>from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Cuba: Latin American Dictatorships
> (from Article in Tricontinental Magazine�No.142, Year 1999)
>
>-- Latin American Dictatorships --
> "Transnational Terror"
> By Marina Menendez Quintero
>
>Histories merge together, the life and death of tens of thousands
>of Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans, and Paraguayans... Latin
>Americans trapped in a kind of shadowy spider web marked by long
>sessions of horror
>
>Almost two decades after the silent massacre carried out by
>the dictatorships on the pretext of stamping out communism, the past
>returns, or rather, it is revealed in all its cruelty because ... it
>has always been present.
>
> It is estimated that 10% of the adult population of Chile was victim
>of torture during the years of the dictatorship, and others were
>assassinated. The official figures say that in 17 years 4000 people
>were officially �disappeared�, a million left the country fearing
>repression, hundreds of thousands were held in secret prisons or
>repression camps, hundreds were taken from their places of work,
>exile, or executed after very brief trials or court-martials. (From
>Latin American Review No.38)
>
> The laws forged by the new democracies of the 80s favored the
>impunity of the guilty in the eyes of the law, but had the opposite
>effect on the people. Far from bringing about forgetfulness, the
>pardon issued to those who had waged genocide kept alive the
>rejection by survivors of torture and panic. The laws validated their
>demands for justice and the need to know the truth.
>
> The detention of Augusto Pinochet in Great Britain stirred
>these feelings, explicit in many, hidden in so many others who had
>come out alive but scarred by the terror, or even worse, manipulated
>in the guise of the struggle against subversion with which the
>assassins had covered up their crimes.
>
> As this edition goes to press we still do not know even if the
>Chilean ex-general will be extradited from England to Spain. Still
>less, there fore, can we foresee whether he will finally undergo any
>punishment for the crimes of torture or conspiring to commit torture
>which have been committed since November 1988.
>
> This is the date to which the House of Lords is limited, due to the
>fact that it was then that Great Britain signed the Convention
>against Torture. The ex-dictator is presently being held in Great
>Britain, where he lives in luxury.
>
> The legal proceedings that have been initiated so far could be held
>up for years. But analysts agree that the case against him argued by
>the Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, has already achieved something
>important: it has mobilized public opinion, defeated the fear of so
>many years and removed the mask of lies for those who were deceived.
>
>-- OPERATION CONDOR --
>
>The seven months of legal proceedings against Pinochet have not only
>served to polarize Chilean society, in the country and within the
>exile community. It has re-opened the huge abyss people tried to
>close after the Pinochet dictatorship, that separates those who love
>"My General. " and those who cannot forgive him.
>
> The scores of new cases presented by Garzon to consolidate his
>arguments have provided more links in the chain that connected the
>Latin American dictators in a sinister extermination plan.
> The military kept files on "suspects" and passed these names from
>one country to another. Officers traveled from on country to another
>to carry out the interrogation and torture.
>
> Operation Condor, we now know, was a system of international terror
>with Augusto Pinochet as the craftsman, the brains, and the promoter.
>This is what Gladys Marin, secretary of the Chilean Communist Party
>affirms in her book �Return to Hope". �Defeat of Operation Condor",
>first published in Buenos Aires and later in Santiago.
>
> According to the communist leader, Pinochet and the ex-chief of the
>Chilean DINA, Manuel Contreras, were the most important leaders in
>the plan involving 120 agents of other nationalities, whose labor led
>to, she says, 119 deaths.
>
> Among the ringleaders she names are 40 Argentines, 38 Chileans,
>14 Bolivians, 13 Uruguayans, four Paraguayans and six Italians.
>Attorney Martin Almada, himself a victim of Operation Condor when he
>was a teacher in the suburbs of Asuncion, Paraguay, believes that
>there are official documents that testify to the participation of
>around 46 thousand Latin Americans of various ranks in the hunt.
>But, he assures us; unofficially this figure could be doubled.
>
> Almada, the president of the American Association of Jurists (AAJ)
>agrees with Gladys Marin in naming Pinochet as the main instigator of
>Operation Condor, although Paraguayan ex-dictator Alfredo Stroessner
>closely collaborated in the execution of the plan. Almada has custody
>of the so-called Terror Files, five tons of paper and ten thousand
>photographs that make up the secret police documentation, discovered
>in Asuncion in 1992, after many years of searching and with
>the collaboration of an informant "whose name will never be given to
>the press".
>
> In these bundles of paper he found documents which proved the links
>between Pinochet and the torture of twenty Spanish Jesuits, which he
>delivered to the Spanish judge Garzon in order to substantiate the
>case against the Chilean ex-dictator.
