The Argentine Connections
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
DRUGS AND POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA-1 The Argentine Connections BY ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO Buenos Aires I was during Holy Week of 1987 that Lieutenant Colonel Aldo Rico staged his initial...
...Until recently this country was a sporadic transit route for Bolivian and Paraguayan traffickers, yet little cocaine was sent south for sale...
...Thus as the anniversary of the Holy Week mutiny neared, the whole country expected the Far Right to do something spectacular...
...an allusion to the Falklands/Malvinas war...
...The Argentine press is beginning to mutter about Klaus Barbie and other Nazis protected by the U.S., about the alleged role of Senator Jesse Helms (R.-N.C...
...He had copies of the OAS —MRP leaflet in his pockets...
...in his apartment police discovered more copies, Nazi memorabilia and miscellaneous weapons...
...It tended to believe the quixotic muckraker Guillermo Patricio Kelly, himself an ex-Fascist, who claimed that Aldo Rico and his circle were deeply tied in to cocaine trafficking...
...Nevertheless, four months after he quit his country, he"wasacouple of hours in Washington, meeting people of the State Department," according to a sworn deposition by his wife, Angelica...
...What did "OAS—MRP" stand for...
...Its star, comedian Alberto Olmedo, had only a few days before fallen or jumped to his death from a balcony...
...Ernesto "Indio" Castillo, former associate of the notorious exPolice Chief of Buenos Aires, Ramon Camps (tormentor of Jacobo Timerman), currently under investigation as a drug trafficker working with Paraguayan elements...
...The public, for its part, thought it already knew...
...The government declared that it had broken a major Rightist terrorist conspiracy...
...A few days later the police attempted to interrogate a 27-year-old veteran and National Alert militant, Adolfo Vera...
...DRUGS AND POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA-1 The Argentine Connections BY ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO Buenos Aires I was during Holy Week of 1987 that Lieutenant Colonel Aldo Rico staged his initial abortive mutiny against the democratically-elected government of President Raul Alfonsin...
...They may also tell us whether the friends of Aldo Rico are the friends of Suarez Mason, and even whether any of them have friends in the Reagan Administration...
...It predicted "a profound crisis of democracy for the period 19-21 April...
...and Lucio Guazzaroni, best known as one of the Rightist goons who participated in the 1973 Ezeiza Massacre, when reactionary Peronists attacked Leftist Peronists along the route of the General's triumphal return...
...as he was led away...
...Former General Carlos Guillermo Suarez Mason, the so-called "Eichmann of Argentina" who fled in December 1983 when Alfonsin came into office, was arrested in San Francisco in January 1987...
...His supposed coconspirators in the plot back home were ultimately released for lack of evidence...
...The others included Sergio Sebastian D'Onofrio, former intelligence operative, now apparently an illicit arms trafficker...
...The action actually began the night of April 18, but it was the government that took the offensive...
...Confiscated, too, were 250 guns of different kinds,1.5 million rounds of ammunition, explosives, an infrared sniperscope, and Seditious and Nazi literature...
...Although his forces surrendered quickly, the public reaction was much more muted...
...That is changing now, and the level of public concern has risen rapidly in the wake of a series of sensational drugrelated crime stories...
...One news magazine ran a front-page photo of Rico and Gonzalez Naya under the headline: Los Narcogolpistas (the drugcoup-plotters...
...As for the condor, in 1966 there was an ill-fated private expedition against the Falklands dubbed "Operation Condor...
...The former military dictatorship helped to install the drug-trafficking Garcia Meza regime in Bolivia in return for an agreement that he would not sell cocaine in Argentina...
...The picture of San Martin, by contrast, made excellent sense as an appeal to patriotic and especially military tradition...
...By now the government was trying in its public statements to connect the shadowy OAS—MRP to Aldo Rico...
...In a series of lightning raids six people were arrested...
...There were persistent reports that he was in Miami, hanging out with precisely those people...
...Inspector Rodolfo Viera of the Federal Police has been digging into reports that a light plane, now missing, was used both to ferry Aldo Rico to Monte Caseros during the January rebellion and to carry cocaine into the country from Paraguay or Bolivia...
...Suspect Guazzaroni had control of two helicopters, reportedly part of the "drug air force...
...Carlos Alberto Miranda, brother-in-law of Usted editor Carlos Tortora and former bodyguard of Rightwing Peronist labor leader Lorenzo Miguel, and so on...
...He even obtained a court order authorizing searches of the offices of Alfonsin's party, the Radical Civic Union, for evidence of a conspiracy...
...he quoted Juan Peron's most infamous —and intemperate—remark: "For each one of us, five of theirs will fall...
...troubleshooter and Ambassador to the UN Vernon Walters arrived a week later to discuss drugs and to solicit Argentine support against Panama's Manuel Antonio Noriega...
...He indicated a great interest in determining the ENO's funding source...
...On Tuesday, March 29, three powerful bombs went off at movie theaters in downtown Buenos Aires...
