 |
| Ships docking at the Tema Harbour |
By
J.A. Y Gordon
I
have observed from afar the development of our ports and my observations and
comments are as follows:, When I saw President Kufuor on GTV cut the sod to
start construction of the above inland port. I asked myself whether there-were
any competent professionals or technocrats left in our public service.
Later,
I heard construction had begun, and although I have never been to the site or
the port facility as constructed, I know nobody can use the facility as an
inland port.
Did
any member of the Shippers' Council, who were at the sod-cutting ceremony,
think they could use the facility to clear their goods? I do not have to wait
for an answer because I know the facility cannot be used for that purpose.
The
basic question as to how either Tema or Takoradi would be linked to the Boankra
Inland Port was not answered. The next question, which was how goods would be
moved to the Inland Port from Tema or Takoradi, was also not answered.
There
are only two safe and secure means of moving goods from an inland port to their
attached sea ports (home sea port), these are water and railway.
I
do not believe the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government ever intended to link the
Boankra Port by rail to the sea port, otherwise it would look like putting the
cart before the horse.
I
wish to state that an inland port constructed at Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso by
the French worked for over 50 years when the ‘Ivorian railway was _
operational.
Tema Harbour
After
a number of years ‘so-called’ development and expansion of the Tema Horbour,
the harbour is choked and traffic flow is slow and haphazard.
The
first major problem which has precipitated the slowdown of, traffic flow at the
Tema Harbour is lack of railway services in the harbour. The development and
expansions which have been carried out since the construction of Tema harbour
in 1965 have made the situation worse as railway lines have been deliberately
removed.
Originally,
the cocoa sheds at the Tema Harbour had railway lines and cocoa came into the
cocoa sheds by rail or by road. Also, cocoa could be moved out of the cocoa
sheds by rail or by road to the quay from where the cocoa could be loaded unto
the ships directly.
The
original cocoa sheds have been taken out and new ones built in their place. The
new cocoa sheds have no railway lines and therefore can only be served by road.
As
our cocoa production goes up, so will the traffic jam in the harbour area. Also
container depots are already overflowing and there is no more room to take any
increase in traffic.
The
rehabilitation of the Accra- Tema railway system cannot benefit the Tema Port
as there are no railway lines in the port and no provision has been made for
the relaying of railway lines in the port.
Tema Harbour –The
new development plan
It was stated by the Director of the Tema
Harbour on TV3 on November 13, 2011 that the land
area around
Tema Port had been exhausted and that extra land area was needed for the smooth operation of
the port.
He went on to state that the port would need one billion US dollars ($1,000,000,000.00) to reclaim land from
the sea near Sakumono so that another road outlet from Tema
Port could be created to enable the port ease the current traffic flow situation.
Again,
on GTV’S programme “Corporate Eye” on November 24, 2012, the new director of
the Tema port stated that they were looking for financiers and partners to
build a platform in the sea near Sakumono area and thus, create extra container
terminal to cope with increasing container traffic.
This
dream project of claiming land in the sea or constructing a platform in the sea
seems to be gathered momentum.
I
have my reservations and wish to make them public in the national interest.
They are as follows:
i.
The
new road outlets to be created under the above project in the port area will
not improve traffic flow because any extra outlet from the port area will end
up on the Tema-Nungua beach road which is already choked. Any other detour will
necessarily end up on the Nungua-Teshie or Nungua-Spintex Road.
ii.
If
any distortion of the coast line occurs as a result of reclaiming land from the
sea, the sea will definitely-respond by eating land anywhere along the toast
from Keta to Half - Assini. The resultant erosion cannot be predicted.
iii.
There
will be very serious vehicular traffic problems during the construction since
the most likely source of boulders or rocks will have to be delivered to the
construction site -from Shai Hills. The volumes involved will definitely be
massive.
iv.
Let
us therefore compare the risks involved and the likely benefits before going
ahead with the said project.
I wish to state that Takoradi Port (1928)
and Tema Port (1965) are both artificial harbour, which were built by the Ghana
Railways & Ports Authority and by their design they must necessarily be
serviced by working railway system. Failures in the railway system impose very
strict restrictions on traffic flow through any artificial harbour.
Editorial:
JEREMY CORBYN
The
leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, could become the next Prime
Minister with interesting consequences for international politics.
At
the beginning not many people took him serious with all the British media or most
of it campaigning against him on the basis of their own perception that “he
does not look prime ministerial”.
But
that was at the beginning and now the British people appear to know better.
Since
the labour party launched its manifesto Jeremy has been rising in the polls and
some reports say that he could defeat Theresa May, the current Prime Minister.
In
the beginning the polls gave him only 20 per cent but as at last week he had
risen to 34 per cent and was still rising.
The
Insight has always been a keen supporter of Jeremy because he stands with the
working people in the confrontation with capital and he supports national
liberation movements across the globe.
The
election of Jeremy Corbyn will be a breath of fresh air for all the people
suffocating under neo-liberalism.
Local
News:
ACTION AGAINST PETROLEUM ACCIDENTS TAKES OFF
 |
| Mohammed Amin Adams, Deputy Energy Minister |
By
Mercy Hededzome
The
Ghana Association of Oil Marketing Companies, an industry association and
private initiative by oil marketing operators, has expressed great frustration
over the very high cases of petroleum related accidents in Ghana.
The
Association in collaboration with the Ministry of Energy is holding the bull by
the horns with the launch of a week long programme to put in place concrete
action to ensure the development and practice of environmental safety in Ghana
and the enforcement of petroleum safety at retail outlets and in homes where petroleum
products are used.
The
launch which was sponsored by the Bidi Group Limited and held under the theme:
“Petroleum Safety,Its Your Right” brought together major stakeholders in the
petroleum industry
Mr.
Kwaku Agyeman-Dua the president of the Association speaking at the programme
said, the association is working to ensure that oil retail companies work in a
healthy and safety environment to prevent disasters associated with petroleum.
He
said trends reveal that petroleum disasters in Ghana are very high and there is
the need to prevent them by educating the public on practicing safety measure.
“Millions
of Ghana Cedis and properties are destroyed when these disasters occur” he said.
He called on every individual to make sure that lives and properties are
protected.