>
> The Paraguayan lawyer, who asked for the extradition of Stroessner
>from Brazil, affirms that Stroessner "was a confidential friend of
>Pinochet, collaborated in the overthrow of Allende and put the
>Paraguayan Foreign Office at the disposal of the Chilean dictator for
>the assassination of Allende's Foreign Minister". Furthermore, he is
>sure that Pinochet gave Stroessner the files he found 20 years later.
>
> He also accuses the Argentine ex-general Rafael Videla and Hugo
>Banzer, one-time leader of a coup d'etat and the present day Bolivian
>constitutional president, among other Latin American political and
>military figures, of implementing the Condor plan.
>
> According to Martin Almada, INTERPOL was involved as well, as was
>the CIA, which was not only responsible for providing information,
>but also for supporting the dictators.
>
>The most terrible part, Almada assures us, is that "today the Condor
>continues to fly". In statements he made to the Buenos Aires press,
>the AAJ President said that he had in his possession a document dated
>July 10, 1997, in which a Paraguayan colonel replies to his
>counterpart in Ecuador "at your request I send you the list of
>Paraguayan subversives".
>
>After his interview with Garzon in Madrid, Almada traveled to
>Barcelona, According to sources close to Almada, he proposed to visit
>various Latin American cities to build up support for his demand for
>the extradition of Stroessner and for justice to take its course.
>
>-- IN THE FLESH --
>
>The workings of the Machiavellian machinery of torture and killing
>cannot only be found in documents, although these constitute the only
>type of evidence usually valid to try cases.
> It is also proven by accounts such as that of Almada himself,
>kidnapped in Asuncion in 1974 on his arrival from university in
>Argentina. There, in La Plata, he had been noted down for his
>defense of a thesis in which he concluded that education in Paraguay
>only benefited the rich and accentuated national dependence.
>
> Upon arrival in his country, he was taken before a secret military
>tribunal where he was shown photographs of what were supposed to be
>prisons of a so-called urban guerilla group. But the most surprising
>thing was not these images, but the different accents of the Latin
>American soldiers who made up that Inquisition.
>
> It was still not the custom in Paraguay to use such torments such
>as the...electric prod, or the hangings that later characterized
>the clandestine battlefields and prisons of Argentina and Uruguay.
>However, those that were applied to him in the police station to
>which he was later transferred were sufficiently painful and
>humiliating. "They pulled out my nails and clipped my ears and
>tongue. In a month, I witnessed 1200 torture sessions there."
>
> In the Emboscada concentration camp, about 45 kilometers outside
>Asuncion, he learnt from the identity of the colonels who had beaten
>him in the police station from an imprisoned ex-policeman. They were
>Colonel Oteiza, of the Chilean Air Force, and the Argentine
>commissary, Hector Ray.
>
>In Emboscada he also found out about other modus operandi that gave
>him the idea of the existence of a network, though he still did not
>really know what was involved, or what it was called.
>
> Some people spoke to him about it. Doctor Gladys de Saneman was one
>of those who knew most about Condor among the 400 people, including
>100 women and twenty children, held in that extermination camp. A
>Paraguayan of German origin, she had been kidnapped by the Argentine
>police and sent to Asunci6n, to be returned again to the Buenos Aires
>military, or more specifically, to Alfredo Astiz, the so-called Blond
>Angel of Death.
>
> Argentines like the lawyer Amilcar Latino Santucho, the brother of
>the famous guerilla, and members of the Paraguayan Communist Party
>such as Maidana and Rojas were his companions in misfortune.
>
>Thus the Latin American military conspired. Thus they massacred.
>Thus the Transnational Terror functioned.
>
> -- NEW LINKS IN THE CHAIN... MORE LIGHT --
>
>The recent accusations made in Argentina against Eduardo Rudolfo
>Cabanillas, general of the division and commander of the second army
>group in Rosario, shed more light on the way Operation Condor worked
>in that country.
>
> This officer is accused of having commanded the secret repression
>center Automotores Orletti, in the capital of Floresta, during the
>period of the dictatorship. Both Argentine and Uruguayan thugs
>worked there.
>
>Outside it looked like any other workshop. Inside it was another
>place of death under the direction of the Tactical Operation Base 18.
>
> It was there that the grandson (or granddaughter) of the
>prestigious Argentine poet - one of the foremost accusers of
>Cabanillas - was stolen. It was there that his daughter-in-law Maria
>Claudia Itureta Goyena de Gelman was seen alive at the beginning of
>October 1976. She was then eight months pregnant, and as a member of
>the Vatican Ministry of State later informed the grandfather, the
>baby was born in captivity. Juan Gelman continues to search for his
>grandchild.
