Right-wing murders of South American Operation Condor prosecuted in Italy

This video is called Investigating Operation Condor. It says about itself:

In the name of the struggle against terrorism, a special operation — code named CONDOR – was conducted in the seventies and eighties in South America. Its target were left wing political dissidents, the organised labour and intellectuals. Condor soon became a network of Military Dictatorships, supported by the US State Department, the CIA and Interpol.

From British daily The Independent:

Italy seeks justice for right-wing murder plots

By Peter Popham in Rome

Published: 26 December 2007

A former officer in Uruguay’s naval intelligence was in jail in southern Italy yesterday after Roman prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 140 South Americans accused of involvement in Operation Condor, the plan agreed by half a dozen Latin American governments in the 1970s and 1980s to hunt down, kidnap and murder their left-wing opponents.

The arrest of Nestor Jorge Fernandez Troccoli, 60, in Salerno, southern Italy, was the first result of a new push by Italian authorities who have been trying for years to prosecute former leaders and officials from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay who collaborated with each other in running death squads to eliminate their common enemies.

Those named by the Italian prosecutors include the former leader of the Argentine junta Jorge Videla and Uruguay’s ex-dictator Juan Bordaberry.

Among the thousands of deaths of which they are accused is the assassination of Orlando Leletier, a former minister in Salvador Allende‘s Chilean government, in a 1976 car bomb in Washington.

See also here.

What a shame that such a vile mass murder plot was named after the beautiful bird, the South American condor.

They were established by the US and the Latin-American oligarchy simultaneously with the so-called “Operación Cóndor” (Operation Condor) which originated a series of bloody dictatorships that repressed the civilian population; a fact of which the continent will never recover completely. Because those dirty wars are not encoded manuals that are now filed in newspaper libraries or the governments’ vaults; they are still in force, renewed in compliance with technology and time requirements. The approach is the same, the objective is the same: destabilize post-neoliberal governments that have managed to make their nations flourish by prompting social and economic transformations in benefit of the majorities. In past decades the reason for their existence was to cut off socialism and communism from their very roots: here.

Related articles

• The regime that left records of its crimes (bbc.co.uk)
• Q&A: “Chile’s 21st Century Democracy Arose From the Dictatorship” (ipsnews.net)
• Condors Drive Cougars to Kill More (livescience.com)