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Chile 50 Years Ago: The Assasination Of THe Prats Family

The Pinochet Regime at 50 The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert Wedding photo Car Bombing in Buenos Aires Marked First Act of State-Sponsored International Terror of Chilean Military Regime On 50th Anniversary of Prats’ Assassination, Archive Posts Key U.S. and Chilean Records on Pinochet’s Use of Terrorism to Eliminate Threats to His Regime Published: Oct 1, 2024 Briefing Book # 871 Edited by Peter Kornbluh For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com Subjects Covert Action Human Rights and Genocide Regions South America Events Chile – Coup d’État, 1973 Project Chile BOOKS Lo Que Tarde La Justicia bookcover Lo que tarde la justicia by Sofía, Angélica, and Cecilia Prats Cuthbert, Debate (September 30, 2024) book The Pinochet File by Peter Kornbluh, The New Press, Updated edition (September 11, 2013) book cover Pinochet desclasificado by Peter Kornbluh, Un Día en La Vida/Editorial Catalonia (August 2023) The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges, The New Press (August 1, 2012) Los Anos del Condor book cover Los años del Cóndor (Spanish Edition) by John Dinges, DEBATE (June 1, 2021) Chile en el corazón book cover Chile en el corazón (Spanish Edition) by John Dinges, DEBATE (September 1, 2023) Washington, D.C., October 1, 2024 - On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents, including CIA intelligence reports and a judicial confession of the Chilean secret police operative, Michael Townley, who constructed, placed, and detonated the car bomb that killed Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974. Only weeks after the bombing, a friend of the Prats daughters gave them a chilling message: the Pinochet regime planned to “celebrate the coup” every September by eliminating specific persons deemed a threat to the dictatorship. This information proved to be prescient. The following September, the Vice President of the Chilean Christian Democrat Party, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife were gunned down and critically injured on a street in Rome. A year later, on September 21, 1976, a car bomb similar to the one that killed the Prats took the lives of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C. Parats Memories book cover After Gen. Prats was assassinated, his daughters salvaged the manuscript of his memoir, which was subsequently published in Mexico. “The first [assassination] was our parents,” Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book, Lo que tarde la justicia, published in Chile this week. The compilation of records posted today marks an anniversary that was commemorated in Buenos Aires, where the attack took place, as well as in Chile, where the atrocities of the Pinochet era continue to cast a shadow over present-day politics. “The Prats case,” notes Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, “provides a dramatic reminder of the true terrorist nature of the military dictatorship—and of Pinochet himself.” Targeting General Prats The target of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism was not a renowned leftist or socialist militant but rather Pinochet’s own predecessor as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, General Carlos Prats González. A pro-constitution officer, General Prats assumed the top military position in Chile in October 1970, after his own predecessor, General René Schneider, was assassinated in a CIA-supported plot to block the inauguration of president-elect Salvador Allende. During Allende’s tumultuous three years, Prats used his powerful position to safeguard Chile’s constitutional order. In 1972, he entered Allende’s cabinet and even held the position of vice president of the nation. In June 1973, he quickly suppressed a coup attempt—known as the “Tanquetazo”—by junior officers and the extremist paramilitary group, Patria y Libertad. In late August 1973, however, protests against Prats’ continuing support for the Allende government forced him to resign. Prats personally recommended General Augusto Pinochet to replace him as commander-in-chief, erroneously believing that he would support the constitutional order against pro-coup officers. Only four days after the coup, General Prats and his wife went into exile in Argentina. Prats “was living quietly in Buenos Aires,” the CIA later reported. “He was not permitted to make any public appearances or statements and had faithfully carried out the restrictive instructions pertaining to his exile.” But General Pinochet clearly considered the highly respected Prats to be a potential threat to his power. Only six weeks after the coup, Pinochet dispatched one of his top deputies, General Sergio Arellano Stark, to Buenos Aires to conduct secret talks with the Argentine military. Arellano’s top priority, according to a CIA source, was to “discuss with the Argentine military any information they have regarding the activities of General (retired) Carlos Prats. Arellano will also attempt to gain an agreement whereby the Argentines maintain scrutiny over Prats and regularly inform the Chileans of his activities.” In June 1974, Pinochet met with the director of the Chilean secret police, DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras, and ordered him to eliminate Prats. Contreras first assigned this mission to his DINA station chief in Argentina, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, who was instructed to enlist Argentine paramilitary groups to kill Prats. When that effort failed to advance, DINA’s deputy director, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, enlisted DINA’s newest recruit, an American expatriate named Michael Townley who was an electronics specialist and had collaborated with Patria y Libertad in anti-Allende operations. In secret testimony given to an Argentine judge in 1999, Townley recalled how Colonel Espinoza had described Prats as a potential leader of a government-in-exile and asked Townley if he could “do something” about the exiled general. Eliminating Prats “was for the wellbeing of the country,” Townley testified. “It was a patriotic request,” he stated. “So, I did it.” Townley traveled to Buenos Aires twice; the first time he was unable to locate Prats. Accompanied by his wife Mariana Callejas—also a DINA agent—he returned on September 10, 1974, and spent several weeks plotting the assassination. At one point, Townley followed Prats into a neighborhood park and considered shooting him in broad daylight, but, he testified, “there were too many people around.” Instead, Townley fashioned a remote-controlled car bomb made of two C4 cartridges, establishing his signature modus operandi as an international terrorist. On September 29, he managed to slip into the parking garage and attach the device to the chassis of Prats’ small Fiat 125. Townley and Callejas then staked out the Prats’ building until they returned from visiting friends just after midnight on September 30. Callejas tried to detonate the bomb, “but it did not function,” Townley confessed. “I took [the detonator] from her, pressed it, and it worked.” Prats car The Prats' Fiat 125 was destroyed by a car bomb planted by DINA agents on Pinochet's orders. The Pursuit of Justice For over thirty years, the Prats family pursued efforts to identify the perpetrators of this atrocity and prosecute them. In 1983, two daughters, Sofía