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On April 22, a trial will begin in Italy against Carlos Luis Malatto, a 74-year-old former Argentine soldier who at the time of Jorge Videla’s dictatorship, therefore between the Seventies and Eighties, was among the leaders of an army division known for his brutality against political opponents. Malatto had fled Argentina in 2011 to avoid being convicted for the crimes committed during the dictatorship, as had many other officials who had been part of the right-wing South American dictatorships which had been responsible in those years for violence, torture and targeted killings. All these operations were part of a larger plan, Plan Cóndor, known in Italy as Operation Condor, for which several people have been convicted over the years in different countries around the world.
Operation Condor was a pact made in the 1970s between the secret police forces of the military dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, with the collaboration of the United States. The goal was to eliminate all forms of opposition through violence, disappearances, torture and targeted killings of dissidents who had fled abroad. The condor was chosen as the symbol of this operation because it appeared on the coat of arms of Chile, the country that proposed it, and because the aim was to “glide” over the entire continent and capture common enemies to eliminate.
The operation was formally born in November 1975. After the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet entrusted Colonel Manuel Contreras, head of the Chilean political police, with the task of creating a transnational organization. Contreras therefore sent one of his generals to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to meet with representatives of the Bolivian and Uruguayan police and Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine police and one of the founders of Triple A, a far-right organization created at the beginning of the Seventies led by José López Rega, personal secretary of the then president Juan Domingo Perón.
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On that occasion the Chilean representative proposed, according to the shorthand version of the conversation, to «accredit a security agent at each embassy, who could belong to both the armed forces and the police, and whose main function would be to ensure coordination with the police or with the security representatives of each country (…). We should also have an information center where we can obtain data on Marxists, (…) exchange information on political activists. We should be able to enter and exit Bolivia, from Bolivia go to Chile and from there return to Argentina. In short, move to each of these countries even without the cover of a formal investigation.”
In 1974 the first corpses of foreign exiles, especially Bolivians, began to appear in the landfills of Buenos Aires. The Chilean general Carlos Prats, who had been commander of the army during the government of Salvador Allende, was killed together with his wife in an attack organized by the Chilean secret services with the collaboration of the Argentine police, of a former CIA agent, Michael Townley, and a group of anti-Castro Cubans. That was the beginning of Operation Condor.
In November 1975 Pinochet summoned to Santiago the heads of the security services of the South American countries then governed by military juntas. The minutes of the meeting, made public in 2001, were signed by representatives of four dictatorships: General Pinochet of Chile, General Alfredo Stroessner who came to power in Paraguay in 1954, General Ernesto Geisel, dictator of Brazil from 1974 to 1979, and General Hugo Banzer who had taken power in Bolivia in 1971. The report had also been signed by the representative of a constitutional government, the Argentine one, at the time presided over by Isabel Martínez de Perón, the last president of the country before the coup military status certificate of 1976.
Soon the generals of the president and dictator of Uruguay, Juan María Bordaberry, also joined the operation.
The repression carried out by the Condor operation occurred without border limits and on the basis of collaboration between neighboring states according to a principle of reciprocity, without respecting any legal order and in violation of the international treaties signed on the right to asylum and political refuge. The organization also operated within their respective territories, kidnapping citizens in clandestinity and handing them over to the authorities of the countries of origin. Students, journalists, intellectuals, university professors, trade unionists, workers, mothers and fathers looking for their missing children were kidnapped, tortured and killed. Often the violence was not limited to the person deemed “subversive”, but also extended to his family members.
Within the Condor operation, special teams were also created composed of individuals from the member countries involved who were called when the targets were presumed terrorists or sympathizers of terrorist organizations.
The dictatorships that were part of Operation Condor received aid from the United States, in terms of economic resources, training, military supplies, preparation and organization of operations. They also relied on local far-right groups, which had helped bring them to power, and on those present in Europe.
The journalist Daniela Padoan, in the book The crazy ones on the history of the Argentine dictatorship, he says that Pinochet’s secret services, as part of Operation Condor, organized a European network that revolved around far-right terrorists.
Among them, in Italy, was Stefano Delle Chiaie, leader of Avanguardia Nazionale who was asked to deal with the elimination of Bernardo Leighton, Allende’s former vice-president who had gone into exile in Rome. On 6 October 1975 Leighton and his wife were attacked by a group of armed men: they survived, but she remained paralysed. Despite the failure of the operation, Pinochet met Delle Chiaie who, explains Padoan, “had in fact become the intermediary between the Italian secret services, the European neo-fascists and the secret services of the Latin American dictatorships”. In September 1975 according to the Argentine newspaper The opinion, always mentioned in Padoan’s book, the Italian far right had a structure of around 500 people in Buenos Aires which operated first alongside Triple A and then with the coup junta.
The former Bolivian president Juan José Torres, in 1976 in Buenos Aires, and Orlando Letelier, an authoritative opponent of the Pinochet regime and former member of the Allende government, were also killed in Operation Condor. On September 21, 1976 in Washington a bomb was placed on board the car in which he was traveling with one of his collaborators.
Proof of the existence of the Condor plan came only in 1992, after the operation was concluded, when the so-called “Archives of Terror” were discovered in Paraguay: more than 700 thousand documents weighing five tons in which it was described how, from the 1970s up until by the 1980s, South American military dictatorships had collaborated to imprison more than 400 thousand people and torture and kill another 50 thousand, going so far as to strike even in Europe. To fully understand what had happened, however, we had to wait until 2000 when the United States made public the CIA documents on Chile relating to that period.