In
the course of the week, organisers and captains of the industry will visits
fuel stations and be engaged in street education on the safe handling of
petroleum products across the country.
 |
| Mr Kwaku Agyeman Duah |
A
special commemorative service will also be held on June 3 for people who have
died out of petroleum disasters and to observe the second anniversary of
victims who died as they took shelter at a petrol filling station at the Kwame
Nkrumah circle.
The
Deputy Minister of Energy Dr. Mohammed Amin Adams commended the association for
putting in place measures to ensure environmental safety and pledged the
support of government for the organization.
He
called on the members of the Association to train their staff at their various
fuel stations to ensure professionalism.
Adding
his voice to the safety campaign the Deputy Minister noted that even though
authorities such as the NPA have technical inspectors who constantly inspect
facilities in the petroleum product chain, inspectors rarely visited people’s
homes to see if consumers were using petroleum products appropriately and
therefore called on domestic users of the products to ensure precautionary
measures in the home.
In
a related development, the stakeholders in the petroleum industry have held an educative
forum with the media on the siting of fuel stations in residential areas, how
safety mechanisms are installed at fuel stations and charged the media to
expose unscrupulous elements who flout the established procedures.
The
forum brought together officials from National Petroleum Authority, the Town
and Country Planning Authority, the Consumer protection Agency and other
industry players.
Africa:
Emails Reveal NATO Killed Gaddafi
 |
| Muammar al-Gaddafi |
In spite of
French-led U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 creating a no-fly zone over
Libya with the express intent of protecting civilians, one of the over 3,000 new Hillary Clinton emails
released by
the State Department on New Year’s Eve, contain damning evidence of
Western nations using NATO as a tool to topple Libyan leader Muammar
al-Gaddafi. The NATO overthrow was not for the protection of the people, but
instead it was to thwart Gaddafi’s attempt to create a gold-backed African
currency to compete with the Western central banking monopoly.
The emails
indicate the French-led NATO military initiative in Libya was also driven
by a desire to gain access to a greater share of Libyan oil production, and to
undermine a long term plan by Gaddafi to supplant France as the dominant power
in the Francophone Africa region.
The April
2011 email, sent to the Secretary of State Hillary by unofficial adviser and
longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal with the subject
line “France’s client and Qaddafi’s gold,” reveals predatory Western
intentions.
The email
identifies French President Nicholas Sarkozy as leading the attack on Libya
with five specific purposes in mind: to obtain Libyan oil, ensure French
influence in the region, increase Sarkozy’s reputation domestically, assert
French military power, and to prevent Gaddafi’s influence in what is considered
“Francophone Africa.”
 |
| Former French President Nicholas Sarkozy |
Most
astounding is the lengthy section delineating the huge threat that Gaddafi’s
gold and silver reserves, estimated at “143 tons of gold, and a similar amount
in silver,” posed to the French franc (CFA) circulating as a prime African
currency.
The email
makes clear that intelligence sources indicate the impetus behind the French
attack on Libya was a calculated move to consolidate greater power, using NATO
as a tool for imperialist conquest, not a humanitarian intervention as the
public was falsely led to believe.
This gold
was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to
establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan
was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative
to the French franc (CFA).
(Source
Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and
silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers
discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was
one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to
commit France to the attack on Libya.)
The email
provides a peek behind the curtain to reveal how foreign policy is often
carried out in practice. While reported in the media that the Western backed
Libyan military intervention is necessary to save human lives, the real driving
factor behind the intervention was shown to be the fact that Gaddafi planned to
create a high degree of economic independence with a new pan-African currency,
which would lessen French influence and power in the region.
The
evidence indicates that when French intelligence became aware of the Libyan
initiative to create a currency to compete with the Western central banking
system, the decision to subvert the plan through military means began,
ultimately including the NATO alliance.
Why Africans Trade Less Among Themselves?
By
Mengisteab Teshome
The
Regional Economic Communities (RECs) have been established in a bid to garner
all opportunities on the ground and boost trade and investment across Africa.
Yet,
intra-trade among African countries is valued at 12 per cent. This figure,
however, remains dwarf as compared with other continents, such as North America
and Western Europe which stands at 40 per cent and 60 per cent respectively.
Ethiopian
Chamber of Commerce and Sectoral Associations (ECCSA) President Solomon Afework
told The Ethiopian Herald that regional trade integration has long been a
strategic objective for Africa.
Hence, he
indicated that some success has been registered in terms of eliminating tariffs
within RECs. Yet, a fragmentation of market and a range of non-tariff as well
as regulatory barriers still account in the rise of transaction costs while
limiting the free movement of goods, services, people and capital across
borders throughout Africa.
Understanding
the role of integration in fostering trade and attracting manufacturers,
Ethiopia has endeavored to address the shackles through power supply as well as
road and railway constructions.
Though the
Chamber is the reflection of the business community, it is pushing business
operators to join the manufacturing sector that could generate an awesome
return to the nation and operators.
The Chamber
is working with penitent stakeholders to shape the intra-trade. “The market is
lucrative we should work hand in glove.”
Pan African
Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PACCI) Executive Director Kebour Ghenna, for
his part, made clear that all African countries are part of a trading and/or
political blocs, but trade still remains meager.
“We
basically produce what we don’t consume and consume what we don’t produce.” For
him, this is a weakness that often frustrates policy makers; it complicates
regional integration and is a primary reason for the low intra-regional trade.
According
to Kebour, part of the problem lies in that most countries belong to 14
different trading blocs with at least two or three overlapping members. This
situation has contributed to the weakness of the regional institutions, which
mainly perform administrative functions. By far, however, lack of
infrastructure, is the most critical one.
“There is
much that Ethiopia need to do to increase intra-regional trade. Expanding
service sector, including telecommunications, transport, educational and
financial into the region.”
African
Reinsurance Corporation Regional Director George Otieno also said: “There are 6
trade blocs in Africa. Trading blocs are designed to spur intra-regional trade
and investment. Statistics for 2016 are not yet widely available but in 2014,
trade between regions accounted for approximately 16 per cent.”
According
to George, Africa could lure as many investors by harmonizing trade policies
among countries to reduce bureaucracies that traders face.