and Angélica Prats, traveled to Washington, D.C., to work with Argentine lawyers requesting the extradition of Townley—then under witness protection in the United States after serving a short sentence for assassinating Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with a car bomb—to Buenos Aires. But a U.S. judge ruled that Townley’s plea bargain agreement in the Letelier-Moffitt case prevented his extradition. A Chilean judge also denied Argentine legal efforts to have Mariana Callejas extradited from Santiago to Buenos Aires to stand trial. In 1987, the Prats daughters repeatedly approached the U.S. Embassy in Chile seeking information and legal assistance in the case. Eventually, their efforts led an Argentine judge, Maria Servini, to travel to Washington in 1999 and officially depose Townley. For a number of years, his secret testimony remained sealed. (See Document 8) “We instinctively understood that the search for justice would be a lengthy journey,” Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book. “We knew it would be arduous, beginning with a period of mourning that would last an unknown amount of time.” Argentine authorities did eventually arrest DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, charging him first with espionage and then as an accessory to the Prats assassination. He was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades. More than 35 years after Prats and Cuthbert were assassinated, and 20 years after the return to civilian governance, in June 2010 the Chilean courts finally convicted and sentenced former DINA chief Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza, along with several other DINA officials and operatives in the Prats case. Pinochet himself was never prosecuted for the Prats assassination, nor for the other acts of terrorism and repression he ordered. After he died on December 10, 2006—ironically, international Human Rights Day—the Chilean military arranged for his open coffin to be viewed by his admirers. Francisco Cuadrado Prats, the grandson of Carlos and Sofía Prats, stood in the viewing line with hundreds of Pinochetistas; when he reached the coffin, he spit on the glass covering Pinochet’s face. “It was a spontaneous act to spit on him out of revulsion,” the young Prats recalled after he was beaten by Pinochet supporters and then arrested for his sacrilegious conduct, “because he had my grandparents murdered.” The Documents ebb 871 doc 1 Document 1 CIA, Intelligence Cable, [Special Mission of General Arellano Stark to Argentina], Secret, November 27, 1973 Nov 27, 1973 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project Only six weeks after the coup, General Pinochet dispatched one of his top deputies, General Sergio Arellano Stark, to Buenos Aires to conduct secret talks with the Argentine military. Arellano’s top priority, according to a CIA source, is to “discuss with the Argentine military any information they have regarding the activities of General (retired) Carlos Prats. Arellano will also attempt to gain an agreement whereby the Argentines maintain scrutiny over Prats and regularly inform the Chileans of his activities.” Instigated by “the Junta leadership,” according to the cable, this “special mission” provides the first evidence of Pinochet’s direct role in the Prats assassination case. ebb 871 doc 2 Document 2 DINA, [Prats Surveillance Report from Captain Juan Morales Salgado to DINA Director Manuel Contreras], Confidential, June 26, 1974 Jun 26, 1974 Source Prats family archives In June 1974, following a reported meeting in which General Pinochet ordered the elimination of General Prats, DINA director Manuel Contreras dispatched an operative to conduct surveillance on the movements of General Prats in Buenos Aires. In this rare DINA cable, Captain Juan Morales files an intelligence report that provides Prats’ addresses for home and work, as well as the workplace of his wife, Sofia Cuthbert. The surveillance report describes the models of the cars used by the Prats couple, provides an account of his movements, and notes the lack of security personnel to protect him. Morales also provides a hand-drawn diagram of the street and entrance to the Prats’ parking garage. ebb 871 doc 3 Document 3 Chilean Embassy, Buenos Aires, [Letter from Consul Álvaro Droguett del Pierro to the Foreign Ministry regarding Prats Passports], August 12, 1974 Aug 12, 1974 Source Prats family archives In this communication between the Chilean consulate in Buenos Aires and the Chilean Foreign Ministry, Consul Álvaro Droguett requests guidance on whether to provide General Prats and his wife Chilean passports so they can travel to Brazil. The response he receives only four days before the assassination is that it would be “inconvenient” to provide the passports to the Prats couple. After the Prats family demands a copy of the denial, Droguett provides them with a Xerox copy of his letter with a handwritten note at the bottom quoting the Ministry’s response and claiming that he only became aware of the denial on September 30th—the day of the assassination. ebb 871 doc 4 Document 4 CIA, Weekly Situation Report on International Terrorism, “Assassination of Former Chilean General Carlos Prats,” Secret, October 2, 1974 Oct 2, 1974 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project The CIA includes an initial report on the Prats assassination in its weekly summary of international terrorism. Their initial description cites erroneous police reports that the Prats were “killed by the blast of a bomb thrown at their car” along with machine gun fire as they returned to their home. The report accurately states that “the assassins were waiting for Prats and his wife as he drove up to his apartment building.” Further investigation soon revealed that the bomb had planted under the Prats’ Fiat 125 and later detonated by the assassins—DINA agents Michael Townley and his wife Mariana Callejas—who were waiting in a car across the street for the Prats to return. ebb 871 doc 5 Document 5 State Department, Cable, “Assassination of General Prats,” Limited Distribution, October 24, 1974 Oct 24, 1974 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project Reacting to press reports that point the finger of responsibility at the Chilean secret police, the U.S. Embassy reveals how detached it is from the ruthless reality of Pinochet’s repression. Ambassador David Popper dismisses a Radio Moscow report that DINA had assassinated General Prats “on basis of rationale that Chilean military leaders were afraid Prats would attract loyalty of Chilean armed forces personnel disaffected with performance of Junta.” “This explanation makes no sense to us,” Ambassador Popper reported. Nor do we see significant interest in killing Prats of any other Chilean group with capacity of doing so.” ebb 871 doc 6 Document 6 CIA, Intelligence Report, [Overview of Prats Assassination, Possible Perpetrators and Motivations], Secret, October 25, 1974 Oct 25, 1974 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project Almost a month after the Prats assassination, the CIA station files a report providing important details from official and confidential sources. The intelligence brief states that “official Argentine government circles consider the assassination of General Prats to be the work of Chileans,” although they are not sure “whether the assassination was the work of a Chilean left-wing or right-wing