In Brief
Operation Condor: New Pieces of the Puzzle New evidence sheds light on links between the U.S. national security apparatus and Operation Condor, the shadowy Latin American military network...
...Less than 48 hours after Congress passed the PAN-PRI version, the Zapatistas, seemingly stunned, broke off all communication with the Fox government, retreating into stony silence "somewhere in the mountains of the Mexican southeast...
...In a 1985 book, McClintock described a secure Central American telecommunications network established in 1964 by the U.S...
...interest...
...forces considered Condor a legitimate "counterterror" organization...
...For their part, the Zapatistas have always argued that they only want to be Mexican citizens, albeit first-class ones...
...government officials know and when did they know it...
...To resolve the discrepancies in the testimonies of the two senators and Borges, the three were called to the Senate Ethics Committee for a confrontation...
...In a poll by the Folha de Sdo Paulo newspaper, the majority of respondents favored the senators' impeachment...
...Even Ingrid testified last December about the DINA's role in a 1974 car bombing in Buenos Aires, which may explain her sudden hemorraghic death...
...The next day, Arruda left the PSDB, although he said that all he did was ask "[Borges] if it were possible [to find out how senators voted...
...On April 30, Mexico's overwhelmingly white and mestizo Congress gutted a far-reaching Indian rights law that would have constitutionally allowed Mexico's 57 Indian nations limited autonomy over their own forms of government and justice, as well as constitutional recognition of Indian territory and protection for the collective use of land and natural resources...
...Together, the EZLN and the CNI arrived in Mexico City on March 11, welcomed by 160,000 enthusiastic supporters...
...Ambassador Hamilton recently told the Peruvian press that the United States maintained ties with Montesinos, who had an "official liaison relationship" with the CIA, right up until Fujimori's announcement of new elections in which he would not run...
...National Security Agency...
...According to Kadane, the CIA also supplied advanced field radiosCollins KWM-2s, singlesideband high-frequency transceivers-to the Indonesian army...
...Mark Fried is Communications and Advocacy Coordinator for Oxfam Canada and a member of NACLA's Board of Directors...
...Tens of thousands of Indians and mestizos lined the highways and filled the plazas as the Zapatistas traveled to the third National Indigenous Congress (CNI) held in Michoacdn...
...The cost of full disclosure could be high for some U.S...
...As McClintock showed, such intelligence coordination was a key component of the new kind of unconventional political warfare espoused by the Pentagon: the capacity to "execute paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities" against the subversive enemy...
...At the People's Summit, nine thematic forums-on women and globalization, the role of parliaments, agriculture, education, the role of the state, communications, human rights, environment and labor-sought to develop both policy proposals for an alternative approach to Hemispheric integration, and a strategy to defeat the FTAA...
...He said intelligence chiefs from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay used "an encrypted system within the U.S...
...The mobile radios transmitted to a tall, portable antenna provided by the U.S...
...White drew the connection to Operation Condor and questioned whether the arrangement was in the U.S...
...Additionally, a State Department cable discovered by this researcher in February 2001 linked Condor's communications system to the former U.S...
...On all sides were the intensive closed meetings of the delegations and the Bank...
...Fretes identified a facility at the Panama base as the site of a secure transnational communications center for Condor...
...Her obituary appeared in all the morning papers, an unsettling reminder of the not-so-distant past...
...For more information write or call: PO Box 452 Manson, WA 98831 Phone (800) 963-9889 Visit our web site: www.infoserve.net/hermandad/ hermandad.htm Vol XXXIV No 6 MAY/ 1 1 CETLALIC Alternative Language School Teaching Spanish & Progressive Issues Since 1987 SPECIAL PROGRAMS 2001-2002 The Gay Experience in Mexico June 17 - July 6, 2001 Lesbian Lives in Mexico June 17 - July 6, 2001 Program for Bilingual Educators June 16 - July 6, 2001 Multicultural Mexico September 1 - 21, 2001 Winter Gay & Lesbian Program January 5 - 18, 2002 Women & Social Change January 5 - 18, 2002 P.O.Box 1-201, C. P. 62000 Cuemavaca, Morelos, MEXICO TellFax: (52-7) 313-2637 infor@cetIalic.org.mx www.cetlalic.org.mx 11 "Vo ' "V " X N 6 ll UNEL niVV Ill 1 1 g \ N imaNI i) In I i IIN BRIEF Telecommunications Security Network linked the intelligence agencies of each country with the U.S...