>
> Sara Mendez, an Uruguayan teacher who Buenos Aires fleeing from
>repression in her country, is also searching, She is the first woman
>to survive disappearance, and to demand the return of her baby. The
>child was 21 days old when they were kidnapped from the room in
>which they slept together. She was in bed and he in a little cradle
>which rocked when the soldiers who broke into the house began to beat
>her and torture her right there so that she would give them the name
>of the father.
>
> They were taken to Automotores Orletti, though the child was
>immediately torn from his mother's arms, There she found other
>Uruguayans and witnessed the most horrible torture, which she has not
>been able to forget, "the death by beating and drowning of a kidnap
>victim by the name of Santucho"
>
> She came out alive after five years in a prison in Purita Riales.
>Much later, when the dictatorship was over, she found our that a
>couple related by marriage to the military chief who had kidnapped
>her, Major Nino Gavazzo, of the Uruguayan Army, had adopted a child
>with the same distinguishing marks as her lost Simon, and with a
>birth date a day after his.
>
> Sara and the father, Mauricio Gatti, who had gone into exile and
>also survived, spoke to the couple, but they refused to let the boy's
>DNA be tested, The Supreme Court of Justice left the decision to the
>young man, who is now 22 years old. But for him, this story is
>rather absurd and remote. He promises that one day he will have the
>tests, but so far he has refused to have any contact with his
>possible parents.
>
> -- LESS IMPUNITY --
>
>In the midst of laws that in one country or other keep those
>responsible from condemnation and punishment, the arrest of Pinochet
>is a tiny drop of justice for his direct or indirect victims.
>
> ... A gust of fresh air that raises their spirits and makes them
>feel less impotent in the face of those they have lost.
> Together with the elderly ex-dictator, yesterday's murderers also
>have less impunity today.
>
> ******************
>
>Tricontinental Magazine�No.142, Year 1999
> "The Death of the Other Marulanda�"
> By Arturo Alape
>
>What with all the military reports, official declarations,
>misinformation campaigns and the desire to count their chickens
>before they hatch, countless now are the times the media has
>announced and confirmed the death of a Colombian guerrilla leader
>whose nom de guerre is "Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez". But this
>"Marulanda", like the legend of the man he was named after, seems to
>be indestructible. To understand his resilience, we need to know the
>story of the other Marulanda.
>
> In early December, 1950 detectives raided the offices of the
>Cundinamarca Workers Federation. In an organized inspection
>operation between 9 AM and 5 PM, they searched off ices and found
>Communist propaganda denouncing the deployment of Colombian troops in
>Korea. Shortly after taking presidential off ice, Laureano Gomez, in
>an effort to win the sympathy and economic and political support of
>the northern power USA] had signed a decree making Colombia the first
>and only Latin American country to send soldiers off to a war that
>was not her own.
>
> They arrested the other Manuel Marulanda Velez along with about
>thirty of his companeros during the raid. They led him hand-cuffed
>to the dark building on 12th and 3rd streets; it was a convent turned
>technical offices and jail for the Colombian Intelligence Service
>(SIC).
>
> The other Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez was not received intelligently by
>his captors; the greeting was savage. They pushed him back first and
>handcuffed against an ashen and damp wall that was already cracking.
>Five or six men with muscles of steel, wielding bludgeons, beat him
>in the stomach mercilessly, as if they were punching a wall or a
>bushel of corn.
>
> They beat him because the other Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez was
>shouting inflaming words to the effect that it was unjust to send
>young Colombians to Korea. They took turns beating him, their anger
>rising because they wanted to hear the other Manuel Marulanda Velez
>pleading for mercy; they beat him so his words would become a
>delirium mingled with the blood oozing from his toothless mouth; they
>beat him one after the other in a rigid line, splintering his ribs
>like twigs from a strong tree destroyed by a lightening storm. They
>wanted him begging on his knees, they wanted a confession from the
>other Manuel Marulanda V61ez, a confession that would lead them to
>other arrests. And they beat him so much that the body of the other-
>Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez slid down the damp wall like a 1.80 meter-long
>slug in agony, breaking under the cramps and intense pain a
>defenseless man suffers, until he collapsed, still, his head hanging
>between his legs; they shot a shocking blast of cold water from a
>demonic hose over him to revive him.