group.” The report reveals that Prats had received “a phone call from a Chilean attempting to assume an Argentine accent” warning that his life was in danger and urging him to leave the country. The CIA concluded the cable by citing a possible motivation for the assassination. “Prats had nearly completed his memoirs which strongly condemned many non-Popular Unity politicians and military officers” for their roles in the coup. ebb 871 doc 7 Document 7 State Department, Cable, “Prats Family Again Seeks Information,” Confidential, June 2, 1987. Jun 2, 1987 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project In a visit to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, the daughters of Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert press their efforts to hold the murderers of their parents accountable. A top DINA officer, Armando Fernández Larios, who participated in the car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, has recently turned himself in to U.S. officials, and the daughters seek to have him questioned in the Prats case. They also inform the Chargé that the Argentine courts are seeking the testimony of Chilean officers, but that the military regime has refused to cooperate. In this cable to Washington, Ambassador Harry Barnes requests information on whether the Argentine courts have the legal latitude to formally interrogate Michael Townley, who has finished his short incarceration for the Letelier-Moffitt assassination and is living in the United States under the witness protection program. ebb 871 doc 8 Document 8 U.S. Federal District Court, “Argentina’s Request for Assistance Through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty Regarding the Investigation of the Death of General Carlos Santiago Prats Gonzalez: Testimony of Michael V. Townley,” November 9, 1999. Nov 9, 1999 Source U.S. Federal District Court As part of Argentina’s legal effort to prosecute the perpetrators of the Prats’ murders in Buenos Aires, the DINA operative who planted and detonated the car bomb, Michael Townley, was officially interrogated by Argentine Judge Maria Servini in Washington, D.C., with the assistance of U.S. Justice Department attorney, John Beasley, Jr. In his sworn testimony, Townley recalled how a top DINA officer, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, had repeatedly approached him in late July and August 1974 about “doing something” about General Prats, who Espinoza described as a potential leader of a government-in-exile. Eliminating Prats “was for the wellbeing of the country,” Townley testified. “It was a patriotic request,” he stated. “So, I did it.” Townley described two trips to Buenos Aires in September 1974; during the first trip, he was unable to locate Prat’s address; during the second trip, another DINA officer provided him with the location of the apartment building at Malabia 3351. He described how he managed to sneak into the parking garage and attach the bomb he had assembled with two sticks of C4 explosives and an electronically activated detonator to the undercarriage of Prats’ Fiat. Although Townley repeatedly attempted to convince Judge Servini that he had acted alone in the bombing, under intense questioning he was forced to admit that his wife, Mariana Callejas, had accompanied him to Buenos Aires and participated in the mission. “She tried to detonate the bomb, but it did not function,” Townley confessed. “I took [the detonator] from her, pressed it, and it worked.”

The Mexico School Children Disappearance Ten Years Later

The Impunity Cascade: Ayotzinapa at Ten Years ayotzi 9 A protestor is pictured outside of the National Palace in Mexico City on the 9th anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students, September 26, 2023. Photograph courtesy Héctor Guerrero/El País 10th Anniversary Brings No Closure to Families of Victims The National Crisis of Forced Disappearance in Mexico Continues Published: Sep 26, 2024 Edited by Kate Doyle and Claire Dorfman For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Subjects Crime and Narcotics Human Rights and Genocide Political Crimes and Abuse of Power Regions Mexico and Central America Project Mexico Conference poster for Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by the University College London. Conference poster for Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by University College London, September 19-20, 2024. UCL Kate Doyle presented her keynote speech at the conference Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by University College London, September 19, 2024. Washington, D.C., September 26, 2024 - On the 10th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Iguala, Mexico, the National Security Archive posts a keynote speech given by Senior Analyst Kate Doyle at an event organized by University College London to commemorate the tragedy and to spotlight ongoing impunity for state actors involved in the crime and the cover-up. The violent attacks of that night and the repeated obstruction of efforts to obtain justice are together emblematic of the human rights crisis in Mexico. The disappearances remain an open wound for the victims’ families and the country as a whole, where more than 100,000 people have vanished without a trace. Sadly, President López Obrador will complete his presidential term without having provided closure for the families of the Aytozinapa students—one of his key campaign promises. The two-day conference at UCL brought together key investigators, analysts, and academics involved in the case. In her address, Doyle said it was the “anniversary of impunity,” explaining how the Ayotzinapa case illustrates the phenomenon of macro-criminality, where security forces, organized crime and economic elites “collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive.” Related to this, Doyle argued, is a system of macro-impunity, where these same actors “cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function.” Since 2015, the National Security Archive has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for U.S. documents related to the case of the 43 students, the “war on drugs” and its consequences, and U.S. security assistance to Mexico. In 2020, Kate Doyle and the National Security Archive partnered with reporter Anayansi Díaz-Cortes and Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting to develop the podcast series “After Ayotzinapa,” released in January 2022. Two months later, the Spanish-language version, “Después de Ayotzinapa,” was released in co-production with Adonde Media. The National Security Archive continues to investigate the case with our partners at Centro Prodh and Reveal. Visit our Ayotzinapa Investigations page to learn more about the case and the National Security Archive’s investigative and advocacy work. The Impunity Cascade: Ayotzinapa and the Triumph of Justice September 19, 2024 By Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst, National Security Archive One decade ago, Ernesto Guerrero, 23 years old, one of the students at the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college who survived September 26, 2014, described the aftermath of the first sustained attacks by police on three buses stuck at Calle Juan N. Álvarez in Iguala. The intense gunfire had finally stopped, and the police cars were gone. One student lay sprawled in the middle of the street with a critical head wound. Another had several fingers shot off, a