Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 82–96, 2019 Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism in Narratives Surrounding the Student Massacre on Tlatelolco Square (Mexico, 1968) ELISA KRIZA Otto Friedrich Universitat, Germany Shortly before the Mexico Olympics, on 2 October 1968, student demonstrators were shot by the military on Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City, thus ending the local student movement and its mass protests. This paper explores the government’s use of anti-communism to ideologically justify this massacre in the context of the Cold War. The student movement was presented as a foreign, communist intervention that threatened Mexico’s sovereignty. The paper analyses the weaknesses and contradictions of this official narrative by contrasting public and confidential reports. Finally, the marginal role of communism in the movement and its internal divisions are also outlined. Keywords: 1968, anti-communism, anti-interventionism, communism, Mexico, Tlatelolco. On 2 October 1968, hundreds of student demonstrators were attacked by the military on Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City. Since then, the history of the Tlatelolco massacre has become a part of different narratives. It has been integrated into the vast memory culture of the Mexican student movement of 1968 and it is also an important moment in the history of resistance against the single-party rule (1929–2000) of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Party of the Institutionalised Revolution) in Mexico (Fenoglio-Limón, 2010: 300–302). This paper is a reassessment of the Tlatelolco massacre as part of the history of Mexico’s Cold War, which often defies the binary setting of conservative anti-communism and Soviet-style communism. In recent years, the experience of the Cold War in the ‘third world’ has received much attention. Conflicts in Latin America, such as the military coups in Chile (1973) or Argentina (1976), were carried out by openly anti-communist, right-wing groups. The persecution and murder of left-wingers in these two countries was therefore consistent with these states’ ideologies. Anti-communist repressions in Mexico were carried out by a state that saw itself as the epitome of the 1910 Revolution which represented the struggle for democracy, redistribution of wealth, and an end to foreign and national exploitation. This paper explores how the ideas of anti-communism and communism clashed in the student movement of 1968 and the state’s justification of the Tlatelolco massacre. Special attention is given to anti-communist rhetoric in the government’s 82 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism battle against the student movement and contradictions in the assessment of the movement. Sergio Aguayo has recently emphasised the importance of the government’s strategic decision to declare the protesting students ‘enemies’ of the state in a global environment of paranoid fear of communism (Aguayo, 2015: 46–63). In my paper I go a step further by adding that anti-communism as an ideology was instrumentalised in the battle against the protesters. Wolfgang Wippermann defines anti-communism as a political force against communism based on certain rhetorical devices he derives from Terry Eagleton’s definition of ideology, as discursive fields thought to be ‘unifying, action-oriented, rationalizing, legitimating, universalizing and naturalizing’ (Eagleton, 2007: 45; Wippermann, 2012: 7–8). The focus of this paper is on the aspect of rationalising, which means that ‘ideologies can be seen as a more or less systematic attempt to provide plausible explanations and justifications for social behaviour which might otherwise be the object of criticism’ (Eagleton, 2007: 52). This paper discusses how the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz used anticommunism ideologically to justify violence on unarmed civilians in an attempt to salvage the state’s reputation during the Olympics and to protect the status quo of the PRI’s political power. This analysis focuses on weaknesses and contradictions in the Mexican government’s narrative that it was protecting the country from foreign intervention. The student movement was accused of being infiltrated by communists who endangered Mexican sovereignty. Only a small percentage of the participants of the student movement were communists, yet even they experienced infrastructural independence from foreign parties (Krauze, 2014: 233, 257). Many of the participating communists displayed a high level of ideological independence as well. More importantly, the main evidence of conspiracy presented by the government and the press was based on claims made by government infiltrators and not by genuine participants. The government’s alleged priority of protecting Mexican sovereignty must be reinterpreted in light of the knowledge that the Mexican state sought US support during the conflict with the students and that President Díaz Ordaz was a longtime informer for the CIA. Communism in this paper is discussed, firstly, as the vague enemy image that was presented by anti-communists and, secondly, as an ideology embraced by specific leftist intellectuals. Julia Sloan rightly notes that during the Cold War defining who is or was communist in Mexico was particularly complicated due to the large number of left-wing movements and the state’s ambiguous ideology (Sloan, 2009: 2–3). To illustrate this complexity, the views of two communist authors who represent different types of involvement in the student movement are outlined: José Revueltas played an important role as a lecturer and as a mature theoretician of the movement. René Avilés represents one of the many young participants in the movement who embodied the class divisions and ideological turmoil among communists in the 1960s. These divisions are often neglected in the analysis of the student movement, yet they are key to understanding the weakness of Díaz Ordaz’s arguments against the movement, as the alleged alliance between privileged and poor students was part of the government narrative exaggerating the danger of the movement. There was no single political party that dominated the movement (Keller, 2015: 202–218). The Partido Comunista Mexicano, (PCM, Mexican Communist Party) is not the focus of this paper because of its marginal role in the student movement. According to Kevyn Delgado, although the PCM did contribute to the movement, the student movement had a stronger influence on the evolution of the PCM rather than the other © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 83 Elisa Kriza way around (2013: 170–172). This was partly the result of the government’s swift arrest of its members and the occupation of its offices in July 1968 (Delgado, 2013: 68–72). The Student Movement of 1968 in Mexico City There are many texts available to those studying the Mexican student movement of 1968 and the events in Tlatelolco. A number of archival documents and reports by government truth commissions are now available, such as Sergio Aguayo’s 1998 report and the report by the 2006 truth commission. There is a large corpus of witness accounts, novels, poems, and other literary works discussing these events and a growing number of secondary sources written by scholars analysing the above texts. More recently, audio-visual testimonies about the movement have become accessible through the internet and 1968 memorial groups, such as Comité 68, have regained relevance through internet activism. These different sources agree on some points and disagree on others. To begin with, I would like to present some of the facts that most parties largely agree upon. The Mexican student movement of 1968 resembled various other movements that sprouted that year all over the world, but its development and priorities were mostly local (Carpenter, 2005: 476; Cerón, 2012: 240–241; Sloan, 2012:175). Mexican students adopted some of the slogans used by French demonstrators, such as ‘it is forbidden to forbid the revolution’, or they carried posters with Che Guevara’s image. A handful of foreigners from countries such as France, Argentina, and the US participated in the Mexican student movement, but apparently none from communist countries (Collado, 2017: 180–181). Octavio Paz insightfully observed and student leaders often explained that the demands of the student movement in Mexico were mainly reformist and nationalist (Paz, 1970: 31, 34–35; Fenoglio-Limón, 2010: 305; Collado, 2017: 185). As opposed to the more radical demands of movements abroad, it concentrated on calling for the rule of law and the abolition of laws that were used to suppress dissent. This concern was largely inspired by the way the Mexican government had suppressed famous strikes, such as the railway workers’ strike of 1959 or the doctors’ strike of 1964–1965. The student movement began in July 1968 in protest against excessive use of force by the police after a riot involving students from a private and a public school (Cerón, 2012: 243). The inconsistent response from the authorities – allowing the students to organise protests and then charging against them, violently seizing universities and schools – led to a massive student strike in the autumn, coordinated by the Consejo Nacional de Huelga (CNH, National Strike Council). The protests and marches that followed soon spiralled out of control, representing multiple ideologies and interests. Cerón provides a useful summary of the ideologies and political tendencies represented in the student movement, which include many different left-wing groups but also Christian and conservative groups dissatisfied with the government (Cerón, 2012: 242–245). Disappointment about the failures of the Mexican Revolution also played an important role for many of the movement’s participants (Revueltas, 1978; Avilés Fabila, 1991b; Sloan, 2012).Other participants were conservative, even anti-communist, activists who used the protests to express their views (Krauze, 2014: 240–241). Some members of more humble professions joined the protests in solidarity with the students. Overall, the movement never achieved ideological unity or coherence. The student movement was deeply divided, not only by ideology but also by class. Rodríguez describes how left-wing students and professors were more ideological and 84 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism peaceful, while many poorer students used violence to express their rage at social inequality, and young gang members joined the violence without ideological motive (Rodríguez Kuri, 2003: 183–184). These sporadic cases of student violence took the form of vandalism, destruction of private property, and the burning or theft of public buses. Moreover, there was a vacuum between the intellectual leaders of the movement and the majority of the students (Rodríguez Kuri, 2003: 190). There was a large amount of verbal abuse on both sides, with the students’ defiance of the authorities and their threatening insults directed against the president and the police proving particularly astonishing (Aguayo, 1998: 11–12; Poniatowska, 2012: 86, 131, 151, 183). Nonetheless, it was police violence towards the students that provoked an increasing amount of outrage among the movement’s participants and led to the coming together of demands that included the resignation of the chief of police, the release of political prisoners, and the elimination of article 145 of the penal code, among other things. The call for the abolition of article 145 of the penal code already hints at the importance of this law in justifying the repression of dissent. This law had been introduced in 1941 as a way of protecting the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. Article 145 criminalised ‘social dissolution’, meaning that it prohibited Mexicans and foreign nationals from ‘making propaganda’, ‘spreading a foreign government’s ideas, programmes, or norms of action that disturb public order or the sovereignty of the Mexican State’ (Suprema Corte, 1966, author’s translation). The law specified that