Prosecutors in Italy have issued arrest warrants for 140 people who participated in the South American dictatorships coordinated repression of the seventies, which was known as Operation Condor.
The list includes the former Argentine dictator General Jorge Videla, former head of the Argentine Navy Admiral Emilio Massera and former Uruguayan president Juan María Bordaberry.
Of the long list some have died such as Chile’s notorious Augusto Pinochet and one of them Captain Jorge Fernandez Troccoli from the Uruguayan Navy intelligence services was arrested in Salerno, where he was retired, reported the Italian press.
Troccoli is accused of the disappearance of four people and will be transferred to Rome to face questioning on December 27.
Under Operation Condor, six governments (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) worked together from the 1970s to hunt down and kill left-wing opponents. Italian authorities have been looking into the plot since the late 1990s.
The investigation followed complaints by relatives of South American citizens of Italian origin who had disappeared. Judge Luisann Figliola issued the arrest warrants on Monday, following a request from state prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo.
Those named face charges ranging from lesser crimes to kidnappings and multiple murders. Under Operation Condor the military governments agreed to co-operate in sending teams into other countries to track, monitor and kill their political opponents.
As a result, many left-wing opponents of military regimes in the region who had fled to neighboring countries found themselves hunted down in exile. The Italian Justice is expected to begin in the coming days procedures for the extradition of those people in the list, according to the Italian press.
The list of suspects allegedly includes 61 from Argentina; 32 from Uruguay; 22 from Chile; 13 from Brazil; 7 from Bolivia; 7 from Paraguay and 5 from Peru.
Peter Popham on The Independent adds these details to the story today:
...Among the thousands of deaths of which they are accused is the assassination of Orlando Leletier, a former minister in Salvador Allende's Chilean government, in a 1976 car bomb in Washington....
...The plot between the six countries, details of which have emerged only slowly since the collapse of the military regimes, is said to have been cooked up in Santiago in 1975 when leaders of the military intelligence services from each of the countries met to co-ordinate their extra-legal efforts to wipe out their Marxist and socialist opponents. It was a bid to systematise efforts already under way to bolster and cement in power right-wingers whose first success had been the overthrow and murder of Allende, the first Communist to be elected head of state of a western country, by Pinochet in 1973.
Like the Chilean coup d'etat that preceded it, Operation Condor enjoyed at least the tacit support of the US. The enemies were ostensibly armed left-wing guerrillas, but in fact a wide range of opponents were "disappeared", ranging from activists and trade unionists to intellectuals and artists, often with their families. At least 30,000 people are believed to have been eliminated in the Argentinian Dirty War alone.
Operation Condor was wound up in 1983 after the collapse of the Argentine military junta....
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