Dictatorships of six countries
conspired to kidnap and kill political opponents in 1970s
Lorenzo Tondo in
Palermo
Mon 8 Jul 2019 13.06 EDT
Last modified on Wed 10 Jul 2019 12.01 EDT
An Italian court has sentenced
24 people to life in prison for their involvement in Operation
Condor, in which the dictatorships of six South American countries
conspired to kidnap and assassinate political opponents in each other’s
territories.
The trial, the first of its
kind in Europe, began in 2015 and focused on the responsibility of senior
officials in the military dictatorships of Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil,
Bolivia and Argentina for
the killing and disappearance of 43 people including 23 Italian citizens.
Those sentenced on Monday
included Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who was president of Peru from 1975 to
1980, Juan Carlos Blanco, a former foreign minister in Uruguay, Pedro Espinoza
Bravo, a former deputy intelligence chief in Chile, and Jorge Néstor Fernández
Troccoli, a Uruguayan former naval intelligence officer.
Exactly how many people died
as a result of the conspiracy is unknown, but prosecutors in South America and
Italy provided evidence that at least 100 leftwing activists were killed
in Argentina,
including 45 Uruguayans, 22 Chileans, 15 Paraguayans and 13 Bolivians.
“Operation Condor spared no
one,” said Francesca Lessa, a research fellow at Oxford University’s Latin
American Centre. “Refugees and asylum seekers were especially targeted, while
children – illegally detained with their parents – had their biological identity
stolen and replaced by that of adoptive families.”
According to a database
recording the
crimes of the coordinated regional repression, at least 496 people of 11
nationalities were kidnapped under the auspices of Operation Condor.
Declassified documents suggest
some victims were drugged, their stomachs were slit open and they were dropped
from planes into the Atlantic Ocean. Other victims’ bodies were cemented
into barrels and thrown into rivers.
Monday’s verdict was the
result of years of pressure from the families of those who disappeared. “For
decades, the victims’ relatives have been seeking justice,” Lessa said. “In the
late 1990s and early 2000s, impunity dominated South America, with former
politicians and military officials involved in Condor Operation still enjoying
immunity. Bringing them before a judge to take responsibility for their crimes
was not a simple undertaking.”
The crimes took place in the
1970s and 1980s. “Many of the perpetrators were growing old and may never be
brought to justice,” said Jorge Ithurburu, a lawyer for 24 Marzo, a Rome-based NGO. “The more time
passed the more the witnesses of those atrocious crimes aged or died.”
Aurora Meloni, 68, whose
husband, Daniel Banfi, was kidnapped and murdered in Buenos Aires in 1974, told
the Guardian: “We’ve never given up and today we all won. Today’s ruling is not
only for my husband … today’s ruling is dedicated to all the people killed and
kidnapped under Condor.”
Prosecutors in the case drew
on the precedent set in 2000 by the arrest in London of the former Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet under the principle of “universal jurisdiction”.
In 2016, Argentina’s last
military dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, and 16 other former military officials
were sentenced to years in prison, marking the first time a court had proved
the existence of Operation Condor.
Last April, a newly
declassified CIA document
showed that European intelligence agencies sought advice from South
America’s 1970s dictatorships on how to combat leftwing “subversion”.
“Representatives of West
German, French and British intelligence services had visited the Condor
organization secretariat in Buenos Aires during the month of September 1977 in
order to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversion organization
similar to Condor,” the document stated.
According to the human rights
prosecution office in Buenos Aires, 977 former military officers and
collaborators are in jail for crimes relating to Argentina’s dictatorship.
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