Reviews of THE
CONDOR YEARS
Washington
Post Book World
Examining
the political ordeals of the Southern half of our hemisphere.
Reviewed by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page BW08
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable." President John F. Kennedy spoke this warning to a
gathering of Latin American diplomats in the spring of 1962, as Cold War-era
civil conflicts were beginning to intensify and spread through the hemisphere.
Kennedy turned out to be prescient: Latin American leaders, with the support of
Washington cold warriors, clamped down on peaceful left-wing reform movements
and thus helped spur the rise of violent revolutionary alternatives. Social and
political struggles escalated into full-blown civil wars.
These may be matters of mere historical interest in the United States, but they
unleashed a dynamic of authoritarianism and violence that plagues Latin America
to this day. Much of the region is still struggling to come to terms with the
legacies of bloody, decades-long conflicts. In Chile, only recently has justice
threatened to penetrate the shield of impunity long enjoyed by politically
motivated murderers. In Colombia, meanwhile, a hydra-headed, cocaine-fueled
civil war continues to claim several thousand lives a year. In these cases and
others, the search for truth, or at least some semblance of understanding, has
just begun.
…
The Unrectified Past
When a Colombian paramilitary kills hundreds of people in the name
of justice and decency, it echoes the "strange moral calculus of mass
murder" that John Dinges, a veteran journalist and former managing editor
of National Public Radio, describes in The Condor Years: How Pinochet and
His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New Press, $25.95).
Dinges uses the phrase to characterize Manuel Contreras's cool justification of
his roles as head of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's DINA intelligence agency and
architect of the South American intelligence and assassination network known as
Operation Condor. By cruelly and decisively "suppressing terrorism and
subversion," Contreras's argument goes, Chile became "the first
country in the world that succeeded in eliminating terrorism from its
territory," thus avoiding the kind of civil conflict that left hundreds of
thousands dead in the rest of Latin America.
That Dinges does not dismiss such arguments out of hand indicates the subtlety
and insight of his account of Condor -- to his mind the "final, worst
departure from the rules of law and civilized society" in Cold War Latin
America. Over several years in the second half of the 1970s, intelligence
agencies in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil
collaborated in tracking, kidnapping, torturing and killing "enemies"
of their military regimes. On the one hand, Dinges points out, such tactics
made some sense in the face of the legitimate (if inflated) threat that the
revolutionary left represented. More often, however, Condor targeted
pro-democracy and human rights activists, religious leaders, opposition
political leaders and peaceful dissidents -- all in the name of winning a
self-anointed "war on terrorism."
Drawing on a trove of declassified documents and personal interviews, Dinges
assembles a scrupulous, well-documented and indignant prosecutor's brief, all
the more arresting for its judiciousness and restraint. In reconstructing
Condor's most infamous act -- the 1976 car bombing that killed the Chilean
dissident Orlando Letelier and an American colleague in Washington, D.C. -- he
weighs the evidence of whether U.S. officials could and should have prevented
the assassination. As with similar questions of U.S. complicity in the
atrocities of Pinochet and his Condor allies, his analysis is cautious and
fair: While a number of officials, from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on
down, should have "connected the dots," there is no proof that any of
them did. There is evidence that many knew exactly what Condor entailed and
that a more definitive U.S. stance against Condor's brand of international
terror might have averted dozens of cases of torture and murder. But
Washington's "green light, red light" approach to the promotion of
democracy and human rights in Latin America signaled clearly that the demands
of an anti-Marxist crusade trumped such secondary concerns.
Throughout, Dinges is driven by an abiding belief that "the unresolved
crimes of the past do not remain in the past." He argues that recent
judicial efforts in Europe, Chile and Argentina to punish the crimes of the
Condor years will usher in "a pioneering new era of international
law" -- forcing individuals who invoked historical imperatives in defense
of their crimes to face long neglected questions of personal responsibility.
…
(The review also discussed Steven Dudley, Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge, $27.50); Michael Taussig, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (New Press, $24.95); and Roberto Bolao, By Night in Chile (Harvill; paperback, $13.95)
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is an associate editor at Foreign Affairs.
2004 The Washington Post Company
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