public order is affected when rebellion, insurrection, or riots are provoked; and that the sovereignty of the country is affected when the territorial or institutional integrity of the country is endangered. However, this law was used to quash internal dissent, such as a prominent railway strike in 1959. In 1968, the students arrested in the early days of the movement were accused of common crimes such as destruction of property, kidnapping, or robbery (Fiscalía, 2006: 76, 94). It was only when the conflict escalated that Article 145 was implemented against them. State Violence and the Reasoning behind it State violence against the 1968 student movement reached its peak on 2 October. A meeting organised by the CNH took place at Tlatelolco Square, also known as the Plaza of the Three Cultures (Aztec, Spanish, and Mexican), as archaeological ruins, a colonial church, and prefabricated apartment blocks flank the square. The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs was also part of the Tlatelolco complex in the 1960s. Around 10,000 people had gathered when the organisers announced that a planned march to a university would not take place in order to avoid a confrontation with the military (Fiscalía, 2006). At that point shots were heard and panic ensued. All exits from the plaza and from the apartment buildings were closed by military personnel. The people on the square and some people in the apartment buildings were attacked by the military, by the police, and by men wearing a white glove who were later identified as belonging to the Batallón Olimpia (Olympia Brigade). This last group of people was described by the Mexican government, by the FBI, and by the CIA as a group of Trotskyist provocateurs who were also accused of having fired the first shots (Collado, 2017: 191). It later emerged that the Olympia Brigade was an elite unit under orders from Defence Secretary Marcelino García Barragán to apprehend the student leaders. Even today, there are still conflicting accounts as to who fired the first shots, but it is likely that it was members of the military © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 85 Elisa Kriza (Fiscalía, 2006: 121–123). In the aftermath, hundreds of people were injured or killed by gunshots or bayonets, yet the exact number of casualties has proved impossible to determine. A thousand student leaders and other political dissidents were arrested that evening and in the weeks that followed. Despite the fact that newspapers and newsreels on television markedly trivialised the bloodshed of the night at Tlatelolco, the knowledge of its magnitude spread. The strike council announced an immediate halt to student protests. The Olympics began peacefully on 12 October (Columbus Day). The strike council continued to demand the release of those who had been arrested until some of them were freed, but the strike ended in December while hundreds of people remained in prison. Article 145 was abolished in 1970 and the remaining prisoners were freed as a result of a government amnesty in 1971. Previous analyses cite three main factors that influenced the Mexican government’s reaction against the student movement: the fear that the first Olympics in the ‘third world’ would become a fiasco, that the country’s prestige would be ruined, and the paranoid environment of the Cold War (Morley, 2006; Fenoglio-Limón, 2010: 305; Keller, 2015: 202). A fourth factor can be added, and that is the overall inefficiency of the Díaz Ordaz administration in dealing with security affairs. The handling of this situation was plagued by decisions that often contradicted the government’s goals of protecting the political status quo and the country’s image. Despite all contradictions in behaviour and rhetoric, the government did offer an ‘official version’ of the events in Tlatelolco and coaxed the media into echoing it (Watt, 2009; González, 2010; Aguayo, 2015; Tasso, 2016). The centrepiece of the government’s narrative was that the student movement had been infiltrated by outside forces that endangered public order, the Olympics, and ultimately the state. Yet it was the Mexican security forces themselves which infiltrated the movement, placing informers in influential positions within the student movement (Fiscalía, 2006: 60–63). These agents identified and accused genuine and purported student leaders, but they also attempted to provoke the students into riskier and more aggressive behaviour. It is unclear what would have become of the Olympics or public order had the participants of the student movement been more susceptible to these provocations. An analysis of public statements made by members of the government and recently released secret intelligence reports describing the behind-the-scenes narrative of President Díaz Ordaz, his cabinet, and intelligence agents reveals the tension between public and private claims and why these can be seen as ideological. The Mexican Federal Security Directorate and the US agencies CIA and FBI took part in the surveillance of the student movement. President Díaz Ordaz and other members of the cabinet had served as CIA informers since before his presidency. As president, Díaz Ordaz received daily briefings from the CIA regarding left-wing dissidents and potential insurgencies (Aguayo, 1998: 93–94; Morley, 2006). Among the public statements made by Díaz Ordaz during the conflict, the most significant ones are a speech made in Guadalajara in August and his presidential address on 1 September 1968. In Guadalajara, the president presents the unrest in Mexico City as a threat to everything Mexicans have fought to achieve and he ‘extends his hand’ to the ‘genuine Mexicans’ among the students who want to restore peace (El Informador, 1968: 3A). The presidential address, also known as the government address, is a yearly report delivered to Congress, which is televised and widely reported upon. This address not only reveals the president’s intention to increase the use of force, but also his justification of it. Díaz Ordaz describes the student movement as an attempt to destroy Mexico’s prestige by creating chaos and possibly preventing the Olympics (Díaz Ordaz, 86 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism 2006: 255). Díaz Ordaz defends the use of article 145 in what he presents as legitimate concerns for Mexico’s sovereignty and he accuses ‘pseudo-students’ of taking schools hostage and of aggravating the conflict (Díaz Ordaz, 2006: 261–262). He alleges that ‘legitimate’ concerns can be addressed in a ‘normal’ manner, but that the government will not give in to anything illegal or ‘inconvenient’ as this might endanger Mexico’s sovereignty (Díaz Ordaz, 2006: 255). He chastises the students’ violence and claims that most Mexicans want an end to this anarchy. He mentions that other countries that faced similar problems have had to use force to restore peace, adding that ‘we will go as far as we need to go’ to restore order (Díaz Ordaz, 2006: 262, 265). Even more ominously, he repeatedly threatens to use the ‘full force’ of the army to enforce internal security and external defence in the context of this struggle (Díaz Ordaz, 2006: 263–264). Despite the president’s allusions to the danger to national sovereignty and his view that article 145 should apply, he does not mention communism or name foreign powers in his speech. In general, his public accusations of foreign intervention remain vague (Keller, 2015: 209–212). Yet throughout the crisis, Díaz Ordaz continued feeding the CIA with claims that this was a communist-led rebellion with Soviet and Cuban backing (Doyle, 2003). At times, the government’s ‘proof’ of a foreign-led communist conspiracy was based on such weak evidence as the fact that students painted Che Guevara’s face on walls or carried posters with Lenin’s effigy (Aguayo, 1998: 183; Cerón, 2012: 250). Cuba and the USSR kept out of this conflict and withheld expressions of solidarity with the students (Aguayo, 1998: 190–193; Keller, 2015: 202–218). The involvement of leftist thinkers, students, and leaders in the movement was undeniable (Cerón, 2012: 244ff; Kelly, 2016: 360). However, whenever the government or the press wished to present evidence of the communist danger stemming from the student movement they did so by quoting either Sócrates Campos Lemus or Áyax Segura, two government infiltrators of the movement, or they repeated unconfirmed reports given by security agents (AEE, 1968b; Sánchez, 1968; Watt, 2009; Tasso, 2016). After the massacre, Díaz Ordaz is quoted by the FBI as having claimed that: The guns used were new and had their numbers filed off. The Castro and Chinese Communist groups were at the center of the effort. The Soviet communists had to come along to avoid the charge of being chicken. (Morley, 2006) Mexican newspaper El Nacional published a picture of Áyax Segura recognising the alleged weapons used by students in Tlatelolco on 7 October 1968. But the façade of the communist conspiracy was not impenetrable. Mexican intelligence analyses of the situation did not report that it was the result of a ‘communist conspiracy’ (Aguayo, 1998: 123). Reports from US agencies such as the CIA and FBI were conflicting, at times contributing to the anti-communist frenzy with unverified reports of communist intervention and at other times offering evidence of their duplicity (Fiscalía, 2006; Morley, 2006; Collado, 2017). María Collado demonstrates that the closer US intelligence agents were to Mexican government sources the more likely they were to repeat the Mexican state’s official version of events, while those who were more independent discredited these claims for their lack of evidence (Collado, 2017: 197–198). The fact that the government had infiltrated the movement with agents provocateurs and informers added to the confusion (Fiscalía, 2006: 59ff). Paradoxically, the day after the massacre, Interior Minister Luis Echeverría claimed that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s statements about a communist conspiracy in the student movement were ‘far © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 87 Elisa Kriza from reality’ (AEE, 1968a: 3). Nevertheless, false reports of a communist conspiracy continued to be published (Sánchez, 1968:1; AEE, 1968b). Shortly after the massacre, a report entitled Tlatelolco was drafted by the Mexican Attorney General Julio Sánchez Vargas (1999). Tasso interprets the report as an attempt to create an ‘official history’ of the massacre which remained unpublished due to its obvious lack of credibility (Tasso, 2016: 863–864). The report speaks of a ‘tragic’ massacre that resulted from the provocations of a group of ‘hard-line’ students who had infiltrated otherwise peaceful student groups. Sánchez describes the goal of the meeting on 2 October as follows: [T]he real motive of this event, as has become evident, was to agitate the people and to attempt to reduce the prestige of the government and its legitimate institutions. It was an act of incitement, organised by the Strike Committee [sic]. (Sánchez Vargas, 1999: 2) The claim that the driving force of the movement consisted of hardliners calling for a revolution and an overthrow of the current establishment made by the Attorney General is based on the testimony of Sócrates Campos Lemus, a paid government infiltrator (Fiscalía, 2006: 60; Collado, 2017: 182). Sánchez writes: [The hardliners] tried to include the workers and peasants in the movement in the attempt to occupy factories and to submit them to the control of student workers and workers, and also to form peasant cooperatives under the leadership of the students, similar to the one that was attempted in Topilejo, in the Federal District. This was all the beginning of a more ambitious plan, which included the transformation of the political structure of the Republic, the abolition of the present institutions and the orientation towards the realisation of the construction of a STATE OF WORKERS AND PEASANTS, of the communist type. (Sánchez Vargas, 1999: 119) Communism is presented as an ‘exotic’ and ‘foreign’ idea that is inadequate for the