#LatinAmerica #history #counterinsugensy #cupdetat #CondorOp #coldwar #70s #80s

Preface

I WAS A VICTIM OF OPERATION CONDOR and the one who discovered its secret archives in Asunción, Paraguay, in December 1992.
During the night of November 29, 1974, I was abducted by the political police of the dictator Afredo Stroessner and taken directly before a military tribunal in Paraguay made up of the military attachés of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay, also with the presence of Paraguayan civil and military authorities.
A Chilean officer questioned me about my supposed link with Chilean university people because I had taken a course in the sociology of education at Catholic University. The police chief of the province of Córdoba, Argentina, wanted to know of my links to the “subversives” of the University of La Plata, where I had graduated with a doctorate in the science of education.
The interrogation lasted thirty days, with terrible tortures. Finally, they categorized my crime as “intellectual terrorism”: for the so-called subversive content of my doctoral thesis; for having promoted the campaign “A Roof of Your Own” for each Paraguayan educator in my capacity as a unionist fighting in the national teachers association; and for having put into practice the methods of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the Juan B. Alberdi Institute, where I was director.
My wife, the educator Celestina Pérez, died as a consequence of the psychological tortures to which she was subjected, being forced to listen on the telephone, systematically for ten days, to my cries and screams from the torture chamber. On the tenth day, at midnight, she received a call announcing my death, with someone asking her “to come to retrieve the cadaver of the subversive educator.” The call provoked a heart attack, and she died of pain.
I was transferred among various police stations for “bad conduct,” eventually ending up at the concentration camp called Emboscada. In Police Station No. 1, the headquarters of INTERPOL, I learned of the existence of Operation Condor for the first time, seven months before the intelligence conference promoted by the Chileans Augusto Pinochet and Manuel Contreras in Santiago in November 1975. My informant was a police officer who was imprisoned with us for not having denounced his son, also a student at the University of La Plata, who had been a member of the rebellious Centro de Estudiantes (Student Center). This policeman became aware of Plan Condor because he worked in the telecommunications office of the police.
In my prison in Police Station No. 3, “Tomb of the Living,” I shared a cell with the Argentine Amilcar Latino Santucho, who told me that he and Jorge Fuentes Alarcón, a Chilean leader of MIR (Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria, Movement of the Revolutionary Left of Chile) also had been taken before a military tribunal composed of military attachés of the Southern Cone countries of South America.
In September 1976, I was transferred to the concentration camp Emboscada, where I met the Paraguayan doctor Gladys M. De Sannemann, who told me that she was a victim of Operation Condor. She was abducted by the Paraguayan police in Argentine territory, in Misiones, Posadas.
After completing three years of prison I began a hunger strike, which lasted for thirty days, and thanks to the urgent action campaign by Amnesty International, I recovered my freedom in September 1977.
I went into exile in Panama. There, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, contracted me to be a consultant of UNESCO for Latin America, a position I held from 1978 to 1992.
For almost fifteen years, I carried out an investigative project on Operation Condor, based on the testimonies of my prison companions and on the Revista Policial Paraguaya (Paraguayan Police Magazine).
For these reasons, I value the research investigation on Operation Condor, Predatory States, realized by J. Patrice McSherry. She presents the U.S. and Latin American scenario in which this criminal pact developed and shows us how the Southern Cone countries were strongly politicized, with the rise of social mobilization after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. Professor McSherry also portrays the energetic response of the United States via the Pentagon, the CIA, and other security agencies, especially under the charge of National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “No more Cubas” was the official policy underlying Washington’s unconditional support for the military coup against the constitutional government of Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973.
This book is a serious historical work with abundant documentation.
Professor McSherry shows us the dynamics of Operation Condor, with the interchange of intelligence information among the member states, the targeting of the “subversive” or “terrorist” element, and the torture, execution, or transfer of the subversives to any other signatory country. She also sheds light on the consequences of U.S. military intervention in the region: the era of state terrorism; the reduction of spaces for democratic participation; the physical elimination of militants and leaders of revolutionary movements; the control of civil society; and the disarticulation of political society.
Using documents declassified by the U.S. State Department, the author points out that U.S. officials regarded Operation Condor as a legitimate counterinsurgency organization. She shows that the state terrorists of Condor counted on Washington for technical assistance in torture, for financing, and even for a system of telecommunications.
Thanks to this important work of historical investigation, we learn of the magnitude of the violations of human rights committed in this epoch against Latin American societies that had aspirations for freedom. Another important element of Professor McSherry’s analysis is the contribution of French military officers, based on their counter-revolutionary experience in Algeria as well as Vietnam, to the training of U.S. soldiers in torture and other grave violations of human rights. This occurred under the administration of President John F. Kennedy.
Shortly before the publication of Predatory States, Paraguay established, through a law passed by Congress (Law 2225 of 2004), the Commission of Truth and Justice, to investigate enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture and other serious abuses, involuntary exile, and other grave violations of human rights. I am sure that Professor McSherry’s work will bring valuable clues to the Commission of Truth and Justice for the clarification of so many crimes against humanity.
Recovering the past is a significant undertaking, indispensable for countering the impunity that continues to reign and for ensuring that justice is made effective in the face of the appalling violations of human rights committed in the decade of the 1970s. The importance of not forgetting what happened has nothing to do with a thirst for revenge. On the contrary, the act of remembering serves the need to keep historical memory alive and allows us to analyze, with some distance, how an organized and deliberate plan existed to do the greatest possible harm to defenseless Latin American societies. In fact, Professor McSherry demonstrates that there was such a plan, systematic, organized, and planned in order to prepare the ground for the critical economic and political situation in which we find ourselves today, with the imposition of neoliberalism, political domination, and an unpayable external debt.
Predatory States is a genuine scientific addition to the clarification of a history that never should have befallen Latin America and an invaluable contribution to the culture of peace.

Martín Almada
The Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) Laureate,
2002 Asunción, Paraguay, 2004