Source:
Ethiopian Herald
Cameroon:
The unfinished business between Cameroon and France
(Left) This photo was taken during the
celebrations for the independence of French Cameroon (1960). At the time of
independence, Cameroon had one of the largest schools systems in Africa. Many
school groups joined the independence day parade. The population of largely
Christian southern part British Cameroon would subsequsntly vote to join French
Cameroon to form a united Republic of Cameroun.
By
Meredith Terretta
In
January this year, Cameroonian President Paul Biya (in office since 1982), cut
off the southwest and northwest regions of the country’s access to the internet
to punish anglophone Cameroonians for protesting their linguistic, political
and economic marginalization.
The
UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called the move
a violation of the right to freedom of expression. The
executive committee of the International Union of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences issued a
statement about the situation in Cameroon and to support the UN
Special Rapporteurs’ calls on the government to “investigate the deployment of
violence against protestors and to exercise greater restraint in policing.”
For
those familiar with Cameroonian decolonization, the internet suppression
reminded of an earlier time: symptomatic of a violent method of administration forged during
Cameroon’s transition to “independence,” by France
and “moderate” local elites.
A
new book that tells that story of decolonization and its legacy for present-day
Cameroon is La Guerre du Cameroun: L’Invention de la Françafrique.
It is written by French journalists Thomas Deltombe and Manuel Domergue, along
with Jacob Tatsitsa, a doctoral student in history at the University of Ottawa.
Achille Mbembe wrote the foreward. La Guerre du Cameroun reveals the façade of a sovereign
Cameroonian state behind which France negotiated, with the Cameroonian leaders
of its choice, its post-independence strategic and economic hold on the
Cameroonian government against a backdrop of counterrevolutionary and psychological warfare. Between
60,000 and 120,000 civilians out of a population of just over three million
were killed between the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. At least 440,000
Cameroonians were resettled in “regroupment” villages, forever changing the
rural landscape of affected zones.
The
French administered French Cameroon for the United Nations. It implemented
policies of isolation akin to those Biya has put in place for Anglophone
Cameroon today. French administrators prevented members and sympathizers of the
most popular pro-independence party, the Union of the Populations of Cameroon
(UPC), from communicating with the rest of the world: Administrators
intercepted mail and telegraph services, and established a cordon sanitaire
around the UN Visiting Missions of 1955 and 1958 to keep them away from
nationalist demonstrators. In violation of the UN trusteeship agreement
requiring France to prepare the territory for self-government, the French
administration banned the UPC and its affiliated women’s party, youth party and confederated trade unions. With
all avenues to political action closed off, the UPC leadership resorted to
violence, implanting maquis (guerrillas) severely lacking in arms and resources
throughout the southern regions of the territories. While the world looked the
other way, the French unleashed an asymmetrical counterinsurgency, uprooting
the maquis and brutally punishing the civilian populations in their vicinity.
Interrogation, detention without trial, torture, and extrajudicial killings
became features of daily life under a Franco-Cameroonian hybrid state even
before the UN Trusteeship was lifted with independence on the January 1, 1960.
The
violence increased after independence. French “technical assistants” Paul Audat
and Jacques Rousseau authored Cameroon’s constitution in the months that
followed. Its key feature was Article 20 which allowed the national assembly to
grant full presidential powers to new President Ahmadou Ahidjo — whom the
French recruited to the ranks of the postal service in 1947 and enabled to
become Prime Minister in February 1958. After independence and freed from UN
inquiries, France remained in command of the Cameroonian national army and
police until 1965 making the war more lethal. It was after independence that
the French army operationalized its forced resettlement policies, recruited
tens of thousands of civilians to auxiliary militia forces, unleashed a
campaign of aerial bombardment, and systematized torture as a mode of
interrogation.
Deltombe,
Domergue and Tatsitsa have spent the past decade delving into the partially
declassified archives of France and the scattered and disappearing archives of
Cameroon, and collecting firsthand testimonies of the war. In 2011 they
published a meticulously referenced and nearly eight hundred page account of
thewar: Kamerun: Une guerre cachée aux origines de
la Françafrique, 1948-1971 (La
Découverte, 2011). Conversations around the book among historians,
statesmen, journalists, writers, activists and students of African history and
French colonial history eventually provoked responses from French officials
about the war they would prefer forgotten.
On
an official visit to Cameroon in July 2015, French President François Hollande, referring to the “painful memory” of
Franco-Cameroonian relations, remarked:
“There
have been tragic episodes,” and declared his wish that all the archives be
“opened for the historians.” It was the first reference a French head of state
has ever made to the history of Cameroon’s decolonization.
Hollande’s
words expressed the ambiguities that characterize the Cameroonian and French
governments’ reticence in acknowledging the past (even as it ignored the
responsibility for the roles each have played in shaping the present). In
excavating the foundation of extreme violence upon which Cameroonian
sovereignty was mortgaged, La Guerre du Cameroun: L’Invention de la Françafrique suffers
from no such ambiguity. The authors’ earlier book served to document. This one
serves to bring the past — of France, of Cameroon — into the present and open
it to public debate. Whether it will succeed in holding France accountable
depends upon its public reception in France, in Cameroon, and beyond. With
history unsettled, the present is on shaky ground, and a different future
cannot be envisioned.
Much
of Cameroon’s present trips over the political detritus of unsettled memories
of the past, referred to by those who survived it as simply “the
troubles.” President Paul Biya himself embodies the 1960s-era
Franco-Cameroonian pact forged in those violent years. He completed his
secondary school education in Paris in the late 1950s, and took university and
postgraduate diplomas in political science and public law in prestigious institutions
of higher learning Paris in the early 1960s. Not even thirty in 1962 when he
entered the executive branch of Cameroon’s government as Chargé de Mission to
the President, Biya’s age and longevity — as the third oldest and fourth longest reigning African head of state — are
millstones of the past weighing down an otherwise youthful
Cameroon.
Neither
the French nor the Cameroonian state has ever facilitated historical inquiry —
in fact the opposite is true. Yet curious moves are afoot. In an interview
at the book’s launch in Yaoundé in late December 2016, Philippe
Larrieu, First Counsellor to the French Ambassador of Cameroon, announced that
the French embassy was planning, in collaboration with a Cameroonian cultural
association, a memorial colloquium in 2017. Larrieu explained that the
colloquium, based on the contributions of researchers, experts, historians and
political scientists, would break the silence about “the dark period in the
history of Cameroon and Franco-Cameroonian relations.”