...officials told her of providing lists of thousands of leftists to the counterinsurgent forces, which used the lists to kill those named...
...The Senate crisis has not only backed up legislative projects until June or July, but fear of political turmoil has contributed to increasing speculation against the country's currency-the real-and consequently added pressure to the country's accounts...
...The official summit must have featured some tough political negotiations too, as the United States and Canada sought to bully Brazil on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA...
...In 1978, for example, the CIA wrote that by July 1976 "the Agency was receiving reports that Condor planned to engage in 'executive action' outside the territory of member countries...
...Martin's Press, 1997...
...The Mexican Congress compounded its racist proclivities by ultimately scalping the Indian rights law...
...Despite this rather ambiguous half-denial, there is earlier evidence of institutionalized arrangements much like the one described by Fretes...
...The 1978 cable, from Robert White, then Ambassador to Paraguay, to the Secretary of State, reported a meeting with Paraguayan armed forces chief General Alejandro Fretes Divalos...
...Families are welcome...
...Predictably, only 207 of the possible 628 legislators were in attendance to hear the Indians speak for themselves...
...John Ross Our Man in Peru LIMA--Confirming long-held suspicions, congressional and judicial investigations in Lima increasingly implicate Vladimiro Montesinos-once considered by U.S...
...NotiSur is a weekly publication of the Latin America Data Base, an on-line news service available at http://ladb.unm.edu...
...At this year's meeting, the Bank and the people who run it protected themselves only with tear gas and water cannons, rather than with Dobermans and the grill...
...The violation of voting secrecy is not the only scandal affecting the Senate...
...Contributing to the schizophrenic atmosphere was the untimely death of Ingrid Olderock, 58, on the night before the opening IDB ceremonies...
...For them, misery promotion and money making are more sophisticated and obscure than in those early days of structural adjustment...
...Asked why he did not take disciplinary action when he learned of the violation, Magalhaes invoked "reasons of state...
...The concept of territoriality, the international benchmark for what constitutes an indigenous people, was also ripped out of the law...
...His latest book is The WarAgainst Oblivion (Common Courage Press, 2000...
...In recent years, national governments, political parties and infamous individuals have been called to account for their role in the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s...
...A consensus on how to take up the challenge of defeating the FTAA did emerge...
...Centuries of quiet industry, pyramids, the potter's craft, rivers of blood-red butterflies...
...Senate president Barbalho has also come under fire, after investigators discovered that some $900 million in project financing was embezzled through phantom projects and false invoices by the Amazonian Bureau (Sudam)-a development agency that provides subsidized loans to businesses in the Amazon region...
...Although Congress and Fox had heralded the notion that the mestizo Marcos would speak for the Indians, it was the indigenous comandantes and representatives of the CNI who spoke at that historic session to defend the Indian rights law...
...military, located in front of Suharto's headquarters, using frequencies known to the U.S...
...While Helena denied the charges, rumors increased that the electronic voting system protecting the secret ballot had been violated...
...Arruda was first to admit participation in the scandal...
...Among them were the Good Government and Development panel, the Women at Work seminar, the Ethics and Development Discussion, deliberations on Sports as a Means for Economic and Social Development and the Dialogue on Development and Inclusion (Opportunities for People with Disabilities...
...Ingrid is an embarrassment to the people who trained her, paid her and used her all those years...
...He never received a response...
...Her research on Condor, begun in the early 1990s, has been carried out in Paraguay, Chile, Argentina and the United States...
...A 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report stated that one Condor team was "structured much like a U.S...
...Kadane revealed in a 1990 Washington Post report that U.S...