country, an ideology ‘divorced from the aspirations of the Mexican people’ (Sánchez Vargas, 1999: 119). Sánchez reiterates the government’s position that the PRI, the party that ‘embodies the Mexican Revolution’, is the only genuine representative of the country and the only one able to prevent foreign intervention. Up to the present day, a few intellectuals, politicians, and historians continue to argue that there was a communist infiltration (Cerón, 2012: 240–241), and some scholars such as Julia Sloan (below) interpret the president’s claims in a generous manner: As the youth protest against Diaz Ordaz and his government grew larger and more vitriolic, the president worked harder to discredit it in the eyes of both foreign and domestic audiences. His key strategy for doing so was to claim communist conspiracy and foreign infiltration of the student organisations. The Diaz Ordaz Administration had some plausible evidence for making such assertions, but these claims did not have the desired effect at home or abroad. (Sloan, 2009: 4) But the president’s assertions failed to fully convince public opinion even in 1968. Soon after the massacre, public opinion polls revealed that 80 percent believed that the student movement was under foreign influence, of which 40 percent thought the US was behind it, 30 percent blamed communism, and 20 percent accused Opus Dei of infiltrating the 88 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism movement (Aguayo, 1998: 91). Scholars such as Renata Keller and Sergio Aguayo write that Díaz Ordaz genuinely believed in the communist conspiracy he spoke of, mainly based on claims made in his unpublished memoirs (Aguayo, 2015: 59–62; Keller, 2015: 212, 216–217). It is difficult to prove what he really thought, but some evidence casts a shadow on this interpretation. The president remained vague in public and his private accusations expressed to the intelligence community were either unsubstantiated or they were based on claims made by infiltrators such as Sócrates Campos Lemus who were working for him, as is the case in the passages quoted from his memoirs (Aguayo, 2015: 58–60; see also: Krauze, 2014: 250). Public accusations by the authorities were mostly based on forged evidence and/or claims made by the infiltrators (El Nacional, 7 October 1968: 1, 6; Sánchez, 1968; AEE, 1968b; Allier, 2016: 9; Tasso, 2016: 873). Commenting upon the practice of presenting forged evidence, Krauze and Kelly rightly point out that if the government had had genuine evidence of a communist conspiracy, it would not have kept it a secret (Krauze, 2014: 240; Kelly, 2016: 360). More importantly, there is evidence that Díaz Ordaz had previously used agents provocateurs in order to justify the violent repression of other protests and that he was aware of their use in 1968 (Fiscalía, 2006; Collado, 2017: 194). This strengthens the argument that the notion of a communist conspiracy to overthrow the government was very likely a rationalisation. On a short-term basis, this anti-communist rhetoric was sufficiently effective in justifying state violence that would otherwise prove intolerable for the international community and for Mexican society (Aguayo, 2015: 118–122). The Olympics were not cancelled or boycotted as a result. In the aftermath of Tlatelolco, the Olympic Committee welcomed the government’s reassurance that the student protests had had no relation to the Olympics and that they were now over (Zuñiga, 1968: 3). However, society’s trust in the police, the military, the government, and the press in Mexico was significantly altered. If Defence Minister García Barragan’s astonishing claims that US Ambassador Fulton Freeman asked him in vain to stage a military coup during the autumn of 1968 have a grain of truth, Díaz Ordaz’s strategy to use anti-communism in order to secure power might have come very close to disaster (Castillo, 2012). The Participants and Alternative Viewpoints The initial narrative offered by the government that the violence was sparked by communist infiltrators has long been contested in line with the now widespread view that the government was solely responsible for the massacre (Aguayo, 1998; Watt, 2009; Allier, 2016). But other elements in the president’s multilayered narrative – that the movement consisted of pampered idealistic students who were operating in the shadow of communist puppet masters and who joined forces with poor youths – need further attention (Aguayo, 2015: 59–61). Looking at texts written by communist participants in the movement, the accusation that they operated under foreign orders seems ludicrous, but so do some of the other points in this narrative. An outline of the thoughts of two communist writers who represent prototypes of communist participation in the movement of 1968 will illustrate the complexity of communist involvement in the student movement in the context of the government’s incongruous claims and behaviour. José Revueltas (1914–1976) was a central ideological leader of the movement who was also imprisoned as a result. René Avilés Fabila (1940–2016) was a participant in the movement who penned a bestselling novel about the movement and the Tlatelolco Massacre. Both © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 89 Elisa Kriza were, off and on, members of the Mexican Communist Party and both were involved in the Organising Committee of the Olympics in 1968. José Revueltas became a member of the Mexican Communist Party for the first time as a teenager, and throughout his life he always returned to the party after repeated exclusions. His first jail term came as a result of his communist activism. The resulting prison novel was the beginning of a prolific career as a novelist, essayist, and political theoretician. In the 1960s he worked at the Subsecretariat for Cultural Affairs of the Education Ministry and as lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Philology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, National Autonomous University). In May 1968, he quit his job at the Subsecretariat apparently for political reasons – he claimed he was offered a better salary in exchange for his silence regarding ‘repressions’ – and got a job as copywriter for the Organising Committee of the Olympics (Revueltas, 1987: 169). Revueltas became involved in the student movement at the very beginning. In August 1968, he abandoned his work at the Organising Committee in order to dedicate more time to the movement. In October, Sócrates Campos accused Revueltas of being an intellectual mastermind of the movement. He was imprisoned in Lecumberri, the most notorious prison in Mexico, from November 1968 until the amnesty of 1971. The texts Revueltas wrote and distributed for the movement and his letters from prison were published as a book, Mexico 1968. Youth and Revolution (1978), and they give insight into his thoughts about the movement. Revueltas always saw the Mexican student movement as distinct from the French uprising of May 1968 and also as a movement divorced from organised communism. In May 1968, Revueltas observed the French protest movements with great enthusiasm, and he wrote a letter to the French workers which he read publicly in Mexico. This letter reveals his disappointment with the communist parties of Mexico and France which he claims are no longer at the ‘helm of history’ and he places his hopes for a real revolution in the striking French proletariat (Revueltas, 1978: 27). In the same text, he bitterly criticises the Soviet Union as ‘anti-Leninist’ and a ‘traitor to internationalism’ due to its failure to help the proletariat in Western Europe to overcome capitalist imperialism. Once the Mexican student movement took off in July 1968, Revueltas joined the solidarity Committee of Intellectuals, Writers, and Artists and the Battle Committee of the Faculty of Philosophy. Revueltas considers that the ‘lack of independence of the working class’ and the repression of the railway strike in 1959 are the roots of the Mexican student revolt and he sees no link between the French and the Mexican student movements (Revueltas, 1978: 21). In a somewhat paternalistic manner, almost reminiscent of the president’s view of the students as pampered youths, he fails to see the students as equals to the proletariat, but rather as the ‘intellectual petit bourgeoisie’ that adopted the language of socialism out of lack of another language (Revueltas, 1978: 21). Revueltas considers it necessary to overthrow the government with a revolution, but he clearly states that the student movement should not do so (Revueltas, 1978: 43). He argues that students are too disconnected from the workers and the peasants, the people he sees as being the providers of the financial support of universities and the future revolutionaries (Revueltas, 1978: 51). He believes that students can pave the way for the removal of the bourgeoisie from power through protests against law 145 of the penal code and in favour of the constitution (Revueltas, 1978: 41, 45). He emphasises that it is too early for radical change in the de facto dictatorship of the PRI, angrily chastising the fringe groups calling for an armed revolt (Revueltas, 1978: 46). Despite the limited role 90 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism he concedes to students in changing society, he calls the student movement a ‘revolution’ (Revueltas, 1978: 52). Revueltas’s main theoretical contributions to the student movement are his ponderings about how universities should be reformed in order to create social cohesion and a stronger foundation for regime change. This includes the introduction of self-management and the creation of councils, brigades, and agitprop (Revueltas, 1978: 60). He clarifies that the PCM and other communist parties are meaningless to the movement (Revueltas, 1978: 65–66). As the confrontation with the government heated up, his concern for the students’ safety grew. As opposed to the government’s claim that communists were ‘provoking’ the students and worsening the conflict, Revueltas clearly tried to alleviate the situation. After the president’s threatening address to the nation, Revueltas wrote a passionate response in which he denies the accusation that the student movement was planning to sabotage the Olympics (Revueltas, 1978: 55). He accused the government of using this excuse to conceal its authoritarian goal of overcoming dissent. He also issued several warnings regarding the president’s threat to use the army to suppress student demonstrations. He asked for all protest activities outside the university to be halted in order to avoid students becoming ‘cannon fodder’ (Revueltas, 1978: 56). His warnings were deemed ‘reactionary’ by fellow leaders of the movement and Revueltas withdrew from the solidarity Committee of Intellectuals, Writers, and Artists three days later (Revueltas, 1978: 57–58). But he continued to write for the movement and to warn of the ‘brutal and rabid repression’ he considered imminent (Revueltas, 1978: 64). He repeated this warning on 27 September (Revueltas, 1978: 73). Violence escalates and his attitude becomes more determined while maintaining the desire to avoid being victimised (Revueltas, 1978: 72f). Revueltas was not present at the Tlatelolco massacre, but fearing arrest he goes into hiding after it takes place. His writings between 2 October and his arrest in November display his concern and fear for those who might already be under arrest or even dead. In this period he begins to interpret the massacre as a ‘sacrifice’ (Revueltas, 1978: 81–83). ‘We are Tlatelolco’, Revueltas writes (1978: 83), as his language in these last texts reflects more heroic and defiant themes. Revueltas’s suspicion of organised forms of communism is unambiguously evident in his texts from 1968, despite his communist convictions. He saw the movement of 1968 as a necessary step in reforming society and a ‘revolution’ of sorts, but in no way as a violent insurrection. To be sure, he was not interested in protecting the government’s prestige during the Olympics, but he was also not involved in a plot