The sentences are seen as a milestone because they mark the first time a court has proved that Operation Condor was an global criminal conspiracy carried out by the US -backed regimes in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
Advertisement
“They got together to maximize efforts to persecute political opponents of each of the dictatorships, and to “disappear” or eliminate those who were considered subversive”, she told reporters after the ruling was read out in court.
Former Argentine junta leader Reynaldo Bignone has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for crimes committed under Operation Condor – a conspiracy between South America’s dictators in the 1970s, BBC News reports.
Eighteen former army officers – including Reynald Bignone, Argentina’s last dictator – are in court.
The judges are continuing to deliberate the sentencing of the rest of the former military officers. They include Uruguayan army colonel, Manuel Cordero Piacentini, who allegedly tortured prisoners inside Automotores Orletti, the Buenos Aires fix shop where many captured leftists were interrogated under orders from their home countries.
A Uruguayan flag was hanging in the hall, marking the first time a former Uruguayan officer had gone on trial for torture in Argentina.
The investigation was launched in the 1990s when an amnesty law still protected numerous accused.
“It determines not only that state terrorism in Argentina was an criminal conspiracy but that it was coordinated with other dictatorships”, said Luz Palmas Zaldua, a lawyer with the Center for Legal and Social Studies (Cels), which represented numerous plaintiffs in the case.
During the case, several defendants either died or were removed from the judicial process.
Prosecutors based their case partly on declassified United States intelligence documents showing how the South American regimes worked together to identify political exiles in neighboring countries and kill them or send them back to their home countries.
Advertisement
Operation Condor was launched by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who enlisted other South America’s dictators. Letelier, and his US aide Ronni Moffitt, were killed by a bomb placed in his auto in Washington D.C. Investigators found that the Chilean dictatorship’s spy agency, known as DINA, and an anti-Castro group, many of whose members had been trained by the CIA, were behind the assassination. Bignone was forced out of power following the country’s defeat in the 1982 Falklands War, but decreed a blanket amnesty for himself and his colleagues before leaving office, in an attempt to protect them from future action over their human rights abuses.