...While the whole country came to a standstill as if Brazil's soccer team were in a World Cup match, all three stuck to their versions of the events and blamed the others...
...Beatrice Edwards Brazil's Senate Crisis Likely to Lead to Impeachment BRASILIA-The institutional crisis in Brazil's Senate is likely to lead to the exit of three of the country's leading senators to restore public confidence in the government...
...Embassy contact that the CIA had played a key role in setting up the computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the Condor states...
...Beatrice Edwards works for the International Secretariat of Public Sector Unions, Public Services International in Washington, D.C...
...policymakers...
...military under cover of the U.S...
...And as always, the police...
...Yet some day, Washington must begin to learn from its past mistakes...
...Continued on page 48 The Indian rights law was finally sent to Congress in December after Vicente Fox became the first opposition party president after seven decades of domination by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI...
...But she belongs to them, and Neruda does not...
...If the scandal now swirling around our man in Peru makes its way to Washington, it could open up a Pandora's box of problems for the CIA-going to the heart of its fundamentally misguided tactics and mission-and for U.S...
...Ingrid served in the National Directorate of Intelligence (DINA) from 1974 to 1976 and was known for her efficiency in torturing female prisoners with dogs...
...They want constitutional recognition that Mexico is a multicultural, plurilingual nation...
...El Mercurio reported that she was survived only by her Dobermans...
...The most secret operations, known as "Phase III," were assassinations carried out by special teams that traveled worldwide to terminate "subversive enemies...
...Coletta Youngers The IDB in the Land of Neruda and Dobermans SANTIAGO-At 11:00 a.m...
...Coletta Youngers is a Senior Associate who specializes in the Andean region of South America at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA...
...Southern Command in Panama, where the parent station was located...
...They arrived just ahead of their governmental counterparts, the heads of state from 34 countries, all save Cuba, who were cloistered behind a ten-foot high, three-milelong fence, that became the symbolic focus of massive anti-freetrade protests...
...The crisis began when Senator Magalhaes made several accusations against President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government in a tape leaked to the press of an interview with federal prosecutor Luis Francisco de Souza...
...Using the widespread public disgust about political corruption, opposition parties led by the PT have been drumming up support for the creation of a legislative investigation commission (CPI) aimed at corruption...
...The last time the IDB held an Annual Meeting in Chile was 1974, just about six months into the Pinochet regime and the sick, bloody nightmare that would last for 17 years...
...The legislation was based on accords reached between the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the government of former President Ernesto Zedillo, signed in February 1996 but subsequently vetoed by Zedillo on the specious grounds that it would allow Mexico's Indians to secede from the nation...
...Both portrayed themselves as saviors of national unity for turning back the purported threat of Indian secession...
...Only the IDB has so seamlessly reinvented itself...
...Trade agreements have been on activists' radar screens in North America for a decade or more...
...The Central American and Panama Study Spanish in Guatemala A not-for profit sisterhood of three collectively-run schools offers one-on-one instruction, family living, field trips and cultural activities...
...If you didn't know better, you would think you had stumbled into some weird commercial retreat organized by Ronald McDonald and the YMCA...
...Public anger at the scandal has not subsided...
...Was Montesinos aiding the very guerrilla forces in Colombia that Washington is paying billions to combat...
...officials had played a significant role in the bloody Indonesian military campaign in 1965 in which some half a million civilians were killed and General Suharto was installed in power...
...We would never expect Iglesias to quote Ingrid Olderock as a source of inspiration for his listeners at the IDB's inaugural session, and not just because she probably did not write compelling poetry...
...But on this bright morning in the late summer of 2001, the assembled listened greedily to the Finance Minister as he extolled Chile's promising growth levels and flexible labor standards...
...We're lucky to have an Ambassador with this profile at this moment," concludes Montesinos, confirming that Washington had reached a policy of accommodation with the Fujimori government as it plotted to steal the 2000 elections...
...This past February, the EZLN launched a march from their home base in Chiapas to lobby Congress for passage of the law...
...officials implicated have managed to keep a lid on debate in Washington...