to sabotage the event or overthrow the government. It is noteworthy that Díaz Ordaz’s government was keen to arrest him under these false pretences after 2 October, having allowed him to work unhindered for the Organising Committee of the Olympics until the end of August. But he was not the only communist intellectual working for the Organising Committee. René Avilés Fabila (1940–2016) was a communist writer and an enthusiastic participant in the 1968 student movement in Mexico City while he was also working for the Public Relations department of the Organising Committee of the Olympics. Exasperated with Mexico’s reaction to the student movement, he left to begin his PhD in France, where he joined the Trotskyist ‘Fourth International’ (Avilés Fabila, 1991a: 61–67). He returned to Mexico three years later. Avilés had been a communist for 30 years since 1960, when he joined the PCM, but he was temporarily expelled from the party before the student movement began. It is unclear whether or not Avilés was in Tlatelolco on the night of the massacre, as he has given contradictory accounts on this issue, but there © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 91 Elisa Kriza is no doubt that he took part in the movement and that he was communist at the time (Avilés Fabila, 1991a: 85, 1991b: 97; Pereztrejo, 2014). Avilés wrote one of the best selling novels about the events in Tlatelolco (Martré, 1998: 141). The Great Solitary of the Palace (El gran solitario de palacio) was written shortly after the Tlatelolco massacre and it embeds the story of various participants in the student movement and their ideological standpoints in an overall discussion of the political regime since 1917. The first editions include long sections of searing criticism of the Mexican Communist Party that Avilés removed when he published the third and all subsequent editions of the book (Avilés Fabila, 1991b: 102). In including a novel in my analysis, I do not use it as a source of facts, but as a rare opportunity to read the type of blunt criticism that often gets lost in self-censorship, as was the case even in the later editions of this novel, and in acknowledgement of the significant role of literature in discussing the student movement before the government’s endorsement of it (Carpenter, 2005: 479; Fenoglio-Limón, 2010: 302). Avilés regarded Revueltas as his mentor in militancy (Avilés Fabila, 1991b: 104), but his work illustrates the deep division between wealthy left-wing activists and the proletariat that Revueltas wished to overcome. Avilés and his book, The Great Solitary of the Palace, unwittingly represent the class conflict Rodríguez claims is underrepresented in the historiography of the student movement in Mexico (Rodríguez Kuri, 2003: 183, 190). This conflict is relevant in understanding the fissures of the movement that the government tried to conceal in its claims of unity between the rich activists and the poor. Avilés’s criticism of the Mexican government is exceedingly ironic, and it is cruder and more hyperbolic than that of Revueltas – in tune with the satirical mode he chose, yet not much different from the tone he uses in his later memoirs. His main point of criticism is the lack of democracy in the Mexican political landscape, ridiculing the PRI’s practice to hold elections every six years, allowing for a different person to become president while the PRI remained in power (Avilés Fabila, 1974; Linz, 1998: 20). A further aim lies in exposing the trope of the Mexican Revolution as a fake by displaying the president as a reactionary, religious ignoramus, who is obsessed with power and who betrays the ideals of the Revolution (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 46–47, 150–151, 172–175). The president, his cabinet, the police, and the military are all criticised for their brutality and ignorance. These issues are presented as the main concerns of the student movement. Anti-communism is interpreted as a form of ignorance: The novel suggests that the government’s claim that Mexico is more prosperous than communist countries is wrong and that hunger and poverty are alien to the latter (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 25). But this naïve view of communist countries is toned down by heavy criticism of the Soviet Union’s cultural politics and its foreign policy (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 39–40, 94, 104). At the same time, the novel repeatedly ridicules the idea of the student movement as a foreign conspiracy, specifically making fun of the notion that the students’ use of Che Guevara’s effigy is proof of this (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 78–79, 89, 119). This paranoia is linked to nationalism. State violence is also portrayed as a result of nationalism, as a counterproductive measure to defend the country’s prestige (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 43). But state violence is also revealed as an effort to retain power (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 92–94). The novel presents a pluralistic student movement, in which not even the most radical students seek to overthrow the ‘bourgeois state’; instead, their goal is to oppose a regime based on lies (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 41, 106, 131–147). In this context, the novel bitterly criticises the Mexican Communist Party. This offers an interesting interpretation of the party’s lack of the necessary leadership and following in order to stage the alleged revolution the government claimed communists were preparing in 1968. The 92 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism novel’s communist protagonist Sergio, despite the heroic and sympathetic role he plays, is a merciless revolutionary. His wrath is strongest against ‘reactionary’ communists like those in the PC, whom he believes should be executed (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 103). Sergio’s fierce criticism of the PC mirrors Avilés’s views at the time, as Avilés explains in his memoirs, and like Sergio Avilés is expelled from the party for allegedly being ‘Maoist’ and ‘Trotskyist’ (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 103–105, 1991b: 102). The party is denounced for its purported cowardice, for passively waiting for the bourgeoisie to finally ‘get bored of power and hand it over to the proletariat’, but no plan of action is suggested (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 105, 123). In a later essay, Avilés explains that he wrote the novel wishing to see ‘the demolition of the system that allowed the Tlatelolco Massacre’ (Avilés Fabila, 1991b: 104). In this essay, written originally in 1989, he confirms his belief that the next revolution will be carried out by students and not workers. But his revolution remains an abstract notion. In his memoirs, Avilés justifies those activists who took up arms after 1968 by claiming that the violence perpetrated by the state left them no alternative (Avilés Fabila, 1991a: 151–154). Yet he sees this battle as futile, not least because of the lack of support from all communist countries except for North Korea (Avilés Fabila, 1991a: 154). Avilés’s distrust of the lower classes to lead the revolution is clearly imprinted in his novel’s protagonists: There is a clear class division in the novel, where upper-class students appear as highly intelligent, good-looking, and ideologically sound heroes. Poor students are lazy and stupid; some are even susceptible to bribes in order to use violence, thus provoking the police (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 67–68, 91–92). Policemen and soldiers are depicted as ugly, illiterate peasants who sell their souls for money (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 67–68). The common people (el pueblo) are as ignorant as the government and the security forces and they faithfully support these. The elitism of the novel is most jarring when the darker colour of people’s skin – including that of the peasants, the poor city dwellers, and the president – is emphasised while describing their stupidity (Avilés Fabila, 1974: 26, 47, 62–63; 175ff; 193). The lack of social cohesion that Revueltas observed in his writings is illustrated in Avilés’s novel and in his non-fiction: these thinkers attest, each in his own way, the depth of the divisions that historians describe and that the government tried to whitewash in its attempt to exaggerate the movement’s unifying power. The lack of unity among leftist activists, the weakness of the PCM, and the estrangement between rich and poor stood in the way of a genuine revolution that would have overthrown the government. The fact that the authorities repeatedly emphasised the ‘propagandistic’ abilities of communists in the student movement yet had no qualms in allowing prominent communists to work in the area of communications for the Organising Committee of the Olympics is a further contradiction in the overall handling of the situation (Aguayo, 2015: 65). Conclusion The Tlatelolco massacre put a brutal end to the Mexican student movement of 1968. The government made unfounded accusations of foreign communist intervention to condone its harsh reaction to student protests and riots in anticipation of the Olympics in Mexico City. This paper has discussed how anti-communism functioned as an ideology used to rationalise state violence. In the context of 1968, with the world’s eyes set on Mexico, and anti-communist fears in the Western hemisphere running high, anti-communism served as a convincing narrative for certain audiences. © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 93 Elisa Kriza This article has presented an analysis of the government’s official narrative and contrasted it with confidential reports in order to understand the contradictions and fissures in this narrative. This inquiry provides solid arguments against the notion that President Díaz Ordaz was overcome by a genuine fear of communism, instead proposing the view that anti-communism was used ideologically as a means towards an end. Above all, the continuous fabrication of evidence and notable use of agents provocateurs undermines the notion that the government was convinced of its own narrative of the communist conspiracy. Díaz Ordaz’s track record of violently suppressing protests after introducing agents provocateurs in other conflicts suggests that a genuine belief in an anti-communist conspiracy was unnecessary, yet was deemed useful in this precise context (Kelly, 2016: 349; Collado, 2017:194). Anti-communist rhetoric was the background music used to silence criticism of the actual suppression of the movement, which was carried out by the military operation of 2 October. It was a strategy to protect the political status quo and Mexico’s prestige that worked in the short term. But the violence and disinformation campaign discredited the government in the long run. Although communists represented a small minority in the student movement, this article has outlined the views of two of them in order to illustrate the type of inner conflicts that plagued a seemingly solid movement. The texts by José Revueltas and René Avilés offer compelling discussions of communists’ motivation in joining the movement, but also intriguing interpretations of the weaknesses of organised communism and the strained relationship with communist countries. A more extensive study of communist perspectives would be necessary to reach broader conclusions, but their texts already reinforce the view held by historians that the student movement was too multifaceted and too divided to seriously threaten the PRI’s hold on power – not to mention too non-communist to stage a communist revolution. References Aguayo, S. (1998) 1968. Los archivos de la violencia. Grijalbo: Mexico. Aguayo, S. (2015) De Tlatelolco a Ayotzinapa. Las violencias del Estado. Ediciones Proceso: Mexico. Allier, E. (2016) ‘Memory and History of Mexico ‘68’’. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (102): 7–25. Avilés Fabila, R. (1974) El gran solitario de palacio. Cid Ediciones: Mexico. Avilés Fabila, R. (1991a) Memorias de un comunista. Gernika: Mexico. Avilés Fabila, R. (1991b) ‘México 68. Veinte años después de El gran solitario de Palacio’ in K. Kohut (ed.) Literatura mexicana hoy: del 68 al ocaso de la revolución. Vervuert: Frankfurt, 93–106. Carpenter, V. (2005) ‘Introduction’. Bulletin of Latin American Research 24(4): 476–480. Cerón, A. (2012) ‘El movimiento del 68 en México: interpretaciones historigráficas 1998–2008’. Andamios 9(20): 237–257. Collado, M. (2017) ‘La guerra fría, el movimiento estudiantil de 1968 y el gobierno de Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. La mirada de las agencias de seguridad de Estados Unidos’. Secuencia 98: 158–203. Delgado, K. (2013) El Partido Comunista Mexicano y el movimiento estudiantil de 1968: enfrentamiento, aportación e impacto. Unpublished thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Querétaro. Díaz Ordaz, G. (2006) Informes de gobierno. Centro de Documentación, Información y Análisis: Mexico. 94 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 Anti-Communism, Communism, and Anti-Interventionism Doyle, K. (2003) The Tlatelolco Massacre. U.S. Documents on Mexico and the Events of 1968. [WWW document]. URL: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB99/ [accessed 1 May 2015]. Eagleton, T. (2007) Ideology: An Introduction. Verso: London. Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado (FEMOSPP) (2006) Informe histórico a la sociedad mexicana. [WWW document]. URL http://nsarchive .gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB209/ [accessed 8 August 2016]. Fenoglio-Limón, I. (2010) ‘Reading Mexico 1968: Literature, Memory and Politics’ in I. Cornils and S. Waters (eds.) Memories of 1968: International Perspectives. Peter Lang: Bern, 299–319. González, C. (2010) ‘1968 Olympic Dreams and Tlatelolco Nightmares: Imagining and Imaging Modernity on Television’. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 26(1): 1–30. Keller, R. (2015) Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Kelly, W. C. (2016) ‘Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s Foreign Policy: A Cold War Study’. The Latin Americanist 60(3): 347–370. Krauze, E. (2014) La presidencia imperial. Revised edition. Tusquets: Mexico. Linz, J. J. (1998) ‘Democracy’s Time Constraints’. International Political Science Review/ Revue internationale de science politique 19(1): 19–37. Martré, G. (1998) El movimiento popular estudiantil de 1968 en la novela mexicana. UNAM: Mexico. Morley, J. (2006) LITEMPO: The CIA’s Eyes on Tlatelolco. [WWW document]. URL http:// nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB204/index.htm#13 [accessed 1 May 2015]. Paz, O. (1970) Posdata. Siglo XXI Editores: Mexico. Poniatowska, E. (2012) La noche de Tlatelolco. Ediciones Era: Mexico. Revueltas, J. (1978) Mexico 68. Juventud y revolución. Revueltas: Obras completas, Vol. 15. Ediciones Era: México. Revueltas, J. (1987) Las evocaciones requeridas, Vol. 2. Ediciones Era: Mexico. Rodríguez Kuri, A. (2003) ‘Los primeros días. Una explicación de los orígenes inmediatos del movimiento estudiantil de 1968’. Historia Mexicana 53(1): 179–228. Sloan, J. (2009) ‘Carnivalizing the Cold War: Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, and the Events of 1968’. European Journal of American Studies 4(1): 12. Sloan, J. (2012) ‘Revolution on the National Stage: Mexico, the PRI, and the Student Movement in 1968’ in S. Christiansen and Z. Scarlett (eds.) The Third World in the Global 1960s. Berghahn Books: New York, 171–181. Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (1966) ‘Disolución social, tipos de conducta que constituyen el delito de’. Semanario Judicial de la Federación 105(6): 62. Tasso, P. (2016) ‘Días de narrar. la prosa oficial de 1968’. Historia Mexicana 66(2): 853–903. Watt, P. (2009) ‘The Invisible Tyranny of the Mexican Media: Tlatelolco and Beyond’. Sincronía 14(52) pages unnumbered. Wippermann, W. (2012) Heilige Hetzjagd. Eine Ideologiegeschichte des Antikommunismus. Rotbuch Verlag: Berlin. Newspapers AEE (1968a) Contestó GDO los seis puntos. El Informador, 3 October, pp. 1, 3. AEE (1968b) ‘Máxima energía’ para suprimir los brotes de violencia. El Informador, 4 October, p. 1. Castillo, G. (2012) En 68, García Barragán no quiso dar golpe de Estado ordenado por EU: Nazar. La Jornada, 29 January, p. 2. El Informador (1968) Patético llamado a la unidad nacional hizo GDO. El Informador, 2 August, p. 3A. © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 95 Elisa Kriza El Nacional (1968) Otro de los lideres detenidos reconoció la existencia de un plan subversivo. El Nacional, 7 October, pp. 1, 6. Pereztrejo, S. (2014) El gran solitario de palacio de René Avilés Fabila presente en la FUL. El Sol de México, 12 August. Sánchez, R. (1968) Implantar el comunismo, meta del grupo de ‘línea dura’ del conflicto estudiantil. El Nacional, 6 October, pp. 1, 4. Zuñiga, A. (1968) La semana que ayer terminó. El Nacional, 6 October, p. 3. Archives Sánchez Vargas, J. (1999) Tlatelolco. Gallery 2, IPS Box 2688-A, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico. 96 © 2018 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2018 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 38, No. 1 Copyright of Bulletin of Latin American Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Remembering Mexico’s Dirty War 50 Years After Tlatelolco Will president elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) bring justice to the families who were detained, disappeared, and killed during Mexico’s dirty war? He could start with the Cabañas family. October 1, 2018 Gladys McCormick Adolfo Godoy Cabañas in 1971 outside of his cell in Campo Militar #1 in Mexico City. (SEDENA) A s president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador prepares for his inauguration this coming December in Mexico, he is a step away from inheriting a country witnessing its worst human rights crisis in a century. Since 2006, the numbers of killings and disappearances attributed to the drug war and organized crime have surpassed 150,000, and 2018 is well on track to being the most violent year on record in Mexican history. López Obrador, or AMLO, recently released a light-on-the-details four-point plan outlining how he proposes to address deep-seated problems of corruption and impunity in the judiciary and law enforcement. AMLO could show he is serious about taking a new approach to tackling these problems by bringing justice to the families of those who were disappeared during Mexico’s dirty wars in the 1970s. Neither the violence nor the impunity of officials in today’s Mexico is unprecedented. On October 2, 1968, 50 years ago today, police and military forces gunned down hundreds of students in downtown Mexico City, just days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This massacre marked the beginning of a brutal dirty war between the government and guerrilla groups that spanned both cities and the countryside. In 2002, then-president Vicente Fox released many of the military and secret police files pertaining to the 1968 massacre and ensuing dirty war. En lieu of a Truth Commission, Fox set up a special prosecutor’s office to look into whether or not charges were necessary. While victims met this news with much hope, they soon grew disillusioned. No one was ever brought to justice for the atrocities government agents committed in the name of national security, and the public has been given only the vaguest outlines of what took place, who was responsible, and how many suffered. The special prosecutor’s office was eventually disbanded and, since 2015, the majority of the files Fox released were informally reclassified. Both in the past and today, despite concerted attempts by victims and their families to hold the perpetrators of the abuses accountable for their crimes, little has happened. This lack of accountability is on display this month as civil society groups and victims across Mexico mark the 50th anniversary of the 1968 massacre. It is within AMLO’s power to change how the justice system tackles its long track record of tolerating, ignoring, and abetting human rights abuses from the past and the present. Government security forces detained, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, and in some cases disappeared these family members. They did so in the name of national security, to punish their relatives and act as a cautionary symbol to dissuade others from joining one of the many armed guerrilla groups that sprung up in the aftermath of the 1968 student massacre. One group of victims—the relatives of the so-called subversives from the 1970s guerrilla wars— offer clear parameters of what could be done today in cases of innocent victims. Today, the families are asking for official recognition of what was done to them and reparations for their pain and suffering. These victims have waited for almost five decades for some form of legal reckoning for what was done to them and AMLO could help them find the answers and justice they have sought for so long. Take, for example, the family of Lucio Cabañas, the former school teacher trained at the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college, who became the leader of a guerrilla group known as the Party of the Poor from Atoyac, in the state of Guerrero. It is no coincidence that this is the same region where 43 students were disappeared on September 26, 2014. Cabañas’ relatives collectively suffered the wrath of the military and police forces that swept through the area in the counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1970s. The family faced harassment, endured countless threats, were repeatedly robbed, and forced off their land. Several were taken to detention centers at the military base in Pie de la Cuesta or clandestine prisons in Acapulco and Mexico City. Some, such as Lucio’s cousin, Isaías Castro Velásquez, were detained and never returned. Those left behind sold off their belongings and gave up their jobs to search for their disappeared loved ones. This harassment continued even after the guerrilla leader was killed in a shootout in 1974. The scale of what this one family endured became evident as we interviewed a dozen survivors over the course of these past few months. The military detained Pablo Cabañas, Lucio’s younger brother, in January 1972 and, as he told me, “my life changed completely.” As the soldiers questioned him about Lucio’s whereabouts, Pablo explained to us that they “slapped [us] across the face, hit [us] with a club, kicked, electric shocks all over the body, inside the underpants, almost naked, stuck us in a barrel of cold water, submerged our heads, hands and feet tied up, thrown on the floor to be kicked wherever we fell.” Pablo spent almost six years in prison and was finally released in 1977. He has brought lawsuits against the government about his unlawful imprisonment and testified before various official bodies, including the Attorney General, to no avail. Adolfo Godoy Cabañas, Lucio’s cousin, tells a similar story. He was detained, interrogated, and imprisoned for four months in 1971. In our conversation, he explained how his family had suffered irreparable damage. He pulled out a photograph of himself standing outside his cell at a military base in Mexico City. “This photo is proof of my disappearance.” “We were disappeared but our family refused to stop looking for us,” explains Bartola Serafín Gervacio, Lucio’s half-sister. She spent two years detained inside clandestine prisons inside military bases in Guerrero and Mexico City along with her mother, sister, brother, husband, and two small children. Bartola explains how her husband and brother were tortured, and how she, the other women, and the children were put in solitary confinement for months on end. Though only six at the time, Bartola’s daughter, Mariela, recalls her fear, nightmares, and hearing the screams of fellow prisoners being tortured. The family endured even more pain beyond that—a sampling of what so many others faced in this brutal era. Two members of the Cabañas family, including