In
mid-February, I received an invitation to an International Colloquium “History and Memory in Cameroon: Legacies and Practices” from Kalliopi Ango Ela. Who is Mrs. Ango Ela? She is a French
expatriate who has resided in Yaoundé since 1987 where she teaches at the
French school Fustel de Coulanges. She served from 2009 to 2015 as elected
Counsellor and then Senator to the Assembly of French expatriates. She is also
the director of the Paul Ango Ela Foundation of Central African Geopolitics, named
after her late husband, a Cameroonian intellectual.
The
timing appeared odd. Is this the memorial colloquium to which the French
embassy’s First Counsellor referred in December 2016? But there is no explicit
link to French embassy in the call for papers, the program committee or the
invitation. This made scholars wonder: Is France funding and directing this
memorial colloquium from the shadows? Those who asked questions of Mrs. Ango
Ela as I did, and those who withdrew from the “scientific committee” after
learning of the sham, as did Michael Rowlands, Professor of Anthropology at
University College London, have received no response. Her silence confirms all.
France
certainly has a role to play in reconciling official history with unsettled
memories of the past. But it appears that once again, and rather predictably,
France would rather play puppeteer than transparently acknowledge its role in
first shaping — and now underhandedly curating — its colonial past. Good faith
gestures by the French organizers would have been to invite the authors
of La Guerre du Cameroun to this conference, and to take steps
to include survivors of the war, journalists, academics and others in Cameroon
who have spent decades preserving memories of the country’s violent past.
Source:
Africa is a Country||
STANDING ROCK
MOVEMENT
The
Standing Rock movement has quickly grown as a national symbol of, and call to
action for, Native power and sovereignty; the rights of Mother Earth,
especially water; and opposition to government impunity and corporate
supremacy.
The
power of mobilized, united people was proven once again on December 4, when the
Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit necessary for the Dakota Access
Pipeline (DAPL) to be laid under the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s ancestral
Missouri River. The Army announced that it would explore
alternative routes.
Despite
these advances, victory is not assured. Growing the visibility and resistance
is the only way to prevent the Trump administration from clearing
legal roadblocks so that Energy Transfer Partners, the company
behind the $3.7 billion oil project, can proceed. Fierce political pressure is
essential to stopping the pipeline from being dug under the river as per the
current plan, or from a rerouted access point in another community with less
power.
Trump
is not only philosophically in favor of the 1,172-mile pipeline. He is
also financially
involved, having as much as $300,000 in combined personal
investments in Energy Transfer Partners and Phillips 66, which would be a
stakeholder in the completed project.
Tara
Houska, an Ojibway attorney working with Honor the Earth, told Democracy
Now on December 5, “It’s really incumbent on us to remain
vigilant, to recognize the power that’s within us of organizing and coming
together… in support of the water and the future generations.”
The
Standing Rock water protectors have withstood frigid weather and blizzards in
unheated tents and tipis. They have withstood the brutality of dog attacks, of
water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures, of rubber bullets and tear gas.
Twenty-one-year-old activist Sophia
Wilansky risks amputation of her arm after being hit by what
witnesses claim was a concussion grenade. Red Fawn Fallis is in prison, facing
a trumped-up
federal charge. More than 500 others have been arrested.
Tribal
chairman Dave Archambault II told water protectors on
December 5 that “It’s time to go home… and spend this winter with your
families.” Not all are following his call.
From
Palestinians to Peruvians, people from as many as 30 countries and 300
indigenous nations have traveled to North Dakota to stand against the pipeline.
The
Standing Rock occupation has captured national moral imagination and riveted
international attention in a unique way. The public sympathy is due to the
urgency of the tribe’s call to protect the riches of nature in its territories
– regardless of their having been stolen under US law – and the water
protectors’ tenacity over many months.
The
Standing Rock movement has quickly grown as a national symbol of, and call to
action for, Native power and sovereignty; the rights of Mother Earth,
especially water; and opposition to government impunity and corporate
supremacy.
Two
among hundreds of cards made for the tribe by local grammar-school children.
Henrietta
Gomez, a self-identified Taos Pueblo grandmother, said, “We Indians have never
had solidarity like this before.”
Silent
women’s prayer march to the Missouri River. Every day at the Standing March
encampment are marches, direct action, prayer ceremonies, and cultural
presentations.
Similar
responses to growing pillaging and extraction are underway around the globe,
where indigenous and other land-based movements are defending their own lands,
waters, forests, minerals, life forms, knowledge (otherwise known as
intellectual property rights), and more.
A
lone rider at dusk between flags of Native nations. The Standing Rock Sioux
have the right to free, prior, and informed consent - guaranteed by the UN
Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to which the US
is signatory - before any development can take place on their lands. In 22
countries, Convention 169 of the UN International Labor Organization provides
the same protection for indigenous peoples, though it is almost invariably violated.
Many indigenous movements are pressing hard for their rights under the
convention. The US government has refused to sign onto Convention 169.
Sitting
Bull meets Standing Rock. The long heritage of Sioux pride and resistance
continues.
Stand
with Standing Rock. December is Global Month of #NoDAPL
Action. Call banks which
have invested in DAPL and urge them to pull their funds. Almost $18 million
have already been divested from the project. Look for more ways to lend
support.
Foreign
News:
The CIA’s “Operation Condor”: Latin America’s Dirty War, Death
Squads and the Disappeared
Operation Condor was
the name given to a secret union of intelligence services of six US-supported,
South American military governments- Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Paraguay and Uruguay, which operated during the 1970s into the early 1980s.
Under Operation Condor
the intelligence agencies were to use their joint resources to round up
thousands of people who were suspected of involvement with leftist groups and
imprison them in camps or secret detention centres. Many were tortured,
interrogated, then executed and secretly buried, becoming known as the
disappeared. Those that escaped their own dictatorship’s security services were
often captured and tortured in other Condor countries and eventually returned
from where they fled to be executed. Condor agents also located and killed
dissidents in operations outside Latin America, in several European nations and
the USA.
The most active period
of this multinational secret police and army cooperation against leftwing and
other opposition was between 1975 to 1978. The overall result of this massive
political repression and terrorist dirty war, was that an estimated 35,000
people were murdered, many disappearing without a trace. Hundreds of thousands
of others were imprisoned and tortured.