...As if this weren't enough psychological warfare, a new magazine, Usted (You), materialized on newsstands April 14 with a banner headline: will there be a coup...
...Even if the Far Right is not financing itself through drug dealing, the claims that it is are enough to discredit it with the man in the street...
...Was rr an accident that the largest cocaine seizure in Argentine history took place at Ezeiza Airport in mid-April, and that U.S...
...The press recalled that OAS was the French Secret Army Organization that opposed the withdrawal from Algeria in de Gaulle's years by committing various terrorist acts, but that left MRP a mystery...
...The bombs scattered leaflets inscribed "For National Liberation" and "We fight because our dead want us to fight...
...The Alfonsin government issued a warrant for Suarez Mason in November 1984, and sought his extradition in November 1985...
...The massive, spontaneous public condemnation was considered a major political watershed in Argentina: For the first time in half a century the citizenry had put the military in its place...
...They also featured pictures of the Liberator, General Jos6 de San Martin, and of acondor, and were signed "OAS —MRP...
...The third house was playing an innocuous domestically-produced comedy, Peculiar Attraction, whose significance was far from obvious...
...Two days later his assistant, Enrique Barrios, was arrested...
...It did...
...In addition, at least 33 prominent figures—from the President himself to Cabinet ministers, congressmen, and party leaders—received typewritten death threats from the OAS—MPR: "The Court of Justice of the OAS—MRP in its plenary session of April 5,1988, having conducted an exhaustive analysis of the facts concerning your conduct prejudicial to the Nation and the Argentine People, has determined that you are subject to the penalty of death, which will be carried out within the year by a special task force...
...It recently embarrassed La Rioja Governor Carlos Menem, who is seeking the Peronist Presidential nomination, by offering him its unsolicited endorsement...
...Three who were indicted but not captured were even more interesting: Gonzalez Naya...
...Arthur M. Shapiro, a previous NL contributor, is a professor of zoology at the University of California, Davis, who frequently visits Argentina...
...Nothing was found...
...Their cases were put in the hands of Federal Judge Alberto Daniel Piotti, well-known and liked for his openness with the media...
...in the coup that overthrew Isabel Peron, and about what America thinks its interests in Argentina truly are...
...Then Alejandro Biondini, leader of the noisy far Right organization National Alert, accused the government of staging the bombings and threats...
...Jorge Iannantuone, sacked from the Army in 1971 for complicity in service station holdups and anti-Semitic violence, and subsequently a goon for the notorious paramilitary thug Anibal Gordon...
...rumor held that Buenos Aires was unwilling to "blow the cover" of informers in the case...
...Unfortunately, such epiphanies are seldom conclusive, and Aldo Rico returned to try again mid-January 1988...
...Perhaps the site was chosen to warn that Alfonsin would be next...
...Biondini reacted to this development by fulminating with rage...
...Meanwhile Lieutenant Colonel Arturo Gonzalez Naya, a classmate of Aldo Rico's in military school and a collaborator in the January mutiny, gave an exclusive interview to the magazine Informador Publico (Public Informer) from his underground hideaway...
...But a bit of history is in order...
...For Argentines accustomed to coded political messages, interpreting the bombings and the leaflets at once became a popular sport...
...He described his objectives as "ending political and military corruption and the economic surrender of the nation to the great powers" (a reference to the enormous debt burden acquired by the former military government...
...The coming trial may tell us if the OAS—MRP and the ENO are any more real organizations than the shadowy groups that surface periodically to claim credit for some atrocity in Beirut...
...Amid these interpretations, on April 1 some two dozen bombs threats were made...
...All in all, an unlikely and unsavory lot of saviors of Western civilization...
...Suarez Mason was Argentina's most-wanted fugitive...
...One exception was the only woman taken, Ines Lidia Deligiannis, a police officer, whose apartment yielded Nazi material, posters of Aldo Rico, and a typewriter allegedly used to produce two "communiques" that the suspects possessed from yet another hitherto-unknown organization, the National Operations Army (ENO...
...Certainly the people seized were an interesting lot...
...He was promptly arrested on April 8 in the presence of several followers, who saluted "Long Live the Fatherland...
...Following lengthy legal maneuvering, he was deported to Argentina last May 9, to stand trial on 39 counts of murder and one of kidnapping...
...Two of the explosions, it was duly noted, occurred at theaters showing films with titles that are meaningful in an Argentine context: Both Eating Raouland The Last Emperor could be taken as referring to President Alfonsin...
...Most of them appeared prosperous, despite their having no known gainful employment...
...He produced a military KM-2 hand grenade and was shot dead as he tried to pull the pin...
...Maybe...
...Itaccused Suarez Mason of plotting to overthrow the Argentine government in a conspiracy involving international drug and gun traffickers...
...There is an odd postscript to all this...
...National Alert, made up mostly of Falklands veterans with an ideology of irredentism and revenge, claims to be Peronist but has been disavowed by the Party's leadership...
Vol. 71 • June 1988 • No. 11