...Only then can Peru's next president fully succeed in the difficult task of rebuilding the civilian institutions that Washington helped dismantle...
...Neruda, of course, was one of the early victims of the Chilean Armed Forces, dead of a failed heart and the wreckage of search and seizure before the IDB could even get to Santiago to do the necessary propping and shilling for Pinochet...
...J. Patrice McSherry Mexican Congress Guts Indian Rights Law MEXICO CITY-If the recent actions taken by its Congress are any measure, Mexico remains deeply wracked by a racial divide dating back half a millennium...
...Although many sources continue to be classified, emerging evidence adds weight to the thesis that the U.S...
...on March 19, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) opened its Annual Meeting in Santiago, Chile...
...The Bush Administration could restore U.S...
...And most importantly, what did the CIA and other U.S...
...It appears that to run drugs in Peru, traffickers had to pay off Montesinos or run the high risk of being busted by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) or Peruvian anti-drug police...
...The U.S...
...Both earlier cases suggest that the provision of telecommunications systems and expertise to allied anti-Communist militaries was an integral component of U.S...
...Matthew Flynn/NotiSur People's Summit Talks Political Strategy QUEBEC CITY-A remarkable array of 2,000 delegates from across the Hemisphere gathered in North America's only walled city April 16-20 for the second People's Summit of the Americas, under the slogan "Resisting, Proposing Together...
...The Board of Governors convened, together with the presidents of Chile and Argentina, Chile's Finance Minister and the throngs determined to cash in on two days of Latin American deal making...
...officials systematically monitored Indonesian PANA army radio communica- protes protes tions, including those in protes which Suharto's intelli- Mover gence units ordered com- wounc mandos to murder targeted persons in precise locations...
...government is far from removed from the scandals swirling in Peru, though the U.S...
...The Bank convened there at the time to help establish the legitimacy of the murderous de facto government and the dotty old monster now facing trial...
...national security apparatus and Operation Condor, the shadowy Latin American military network created in the 1970s whose key members were Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru and Ecuador...
...Nonetheless, he appears on his way out...
...The Bank cobbled together a long list of semienlightened seminars to precede its formal debt-enhancing strategic meetings...
...national security apparatus was a secret sponsor of Operation Condor...
...Some thorny strategic questions that could be divisive were raised, but only rarely discussed, and the urge to address my issue, my country, my situation, tended to swamp efforts to build a shared agenda beyond declarations of principles...
...Although both Arruda and Magalhaes first claimed ignorance of the list, both had to change their stories after Borges' confession...
...In spite of himself, he described a context of generalized misery, and then wound up quoting Pablo Neruda...
...In a 1988 book, Saul Landau reported that in 1976 an Argentine military source told a U.S...
...Fox's own Indian Affairs Secretary, Xochitl Gilvez, and the government's National Indigenous Institute (INI) said the new law would only worsen racial divisions...
...Who else was there...
...For subscriptions, visit LADB's website or call 1-800-472-0888...
...On national television, he tearfully admitted that he received the list and passed it to Magalhaes...
...Rather than enshrining autonomy in the Constitution, legislative power for autonomous municipalities was delegated to 31 state congresses, the most venal political bodies in the nation...
...Current Senate president Jader Barbalho of the Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) has also been on the defensive as evidence has surfaced about his involvement in fraud and influence peddling with a federal development body and a state-owned bank in his home state of Pard...
...Public Safety Program...
...At first denied access to Congress by Bartlett, Fernandez de Cevallos and their minions, the Indians were finally granted the right to address the nation from the most symbolic podium in the country on March 28...
...Both gatherings were about trade, but the contrast between them could not have been starker: The People's Summit, sponsored by a looselyknit umbrella of coalitions called the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), was an open, raucous affair, combining policy discussions by women's activists, unionists, farmers and indigenous leaders, with rhetorical speech-making and hardheaded efforts to construct a political common ground among the disparate majorities left out by the neoliberal economic model...
