Operation Condor
Operation Condor was a US-backed system to coordinate repression among the countries of the Southern Cone that were in operation from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, aiming to persecute and eliminate political opponents and activists from Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.
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Its founding document is dated November 28, 1975.
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It was signed by the intelligence service representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay who met in Chile as of November 25 for the “First Meeting of National Intelligence”. Even though no representative from Brazil signed this inaugural agreement, that country's cooperation with the others for purposes of repression has been proven over the course of this trial.
The dictators, from left: Jorge Videla of Argentina, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, João Figueiredo of Brazil and Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay. Composite: AP, Reuters & Rex Features
The Jakarta Method
“The Jakarta Method”: is a book by the American author V. Bevins concerning the support of the U.S. to the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966, during which a million people died (estimation) in the effort of destroying the political left and movements for government reform in the country. Bevins makes a connection of the subsequent replication of mass murders against government reform and economic reform movements in Latin America and elsewhere. The killings in Indonesia by the American-backed Indonesian forces were so successful in culling communism that the term "Jakarta" was later used to refer to the genocidal aspects of similar later plans implemented by other authoritarian capitalist regimes with the assistance of the United States.
When Videla installed his ferocious military regime in 1976 in the name of “national reorganization” and western, Christian civilisation the country was in the grip of political violence.
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Leftist guerrillas were battling the government while right wing death squads hit the streets, murdering with complete impunity.
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Guerrillas, trade unionists, journalists and political dissidents were kidnapped, tortured and killed. Some of them were carried on the “death flights” and their bodies disappeared forever.
The brutal repression of the opposition facilitated an economic policy run by J.M. de Hoz which dismantled Perón pro-labour laws and opened up the economy to foreign capital and vastly increased the country’s external debt. Years later it was revealed that the coup had been planned by business interests allied with hardliners in the armed forces.
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The repression of the opposition facilitated an economic policy, run by José Martínez de Hoz, which dismantled Perón's pro-labour laws, opened up the economy to foreign capital and vastly increased the country's external debt.
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Many years later, it was revealed that the coup had been planned by business interests allied with hardliners in the armed forces. Videla presided over this butchery until his retirement in 1981, although for the last year – having reached the end of his military career – he was formally subordinate to the junta.
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An official number of the disappeared people is missing and was highly debated throughout the years, without reaching a common conclusion. While in 1979 Amnesty International accused the videla military government of being responsible for the disappearance of 15,000 to 20,000
Argentinian citizens since the 1976 coup, the Registro Unificado de Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado (Ruvte) uncovered records of 662 people disappeared under the presidency of Isabel Perón, and another 6,348 disappearing during the military dictatorship.
The latest sources state that the number of disappeared people is 30.000, although the total number is purely approximated proven that the detentions and repressions were covert and no records were taken regarding how many people were detained, where they were displaced and the direction of their bodies.
Kidnappings
The junta’s security forces exceeded even that sweeping mandate when targeting dissidents for elimination. Sixty students from Manuel Belgrano High School, in Buenos Aires, disappeared simply for having joined their student council. Victims were abducted as they stepped off buses, as they walked home from work or school, or in midnight raids of private residences and of the safe houses where members of guerrilla groups or of banned trade and student organizations lived in hiding. The abductees were taken to clandestine detention centers, where the majority of them were tortured and killed.
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Approximately thirty per cent of the disappeared were women. Some were abducted with their small children, and some were pregnant, or became so while in detention, usually through rape by guards and torturers. Pregnant prisoners were routinely kept alive until they’d given birth.
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Detention Centres
The prosecution has described the clandestine centres as "central nuclei of state terrorism" in which people suspected of opposing the military junta were taken to be interrogated, tortured and often killed.
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Survivors say detainees were sexually abused and subjected to degrading treatment, some had plastic bags placed over their heads to asphyxiate them while others were given electric shocks or subjected to mock executions.
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According to prosecutors, "torture was systematic" and "sexual violence an integral part of the attempts to dehumanise those detained".
Survivors say that there was a secret maternity center at Pozo de Banfield, where pregnant women were taken to give birth, often while shackled, before they had their babies taken from them.
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Death Flights
A common tactic was to kidnap targets, sedate them and load them into planes. Once over the ocean or a large body of water, the people would be dropped into it.
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The Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), in Buenos Aires, which was used as a secret detention centre during the repression @G. Ceraudo
@G.Ceraudo
Families of the desaparecidos waiting to denounce the missing relatives in front of the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights. Buenos Aires, 1979
GUILLERMO LOIÁCONO / ARCHIVO NACIONAL DE LA MEMORIA
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo
The large number of desaparecidos led to the formation in 1977 of an association called Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, formed by the mothers of people who disappeared during Videla regime. The association is dedicated to activism in the field of civil rights and the goal is to claim the disappearance of their children and obtain their restitution.
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They took their name from the Plaza de Mayo square in Buenos Aires, where they met for the first time.
Four decades on and 2,037 marches later, the mothers are still marching. Moreover, it’s important to say that they have largely succeeded in their original aims: as of 2016, more than 1,000 of the dictatorship’s torturers and killers had been tried and 700 sentenced.
Midnight, our sons and daughters
Cut down, taken from us
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat
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In the wind we hear their laughter
In the rain we see their tears
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat
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Night hangs like a prisoner
Stretched over black and blue
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat
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In the trees our sons stand naked
Through the walls our daughters cry
See their tears in the rainfall
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- U2-Mothers Of The Disappeared
Finding the Desaparecidos
In the early eighties, geneticists at universities and research hospitals in the United States, some of them South American exiles, began to take an interest in the Abuelas’ quest.
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In 1984, a year after the end of the military regime, Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, travelled to Buenos Aires to work with the Argentine geneticist Ana María Di Lonardo. Together, they developed the Grandparents’ Index, a human-leukocyte-antigen test that can identify a genetic link between grandparents and their grandchildren.
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Later that year, genetic testing was used for the first time to identify the child of disappeared parents. The girl, Paula Logares, had been kidnapped with her parents, in 1978, when she was twenty-three months old. The police officer who raised her—and who was likely involved in the death of her parents—had registered her birth date as two years after the actual date. (Logares was eventually returned to her biological grandmother.)
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The Abuelas began pushing the government to establish a national genetic data bank to store the genetic profiles of families seeking missing children, and in 1987 the Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos, or B.N.D.G., was established.
Juicio a las Juntas
The historical trial of the military juntas, also known as “Juicio a las Juntas” began in 1985 in Buenos Aires. Due to the large number of victims, the court selected 280 emblematic cases among the 709 cases presented by the Prosecution. During that occasion Videla was sentenced to life-imprisonment, and other military leaders were jailed.
When the “Impunity Laws” were put into place between 1986 and 1990 the investigation stopped and they started again in 2003, when hundreds of ex-militaries were incarcerated for committing crimes against humanity.
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This trial is so far the only example of such a large-scale procedure by a democratic government against a former dictatorial government of the same country in Latin America.