Unsealed Documents Show Pinochet 'Directly' Involved in Capitol Hill Assassinations
Pinochet was Poppy's friend.
Unsealed Documents Show Pinochet 'Directly' Involved in Capitol Hill Assassinations
Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt became 'symbols of the broader human rights catastrophe of the Pinochet dictatorship'
by Sarah Lazare, staff writer
CommonDreams, Oct. 8, 2015
Loved ones have long charged that U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet had a direct hand in the 1976 assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his Institute for Policy Studies colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Now, they may finally be vindicated.
The administration of President Barack Obama on Thursday publicly released documents that appear to show that Pinochet was behind the murders of Letelier and Moffitt, who have become "symbols of the broader human rights catastrophe of the Pinochet dictatorship," Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS, told Common Dreams.
The materials, which include CIA papers, were given to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on Tuesday by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
SNIP...
Letelier’s son, Chilean Senator Juan Pablo Letelier, is one of the few people who has reviewed the trove and confirmed to the Guardian that they conclusively show Pinochet directly ordered the killing. In addition, the documents reportedly reveal that Pinochet had intended to cover up his role in the assassination by killing his spy chief.
"In (Pinochet’s) predisposition to defend his position he planned to eliminate Manuel Contreras to keep him from talking," Senator Letelier told the Mesa Central show on Tele13 Radio.
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/08/unsealed-documents-show-pinochet-directly-involved-capitol-hill-assassinations
From 2006: Know your BFEE: Los Amigos de Bush
= new reply since forum marked as read
An Open Letter to Henry Kissinger from One of Pinochet's Political Prisoners
The Last Man of the Junta
by FERNANDO A. TORRES
CounterPunch, DECEMBER 12, 2006
All of the original members of the military junta that overthrew Allende and his government with the knowledge and the direct support of the US government, are now gone.
Nixon is gone and Kissinger is left alone on this earth.
Now we will never know the number of secrets or the details that they took to their graves with them. Nor will we ever know the whereabouts of the missing ones— every single one of them. I also wonder if justice will prevail and will catch up with Kissinger, the last man of the Junta? F.T.
"I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." – Henry Kissinger
An open letter to Henry Kissinger
I was not an "irresponsible" Chilean sir, but I did pay the heavy price of your words.
Mr. Henry Kissinger
Kissinger Associates.
New York
I do remember your reprimand to Chileans when they elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1970: "We cannot allow a country to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible"
Although we were used to this kind of rhetoric coming out from the White House those years, we couldn’t imagine that those opprobrious words of yours would eventually seal the future of Chile in one of the most horrendous episodes in Latin America’s history. Yes, I can say we underestimated you sir.
Bombs falling from the skies, towers and buildings destroyed, hundreds of people butchered. Thousands missing and soccer stadiums converted into concentrations camps. Do you remember this, your own 9/11?
Since day one; since before Allende was ratified by Chilean parliament as its legitimate President, you, Secretary of Sate and National Security Advisor, Mr. Kissinger, were plotting the overthrow of Allende. You conjured up the assassination of General Rene Schneider — who supported the Chilean Constitution — to provoke an early military coup.
You plotted a "two track" policy toward this small country aimed, on the one hand, to isolate Allende internationally and, on the other (more dirty) hand, to provoked a military coup through assassinations, political subversion and economic sabotage.
Your goal, Mr. Kissinger, in uniting military leaders in neighboring countries to pressure Chile, later became "Operation Condor", which was the coordination of the secret political police forces to carry out exchange of information and prisoners, kidnappings, torture, and political assassination such as the one against Orlando Letelier and his aide Ronni Moffit carried out in Washington DC by Chilean and Cuban terrorists lead by CIA agents Michael Townley and Novo Sampol [who later was convicted in Panama for various terrorists attack and an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, but was eventually freed at the behest of the United States, which pulled the strings on the outgoing puppet president, Mireya Moscoso].
You, Mr. Kissinger, and Nixon lied to Congress, given misleading information and assuring the US played no role in Chile’s democracy deceased. You may know that at the time there was no danger of the elusive "weapons of mass destruction" but the "danger" of the spread of communism in the southern cone. You believed Chile’s "irresponsible" people were prescribing a wrong example; Chile was a dangerous "dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica," as you put it. A dagger that needs to be removed at any cost. Allende must be stopped even at the expense of democracy itself.
