Five Men Sentenced to Life for Operation Condor Killings Trained at School of the Americas – Antiwar.com Original
Posted by M. C. on July 18, 2019
You have to break a few eggs to make an empire omelet.
Five of the 24 men sentenced last week by an Italian court to life in prison for their roles in a brutal and bloody US-backed Cold War campaign against South American dissidents graduated from a notorious US Army school once known for teaching torture, assassination and democracy suppression.
On July 8 judges in Rome’s Court of Appeals sentenced the former Bolivian, Chilean, Peruvian and Uruguayan government and military officials after they were found guilty of kidnapping and murdering 23 Italian nationals in the 1970s and 1980s during Operation Condor, a coordinated effort by right-wing military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and, later, Peru and Ecuador, against perceived leftist threats. The campaign, which was characterized by kidnappings, torture, disappearances and murder, claimed an estimated 60,000 lives, according to human rights groups. Victims included leftists and other dissidents, clergy, intellectuals, academics, students, peasant and trade union leaders and indigenous peoples.
The United States government, military and intelligence agencies supported Operation Condor with military aid, planning and technical support, as well as surveillance and torture training during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations. Much of this support, which the US attempted to justify within the context of the global Cold War struggle against communism, was based at US military installations in Panama. It was there that the US Army opened the School of the Americas in 1946, which would graduate 11 Latin American heads of state over the following decades. None of them became their country’s leader by democratic means, leading critics to dub the SOA “School of Assassins” and “School of Coups” because it produced so many of both.
SOA’s most notorious graduates include narco-trafficking Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the genocidal Guatemalan military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, Bolivian despot Hugo Banzer (known for sheltering Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie), Haitian death squad commander and military dictator Raoul Cédras and Argentine strongman Leopoldo Galtieri, who presided during a period of his country’s “Dirty War” in which tens of thousands of innocent men and women were disappeared. Countless other war criminals have studied at the SOA, sometimes using US manuals that taught kidnapping, torture, assassination and democracy suppression techniques.
Some of the worst massacres and other atrocities perpetrated by US-backed forces during the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s, including the slaughter of 900 villagers – mostly women and children – at El Mozote, the assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero and the rape and murder of four US churchwomen who worked with him, were planned, committed or covered up by SOA graduates. So were a series of chainsaw massacres in Colombia, the murder of four Dutch journalists in El Salvador, the assassination of a former Chilean official and his US aide in a 1976 car bombing in Washington, DC and many other atrocities.
It can now be revealed that several men sentenced to life in prison in Rome last week are also SOA graduates…
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