba," commented Van.
The CIA links with Operation Condor were further confirmed by political analyst Jose Maldavsky in a recent edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, where he described the operation as an "alliance of Latin American dictatorships against the Left, directed by the Chilean junta, but coordinated by Washington."
If high-level American executive orders to the CIA remain conspicuously absent from the Chilean files, and may indeed never see the light of day, that official support for such activities did exist is nevertheless quite evident. As then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, told Pinochet on a visit to Santiago in 1976, "I come to add prestige to Chile. We want to help. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende."