Because 9/11/1973 is of your absolute responsibility Mr. Kissinger, we the "irresponsible" people of Chile are naming you the Chilean version of Osama Bin laden, to say the least.
Mr. Kissinger, I was not an "irresponsible" Chilean because I was a 14 year old kid that couldn’t vote, but I did have to fully pay the heavy and bloody price of your words, sir. However thinking about your role not only in Chile but in Indochina, East Timor, Cyprus, your betrayal of the Kurds in Iraq, your unconditional support of South Africa’s Apartheid, etc. etc., I can say something you cannot: my hands are clean.
Sincerely
FERNANDO A. TORRES
FERNANDO A. TORRES was a political prisoner in Chile when he was sent to exile in 1977. He is now a freelance journalist.
SOURCE: http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/12/12/the-last-man-of-the-junta/
DU: This is not old news. Kissinger and his brethren are bringing this type of government -- where might and money make right -- to the United States today.
Doubt me? Consider Bush wins SCROTUS 5-4 and the Banksters rip off millions of homes and get off with fines for a fraction of what they stole. Disaster capitalism, Chile-Style is another name for the Austerity that We the People are going to have to get used to, even during a time of the greatest wealth in human history and its greatest concentration on record.
The only way to stop is to be aware of what is going on and to make our voices heard in opposition. While Kissinger and his bosses won't call their support for right-wing death squad tyranny for what it is for public consumption and modern marketing purposes, know it by its real name: fascism.
The following report should be read by anybody who cares about the United States of America.
'I’m sorry, Ed. There’s nothing I can do': Shocking untold tale of the Chilean government's plot to KILL Ed Koch...and how CIA director George Bush couldn't help
* Then a New York congressman, Koch won the ire of South American dictators he'd begun a crusade to help oust in the name of democracy
* Exiled Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier was assassinated days before Koch was warned in a shocking act of terrorism in Washington
* A new book links the threat on Koch to what was known as Operation Condor, a top secret terrorism corps involving Pinochet and other despots
In The Condor Years, John Dinges reveals Bush knew of Condor threats against Koch but failed to warn him until Letelier's spectacular murder
By JOSHUA GARDNER
Daily Mail (London), PUBLISHED: 10:58 EST, 18 February 2014
Ed Koch's status as a beloved New York City mayor hid a shocking untold history: the late politician was the target of a widespread South American terror operation's 70s-era assassination plot, a new book revealed Tuesday.
While still serving as a New York congressman working to oust ruthless despots from beleaguered countries like Chile and Uruguay, Koch received a phone call in 1976 from then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush telling the future mayor to watch his back.
Just days before, Washington saw its worst act of terror ever when an exiled Chilean ambassador was snuffed out with a car bomb on Embassy Row. Bush called to tell Koch he was next, and there was nothing he could do.
'Listen, my agents have gotten news that there’s a contract out on your life,' Bush told the horrified four-term congressman in a conversation recalled to author John Dinges by Koch.
SNIP...
Cue Operation Condor: an alliance of six Latin American countries led by Chile and Pinochet which formed secretly as a means of collaborating when one country wanted an enemy on foreign soil dead.
CONTINUED...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2562159/Shocking-untold-tale-Chilean-governments-plot-KILL-Ed-Koch-CIA-director-George-Bush-help.html
One giant step for justice.
This is the last poem of Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez, who was born on September 28, 1932 and murdered on September 16, 1973. Jara, a teacher, theatre director, poet, singer, songwriter and political activist was arrested after Pinochet’s US-Backed coup, in Chile. He was tortured, both his hands and ribs broken and shot 44 times. His body was dumped in the streets of Santiago. This is Jara’s last poem, written in a concentration camp, memorized, and smuggled out by other political prisoners:
SOURCE: https://thelemniscat.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/victor-jaras-last-poem/
images
There are five thousand of us here
in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone
are ten thousand hands which plant seeds
and make the factories run.
How much humanity
exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain,
moral pressure, terror and insanity?
Six of us were lost
as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I could never have believed
a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror
one jumping into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall,
but all with the fixed stare of death.
What horror the face of fascism creates!
They carry out their plans with knife-like precision.
Nothing matters to them.
To them, blood equals medals,
slaughter is an act of heroism.