...By sending the bill to the legislature, Fox, in effect, washed his hands of it-in Mexico's new, deeply divided political equilibrium, the president can no longer dictate passage of his legislative initiatives...
...Saying what...
...However, Cardoso, in an attempt to block such an initiative, said: "I appeal to the members of Congress not to transform things that happen in politics into an obstacle to governability, because this is not patriotic...
...NACLA's correspondent was denied entry to the official summit, along with some 80 other journalists representing "not bona fide news organizations...
...Following the report, Regina Celia Borges, former director of the Data Processing Service (Prodasen), confessed her role in obtaining a list of senators' votes in Estevao's impeachment, but said she was following orders...
...But that morning, we were seeing the new face of the IDB...
...telecommunications net[work]," which covered all of Latin America, to "coordinate intelligence information...
...Participation was significantly more representative of the varied interests of civil society than in the first 1998 People's Summit in Santiago, and proposals were more specific and covered new issues...
...Passage of the Indian rights law has been the focal point of the Zapatista struggle for the past six years...
...He recounts that Hamilton assured him that he would remain "neutral" with respect to the April 2000 elections-in which Fujimori ran for an unconstitutional third term and "won" via massive fraud...
...If the People's Summit is any indication, that is about to change...
...How many more policy debacles like that in Peru will it take...
...But except for the eloquent and frank addresses on free trade's failures by the prime ministers of St...
...Peruvian investigators have asked Washington to open up the files...
...Matthew Flynn writes for the International Weekly Edition of the Gazeta Mercantil, a Sao Paulo-based financial newspaper...
...Moreover, U.S...
...But in most of Latin America and the Caribbean (save Mexico and the English-speaking islands, where anyone can give you an earful about the IMF and structural adjustment), civil society has yet to address the trade agenda...
...One of the infamous Vladivideos shows Montesinos describing a meeting with the U.S...
...Condor employed a powerful telecommunications system (Condortel) to coordinate its intelligence, planning, and operations...
...Today, instead of administering economic shock treatments, they push deregulation and privatization, all decked out as institution strengthening, competitiveness and efficiency...
...officials who advocated doing business with a criminal...
...Odd that he should think Neruda would appeal to this crew...
...John Ross is a freelance journalist based in Mexico...
...It wasn't altogether convincing though...
...Traveling from the Mayan south to the old Aztec heartland of Mexico in what the EZLN's spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos variously described as a "March for Indigenous Dignity" and "The March of the People Who Are the Color of the Earth," 23 comandantes of the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee (CCRI), the general command of the EZLN, plus Marcos, rekindled support for the Indian rights law...
...Sleek, intentlooking white men in expensive suits were everywhere, together with the dead-eyed security goons with buttons in their ears-guys who used to be known as "heavily armed men in civilian dress" in the old Americas Watch reports...
...The tradition of protesta rather than propuesta often prevailed, with more affirmation of shared values than definition of steps forward...
...Collective use of land and natural resources was stripped from the law to allow national and transnational corporations to mow down Indian forests, exploit mineral rights, pirate native plants and sow agricultural land with junk tree plantations for the international pulp and paper market...
...Now that the Zapatistas' peaceful efforts to lobby Indian rights have badly flopped, the political luster of a president who not six months ago was promising peace will be further tarnished...
...Mark Fried Sources J. Patrice McSherry is associate professor of political science at Long Island University, a member of NACLA's Editorial Board, and author of Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina (New York: St...
...Why did Washington continue to do business with Peru's drug czar despite his ties to the drug trade...
...Fox's own right-wing National Action Party (PAN) subsequently eviscerated the Indian rights law, under Senate leader Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, a stern patrician of lily-white extraction, and the PRI's Manuel Bartlett, a name synonymous with electoral fraud...
...citizens deserve a full accounting of what happened in Peru and those implicated in human rights violations, illicit activities or cover-ups should be held accountable, regardless of their nationality...
...Who better, he asked piously, to paint a picture of our region in words...
...More information on the People's Summit can be found at www.sommetdespeuples.org/en...