>
> They dragged the other Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez's body and threw it in
>a cell that had never seen the light of day. Day was night, night
>was day, except in the daytime there was the door and you could hear
>the jailers call out the full name of the other Manuel, and the names
>of his 27 companeros who were crammed into the cell. Later the
>sessions continued, one or two hours followed by frenzied beatings
>with a club to break the bones in his long legs; and when he went
>back darkness returned, trapped in that room. They saw light in an
>endless journey of the imagination, someone was talking the owner of
>the voice couldn't be seen, implacable darkness had consumed those 28
>men in its lair. The other Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez suddenly felt
>like there was a dried up river inside, as if someone had maliciously
>taken his breath from him, leaving his throat dry as a pumice stone,
>burning; the windows of his nose and his mouth were endless caves,
>his lungs tired bellows stuck to his ribs, he breathed intermittently
>and began to suffocate. His companeros squeezed closer together,
>shoulder to shoulder; they sat quietly to give the other Manuel
>Marulanda Ve1ez more room so he could breathe a little of the fetid
>air that reeked of moss and damp dust and heaps of humans in that
>minuscule area where they defecated and urinated like children with
>no control: men, dampness, shit, urine, and spiderwebs that already
>covered their bodies with the finest of threads.
>
> The other Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez tried to capture the air, the
>almost solid, dense air, in his hands; he wanted to catch it so he
>could take it to his mouth, fanning it with his waving hands, he
>wanted to feel it for a moment in his throat, He was sitting, his
>body angled, his back against the dripping wall, he sat straight up
>to better bear the approaching attack, he scratched his neck hard to
>warm himself up a bit, his feet were frozen, his hands numb and his
>choking more intense, and the rosy black skin of the other Manuel
>Marulanda Velez began to change to a yellowish black, then to
>a greenish black, and finally turned an ashen, whitish black; and the
>other Manuel Marulanda Velez's heart was a tired train that barely
>had enough steam in its boiler to release a thin puff of smoke.
>
> The other Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez dreamed, or tried to dream, that he
>was running wildly through the deserted streets of the city, he ran
>until his lungs burst from joy. He dreamed, or he wanted to dream,
>that one day he would be able to go back to the daily meetings with
>his union buddies. He dreamed, or he thought he dreamed, he was
>smoking a cigarette the size of a cigar, taking a drag to forget his
>asthma attacks, feeding off smoke from an endless time of return to
>hear once again - and it had been twenty years since he had heard it
>in the public square - the sound of Maria Cano's voice. Manuel and
>Maria Cano had been companeros in struggle and speeches in the
>twenties.
>
> When he was freed from the SIC jails, the first thing old man Perez,
>a communist for three quarters of a century and liberal soldier under
>General Benjamin Herrera in Panama in the Thousand Day Civil War,
>said as he hugged his very soul in front of the companeros waiting
>for him, was: "Yesterday they killed 'el negro' Marulanda. I saw
>when they took him out on a stretcher dead, after they had again
>beaten him brutally..."
>
> They went to the SIC building with this news to claim the corpse of
>Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez after his first death. "They handed over the
>teetering, tortured, agonized body. That's why they handed it over.
>He hadn't died, but he was already close to death. He was physically
>destroyed, his eyes were out of focus."
>
> There was a huge protest against the Laureano Gomez dictatorship at
>the funeral of the other Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez. Julio V Gutierrez,
>speaking for the union of box workers, said in his eulogy: "Manuel
>Marulanda Ve1ez has disappeared but he has not died; he lives and
>will live always in our hearts where we have built an altar of
>gratitude and where the seed he so generously sowed will take
>root..."Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez, born in the morning mist of Ceja-
>Antioquia, the Medellin workers' councilor, the founder of the
>Cundinamarca Workers Federation, had died.
>
> In El Davis in southern Tolima, at the end of a political science
>course, Martin Camargo and Pedro Vazquez made a suggestion to liberal
>guerrilla Pedro Antonio Marin, who had opted for communist militancy
>and was taking the course. "Hey, why don't you take Manuel Marulanda
>Velez's name and we'll baptize you right here in the school of Party
>cadres. The school will give you this name as encouragement," they
>told him. Pedro Antonio Marin answered them: "I think the name is
>great, but for me to take it on, I don't know, it's a big
>responsibility. But as long as you stop calling me 'Tirofijo'
>('Sureshot'). Deep inside, my motive was to get rid of
>that nickname, that's why I was willing to take on Manuel's name..."
>They baptized him again. "So that's how I was named and that's how I
>will remain. Even though on my birth certificate and my
>identification card they still have me as Pedro Antonio Marin,
>Besides I am Marin by family and by virtue of the memories I have, my
>good shadows..."
>
> -- THE DEATHS OF THE GUERRILLA LEADER --
>
>What with all the military reports, official declarations,
>misinformation campaigns and the desire to count their chickens
>before they hatch, countless now are the times the media has
>announced and confirmed the death of Colombian guerrilla leader
>"Manuel Marulanda Ve1ez". Yet he is more alive than ever and
>vigorously brandishing the banner of the struggle of the people, for
>social justice, democracy, true peace, and sovereignty." JC
>
>
>
>
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