Oh God, is this the world that you created,
for this your seven days of wonder and work?
Within these four walls only a number exists
which does not progress,
which slowly will wish more and more for death.
But suddenly my conscience awakes
and I see that this tide has no heartbeat,
only the pulse of machines
and the military showing their midwives’ faces
full of sweetness.
Let Mexico, Cuba and the world
cry out against this atrocity!
We are ten thousand hands
which can produce nothing.
How many of us in the whole country?
The blood of our President, our compañero,
will strike with more strength than bombs and machine guns!
So will our fist strike again!
How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment …
.
September 1973
His successors in office, not so much. George H W Bush, in particular, helped us "move on" from the "peace dividend" after the Cold War ended with the fall of the USSR.
In 1961, Dulles and Lemnitzer told him best time to launch, when the USA would enjoy maximum strategic superiority -- was "fall 1963." James Galbraith reported the history , revealed only when a participant's minutes of the meeting were found with McNamara's papers.
No wonder they tried to paint Oswald a commie working with Castro. Treason -- for victory.
-------------------- ETA ------------------------
The best time for attack was "sometime in the fall of 1963," ensuring the nation's maximum nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. That way there wouldn't be any question as to the end of communism.
Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?
Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.
James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994
During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.
But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.
The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.
CONTINUED...
http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963
Makes one see where they got the idea for "Better Dead than Red."
The Real Eisenhower: Planning to Win Nuclear War
by Ira Chernus
Common Dreams
March 18, 2008
Peace activists love to quote Dwight Eisenhower. The iconic Republican war hero spoke so eloquently about the dangers of war and the need for disarmament. He makes a terrific poster-boy for peace. But after years of research and writing three books on Ike, I think it's time to see the real Eisenhower stand up. The president who planned to fight and win a nuclear war, saying "he would rather be atomized than communized," reminds us how dangerous the cold war era really was, how much our leaders will put us all at risk in the name of "national security," and how easily they can mask their intentions behind benign images.
From first to last, Eisenhower was a confirmed cold warrior. Years before he became president, while he was publicly promoting cooperation with the Soviet Union, he wrote in his diary: "Russia is definitely out to communize the world....Now we face a battle to extinction." On the home front, he warned that liberal Democrats were leading the U.S. "toward total socialism."
SNIP…
For Eisenhower, the point of amassing a huge nuclear arsenal was not to deter war but to win it. This was enshrined as official policy in NSC 5810/1: "The United States must make clear its determination to prevail if general war occurs." The only meaningful war aim, he told the NSC, was "to achieve a victory." He described his war plan as "Hit the guy fast with all you've got if he jumps on you"; "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket."
SNIP…
Eisenhower assumed that a post-holocaust America would be a totalitarian state, ruled by martial law. But he worried about (among other things) what would happen to the credit structure of the country and how to print and sell war bonds to finance the next war if Washington were destroyed. At one NSC meeting he complained that if the President and the Vice President were "knocked off," the "damnable" law of succession would result in the Democrats (he called them "the other team"
taking the White House. "To assure against that happening, the President thought the Vice President should be put in cotton batting."
SNIP…
And we ignore it at our peril, because it was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would "push whole stack of chips into the pot" and "hit 'em ... with everything in the bucket"; who would "shoot your enemy before he shoots you"; who believed that the U.S. could "pick itself up from the floor" and win a nuclear war, even though "everybody is going crazy," as long as "only" 25 or 30 American cities got "shellacked" and nobody got too "hysterical."
CONTINUED…
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/18/7742
Too bad there might not be many Americans around after hitting them with "everything in the bucket," but, hey! As Eisenhower and crazy Gen. Powers said, even if only one American survives and no Russians, "We win!"
Gen Pinochet at the Bookstore
Santiago, Chile, July 2004
The general’s limo parked at the corner of San Diego street
and his bodyguard escorted him to the bookstore
called La Oportunidad, so he could browse
for rare works of history.
There were no bloody fingerprints left on the pages.
No books turned to ash at his touch.
He did not track the soil of mass graves on his shoes,
nor did his eyes glow red with a demon’s heat.
Worse: His hands were scrubbed, and his eyes were blue,
and the dementia that raged in his head like a demon,
making the general’s trial impossible, had disappeared.