third was shot in the face. A group of some twenty students had been forced off the buses and taken away in the backs of police trucks. Journalist John Gibler later published Ernesto’s testimony in his book, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, a collection of oral histories about the night of Iguala. Ernesto told John, “We students tried to cordon off the area and protect it as best we could. We put rocks and sticks around the bullet shells and other evidence so that no one would pick them up or step on them, so when the detectives arrived… But they never came.” The Mexican government’s first response to the disappearance of the 43 was to construct a cover-up. President Enrique Peña Nieto and his senior officials maintained the validity of their “historical truth” until the day they left power. On December 1, 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office with the very public pledge to solve Ayotzinapa. López Obrador decreed the creation of a truth commission to be headed by his most senior human rights official, Alejandro Encinas. A human rights lawyer with the United Nations, Omar Gómez Trejo, was named special prosecutor. The president went further, ordering all federal agencies (including the Army, Marines, national intelligence, and federal police) to provide any assistance required by the investigation, including access to their personnel and their archives. Within 18 months, Gómez Trejo had undertaken a major housecleaning of his office, replacing career cronies with younger, committed investigators and prosecutors, many from outside the government. He and Encinas had searched dozens of sites and located the remains of two students. Arrest warrants were obtained for more than 80 suspects. The group of independent experts (GIEI) was invited back into the case. It was exciting to see the work that was getting done, the resources invested, the new technologies available, the searches underway, the multiple meetings, the assurances to parents, the skills and knowledge and expertise being poured into this case. To solve it and to find the boys. So it’s hard to believe we are gathering today to mark ten years since one of the most shocking human rights atrocities to ever take place in Mexico and contemplating how completely the case has collapsed. It turns out, those early advances were the exceptions that proved the rule. Once the investigation began to find evidence of a military role in the crimes, President López Obrador became disaffected and the government’s cooperation began to wither – then curdled into open hostility. In 2022, the special prosecutor left the country in fear for his life. The commission head, Alejandro Encinas, resigned after learning he had been under military surveillance through Pegasus spyware. The GIEI jumped ship in 2023, accusing the Army and the Center for National Intelligence of sabotaging the investigation. No more students have been found. There have been no trials and no convictions. No truth, no justice. This is the anniversary of impunity. The title of my talk is half-borrowed from the title of an influential book published in 2011 by Harvard scholar Kathryn Sikkink called The Justice Cascade. In it, Sikkink proposed that with the end of the Cold War, some nations began organizing what had previously been impossible to imagine – criminal trials of the perpetrators of human rights abuses. According to her research, once the political logic of the Cold War vanished, a powerful desire for truth, memory, and justice began to emerge in countries around the world, and specifically the desire to hold individuals criminally responsible for grave human rights violations. This global trend, as Sikkink identified it, took place within the context of the much broader arena of transitional justice, which included forms of truth-telling and memorialization, but the focus of her book was on the trials. Human rights trials were periodic and highly dispersed at first, but by the early 2000s turned into a flood – the cascade of her title. They were not homogeneous; they could be national courtrooms, regional bodies, special tribunals, cases of universal jurisdiction, all the way to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. My entire career at the Archive has been focused on the post-Cold War consensus in the Americas that the recovery of historical memory, truth-telling, transparency, and trials would not only strengthen democratic governance but also support social movements through recognition of their struggles, information about what truly happened, and accountability. I still believe this. But it’s clear that the narrative of The Justice Cascade fails to address other powerful and insidious forces at work, even in those countries that convened the truth commissions, built the monuments, held the trials. I think, for example, of Guatemala, which shortly after the historic genocide trial of Ríos Montt careened into an aggressive authoritarian government that quickly dismembered the very justice system that had carried out that and other paradigmatic human rights trials. Obviously, individual criminal accountability through a justice system in and of itself does not lead to political, social, or economic justice. Furthermore, while The Justice Cascade posits impunity as the opposite of individual accountability – in other words, impunity is literally when a person goes unpunished for a crime they committed – there’s another, more ferocious kind of impunity, a structural impunity, that is not addressed. We could call it macro-impunity, in direct response to what has become a whole new field of violence studies in the Americas, called “macrocriminality.” Using the definition given by María Luisa Quintero (former Director of Investigations and Litigation at CICIG), macrocriminality is a system that functions at the intersection of three spheres: 1) the classic “criminal” (organized crime group), 2) economic, business (private interests, private companies), 3) and the public (agents of the State, whether police, judges, prosecutors, politicians, etc.). The three spheres collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive. So we could say that macro-impunity would operate in a similar fashion, as those networks of actors from the public, private, and classically “criminal” spheres cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function. In other words, macro-criminality is the crime, macro-impunity is the cover-up. And the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students is now a caso paradigmatico – not of Mexico’s ability to solve a complex human rights case for the very first time, as I know Prosecutor Gómez Trejo and his team had hoped and believed – but a paradigmatic case of macro-impunity. In order to better understand the contemporary problem of macro impunity, we need to look at the history of impunity in the Americas – which for me starts in the United States, after the Second World War. As the Cold War began, the United States instrumentalized “national security doctrine” in order to protect US interests, and military governments south of the border largely signed on to the anti-communist project, converting it into the Dirty Wars of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. US support for repression in the hemisphere took many forms: military assistance, training in our military schools, weapons grants, and “technical assistance,” which meant