The Historical Beginnings Of
Condor
The historical roots
of Operation Condor go back a long way, when the US began telling South
American military commanders about the growing dangers of communism in the
region, at the Inter-American Conference in Mexico City in 1945. Agreements on
mutual military assistance and cooperation followed in 1951. They also covered
the supply of US arms and funding, the use of US military advisers, and the
training of Latin American officers in the USA and the US army’s School of the
Americas in the Panama Canal Zone.
The move towards
“continental defence against communism” was accelerated after the victory of
Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba in 1959.
The following year
General Bogart, the head of US Southern Command invited his Latin American
military counterparts to a meeting in his military base in Panama. The outcome
of this was an annual Conference of American Armies [CAA] the first was held in
Panama. It was then transferred to the American Military College at West Point
and from 1965 it met every two years. This Wrest Point meeting place was the
roots of the later secret Operation Condor.
Fearful of leftwing
opposition movements, at its second meeting US and Latin American military
commanders speeded up links between their intelligence agencies. The CAA
established a standing committee in the Canal Zone to exchange information and
intelligence. From then on a continental communications network functioned and
regular secret intelligence meetings were held between Argentina, Paraguay,
Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia and others. Files and other information was
supplied by military intelligence services, security police and death squads
and made available by these countries and circulated between them through a
network of military attaches.
In 1968, General
Porter, the head of the US Southern Command explained the strategy for
combating radical and socialist movements in Latin America and it sounded very
close to the eventual structure of Operation Condor. He said, “In order to
facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and
among Latin American countries, we are…endeavouring to foster inter-service and
regional cooperation by assisting in the organisation of integrated command and
control centres; the establishment of common operating procedures and the
conduct of joint and combined training exercises.”
At the 10th meeting of
the CAA, in Caracas, Venezuela on the 3rd of September 1973, General Fortes,
commander of the Brazilian army, said as far as collective action was
concerned, in the struggle against communism, “the only effective methods are
the exchange of experience and information, plus technical assistance when
requested.” On this basis, the CAA decided to “strengthen information exchange
in order to counter terrorism and control subversive elements in each country.”
As Chile [in 1973] and
other South American countries one by one came under repressive military
regimes, up until 1976, Argentina was the only country in the region where
thousands of Chilean, Uruguayan, Bolivian and other political exiles were able
to find refuge. The response of the Argentine police and armed forces was to
become more repressive and the military formed a death squad, the Argentine
Anti-communist Alliance [AAA].
In March 1974,
Chilean, Uruguayan, and Bolivian police leaders met with the deputy chief of
the Argentine federal police, Alberto Villar [who was also a joint founder of
the AAA], to investigate ways of working together to wipe out the presence of
thousands of ‘subversive’ political exiles in Argentina. The Chilean
representative, the general of the military police, proposed that a member of
the military or police be placed in each embassy as a security agent to
coordinate operations with the police and armed forces of each country. The
meeting also decided to create “an intelligence centre where we can obtain
information on individual Marxists and exchange programmes and information
about politicians. We must be able to move freely across the frontiers between
Bolivia, Chile and Argentina and operate in all three countries without an
official warrant.” Villar promised delegates that the Argentine Federal
Police’s Foreign Affairs Department would deal swiftly with any foreigners that
the neighbouring juntas wanted eliminated.
The Violent Birth Of Operation
Condor
By August 1974, the
bodies of foreign, especially Bolivian refugees began to appear on various
Buenos Aires rubbish tips. On September 30, a bombing in Buenos Aires carried
out by a Chilean military unit led by a CIA agent [Michael Townley] killed
Chilean General Carlos Prats, [he had been the
commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, until the coup of September 1973] who
was a leader of the opposition to the dictatorship of General Pinochet.
Police and military
units and crossed borders at will to carry out covert operations. In March and
April 1975, over two dozen Uruguayans exiles were arrested in Buenos Aires by
Argentinian and Uruguayan police, who jointly interrogated them in Argentine
police stations.
In May, Paraguayan
police arrested two men representing a united underground opposition
organization. The men were Jorge Fuentes Alarcon a leading member of the
Chilean group MIR [Movement of the Revolutionary Left] and Amilcar Santucho,
from Argentina’s ERP [Peoples Revolutionary Army]. These Chilean and Argentine
guerrilla groups had joined with other organizations from Uruguay and Bolivia
to resist the region’s oppressive military regimes. Fuentes and Santucho were
on their way to Paris for an opposition meeting when captured.
The military operation
that followed the arrests involved the intelligence agencies of at least four
countries, including the US FBI. One FBI officer Robert Scherrer’s job included
maintaining intelligence liaisons with various regimes. Fuentes was
interrogated by Paraguayan and Argentine intelligence officers, as well as US
embassy officials in Buenos Aries, who then passed on information to the
Chilean secret police [Dina]. Documents indicate these combined intelligence
efforts may have led to the formal launch of Operation Condor several months
later.
Fuentes was
interrogated for four months, then turned over to the Chilean DINA. Jorge
Fuentes was last seen alive inside Chile’s most feared secret detention centre,
Villa Grimaldi, near Santiago. Other DINA victims testified years later to
human rights groups, that they saw Fuentes after he arrived from Paraguay
“badly wounded from the tortures.” They told that he was kept in a cage and was
driven insane by continuing DINA torture before disappearing.
Operation Condor’s Formal
Launch
On August 25, Colonel
Contreras, head of Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate [DINA] visited the
CIA headquarters in Washington, where he held a long secret meeting with Vernon
Walters, deputy director responsible for Latin America. The leader of the
Chilean Junta Pinochet had given Contreras wide powers destroy “the cancer of
communism” in Chile, but Contreras efforts extended far beyond Chile.
On September 25, Colonel Manuel Contreras from DINA wrote a letter
to his Paraguayan counterpart, Pastor Coronel, thanking him for his
cooperation. Contreras says, “I am sure that this mutual cooperation will
continue and increase in the accomplishment of the common objectives of both
services.”
At its meeting of
19-26 October 1975, in Montevideo, Uruguay, the CAA [Conference of American
Armies] gave the approval for a proposal prepared by Contreras for a “meeting
of national intelligence services.”
Contreras’s main
proposal was for the establishment of a continental database “similar to
Interpol database, but dealing in subversion.”