...The former director of the DIA stated to the New York Times in March 2001 that "if such an arrangement existed on an institutional basis, I would have known about it, and I did not then and do not now," but added, "that such an arrangement could have been made locally on an ad hoc basis is not beyond the realm of probability...
...They were more focused on mountains of money, that Howard Johnsons-like thing they built at the gates of Macchu Picchu and dark flocks of Blackhawks...
...Barbalho insists he is innocent of this and other financial irregularities...
...military base in the Panama Canal Zone...
...counterinsurgency strategy-and both substantiate Peter Kornbluh's observation that White's cable implied U.S...
...it should order the immediate declassification of documents on Peru and Montesinos in particular...
...LA HERMANDAD EDUCATIVA includes Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco in Quetzaltenango, Proyecto Linguistico de Espaiiol/Mam in Todos Santos and Escuela de la Montafia near Nuevo San Jos6...
...Then came Enrique Iglesias, president of the IDB, who reiterated this robust scenario for all of Latin America...
...H6ctor de la Cueva of the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade sketched out HSA's threepronged political strategy: Demand a binding referendum in each country on the proposal to negotiate an FTAA, organize a hemisphere-wide popular plebiscite on the FTAA, and build the movement to reach more people in more places across the hemisphere...
...foreknowledge, cooperation, and total access" to Condor plans and operations...
...Finally, however, he acknowledged a few remaining "challenges": 50% of the continent's population sunk in officially declared poverty, half of the active labor force under- or unemployed, low educational levels and high mortality rates from preventable disease...
...Both Peruvian and U.S...
...I did not want to stain the image of the Senate...
...officials to be Peru's de facto "drug czar"-in illicit arms deals and widespread drug trafficking-related corruption...
...Ambassador to Peru, John Hamilton...
...Top U.S...
...The NSA intercepted the signals from a secure site in Southeast Asia...
...Special Forces Team," and described Condor's "joint counterinsurgency operations" to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities...
...Recently declassified documents indicate that U.S...
...Later she brought me the list...
...Perhaps most importantly, Quebec's People's Summit went head-to-head with the presidents and prime ministers in the court of public opinion, achieving new legitimacy for the anti-free-trade argument, as evidenced in widespread media coverage, especially in Canada...
...On March 17, technicians at the University of Campinas confirmed that the Senate's computer system had been broken into...
...The Bank will have to change more than its rhetoric before it can lay claim to Neruda, who, in his poem "Clenched Soul" asked, "Where were you then...
...Lucia and Barbados, all the public saw were men in dark suits (the one woman was Panama's Mireya Moscoso) mouthing platitudes during carefully scripted television appearances...
...After Borges' and Arruda's confessions, Magalhaes said he only became aware of the list after Arruda handed it to him, but he had never requested it...
...Senator Antonio Carlos Magalhaes of the Liberal Front Party (PFL) and Senator Jose Roberto Arruda of the Social Democratic Party (PSDB) have been unable to convince their colleagues and the public that they are innocent of violating voting secrecy in the Senate...
...This was years after the first credible allegations linking Montesinos to drug trafficking and death squad activity emerged, months after his role in subverting the 2000 elections became painfully clear, and weeks after Peruvians learned that Montesinos was allegedly running guns to Colombian guerrillas-in exchange for drugs...
...credibility in Peru by cooperating with the investigations underway...
...Scholar Michael McClintock and journalist Kathy Kadane have both documented earlier U.S.backed communications systems set up in Central America and in Indonesia in the context of counterinsurgency collaboration...
...The sophisticated communications network allowed intelligence forces to relay messages among themselves as they tracked the movements of persons within and among countries...
...One of his revelations was that Senator Heloisa Helena of the Worker's Party (PT) voted against the impeachment of Senator Luiz Estevao, removed by his colleagues last June because of his role in corruption surrounding the construction of a federal courthouse...
...Criticism of the Congressional hatchet job was immediate...
...Condor was a covert intelligence and operations system that enabled the Latin American military states to hunt down, seize, and execute political opponents across borders...
Vol. 34 • May 2001 • No. 6