Lucio, died during combat between the guerrilla group and security forces; five others—four men and one woman—were detained and subsequently disappeared. Eighteen of them, including men, women, and children of varying ages, were detained, tortured, and imprisoned for anywhere between hours to six years. At least one woman from this last group, María del Rosario Cabañas Alvarado, subsequently died from injuries she sustained during torture. There are others like the Cabañas family, whose members must be accounted for as victims. As Mexico gears up to mark the 50th anniversary of the massacre of students in 1968, AMLO could stand apart from history by promising that the judiciary will finally answer the Cabañas family, giving them the reckoning they so deserve. AMLO has shown he appreciates the value of symbols in politics. This is the man, after all, who opted for a 60% pay cut in his salary as president and spent hours sitting on a commercial plane on the tarmac of Mexico City’s airport to showcase his refusal to use the presidential plane. Bringing justice to the Cabañas family on this anniversary would make a powerful statement, even more so because it comes on the heels of the four-year anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa. Making this announcement to the Cabañas family on such an occasion will elicit hope that impunity is no longer sacrosanct in Mexico and the government is serious about tackling this issue both in the past and the present. It would also go much further than President Enrique Peña Nieto’s recent announcement that the 1968 student massacre was indeed a “state crime.” There were other state crimes beyond what happened at Tlatelolco that Mexico must reckon with. Beyond acknowledging the horrors of Tlatelolco, AMLO should recognize what happened to the families targeted by the counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1970s, in the repression of popular uprisings in Chiapas and Guerrero in the 1990s, and against many of the innocent civilians caught up in the current drug war. Bringing closure to the Cabañas family’s search for reckoning would thus be an important first step for AMLO to take as he embarks on a long journey to address entrenched impunity that thrives in silence and in relegating to oblivion the pain of so many across five decades. Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America by Giles Tremlett 3 Sep 2020 The last time Anatole Larrabeiti saw his parents, he was four years old. It was 26 September 1976, the day after his birthday. He remembers the shootout, the bright flashes of gunfire and the sight of his father lying on the ground, mortally wounded, outside their home in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his mother lying beside him. Then Larrabeiti remembers being taken away by armed police, along with his 18month-old sister, Victoria Eva. The two children became prisoners. At first, they were held in a grimy car repair garage that had been turned into a clandestine torture centre. That was in another part of Buenos Aires, the city that their parents had moved to in June 1973, joining thousands of leftwing militants and former guerrillas fleeing a military coup in their native Uruguay. The following month, in October 1976, Anatole and Victoria Eva were taken to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and held at the military intelligence headquarters. A few days before Christmas, they were flown to a third country, Chile, in a small aircraft that climbed high above the Andes. Larrabeiti remembers looking down on snowy peaks from the plane. Young children do not usually make epic journeys through three countries in as many months without parents or relatives. The closest thing they had to family was a jailer known as Aunt Mónica. It was probably Aunt Mónica who abandoned them in a large square, the Plaza O’Higgins, in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, on 22 December 1976. Witnesses recall two young, well-dressed children stepping out of a black car with tinted windows. Larrabeiti wandered around the square, hand-in-hand with his sister, until the owner of a merry-go-round ride spotted them. He invited them to sit on the ride, expecting some panicked parents to appear, looking for their lost children. But nobody came, so he called the local police. No one could understand how the two children, whose accents marked them as foreign, had got here. It was as if they had dropped from the sky. Anatole was too young to make sense of what had happened. How does a four-year-old who finds himself in Chile explain that he does not know where he is, that he lives in Argentina, but is really Uruguayan? All he knew was that he was in a strange place, where people spoke his language in a different way. The next day, the children were taken to an orphanage, and from there they were sent on to separate foster homes. After a few months, they had a stroke of luck. A dental surgeon and his wife wanted to adopt, and when the magistrate in charge of the children asked the surgeon which sibling he wanted, he said both. “He said that we had to come together, because we were brother and sister,” Larrabeiti told me when we met earlier this year in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Today, he is a trim, smartly suited 47-year-old public prosecutor with hazel eyes and a shaven head. “I have decided to live without hate,” he said. “But I want people to know.” What Larrabeiti wants people to know is that his family were victims of one of the 20th century’s most sinister international state terror networks. It was called Operation Condor, after the broad-winged vulture that soars above the Andes, and it joined eight South American military dictatorships – Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador – into a single network that covered four-fifths of the continent. It has taken decades to fully expose this system, which enabled governments to send death squads on to each other’s territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies – real or suspected – among their emigrant and exile communities. Condor effectively integrated and expanded the state terror unleashed across South America during the cold war, after successive rightwing military coups, often encouraged by the US, erased democracy across the continent. Condor was the most complex and sophisticated element of a broad phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people across South America were murdered or disappeared by military governments in the 1970s and 80s. Most Condor victims disappeared for ever. Hundreds were secretly disposed of – some of them tossed into the sea from planes or helicopters after being tied up, shackled to concrete blocks or drugged so that they could barely move. Larrabeiti’s mother, Victoria, who was last seen in an Argentinian torture centre in 1976, is one of them. His father, Mario, who was a leftwing militant, probably died in the shootout when they were snatched by the police. Enough victims have survived, however, to tell stories that, when matched against a growing volume of declassified documents, amount to a single, ghastly tale. In the past two decades, Larrabeiti’s story has been told and retold in half a dozen courts and tribunals around the world. In the absence of a fully formed global criminal justice system, the perpetrators of Condor are being taken to court through a piecemeal process. “The trouble with borders is that it is easier to cross them to kill someone than it is to pursue a crime,” says Carlos Castresana, a prosecutor who has pursued Condor cases and the dictators behind them in Spain. Those seeking justice have had to rely on a judicial spider’s web of national laws, international treaties and rulings by human rights tribunals. The individuals they pursue are often decrepit and unrepentant old men, but a tenacious network of survivors, lawyers, investigators and academics, rather like the postwar Nazi-hunters, has taken up the challenge of ensuring that such international state terror does not go untried. The process is painfully slow. The first major criminal investigation focusing on Condor – with victims and defendants from seven countries – began in Rome more than 20 years ago. It still has not ended. On a sweltering day in July 2019, a judge in the Rome case handed life sentences to a former president of Peru, a Uruguayan foreign minister, a Chilean military intelligence chief and 21 others for their role in a coordinated campaign of extermination and torture. The defendants are appealing, and a final verdict is due within a year. Much of what we now know about Condor has been unearthed or pieced together in Rome, Buenos Aires and in dozens of court cases – large and small – in other countries. Further evidence comes from US intelligence papers dealing with Argentina that were declassified on the orders of Barack Obama. In 2019, the US completed its handover of 47,000 pages to Argentina. These documents show how much the US and European governments knew about what was happening across South America, and how little they cared. When he was seven, Anatole Larrabeiti discovered his true identity, thanks to his tenacious paternal grandmother, Angélica, who tracked the siblings down. Stories had appeared in the Chilean press when they vanished in 1976, though headlines claimed they were abandoned by unidentified “red terrorist parents”. Over the next few years, word of the missing children’s whereabouts spread from one humanitarian organisation to another, before eventually reaching the Brazilian human rights group Clamor, which had activists in Valparaíso, the city in Chile where Larrabeiti and his sister were living. After a tipoff, the activists secretly photographed the children on their way to school and sent pictures to Angélica. She immediately recognised her grandchildren. “My sister was a replica of my mother as a child,” explained Larrabeiti. “And I have her lips.” By agreement with their biological grandparents, the children remained with their adopted parents in Chile. When Victoria Eva turned nine, she was told about her true identity, and the children started to make family visits to Uruguay. “They were good parents,” said Larrabeiti, of the couple who adopted them. “They kept the links with Uruguay and we had psychological support, which I needed when I became a very angry adolescent.” The crimes committed by Latin America’s military regimes during the cold war continue to haunt the continent. Only a perverse combination of power and paranoia can explain why these regimes awarded themselves the right not just to murder and torture, but also to steal children such as the Larrabeitis. The men perpetrating such crimes saw themselves as warriors in a messianic, frontierless war against the spread of armed revolution across Latin America. Their fantasies were overblown, but not entirely baseless. In 1965, the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara had waved an emotional goodbye to his comradein-arms Fidel Castro, leaving Cuba. He vowed to initiate a new phase of revolutionary activity, extending guerrilla warfare across Latin America. Che was killed while carrying out his mission in Bolivia in 1967, but the US by then viewed revolution in Latin America as an existential threat – recalling how Russian nuclear weapons had reached Cuban soil during the 1962 missile crisis. In a bid to strengthen anti-communist forces, the US pumped money and weapons to armed forces across the region, vastly increasing the power of the military within these states and eventually, as the American journalist John Dinges has written, ending up in an “intimate embrace with mass murderers running torture camps, body dumps, and crematoriums”. In the 70s, as rightwing military coups and state terror swept the continent, an attempt at coordinating an armed response was made via a loose network known as the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR). Formed by groups from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia in 1973, the JCR had grandiose plans to pursue Che’s continental