Another long letter
soon followed, Contreras invited three top Paraguayan intelligence officials to
attend a “strictly secret” meeting in Santiago with intelligence chiefs from
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay. Chile paid all expenses for this,
“First Working Meeting on National Intelligence” which took place on November
25-December 1, 1975. In his introduction Contreras described the meeting as,
“the basis of excellent coordination and improved activities of the national
security of our respective countries.”
These representatives
of the security forces forged an agreement to set up a joint “information bank”
and “task forces” to cooperate in a war to destroy the opponents of imperialism
and military rule. Thus a more organized system of units operated across
national borders, spying on, kidnapping, torturing and murdering dissidents and
other people from these countries.
Although the Condor
countries committed themselves to a war against communism, it included human
rights activists, writers, priests, trade unionists, students and others.
Judges, intellectuals and journalists who criticised torture or corruption were
seen as opponents and treated as the ideological enemy. The Argentinians outdid
all the other dictatorships in the zeal and ferocity of their annihilation
campaign.
In one of the most
gruesome cases of joint operations between the military commands of Argentina
and Chile the bodies of 119 abducted in Chile turned up in Argentina with fake
documents. The Argentine security forces had tried to pass the disappeared
victims off as Argentinians who had died in inter-faction party strife.
But Operation Condor’s
state terror extended outside Latin America, with the exiled leaders of
democratic, leftist and revolutionary groups and other political opponents of
the rightist regimes hunted wherever they took refuge and assassinated. An
“anti-subversion” network was set up in Europe based on Italian fascist
terrorist groups. On October 6, 1975, Bernardo Leighton, Chile’s former vice
president and a founding member of the Christian Democratic Party and his wife
were shot by a hit squad.
Both survived their
severe wounds, but Mrs Leighton was left paralysed.
 |
| Augustus Pinochet |
Despite this failed
killing, General Augusto Pinochet had a meeting with a
leader of the Italian rightwing groups, Stefano Delle Chiaie, who agreed to
continue to help Chile’s regime. Regular bilateral meetings of Condor and CAA
continued as usual as did death squad activities with devastating effects
during 1976. Among other high profile killings were those of an Uruguayan
senator, Zelmar Michilini, who was assassinated in June 1976. The former
left-wing military leader and former president of Bolivia, Juan Torres was also
shot dead in Argentina. On June 8, in a friendly meeting in Santiago, Chile,
Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, in the Nixon and Ford administrations
told General Pinochet “that the people of the United States are wholeheartedly
behind you, and wish you every success.”
That same year the
most well known action of Condor was carried out in Washington. Orlando Letelier, the minister of defence and foreign
affairs in the elected government of Allende of Chile, had escaped to the US,
and was carrying out a campaign to isolate the Pinochet dictatorship. On
September 21, Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffet [25] were killed when
a bomb ripped the car they were travelling in apart. This was a major Condor
blunder. Such actions and the scale of repression made the existence of Condor
difficult to continue to hide.
The newly elected US
president Jimmy Carter had made human
rights part of his election platform. He was not prepared to countenance Condor-style
operations, especially in the US. And he did not want the sort of exposure that
pointed towards the involvement the US intelligence agencies in such
activities. Some US investigators were determined to identify those
responsible.
The trail led
eventually to Michael Vernon Townley, a US citizen and former CIA agent, with
ties to the fascist Chilean group Patria y Libertad, who organised the murders.
Townley left the US and returned to Chile after the 1973, CIA-backed coup. With
his skills as an electronics and bugging expert he joined the Chilean secret
police, DINA. The Chilean regime was forced to extradite him to the US in 1978.
In return for informing on his Cuban exile accomplices and naming DINA
commander Colonel Manuel Contreras as the man who ordered the killings, Townley
was given a reduced sentence. Later Townley was given a new identity by the US
government under its Witness Protection Program. A number of countries have
since expressed an interest in speaking to Townley, but the US has resisted
these overtures.
A More Discreet Condor
Continues Its Crimes
The FBI’s chief
officer in Argentina filed a special report on Phase Three of Operation Condor,
the policy of international “targeted assassinations” only to have extracts
find they’re way into the US press. This resulted in a US Congressional
Committee of inquiry was established. The Chileans responded by sacking
Contreras and disbanding Dina [only to replace it by another secret police
organization]. It is believed that the Carter administration forced the member
countries to closure down Condor, as part of the US’s new strategy of promoting
the re-establishment of democracy in Latin America. Leaks exposing the
existence of Condor were embarrassing and to some it had outlived its usefulness.
Representatives of all
the Condor states met in Buenos Aires between 13-15, December 1976 to discuss
the future direction. The Argentinians, with the support of Paraguay, pushed
for a more guarded and secure way for continuing their campaign. The meeting
decided to work more closely with the Latin American Anti-Communist Federation
[CAL].
CAL held its third
meeting in Asuncion, Paraguay, in March 1977. All the top leadership of the
dictatorships, including the Argentine President, General Videla and General
Leigh, a member of the Chilean junta attended it. Also present were a variety
of Latin American torturers and death squad members. The spread of leftist
social and political movements in Central America and the rise of radical ideas
inside sections of the Catholic Church alarmed them. A plan put forward by the
Bolivians, named after the Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, was adopted.
Its purpose was to
“eradicate” the supporters of liberation theology in the church. Under this
plan, hundreds of priests, nuns, bishops and lay members of religious
communities were murdered. It culminated in the execution of Archbishop Oscar
Romero.
The Argentinians took
charge of most of the coordination of the repression throughout Latin America.
Their soldiers, police and civilians were entrusted with death squad
operations. The Argentinians also sent several military missions to Central
America to assist the local armed forces and secret police in “anti-subversive”
efforts. In early 1979, they initiated “anti-subversive” training courses in
Buenos Aires for the military forces of allied states.
Intelligence meetings
of the various national security agencies, as well as the CAA, continued with
the assistance of the US military. In 1977, the CAA met in Managua, Nicaragua
and in Botoga, Colombia in 1979.
Operation Condor Emerges In A
New Form
In 1979, the Somoza
regime in Nicaragua was overthrown and this gave renewed encouragement to the
other dictatorships to work together to standardise their regional operations.