access to advanced computers as well as surveillance and intelligence technologies. Physical and psychological torture techniques were recast as “interrogation methods” and formalized in official US military training manuals. The rest of the hemisphere knew this – the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans, they knew it; we trained their militaries for decades in the art of what US defense strategists called “internal security”: how to identify and eliminate the enemy hiding inside civil society. Most US citizens did not know it or refused to know it. They were spared the firsthand experience of the Dirty Wars, of course. And the United States government was careful to shroud kidnapping, torture, and assassination programs in secrecy – especially at home. If there were activists and human rights groups and investigative journalists, a few members of Congress, who exposed the consequences of the US-supported counterinsurgency programs, most Americans accepted the propaganda manufactured by Washington that explained that the wars south of our border were dirty because that’s just how it was in Latin America. Latin America was made up of communist terrorists and brutal militaries, it was in their nature, a history of bloodshed going back hundreds of years. Even in internal, classified communications, US officials promoted this framing. “Guatemala is a violent society,” wrote one State Department analyst 38 years ago in a secret report on forced disappearance. “The conscious acceptance and use of violence as an instrument of politics contribute to the extraordinary levels of murder, kidnapping, and disappearances.” The analyst was referring to human rights violations committed by Guatemalan army officers and units the US had backed for decades. The United States had less direct influence on the Mexican military because Mexico’s insistence on sovereignty kept the Pentagon mostly out of its defense affairs. At the same time, Washington had confidence in the ability of the PRI to control subversion, with or without US military assistance. As a CIA secret intelligence estimate on “Security Conditions in Mexico” explained in 1966, “The government party virtually monopolizes politics and is an outstanding force for stability. Top government leaders are strong, determined men, conversant with the uses of power. Security forces are tough and well-trained; when so ordered, they carry out missions without overmuch regard for legalisms.” “Without overmuch regard for legalisms”: That’s the CIA signaling impunity as a strategic advantage in Mexico. 1966 is about when Mexico’s Dirty War began, according to the truth commission, which issued its first report last month. By the mid-1970s, when political repression in Mexico reached its most intensive phase, US human rights policy was taking shape in Washington. As early as 1973, Congress began conditioning military assistance to countries on their human rights records. The Department of State instituted a new human rights reporting requirement for embassies around the world, and in 1977 compiled the first annual State Department Human Rights Report. But Congress and later President Carter’s new commitment to human rights coexisted uneasily alongside US national security objectives in Mexico (and the rest of the Americas). Read the now-declassified communiqués sent by the US Embassy in Mexico City to Washington during those years and you can track how the US government sanitized Embassy reports of human rights abuses under the Echeverría regime for public consumption. In 1976, for example, political officer John Hamilton addressed the prevalence of torture in Mexico’s criminal investigations system. “Torture and other similar violations of human rights frequently occur immediately after arrest during police interrogation… These violations occur in all kinds of instances, both in normal criminal arrests and in politically motivated detentions…. Although the Government of Mexico clearly does not condone this officially or publicly, it just as clearly tolerates the abuse so long as it does not result in embarrassing public disclosures. It undoubtedly is also limited in its ability to change this centuries old pattern.” Although Hamilton used his best bland and bureaucratic language to describe the abusive practices of a close ally, the State Department’s first annual human rights report, issued one year later, stripped his references to torture and other violations altogether and pointed instead to the “strong enforcement actions” taken by Echeverría’s government against suspected terrorists. The truth was US interests lay elsewhere. In 2003, I interviewed Lawrence Sternfield, the former CIA chief of station in Mexico who served in the mid to late 1970s. When I asked him about the CIA’s concerns about the excesses of the Dirty War at that time, Sternfield told me: "There was absolutely no mention of human rights while I was there. Not one word was spoken about it with my counterparts. It wasn't something that we broached or they broached. The relationship we had with the DFS was about pure intelligence gathering. This was the height of the Cold War, and our efforts were focused against the Soviet target. Not that we weren't aware that the Mexicans were doing bad things when they picked up people. But we didn't raise that with them." As one former US ambassador told me a few years ago, “It’s always the fault of the United States!” But whether or not we want to make a direct, causal link between the hundreds of Mexican military officers who trained at the School of the Americas and the methods they used to crush dissent at home, we can recognize the erasure of the Dirty War in the official US record as a cover-up of Mexican repression in exchange for policy priorities that mattered more. Washington’s willingness to read authoritarian rule as an “outstanding force for stability” and to christen human rights abuses as “strong enforcement actions” point to what was actually important to US policy makers. Mexico has always considered itself exceptional, and when the era of transitional justice dawned in the early 1990s it became the exception in how countries in the hemisphere grappled with legacies of political violence. There would be no truth commission. Memorialization was left to the victims and their families. No human rights trials would be held. Upon taking office in 2000, President Vicente Fox took the important decision to order an opening of Dirty War archives. When it came to truth-telling and accountability, however, he fell back on the old impunity playbook. With great fanfare he announced the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate past human rights crimes and prosecute those responsible, but the effort was an expensive simulation that ended with a whimper. FEMOSPP – the fake transitional justice effort – was dissolved in November of 2006, and days later Felipe Calderón was sworn into office as Mexico’s new President. One of his first acts in office was to declare war on the drug cartels and call in the military to assist. The common critique of the war on drugs rejects the emphasis on punitive measures: drug addiction should not be criminalized and the effort to stop narcotics production should not be militarized. But maybe we should look at it from a different perspective. How does the war on drugs itself produce criminality? Can we draw a line connecting the drug war and the disappearance