Desaparecido: like thousands dead but not dead,
as the crowd reminded the general,
gathered outside the bookstore to jeer
when he scurried away with his bodyguards,
so much smaller in person.
-- Martín Espada
Spitting mad.
When Will National Review Apologize for Cooperating With Murderous Dictator Augusto Pinochet?
The Chilean general ordered an assassination on American soil, and the conservative magazine came to his defense
by Jeet Heer
The New Republic, Oct. 9, 2015
ewly declassified documents released by the Obama administration confirm the long-held suspicion that in 1976 the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was responsible for killing two people on American soil. Other evidence had long pointed to Pinochet’s culpability, but these new documents leave the question of guilt beyond doubt. On September 21, 1976, a car bomb went off in Washington, D.C., killing Orlando Letelier (an exiled Chilean diplomat and critic of the Pinochet dictatorship) and his assistant Ronni Moffitt, whose husband, Michael, was badly wounded in the attack.
Pinochet directly ordered the attack and was so eager to make sure that his guilt never be known that he even contemplated killing his own spy chief, Manuel Contreras, in order to cover up the crime. Pinochet wasn't alone in wanting the truth of the Letelier assassination to be hidden. The American conservative magazine National Review played a major role over many years to whitewash and obscure Pinochet’s guilt. They did this during a period when they were actively in cooperation with Pinochet’s regime.
As John Judis notes in his invaluable biography of William F. Buckley, National Review’s ties to the Pinochet’s political fortunes even preceded the 1973 coup that brought the dictator to power. In the early 1970s, National Review editor William F. Buckley hired Nena Ossa to report from Chile. Ossa was politically close to the right-wing movement that overthrew a democratic government in 1973. After Pinochet seized power, Ossa was rewarded for her loyalty by being made head of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chile. Even after her ties to the Pinochet regime were made public, she continued to cover Chile for National Review.
In 1975 Buckley and his friend Marvin Liebman set up the American-Chilean Council (ACC) to promote Pinochet’s interests in the United States. Short of funds, the organization took money from the Chilean government, funneled by Ossa, although Liebman didn’t list himself as director with the Justice Department. ACC funding went to pay for National Review writers like William Rusher, Robert Moss, John Chamberlain, and Jeffrey Hart to take luxurious junkets to Chile, which often resulted in articles defending Pinochet.
In a letter to Liebman in July 1975, Ossa praised Robert Moss for writing a National Review article that fulfilled the political agenda of the Pinochet regime. “Fortunately he seems to be enough to the Right to understand that he cannot possibly writer all he sees and hears,” Ossa enthused. “His fight against Marxism is much more important than being a journalist.” Ossa wanted propaganda, not journalism. National Review was happy to fulfill that mandate.
CONTINUED...
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123073/national-review-should-apologize-cooperating-augusto-pinochet
Remembering things that were long ago supposed to have disappeared into the memory hole.
Fortunately, your posts show me I'm not alone. 
Pinochet's Death Spares Bush Family
Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile’s notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush.
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews, December 12, 2006
EXCERPT...
Threat to Bush
Bush’s reputation was also at risk. As authors Dinges and Landau noted in Assassination on Embassy Row, “the CIA reaction was peculiar” after the cable from Ambassador Landau arrived disclosing a covert Chilean intelligence operation and asking Deputy Director Walters if he had a meeting scheduled with the DINA agents.
“Landau expected Walters to take quick action in the event that the Chilean mission did not have CIA clearance. Yet a week passed during which the assassination team could well have had time to carry out their original plan to go directly from Paraguay to Washington to kill Letelier. Walters and Bush conferred during that week about the matter.”
“One thing is clear,” Dinges and Landau wrote, “DINA chief Manuel Contreras would have called off the assassination mission if the CIA or State Department had expressed their displeasure to the Chilean government. An intelligence officer familiar with the case said that any warning would have been sufficient to cause the assassination to be scuttled. Whatever Walters and Bush did – if anything – the DINA mission proceeded.”
Within hours of the bombing, Letelier’s associates accused the Pinochet regime, citing its hatred of Letelier and its record for brutality. The Chilean government, however, heatedly denied any responsibility.
That night, at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Senator James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat, spotted Bush and approached the CIA director. Abourezk said he was a friend of Letelier’s and beseeched Bush to get the CIA “to find the bastards who killed him.” Abourezk said Bush responded: “I’ll see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile.”