General Mason, of Argentina chaired CAL’s fourth meeting in September 1980; the
meeting favoured the adoption the brutally efficient Argentine model throughout
Latin America.
From April 1980,
Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil were pursuing the formation of
an “international anti-terrorist organisation”, Condor in a new form.
Meanwhile CAL was
coordinating the massacres carried out by the death squads and security forces
in Central America. The Agremil files continued to circulate among the general
staff of Condor, resulting in the organizing of cross border arrests, exchanges
of prisoners and international torture and killing squads.
Following the election
of the Republican president Ronald Reagan in
1981, the next CAA meeting was held in Washington. The victory of the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua gave fresh impetus to the anti-subversion efforts of
the dictatorships. On December 1, 1981 the US administration released $19
million to fund the training of an initial contingent of 500 Contras
[Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries] by Argentine army officers.
The representatives
renewed their agreements on exchange of information about “terrorists” and
decided to set up a permanent CAA headquarters in Santiago.
The End Of Operation Condor
In 1985, the Argentine
dictatorship gave up power, in the wake of a military defeat and popular
discontent. Chile and Paraguay were left to fight the “anti-terrorist” war. As
covert US intervention increased in Nicaragua and the rest of Central America
the Reagan administration entrusted more of it’s secret war to the CIA, CAL and
the private sector agencies. As the last of the military regimes collapsed and
more democratic governments returned to the region, so finally Operation Condor
had outlived its usefulness and ceased to function. Its existence and brutal
atrocities were by now hard to hide.
Uncovering Condors Secrets
In 1993, a Paraguayan
ex-political prisoner acting on a tip-off took a judge who was investigating
human rights cases to a police station in Asuncion and there they discovered a
vast cache of documents of police terror. These uncensored files, known as the
“archives of terror” show the inner workings of the Paraguayan political police
and state terror network, Operation Condor.
They also document the
presence of Nazis in the southern cone of South America and their activities in
Condor. According to estimates there are between 500,000 to 700,000 individual
pages of documents and photos.
The release of the
secret files, along with the release of documents under freedom of information,
[with limitations as CIA files are exempt from declassification] in the US and
new assertive judicial investigations are shedding fresh light on Latin
Americas worst era of political repression.
This information is
helping to pull together a more complete picture of Condor and the role of US
agencies, as well as aiding the judicial investigations of US, Spanish,
Brazilian, Argentine and others in uncovering human rights crimes against their
citizens. For instance the case of the Swiss-Chilean student Alexei Jaccard,
who was abducted off the streets of Buenos Aires in May 1977. He was taken to
the infamous torture centre at the Navy School of Mechanics, from which he then
“disappeared”.
These documents are
also of benefit to long grieving relatives seeking knowledge of missing family.
Among others the widow of Paraguayan, Federico Tatter, who because of his
opposition to the dictatorship of General Stroessner fled to Argentina in 1963
and was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1976. His wife obtained photographs from
human rights groups showing him as a prisoner of Paraguayan police.
The Role Of The United States
“Operation Condor” is
the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data
concerning socalled “leftists,” communists and Marxists, which was recently
established between cooperating intelligence services in South America in order
to eliminate Marxist terrorist activities in the area. In addition, “Operation
Condor” provides for joint operations against terrorist targets in member
countries…A third and most secret phase of Operation Condor involves the
formation of special teams from member countries who travel anywhere in the
world to non-member countries to carry out sanctions up to assassination
against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organizations.” This September
28, 1976 cable marked “secret foreign political matters” and with lines deleted
is from the FBI’s legal attache` in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer. For a long
time it was the only released document that mentions Condor, the Pentagon’s
Defence Intelligence Agency recently declassified a more complete version of
the above information. Also other material has come to light about the US role.
The declassification
of long-secret files is confirming US government agencies more actively
cooperated with the Condor regimes repressive activities than had previously
been acknowledged. These files confirm the US not only knew about Condor but
aided and facilitated Condor operations as a matter of secret and routine
policy. In 2001, Prof. J. P. Mc Sherry of Long Island University who has
written articles on Condor discovered a document that she described as “another
piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that US military and
intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret
partner or sponsor.”
The State Department
cable dated October 13, 1978 is from US Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White, to Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance.
“ On October 11, I
called on chief of staff General Alejandro Fretes Davalos… he read me the
…minutes resulting from the visit of General Orozco, chief of Chilean
intelligence to Asuncion…The document is basically an agreement to coordinate
all intelligence resources in order to control and eliminate subversion…They
keep in touch with one another through a US communications installation in the
Panama Canal Zone Which covers all Latin America. This US communications
facility is used by student officers to call home…but it is also employed to
coordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries. They
maintain the confidentiality of their communication through the US facility in
Panama by using bilateral codes… obviously this is the Condor network which all
of us have heard about over the last few years.”
In a final comment
White makes a recommendation,
“The two FBI agents
here tell me there is likelihood Condor will surface during Letelier trial in
the US. If General Fretes Davalos is accurate in describing the communications
it uses as an encrypted system within the US communications net… it would seem
advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in the
US interest.”
With Latin American
officers using American facilities to transmit intelligence, this would have
clearly provided US officials with the opportunity to closely monitor Condor
activities and know exactly what operations were undertaken. Peter Kornbluh, a
senior analyst at the National Security Archive, said the cable implied
“foreknowledge, cooperation and total access to the plans and operations of
Condor. The degree to which the USA knew about and supported these operations
has remained secret until now, the layers of the onion are peeling away here,”
he said.
“This document opens a
pandora’s box of questions on the US knowledge of and role in Operation
Condor,” said Peter Kornbluh.
Former Ambassador
White, who now runs the Center for International Policy, a research
organization said in a recent interview that he received no response to his
message to Secretary Vance. “What it suggests to me is that people in the US
government really actively worked not to have this knowledge, this evidence, in
play.”
The Panama base
mentioned above houses the headquarters of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM),
the US Special Forces, the Army School of the America’s (SOA), among other
facilities. Tens of thousands of Latin American officers were trained at the
SOA, which used torture manuals released by the Pentagon and the CIA. American
officers trained there have confirmed that the base is the centre of the
hemispheric rightwing alliance. A military graduate of the School said, “The
school was always a front for other special operations, covert operations.” An
Argentine navy officer whose unit was organized into “kidnap commandos” (or
“task forces”) in 1972, said that the repression was part of “a plan that
responded to the Doctrine of National Security that had as its base the School
of the Americas, directed by the Pentagon in Panama.”