of 43 college students in Guerrero? Let’s recall the 1990s, when the United States crafted the “kingpin strategy” to combat violent drug trafficking organizations. It resulted in the takedown of major drug lords in Mexico. Analysts of counternarcotics policies have demonstrated that – like any corporate break-up – when the monopoly is dismantled, the dominant cartel fragments into smaller trafficking groups which, in their search for territory and market share, burrow into local communities and use any combination they can of bribes, favoritism, intimidation, and coercion, to extreme violence to increase their power. One cartel dismantled under the kingpin strategy was Beltrán Leyva. After breaking with the Sinaloa Cartel, Arturo Beltrán Leyva and his brothers created a powerful, thriving criminal business that trafficked millions of dollars of narcotics annually. In order to protect it, they bribed national-level government officials such as Mexico’s drug czar and the head of the Attorney General’s organized crime division, SEIDO. In 2008, the US declared Arturo a kingpin, and the Treasury Department sanctioned him. In 2009 he was shot and killed by Mexican Marines, effectively destroying the organization. At least seven splinter groups took its place (according to InSight Crime) and competed with each other for territory. One of them was Guerreros Unidos, which from 2010 began controlling plazas in parts of Morelos, Estado de México and northern Guerrero. By 2014, Guerreros Unidos was a pretty successful transnational drug trafficking organization. It wasn’t bribing Mexico’s drug czar but, according to investigators, they were bribing state officials in Guerrero, local mayors, municipal police, the head of the Guerrero office of the federal police, the commanders of two military bases, and employees of the bus companies that ferried their heroin from Iguala to Chicago, Illinois every day, returning with dollars. Then the attacks of September 26 happened. Let’s read what Enrique Peña Nieto’s government declared about the night of Iguala. In the Informe de Caso Iguala, the official story released in 2016 (full of misleading and false information), the government described the attacks and then concluded, “These unfortunate events alerted us to abuse of power, corruption, and infiltration of some municipal police forces by criminal organizations in Guerrero’s northern zone.” The response of the authorities to the disappearance of the 43 was not investigation but containment. The human rights atrocity was characterized as a common crime (kidnapping, homicide). Some municipal police were “corrupt” and acted in collusion with local thugs. A bone was planted and found, suspects detained and tortured, the official story became the historical truth, and as far as President Enrique Peña Nieto and everyone who reported to him were concerned, the case was closed. Containment was necessary because it masked a monster. For every action that unfolded on the night of September 26-27 – as described by then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and his chief of investigations, Tomás Zerón – there were countless other actions taken by people who were invisible in the official story. It took time and courageous effort on the part of the survivors and the parents of the missing students, the new investigating team, the forensic experts, and the GIEI, but the true dimensions of the atrocity began to be revealed. We learned of the complicities of the military battalions in Iguala, the Federal Police, state police, Ministeriales, Transit Police. The bus companies. The meetings held with the President to coordinate strategy, the roles of the Attorney General, Zerón, the Marines, Defense Secretary Cienfuegos. These weren’t the people who seized the students, hustled them into the backs of trucks, and took them to their fates. These were the people who concocted a cover story and then did everything in their power to ensure the facts about that night would be suppressed. Because the truth about the night would expose the criminal networks that bound Guerreros Unidos not just to local police but to state and federal officials, to members of the Army, the Marines, to private companies. The truth would rearrange accepted definitions of who is the criminal and what is corruption. As the students were being stalked and surveilled, then attacked in Iguala, thousands of miles away the DEA was wrapping up a criminal investigation it had launched in Chicago against a group of Mexican heroin traffickers who belonged to a gang called Guerreros Unidos. In December 2014 – just a few weeks before the Peña Nieto government would close the case with the verdad histórica – eight GU members were indicted, drawing on thousands of hours of surveillance over the course of a year and a half, and hundreds and hundreds of pages of intercepted text messages sent between the group in Chicago and their co-conspirators in northern Guerrero. The messages contained running conversations about the mechanics of operating a heroin trafficking business. There were references to the passenger buses the GU used to transport drugs over the border into the US – the buses the students were riding in when they were attacked by police. Discussions of the system of roadblocks and lookouts maintained by collaborating police officers that kept the shipments safe. The traffickers planned meetings with municipal presidents, compared which officials got what bribes, name-dropped army commanders and other military officers on the payroll. They borrowed police cars to run errands without interference. They guided Marine patrols to the hide-outs of rival gangs to ensure their elimination. They organized special dinners for officers they were courting for favor. They complained about the greedy soldiers, who always asked for more no matter how much they gave them. The investigators in Mexico and the GIEI didn’t see most of the intercepted messages until 2022. Despite the notoriety of the Ayotzinapa case, the Justice Department refused to share them for years, claiming they didn’t contain evidence related to planning or carrying out the students’ disappearance. When the National Security Archive got involved in 2017, it was at the request of the parents’ lawyers from Centro Prodh, who were trying to figure out how to obtain the DEA intercepts. We filed FOIAs and sued the government in federal court. Nothing a non-profit research institute could do succeeded in prying them loose, and they weren’t released until the President of Mexico asked the Vice President of the United States for them when Kamala Harris visited Mexico in late 2021. That helped. So did Mexico’s decision to extradite one of the accused Guerreros Unidos chiefs – Adán Casarrubias Salgado – to Chicago in May 2022. The messages were released to the special prosecutor a few weeks later. I once asked a senior diplomat who was serving in the embassy when the boys were taken how the US viewed the Mexican government’s efforts to solve the case. He had sent a team of FBI agents to Iguala to provide technical assistance, and they returned to Mexico City with bad news. “The investigation was so disorganized,” he told me. “Mexicans had very poor practices, like not protecting the crime scenes. It was a bit frustrating for us since we had spent years and millions of dollars in training them in police and criminal investigation techniques!” Unfortunately, the