24 former officers linked to Plan Condor convicted in Italy
An appeals court in Rome convicted 24 former South American officers for their roles in at least 43 deaths of Italian nationals in the 1970s CIA-sponsored anti-subversive campaign known as 'Plan Cóndor'.
The convictions cap a 20-year legal effort that began with an investigation launched into Plan Cóndor-associated Italian deaths by prosecutors in Rome in 1999.
Arrest warrants were issued for 146 individuals in 2006. But due to a lack of cooperation from most of the South American nations involved, only one - former Uruguayan Navy Intelligence head Jorge Troccoli - was ultimately arrested.
Troccoli, 70, had emigrated to Italy, and was arrested in Salerno in 2007. Of the 24 defendants from Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, he was the only one present at the trial.
He had been acquitted of all charges by a local Roman court in 2017; but was convicted in today's appeals court ruling. Extradition requests have been filed against the others.
Cóndor then and now
Plan Cóndor, formally established in November 1975 as a secret pact between the military intelligence heads of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, led, according to Paraguayan military documents, to the deaths of at least 50,000 dissidents over the next decade.
Through numerous Italian operatives, Cóndor was closely linked to the NATO-sponsored Operation Gladio, which sought to foment a "strategy of tension" in Italy during the 1970s as a means of undermining communist support there.
To many political observers in South America, Cóndor has a direct parallel to the recent wave of often unfounded charges against former officials in many of the center-left administrations that governed the region from 2003 to 2016.
These include those against former Argentine President Cristina Kirchner, who was revealed in February to be the main target of a wide-reaching, Argentine Intelligence-run extortion and coercion scheme against contractors and her former officials. And that of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who remains in prison despite a lack of proof and despite recently-published recordings showing a coordinated, politically-motivated prosecution against him.
Both countries are now governed by hard-right - and unpopular - presidents who've expressed their desire to see Kirchner and da Silva in prison, and who work closely with the magistrates involved in their cases.
"I must say, for those who do not know, that Operation Condor never ended," Argentine exile Julio Frondizi, whose father, Professor Silvio Frondizi, was murdered by the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (which carried out the first stage of that country's Dirty War) in 1974.
"It goes on."
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=wT&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pagina12.com.ar%2F205121-condenan-a-perpetua-a-24-represores-sudamericanos-en-italia-
Former Uruguayan Navy Intelligence head Jorge Troccoli (left) during his trial in Rome.
Troccoli was one of 24 former South American dictatorship officials convicted in today's ruling. But due to lack a lack of cooperation from most of the countries involved, the other 23 remain at large.