An Uruguayan officer
who admitted working for the CIA in the 1970s said that the CIA not only knew
of Condor operations, but also supervised them.
Another amazing piece
of recently released information is the admission by the CIA in September 2000,
that DINA chief Manuael Contreras was a CIA “asset” between 1974 and 1977, and
that he had received a large unspecified payment for his services. During this
period Contreras was known as “Condor One,” the leading organiser and champion
of Operation Condor. The CIA did not divulge this information in 1978, when a
US Federal Grand Jury indicted Contreras for his role in the Letelier-Moffitt
assassinations. Contreras was sentenced to a prison term in Chile after the
fall of the military junta for this crime. He was also convicted in absentia in
Italy for the Leighton assassination attempt. The CIA says that it only asked
Contreras about Condor after the assassinations of Letelier and Moffitt in
1976. This is hardly credible, when one considers that Condor informed the CIA
of previous assassination plans. As well the CIA helped organise and train the
DINA in 1974 and retained the services of Contreras as an asset for a year
after the Letelier and Moffitt murders. The CIA destroyed the files on
Contreras in 1991.
In other known cases
of US agencies collaboration with Condor according to declassified US Defence
Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports, the CIA had played a key role in setting up
the computerized links (Condortel) to coordinate the intelligence and
operations units of the Condor states.
The USA, Condor Crimes and
Conclusions
Declassified US
documents make clear that US security officers saw Condor as a legitimate
“counterterror” organization. One 1976 DIA report stated “ that one Condor team
was structured like a US Special Team” and described Condor’s “joint
counterinsurgency operations.” In this report it was noted that Latin American
military officers bragged about their Condor activities to their US
counterparts and among each other. Numerous other CIA, DIA, and State
Department documents refer to Condor as a countersubversive organization and
some describe its assassination role in a matter-of-fact way.
The documentary record
is still fragmented and many files continue to be classified as secret, but we
know that security forces in Latin America classified and targeted people for
torture and murder on the basis of their political ideology (or even perceived
ideology) rather than illegal acts.
These military regimes
hunted down dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and
nuns, intellectuals, students and teachers and other people not just guerrillas
(who, under international law are also entitled to due legal process). These
illegal military regimes defied international law and traditions of political
sanctuary to carry out their ferocious state terror and destroy democratic
opposition forces.
US training, doctrine,
organizational models, technology transfers, weapons sales, finance, military
aid and ideological attitudes profoundly shaped the security forces of the
region. Viewed in this context, US national security strategists and their
counterparts in Latin America regarded large sections of the society as
potentially subversive. They adopted the Cold War National Security Doctrine, a
political doctrine of internal war and counterrevolution that targeted
“internal enemies.” During these years the military in one country after
another ousted their civilian governments in a series of US-backed coups, even
in such long standing democracies as Chile and Uruguay and installed repressive
totalitarian regimes.
The new documentary
evidence shows something of the USA’s central role in financing, training and
collaborating with institutions that carried out torture, assassinations and
coups in the name of national security. The CIA denies that it provided
information to governments that would have resulted in people being killed. But
the past history of the CIA as well as recent evidence show that this can’t be
believed. The CIA aided these regimes because they were anti-socialist allies,
and the ends were assumed to justify the means, resulting in appalling
atrocities.
There is still a lot
we don’t know. With only a couple of exceptions, those that kidnapped, tortured
and killed have not been tried. The US National Security Archive has called on
the US government and the intelligence community, the NSA, CIA, DIA and others
to fully divulge their files on Condor. Hopefully with the continued pressure
of lawyers and human rights activists we will get further information that will
expose assistance to Condor and provide some truth and accountability of the US
role in the Latin American repression.
War criminals like
former generals Pinochet of Chile and Jorge Videla of
Argentina and others must be tried for their human rights crimes. And it is
evident that other leading figures in the US political, military and
intelligence establishment like George Bush, Henry Kissinger,
Richard Helms, Cyrus Vance belong in the same dock as the dictators.
In Latin America
fragile civilian governments are struggling with the effects of decades of
state terror excesses and control their still powerful military/security
organizations. And while institutionalised torture and executions are not as
widespread it has not ceased. In May 2000, the Committee on Hemispheric
Security of the Organization of American States (OAS) reviewed 10 years of
anti-subversion cooperation in Latin America. Many of the Latin American states
have concluded new intelligence agreements among themselves and with the US
aimed at greater cooperation against “terrorism.”
The Conference of
American Armies (CAA) still meets regularly (in Argentina in 1995 and Ecuador
in 1997). A military conference on intelligence services organized by the
Bolivian Army was also held in March 1999 and attended by the USA, Argentina,
Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuala. These meetings and
agreements confirm the continuing role of the Latin American armed forces in
social control when faced with serious domestic opposition for social change.
With US agencies
unwilling to reject security doctrines that rationalise violations of human
rights as a legitimate means to an end and security in the Americas so
important to the US, the USA’s public espousal of rights and freedoms does not
mean democracy and human rights have priority.
It would not take much
for another form of Operation Condor to rise again if the interests of the USA
and its allies were challenged.
And so the continental
scale covert extermination campaign that was Condor vanished from Latin America
leaving an estimated toll of 35,000 people dead (more than 10,000 of them in
Argentina) and leaving their grieving families still trying to learn what had
happened to their disappeared love ones. And while Condor was proceeding, the
rightist military regimes in each of these Latin American countries were
carrying out mass murders of citizens that resulted in the deaths and disappearances of an estimated 350,000 people and
the imprisonment and torture of hundreds of thousands of others. Millions of
people also became exiles and political refugees.
“…our people want
Pinochet brought to trial for the crimes he committed against humankind. Crimes
that should never be forgotten, because that’s the first step towards forgiveness
and oblivion. We do not have the right to forget or forgive; it would be an
insult to every raped victim, to every person thrown into rivers or the ocean,
it would be an insult to all those who were savagely tortured and then murdered
by the military under general Pinochet’s command.”
Tito Tricot is a
Sociologist and Director of Center For Intercultural Studies (ILWEN) in
Santiago, Chile.
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