kind of impunity that protects criminal networks in Mexico can’t be improved with better police techniques. Not because the “drug lords” or the “cartels” are so powerful that they’re impervious to even the most skilled investigators. But because they’re part of a criminal system that includes the police chief we just trained or the Marine commander we invited to Washington for a conference on drug interdiction. Or a defense secretary like Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, awarded with the Pentagon’s Legion of Merit in 2018 for his “extraordinary contributions in strengthening the relationships between the militaries of Mexico and the United States.” In 2015, Cienfuegos refused to allow the soldiers stationed in Iguala to be questioned by investigators, a position he held until his retirement three years later. In 2020, he was arrested by DEA agents in Los Angeles on charges of drug trafficking. US policy needs to recalibrate. The United States backed Calderón’s militarization plan with the Mérida Initiative, which pushed hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons, helicopters, vehicles, intelligence and other assistance to the Army and Marines for their cooperation in going after the traffickers. Today, the military is linked to multiple human rights violations that have gone mostly unpunished, and Sedena has more power to exercise civilian law enforcement than US laws would ever allow at home. But Washington continues to encourage the military’s lead role in the drug war. We’ve trained thousands of Mexican soldiers and Marines in counternarcotics – including members of the 27th Infantry Battalion, based in Iguala, in the weeks before the students were taken. Why didn’t the US Justice Department release the intercepted messages to investigators for eight years, when they contained powerful evidence of the web of complicities that lay behind the disappearance of the students and the subsequent cover-up? The fact is, the Office of the US Attorney in Northern Illinois is concerned with targeting the heroin trade in the streets of Chicago and charging individuals for their roles in it – not macro-criminality in Mexico. By the same token, the hundreds of FOIA requests the Archive filed for information about Ayotzinapa have been met with silence: denials, continuing secrecy, extensive redactions, even of unclassified documents. From a US policy perspective, allowing even the most modest critique of Mexico’s actions in this case threatens bilateral relations on two of the most politically charged issues in Washington today: counternarcotics and migration. And so far, the US hasn’t been willing to take that risk. There are other unintended consequences of the Chicago case on the Ayotzinapa investigation, rarely mentioned. When Adán Casarrubias was extradited to face trafficking charges, his defense lawyer got him a plea deal. As a result, there will be no public trial, and Casarrubias will never be compelled to speak about his role in Guerreros Unidos or say what he knew about the attacks against the students, their disappearance, or their collective fate. For the parents, that is a missed opportunity. To borrow (and paraphrase) again from Kathryn Sikkink, in contrast to the “justice cascade,” the impunity cascade implies the growing legitimacy of the norm that accepts the lack of criminal accountability for human rights abuses and the absence of prosecutions. “The term captures how the idea started as a small stream, but later caught on suddenly, sweeping along many actors in its wake.” The ways the logic and procedures of the US drug war feed impunity and strengthen it make the United State a partner in impunity with Mexico. Impunity-complicit. But as we’ve seen, impunity has its own history. The impunity of the Dirty War flowed naturally into the impunity of today’s permanent violence of the Drug War. As John Gibler pointed out in the Afterword to his collection of oral histories – responding to Ernesto’s story about protecting the evidence after his companions were disappeared – it was the students who believed in the rule of law, who treated the site of attacks as a crime scene and protected evidence they knew the authorities would need to investigate properly. Even in Mexico, even in 2014, the urge to believe in justice existed, that justice was a real possibility. That’s true today. The parents have to believe that their sons will be found and justice is possible. And we do too. But if we don’t challenge the militarized enforcement apparatus managed by the US and Mexico that produces criminality and reinforces impunity, we’re left with… rocks and sticks. Waiting for the detectives. Thank you.

Fujimori's Ghost Haunts Peru

The Ghosts of Leaders Past Peru The recent death of Alberto Fujimori, 86, who served as president of Peru in the 1990s, was a milestone in the South American country’s political history. Fujimori gained respect when he first took office for his neoliberal economic policies and his tough stance against left-wing terrorists who waged a war against the central government from 1980 to 2000. Eventually, as the Washington Post reported, Fujimori’s oppressive governance and corruption caught up with him. In 1998, he was convicted of human rights violations and sent to prison for 25 years. He was released from jail in 2023 due to his advanced age and health, but he was still facing charges dating back to his years in power. Even with his passing, however, Fujimori’s legacy lingers. Peru’s government recently passed a law, for example, giving legal immunity to Fujimori and members of the security forces for human rights abuses committed before 2002. The law was a gift for the president and his allies, the Associated Press wrote. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk panned the legislation. “Lack of accountability for these crimes, whenever committed, risks endangering the rights to truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence for thousands of victims of grave violations in Peru,” Türk said, according to Agence France-Press. Interestingly, lawmakers who passed the law and President Dina Boluarte, who signed it, arguably lack the legitimacy to do so. Their popularity ratings are among the lowest in the world – 10 percent in Boluarte’s case, World Politics Review noted. Boluarte took office because she was vice president when ex-President Pedro Castillo was impeached. Small, fragmented parties dominate the Peruvian Congress. Boluarte began her administration ignominiously when security forces killed 50 demonstrators who had taken to the streets to protest the ousting of Castillo. She claims she was not involved in the decision-making that led to those deaths. Amnesty International disagrees. Before Boluarte, incidentally, Peru had six different presidents in six years, underscoring how all managed to violate the law while none had sufficient popular backing to remain in office. Meanwhile, the true leaders of the country, according to the Economist, are right-wing and centrist lawmakers in Congress. Because Boluarte has no vice president, they don’t want to oust her because the country’s constitution states that new elections must be held if she leaves office. Voters would almost certainly fire these lawmakers if they had a chance. The result is a bevy of laws, like the amnesty legislation, that critics say are eroding Peruvian democracy, Al Jazeera explained – just like Fujimori did.