uprising, but lacked funds, friends and firepower. Meanwhile, South America’s military regimes began to collaborate more closely, initially striking bilateral agreements that allowed operatives to carry out their work on foreign soil. Argentine special forces in operation in Buenos Aires in 1982. Aurora Meloni, a Uruguayan who had gone into exile in Argentina with her husband, Daniel Banfi, and two young daughters, was one of the first to suspect that South America’s violent right was plotting an international network of terror and rendition. At 3am on 13 September 1974, Meloni and Banfi were at home in a suburb of Buenos Aires when about half a dozen armed men burst through their door. Meloni, then aged 23, immediately recognised one of them as the notorious Uruguayan police inspector Hugo Campos Hermida. Back in Uruguay, Hermida had once questioned Meloni and Banfi – then students of literature and history respectively – after they had taken part in a demonstration back home in support of the leftwing Tupamaro guerrilla movement, to which Banfi belonged. “I remembered how he [Hermida] had hit me,” Meloni told me. “He was very aggressive.” Meloni could not understand why Hermida was working freely in a foreign country. At that time, Argentina was still a democracy, with rule of law. (The military takeover came later, in March 1976.) Foreign policemen had no right to act there. After their apartment had been ransacked for clues as to the whereabouts of other exiled Tupamaros, Hermida took Banfi away. Aurora assumed she would soon discover which police station or jail he had been taken to, but there was silence. In September 1974, this was still a bizarre event. “We had never heard of people disappearing in Argentina before. I was sure I would find him,” Meloni told me. Eventually she called a press conference. How could someone vanish like that? The answer came five weeks later, when three bodies bearing torture scars were discovered by police 75 miles away. Car headlights and a group of men had been seen in a remote spot at night, and pile of fresh earth had been left behind. Daniel Banfi was one of three murdered Uruguayans found in the hastily dug grave. The following month, Meloni left Argentina, and eventually moved to Italy, where, since her father was Italian, she had dual nationality. She returned to Uruguay for three spells over the next 25 years, seeking justice. But, just as in Chile and Argentina, the price of ending dictatorship in Uruguay in 1985 was an amnesty, which ruled that state representatives could not be charged with crimes committed during the regime’s 12 years in power. It seemed nothing could be done. It wasn’t until the end of the century that cracks in the legal status quo began to appear. In the late 90s, a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garzón began testing a previously ignored law that obliged Spain to pursue any alleged human rights abusers anywhere in the world, if their own countries refused to try them. Garzón and a group of progressive prosecutors opened investigations for genocide and terrorism against Argentina’s former military junta and Pinochet’s regime, and “a criminal conspiracy” between them. Since the accused did not live in Spain, Garzón’s quest was viewed as quixotic. “People laughed at us,” the Spanish prosecutor who brought these cases, Carlos Castresana, told me in Madrid recently. On 16 October 1998, however, Pinochet was arrested by police at a London clinic after a minor hernia operation. He was a frequent visitor to the city, taking tea at Fortnum & Mason and popping in on his old friend and ally Margaret Thatcher. Amid the headlines and the flurry of paperwork sent to London over the following days, few people noticed that the initial warrant for Pinochet’s arrest was based on a Condor case. It named a Chilean victim who disappeared in Argentina, Edgardo Enríquez, and stated that “there is evidence of a coordinated plan, known as Operation Condor, in which several countries took part”. Pinochet was held for 17 months while Britain’s law lords twice approved extradition to Spain. Labour party home secretary Jack Straw stymied the extradition, instead sending Pinochet home to Chile on health grounds. On his return, the former dictator made a mockery of that justification by stepping out of his wheelchair to wave joyfully at supporters. Yet something major had changed, as prosecutors, judges and activists realised that South America’s dictators and their henchmen were no longer untouchable. In 1999, inspired by Garzón, Aurora Meloni brought a murder case in Italy against Uruguayan security officials who were suspected of killing Banfi and others. Families of other Condor victims with Italian citizenship joined Meloni, and the case broadened to cover Condor crimes in several countries. From her home in Milan, Meloni – now aged 69 – has kept the case alive ever since. “It has taken a long time,” she told me. After last year’s sentencing in Rome, the plaintiffs were delighted, but Meloni points out that until we know the outcome of the appeals, the story isn’t over. When Daniel Banfi was murdered in late 1974, Condor did not yet formally exist. His death can be seen as a precursor, or trial run. Hermida Campos was one of a handful of Uruguayan security officials who were secretly testing ways of hunting down exiles with their Argentinian counterparts. Another of those preparing the rendition programme with Argentina, which would later be absorbed into Condor, was the Uruguayan navy lieutenant Jorge Tróccoli. Now a grey, jowly 73-year-old, Tróccoli was the only defendant present at the Rome trial. He had moved to Italy and was arrested in Salerno, near Naples, in 2007. In the 90s, Tróccoli wrote two semi-autobiographical novels about how Uruguay’s military had embraced torture, murder and repression. In La Hora del Depredador (The Predator’s Hour), a torturer who appears to act as a proxy for the author (though Tróccoli insists this is fiction) declares: “When this is over, we will have to make peace. And that won’t happen if we use methods like this … What’s more, you will begin to feel bad about it as the years go by.” Yet, in court, Tróccoli showed no remorse, claiming innocence. “He sat beside me one day,” Meloni told me. “He was angry, not ashamed.” Most of what we know about Operation Condor only emerged years after it was over. Formal coordinating offices existed in several countries, and the network generated considerable paperwork as documents and encrypted cables were sent back and forth over a dedicated communications network called Condortel. But at the time the victims did not understand the scale of the international conspiracy. For more than a decade, public knowledge of Operation Condor was largely limited to an obscure FBI note quoted in a book, published in 1980, by John Dinges and fellow journalist Saul Landau. They were investigating the murders of a former Chilean ambassador and his American assistant, who were killed in Washington DC in 1976 by Pinochet’s agents. In a cable sent shortly after the killings, an FBI officer wrote: “Operation Condor is the code name for the collection, exchange and storage of intelligence data concerning leftists, communists and Marxists which was recently established between the cooperating services in South America.” The note went on to mention “a more secret phase” of Condor, which “involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to travel anywhere in the world to carry out sanctions, [including] assassinations”. Beyond that, relatively little was known. It was in Paraguay where the first major breakthrough took place. In 1992, a young magistrate, José Agustín Fernández, received a tipoff on the whereabouts of the secret police archive of the country’s former strongman Gen Alfredo Stroessner, who grabbed power in 1954 and stayed until 1989. At dawn, three days before Christmas, Fernández made a surprise visit to a police station outside the capital city, Asunción. With a caravan of television cameras as company, but armed only with a warrant signed in his own hand, the magistrate forced Paraguay’s once-untouchable police to hand over the documents. “The journalists had to lend us a truck to take it all back to the court house,” Fernández told me. “Perhaps the most shocking thing were the photographs. They included people who were disappeared by Condor.” Fernández’s haul became known as the Archive of Terror. Here, buried among half a million sheets of paper detailing three decades of domestic repression under Stroessner, was the story of how Operation Condor was created, and by whom. It was not what Fernández had originally sought, and he was shocked. “We had heard the stories about it, but here was written proof,” he told me. The “Archives of Terror”, papers relating to Operation Condor, seized in Paraguay in 1992. The documents established that Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Pinochet’s spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to the Army War Academy on La Alameda, Santiago’s central avenue. Pinochet welcomed them in person. “Subversion has developed a leadership structure that is intercontinental, continental, regional and sub-regional,” Contreras told them, referring to organised resistance from opponents of the continent’s military regimes. He proposed a sophisticated network linked by “telex, microfilm, computers, cryptography” to track down and eliminate enemies. The club, with the first five countries as members, came into existence on 28 November. Brazil joined the next year, while Peru and Ecuador joined in 1978. At its height, Condor covered 10% of the world’s populated land mass, and formed what Francesca Lessa of Oxford University calls “a borderless area of terror and impunity”. The Archive of Terror documents were revealing, but they were largely dry, bureaucratic records. Behind them lay a reality of the kidnap, torture, rape and murder of at least 763 people, according to a database that Lessa is building. Yet it was only after the archive was found – and especially after Condor was named in Garzón’s Pinochet case – that the disconnected stories of the victims began to cohere into a bigger story. Laura Elgueta lives in a small house in La Reina, a tranquil suburb of Santiago where purple jacaranda trees blossom. She is one of Condor’s survivors. Her friend Odette Magnet – whose 27-year-old sister, María Cecilia, disappeared in Argentina in 1976 – lives a five-minute walk away. “When I was looking for somewhere to move to, I wanted to live near her,” Magnet explained as we made the walk to Elgueta’s home. Together, the two women have long shouldered the burden of explaining Condor to Chileans at human rights conferences and in the media. Although Condor operatives hunted down targets in all member states, their work focused on Argentina in particular, which was a refuge for exiles escaping military dictatorships across the continent before it, too, fell under military control. Condor squads dispatched to Argentina from Uruguay and Chile used a series of makeshift jails and torture centres provided by their hosts. The first was the abandoned car repair garage, Automotores Orletti, where Anatole Larrabeiti was held and his mother Victoria was last seen alive. Larrabeiti still recalls seeing a jar of glittering metal in the garage, in which victims’ wedding rings were kept. Later, Condor victims were taken to Club Atlético, a codename for the basement of a police warehouse in Buenos Aires. This is where a blindfolded, 18-year-old Laura Elgueta arrived in July 1977 with her sister-in-law, Sonia, after armed Chileans and Argentinians snatched them from her home nearby. At the time, Elgueta’s Chilean family – part of which was now exiled in Argentina – was still searching for her activist brother, Kiko, who had disappeared in Buenos Aires the previous July. “We knew he had been kidnapped, but that was all,” Elgueta told me. In the car, the sexual, physical and verbal abuse began. It continued at Club Atlético – where the women were stripped, handcuffed, hooded and given their numbers, K52 and K53. “Whoever walked past would insult you, or beat you, or throw you to the ground,” Elgueta recalled. They could hear fellow prisoners walking in chains. The Chilean torturers made no attempt to disguise their nationality, and Elgueta and Sonia’s interrogation focused solely on Chile’s exile community in Argentina. The women were taken to the torture room by turns. Beatings, more sexual abuse and electric shocks followed. “They’d say: ‘Now the party can really start.’ Despite all we know and have read, you cannot imagine what human beings are capable of. It was a house of horrors,” Elgueta told me. “When my sister-in-law came out of one session, they had given her such strong electric shocks that she was still trembling.” After eight hours, Elgueta and her sister-in-law were released. Their torturers had realised the two women knew nothing about Pinochet’s political or armed opponents. “As I left, the one [torturer] who had decided I was his girlfriend was there shouting: ‘Don’t take her away. I want to be with my girl!’” Elgueta was still blindfolded when she was driven away and dumped on a street corner near her home. Although Elgueta and Magnet had campaigned for Operation Condor to be investigated in Chile for years, they say that the media and politicians there only became interested after Pinochet was arrested in London. “Countries did not want to recognise that they had allowed armed units from other countries to operate on their territory,” Elgueta told me. “The ignorance about Condor here was incredible.” Awareness of Condor is now more widespread, and many deaths are finally being investigated by the courts, but that does not mean all Chileans think it was a bad idea. In fact, just as in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, a small but significant part of Chilean society defends the dictatorship and its enforcers. One March afternoon in Santiago, I walked to La Alameda, the broad main avenue, which is officially called Avenida Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins, where daily battles were raging between rock-throwing protesters and teargas-armed police. Protests demanding reforms to the neoliberal state and constitution imposed by Pinochet had rumbled on since October 2019, reflecting broad anger at hangovers from that era – including allegations of police abuse under the conservative government of billionaire president Sebastián Piñera – the country’s fifth-richest man, whose brother served as a minister under Pinochet. Alleged victims, many of whom were demonstrators, talk of torture, rape, killings and attempted killings. “We never thought we would have to come back to Chile under these circumstances,” declared José Miguel Vivanco, of Human Rights Watch, when it presented a report that counted injuries to more than 11,000 people in protests up to November 2019. “We thought this was history.” On the avenue, an empty teargas canister lying among freshly-hurled stones bore, by coincidence, the name “Condor” – a company that has long supplied the Chilean army and police. Protesters claimed these were being shot directly at people’s faces, helping account for more than 400 eye injuries. Piñera at first condemned protesters as being “at war against all good Chileans”, but has since ordered investigations and replaced his interior minister Andrés Chadwick (a former Pinochet supporter and cousin of Piñera), who was then punished by parliament with a ban from holding public office for five years. A referendum on constitutional change, which had been postponed because of Covid-19, is now scheduled for 25 October. On the outskirts of the city, Magnet took me to Villa Grimaldi, a detention centre in a former restaurant complex where victims were sometimes locked for days inside tiny wooden boxes. It is now a museum that includes drawings by the English doctor Sheila Cassidy, who was tortured there after treating a wounded leader of the armed opposition to Pinochet. Cassidy later told of how women prisoners were given electric shocks to the vagina and raped, including by dogs. On display at Villa Grimaldi is one of the concrete beams to which victims were tied before they were taken to be dropped into the sea from helicopters. Magnet and I looked for her sister María Cecilia’s name among the 188 small ceramic plaques set down beside rose bushes to commemorate each of Pinochet’s female victims. Magnet’s sister had been an active part of the exiled opposition. “Sometimes I wish she hadn’t been so brave, and had fled from Argentina before this happened, as others did,” said Magnet. Eventually we found María Cecilia’s plaque, beside a bush of pale yellow roses. Although many of the men who carried out Operation Condor were alumni of the US army’s School of the Americas – a training camp in Panama for military from allied regimes across the continent – this was not a US-led operation. Recent revelations, however, show just how much western intelligence services knew about Condor. Shortly before I travelled to Chile in March, startling news emerged about a Swiss company that had, for decades, supplied cryptography machines to military, police and spy agencies around the world. The company, the Washington Post revealed, had been secretly owned by the CIA and West Germany’s BND intelligence service. Any messages sent via its cryptography machines could, unbeknownst to the users, be read by the US and West Germany. Among the company’s clients were the regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. As the Washington Post put it, the CIA “was, in effect, supplying rigged communications gear to some of South America’s most brutal regimes and, as a result, in [a] unique position to know the extent of their atrocities”. The new information about the rigged cryptography machines follows the revelations, from a declassified document handed to Argentina by the US last year, that West German, British and French intelligence services even explored the possibility of copying at least part of the Condor method in Europe. A heavily redacted CIA cable from September 1977 is headed: “Visit of representatives of West German, French and British intelligence services to Argentina to discuss methods for establishment of an antisubversive organization similar to Condor”. The visit coincided with cross-frontier terror campaigns by Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army. According to the cable, the visitors explained that “the terrorist/subversive threat had reached such dangerous levels in Europe that they believed it best if they pooled their intelligence resources in a cooperative organization such as Condor”. There is no evidence that this plan went any further, but we know that by that point, Condor countries were planning a Europe-wide assassination campaign. Chile had already independently carried out attacks in Europe, including an assassination attempt in Rome, in October 1975, on the exiled Chilean politician Bernardo Leighton. Now Condor teams were to kill people of any nationality living in Europe who they deemed terrorist leaders – though “non-terrorists also were reportedly candidates”, a CIA report from May 1977 reveals. The report states that “leaders of Amnesty Internation[al] were mentioned as targets”. Fortunately for those on the hit list, the blustering nationalism of generals in different Latin American countries, who had spent much of their careers preparing to fight each other – rather than “subversives” at home – came to a head in 1978, when Chile and Argentina fell out over their maritime frontiers in the Beagle Channel. The quarrelling made military cooperation between them impossible, and eventually provoked the collapse of the wider Condor network, putting paid to the campaign in Europe. Just a few years later, Chile would secretly assist Britain in the Falklands war, which would, in turn, lead to the fall of Argentina’s military junta in 1983. The dictatorships fell, one by one, during the 80s. In the wake of these upheavals, attempts to prosecute human rights abusers in Condor countries were either nonexistent, or easily stalled, amid widespread fear that the military would rebel and reimpose dictatorship. Argentina’s former junta leaders were tried and found guilty of human rights abuses in 1985, but soon pardoned – and an amnesty law introduced. In Uruguay, an amnesty was approved in 1986, hours before Condor officers and others were due in court for the first time. It seemed that some of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century were destined to go unpunished. That began to change with Pinochet’s arrest in London. “It was Garzón who woke the world up to this,” Laura Elgueta told me. As Pinochet’s arrest highlighted, amnesty laws did not provide universal protection, and Condor was a weak spot. In retrospect, those who expected lifelong impunity for their involvement in Condor made three key mistakes. First of all, they stole children, a crime that even amnesties did not cover. Second, they wrongly assumed that amnesties would cover crimes committed on foreign soil. Finally, they hid their killings by making victims disappear – thereby turning those crimes into ongoing, unresolved kidnappings, which, unlike a murder where a body is found, cannot be covered by a statute of limitations or an amnesty for past events. These errors allowed a bold group of prosecutors and judges to bypass amnesty laws in a handful of carefully selected cases. These, in turn, revealed such ghastly truths that some governments were shamed into voiding the amnesty laws. In Argentina, the trial of one of Elgueta’s Chilean kidnappers, for a separate assassination in 1974, produced a 2001 court ruling that statutes of limitations did not apply to crimes against humanity – which include torture, murder and kidnapping. As these were crimes routinely committed by a military regime that had “disappeared” more than 20,000 of its citizens during the so-called dirty war, this ruling undermined the Argentinian amnesty laws, and they were annulled in 2003. Uruguay’s amnesty law, meanwhile, was voided in 2011 at the behest of the Inter-American court of human rights in Costa Rica, after it had investigated the case of a kidnapped baby who had been held with Anatole Larrabeiti and his sister at the military intelligence headquarters in Montevideo. Chile’s amnesty law still stands but, by 2002, a series of court decisions had left it almost toothless, declaring that it could not be applied to operations abroad, forced disappearances or cases with child victims. Of the major Condor countries, only Brazil conserves its amnesty law intact, and it remains the country where least progress has been made in pursuing crimes committed by its military dictatorship. By 2011, with most amnesties cancelled or deemed largely inapplicable, Condor cases could finally be investigated more freely – and information began to flow between investigators in multiple countries. Two long-running cases – the one instigated by Aurora Meloni in Italy, along with another in Argentina – have come to sentencing in the past five years. In 2016, the trial in Argentina, which centred on 109 Condor victims from six countries, ended with 15 prison sentences – including for former junta president Reynaldo Bignone, who was then 87. Seven other accused men died during the three-year trial. The sentence was the first to recognise “a transnational, illegal conspiracy … dedicated to persecuting, kidnapping, forcefully repatriating, torturing and murdering political activists.” Argentina, it added, had become “a hunting ground”. Former Argentinian junta president Reynaldo Bignone (right) and former general Santiago Riveros (centre) at their trial for crimes against humanity in 2012. The Rome case extended the investigation to suspects from Peru, Bolivia and Chile. As in Argentina, it required unprecedented – if sluggish and sometimes failed – collaboration between countries, but the conclusion was the same: Condor was an illegal international network of state terror. Both sentences provided not only j...
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