Condor Death Squads + US

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

{My comments must come as an endnote to this extraordinary report}: 

Latin Death Squads and U.S.: A New Disclosure

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
 New York Times, October 23, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/23/international/americas/23COND.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 - The day before Chilean agents assassinated Orlando
Letelier, Chile's former foreign minister, with a car bomb here in 1976,
a senior State Department official canceled an order that United States
ambassadors approach South American dictators about ending their use of
death squads abroad, according to United States government documents.

While the assassination plot was well advanced and unlikely to have been
aborted through last-minute diplomatic efforts, the cancellation
underscored the ambivalence of United States policy makers toward
confronting Latin America's military governments over their disregard
for human rights.

The murders of Mr. Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, an American colleague in
Mr. Letelier's car when it exploded on Sept. 21, 1976, were the work of
Operation Condor, a secret arrangement by right-wing military
governments in Latin America to share intelligence and manpower with the
aim of arresting and intimidating political opponents. Its members
included Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia. In the
spring of 1976, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile began murdering opposition
figures abroad.

"The opportunity to have prevented this was there, and it was never
taken," said Peter Kornbluh, author of a forthcoming book on United
States relations with Augusto Pinochet's military government in Chile,
"The Pinochet File." A swift and forceful United States response in late
July, when American policy makers first learned of the death squads, he
said, "could have stopped this thing in its tracks."

Mr. Kornbluh obtained the State Department document, dated Sept. 20,
with John Dinges, who is writing a book called "The Condor Years." The
authors, whose books are to be published by The New Press, wrote about
the decision to rescind the order in a recent essay in The Washington
Post. 

In July 1976, the Central Intelligence Agency briefed State Department
officials on Operation Condor, newly discovered documents show. On Aug.
23, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger ordered United States
ambassadors to relay Washington's "deep concern" over Condor in direct
contacts with the generals.

But none of the documents released so far, Mr. Kornbluh said, show that
any ambassadors approached Latin heads of state before the order was
canceled on Sept. 20 by the senior State Department official in charge
of Latin America, Harry W. Shlaudeman. In canceling the order, Mr.
Shlaudeman said there had been no signs in the previous few weeks of any
Condor activities. Eighteen hours later, Mr. Letelier's car exploded on
Embassy Row here.

Mr. Shlaudeman, now retired, said in a telephone interview that he did
not believe that he could have prevented the assassinations had he not
called off the Kissinger order. "The bomb was already under the car by
the time my cable went out," Mr. Shlaudeman said.

In recent years, United States government agencies, under an order
signed by President Clinton, have released thousands of documents on
American relations with the dictatorships it supported in Latin America. 

According to the documents, the revelation by intelligence officials
that United States-backed dictators had embarked on a scheme to
eliminate opposition set off internal debate among senior diplomats
through the summer of 1976.

The order to approach the foreign leaders, for example, troubled the
American ambassador to Chile, David Popper, who responded that raising
the issue was sure to upset General Pinochet. He suggested, instead, a
lower-level approach to Manuel Contreras, the head of Chile's secret
service.

In their discussions, American officials acknowledged that Latin
intelligence services cast their net extremely wide. "They are joining
forces to eradicate `subversion,' " Mr. Shlaudeman reported on Aug. 3,
"a word which increasingly translates into nonviolent dissent from the
left and center left."

He reported that the generals had convinced themselves that Latin
America would be the setting for a " `Third World War,' with countries
of the southern cone as the last bastion of Christian civilization."

As those discussions were unfolding in Washington, senior Paraguayan
officials approached the American ambassador in Asunción, George Landau,
and pressed him to issue visas to two men holding what appeared to be
false passports. They told Mr. Landau they were traveling to Washington
and would meet with Vernon A. Walters, the director of central
intelligence.

Mr. Landau gave them the visas, but photocopied their passports and sent
them to Washington, with inquiries to the C.I.A., which said it had no
knowledge of any meeting with the men. The two entered the United States
on Chilean passports.

The pictures, it later turned out, belonged to Michael Townley and
Armando Fernández , the two Chilean agents eventually convicted of
assassinating Mr. Letelier and Ms. Moffitt.

My comments:
Harry W. Shlaudeman was a high-ranking, carreer diplomat in the US State
Department before, during and after Henry Kissinger's tenure at the
heights of US power in the 1970s. As such, his life's work shows the
continuity of a certain strain in US foreign policy that seems to go on
through the regimes of either capitalist party, and therefore seems
indicative of intrinsic imperialist characteristics that contradicts any
attempts at dissimulation.
Harry W. Shlaudeman: Colombia 1956-1958, Bulgaria 1959-1962, Dominican
Republic 1962-1965, Chile 1969-1973, Venezuela 1978-1980, Peru 1980,
Nicaragua 1990-1992 (source: Namebase).
In 1990 Shlaudeman was appointed ambassador to the new post-Sandinista
government of Violetta Chamoro in Nicaragua. He also "played an
important role in the reinforcement or reimposition of U.S. hegemony in
the Dominican Republic in the 1960s and Chile in the early 1970s (Thomas
W. Walker, Nicaragua: The Land of Sandino, 3d ed., (San Francisco:
Westview Press, 1991):170)." Shlaudeman said, "Force works," and added,
"Before you try to win hearts and minds, first you have to kill off the
communist leaders (Nicaraguan Network (D.C.) Monitor, June 1990)." On
December 11, 1992, U.S. President George H. Bush gave his nation's
highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, to diplomat Harry
Shlaudeman (Bloomington, Indiana, Herald-Times, 12 Dec., 1992). This is
but one more indication of the democractic aims of U.S. imperialist
policy: so as to win the hearts and minds of all, some must be blown
away.  At any rate, in the context of his opinions Shlaudeman's reason
for his cancellation of Kissinger's Condor order appears less than fully
candid.

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