A Second Senior Prison Official Assassinated In Ecuador

The director of Ecuador's biggest prison was killed in an armed attack on Thursday, the second such killing in under two weeks in the Latin American country, the SNAI prison agency said. Maria Daniela Icaza, director of the infamous Litoral penitentiary in the port city Guayaqui l died of injuries sustained "following an armed attack on the road" leading to the nearby town of Daule, the agency said. She died while being taken to hospital, the agency said in a WhatsApp message, adding that an official from the prison service who was travelling with her was injured in the incident. "We convey our deepest condolences," the agency wrote on social media . Ecuador's prisons are among the most dangerous in the world, and many have been taken over by drug gangs. The penitentiaries have been under military control since January, when President Daniel Noboa declared a state of "internal armed conflict" after a brutal wave of violence, sparked by the jailbreak of a powerful crime boss. In January, gunmen stormed and opened fire in a TV studio and bandits threatened random executions of civilians and security forces. A prosecutor investigating the assault was later shot dead . Icaza's death comes nine days after the head of a prison in the Amazonian province of Sucumbios, Alex Guevara, was killed, also in an armed attack while travelling by car. Two other workers who were with him were wounded after unknown assailants raked his vehicle with gunfire. And two weeks ago, two prison officers in Guayaquil were murdered on their way to work. Ecuador registered a record 47 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, up from a rate of six murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018. Once considered a bastion of peace in Latin America, Ecuador has been plunged into crisis by the rapid spread of transnational cartels that use its ports -- mainly Guayaquil -- to ship drugs to the United States and Europe. Noboa's government claims that its offensive against organized crime has reduced homicides. Between January and September this year, 4,236 murders were reported, while in the same period in 2023, there were 5,112, according to the interior ministry. Noboa said he is targeting 22 criminal groups, the most powerful of which are Los Choneros, Los Lobos, and Tiguerones. In June, the U.S. sanctioned Los Lobos and its leader, Wilmer Geovanny Chavarria Barre, who also goes by "Pipo." U.S. officials have deemed Los Lobos the largest drug trafficking ring in Ecuador and said the gang "contributes significantly to the violence gripping the country."

Brasil's Government Foghts to Stop Deforestation In The Amazon

Rich, Dark Earth Amazon Rainforest If the fabled fountain of youth exists, modern society might be destroying it. In the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, centenarians in indigenous tribes remain spry, hiking barefoot for miles through rough, dangerous terrain after years of active lifestyles and healthy eating. Varî Vãti Marubo of the Marubo tribe, for example, could be 107 or 120 years old. When she was a little girl, she and her family would run from white explorers in the jungle. Now, her friends and neighbors pursue traditional modern careers and share their experiences on social media. The lifestyle that cultivated her longevity and that of other indigenous folks is disappearing. “Since our birth, we’ve kept the traditions alive,” she told the New York Times. “But now I see everything changing. Many young people have forgotten the wisdom of our elders.” Marubo represents the human side of what’s being lost every day in the rainforest. The Brazilian government recently announced that deforestation in the Amazon in the 12 months through August occurred at around half the rate of the prior year, and marked the lowest rate since 2016. The success in reducing deforestation stemmed from Brazilian officials using satellites and rigorous inspection programs that focused on areas where deforestation was most rampant, University of Toronto researchers wrote. Authorities have also cracked down on those who clear land illegally, too. For example, a Brazilian court recently ordered a rancher to pay $50 million for destroying part of the jungle, the Guardian noted. The fee included penalties for emitting carbon into the air. But loggers and others still cleared 1,700 square miles – the size of Rhode Island – in the year through August, the Associated Press reported. The disappearance of this massive carbon sink has major implications for the world when greenhouse gases are causing climate change, the Council on Foreign Relations explained. Illegal gold mining is also taking its toll. Greenpeace recently revealed that 5,000 miners were operating in the rural Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, Reuters reported. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to end illegal mining and deforestation by deploying the military, but the territory to cover is enormous and the financial incentive to break the law is very high. Climate change is also a problem. The Amazon saw more forest fires in August than at any other time since 2020, according to Voice of America. Ranchers often light the fires to clear land. But less rain and drier conditions cause them to spread out of control. Experts estimated that almost 40,000 fires occurred in August. Meanwhile, these developments come as scientists say the Amazon may actually store more carbon than originally thought. “Rich soil in the Amazon cultivated over centuries by Indigenous communities may store billions of tons of carbon,” New Scientist wrote. As a result, the “Nutrient-rich ‘dark earth’ soil may store an amount of carbon nearly equivalent to annual CO2 emissions in the US.”

Trump’s DANGEROUS STUNT in OHIO Gets QUICKLY EXPOSED