Natl. Security Archive releases newly declassified Operation Condor documents

Washington, D.C., February 22, 2008 - Declassified U.S. documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) show that the U.S. government had detailed knowledge of collaboration between the Peruvian, Bolivian and Argentine secret police forces to kidnap, torture and "permanently disappear" three militants in a Cold War rendition operation in Lima in June 1980—but took insufficient action to save the victims.

The Archive's documents are part of a sweeping Italian investigation of Condor that has issued arrest warrants for 140 former top officials from seven South American countries and, in the words of today's New York Times, has "agitated political establishments up and down the continent."

The documents address what has become known as "the case of the missing Montoneros," a covert operation by a death squad unit of Argentina's feared Battalion 601 to kidnap three members of a militant group living in Lima, Peru, on June 12, 1980, and render them through Bolivia back to Argentina. (A fourth member, previously captured, was brought to Lima to identify his colleagues and then disappeared with them.) "The present situation is that the four Argentines will be held in Peru and then expelled to Bolivia where they will be expelled to Argentina," a U.S. official reported from Buenos Aires four days after Esther Gianetti de Molfino, María Inés Raverta and Julio César Ramírez were kidnapped in broad daylight in downtown Lima. "Once in Argentina they will be interrogated and then permanently disappeared."

The case was first detailed at length in The Condor Years, a book by National Security Archive board member John Dinges. In his own book, The Pinochet File, Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh identified the Montonero operation as "one of the last recorded cases of a Condor operation." Condor was founded in November 1975, in Santiago, Chile, by the Pinochet regime, which became known as "Condor One." Operation Condor became infamous for terrorist activities after Chilean agents, in collaboration with Paraguay, planted a bomb under the car of former ambassador Orlando Letelier in September 1976, killing him and his colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington D.C...http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB244/index.htm
*

for being so stupid as to talk all about their rendition plans over cell phones. Mean and dumb. Scary combo and nothing has changed to this day. They believed in death squads then, they believe in them now. Permanently disappearing someone means murdering them today and it meant that fifty years ago, even before a school to train death squads was ever thought about.