A problem, however, was that one of the CIA’s best-placed assets – DINA chief Contreras – was part of the assassination. Wiley Gilstrap, the CIA’s Santiago Station Chief, did approach Contreras with questions about the Letelier bombing and wired back to Langley Contreras’s assurance that the Chilean government wasn’t involved.
Following the strategy of public misdirection already used in hundreds of “disappearances,” Contreras pointed the finger at the Chilean Left. Contreras suggested that leftists had killed Letelier to turn him into a martyr.
CIA headquarters, of course, had plenty of evidence that Contreras was lying. The Pinochet government had flashed its intention to mount a suspicious operation inside the United States by involving the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay and the deputy director of the CIA. Bush’s CIA even had in its files a photograph of the leader of the terrorist squad, Michael Townley.
Yet, rather than fulfilling his promise to Abourezk to “see what I can do,” Bush ignored leads that would have taken him into a confrontation with Pinochet. The CIA either didn’t put the pieces together or avoided the obvious conclusions the evidence presented.
CONTINUED...
https://consortiumnews.com/2006/121106.html
PS: Always great to read ya, me b zola! Fewer these days see the marriage of corporate and state power at play.
From Spartacus Schoolnet (published by DUer John Simkin):
Operation CONDOR
EXCERPT...
The director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush, was quickly told that DINA and several of his contract agents were involved in the assassination. However, he leaked a story to members of Operation Mockingbird that attempted to cover-up the role that the CIA and DINA had played in the killings. Jeremiah O'Leary in the Washington Star (8th October, 1976) wrote: "The right-wing Chilean junta had nothing to gain and everything to lose by the assassination of a peaceful and popular socialist leader." Newsweek added: "The CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police was not involved." (11th October).
William F. Buckley also took part in this disinformation campaign and on 25th October wrote: "U.S. investigators think it unlikely that Chile would risk with an action of this kind the respect it has won with great difficulty during the past year in many Western countries, which before were hostile to its policies." According to Donald Freed Buckley had been providing disinformation for the General Augusto Pinochet government since 1974. He also unearthed information that William Buckley's brother, James Buckley, met with Michael Townley and Guillermo Novo in New York City just a week before Orlando Letelier was assassinated.
In October, 1976, the midair explosion of Cubana Flight 455 flying out of Barbados killed all 73 people aboard. This included all 24 young athletes on Cuba's gold-medal fencing team. Police in Trinidad arrested two Venezuelans, Herman Ricardo and Freddy Lugo. Ricardo worked for the security agency owned by Luis Posada in Venezuela. He admitted that he and Lugo had planted two bombs on the plane. Ricardo claimed the bombing had been organized by Posada and Orlando Bosch. When Posada was arrested he was found with a map of Washington showing the daily route of to work of Orlando Letelier.
It later emerged that George H. W. Bush, the director of the CIA, warned U.S. Congressman Edward Koch, in October, 1974, that his sponsorship of legislation to cut off U.S. military assistance to Uruguay on human rights grounds had provoked secret police officials to "put a contract out for you." According to documents and interviews obtained by John Dinges for his book, The Condor Years (2004), the CIA station chief in Montevideo received information in July 1976 that two high-level Uruguayan intelligence officers had discussed their ability to have Chile's secret police, DINA, send agents to the United States to kill Koch. The station chief, identified in the book as Frederick Latrash, reported the conversation to CIA headquarters but recommended that the Agency take no action because the officers had been drinking at a cocktail party when the threat was made.
Only after the assassination of Orlando Letelier did the CIA warn Edward Koch about the planned assassination and share the intelligence with the FBI and the State Department. Recently released documents show that the CIA had close contact with members of the Chilean secret police, DINA, and its chief Juan Manuel Contreras, who was the head of Operation Condor. In fact, Contreras was on the CIA pay-roll (it was later stated this was an adminstrative mistake).
A 1978 cable from the US ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, to the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was was released in November 2000 by the Bill Clinton administration under the Chile Declassification Project. In the cable Ambassador White reported a conversation with General Alejandro Fretes Davalos, chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, who informed him that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Condor kept "in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covered all of Latin America". White feared that the US connection to Condor might be publicly revealed during the investigation into the murder of Letelier.
John Dinges argues that "The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented." Hewson Ryan, who worked for Henry Kissinger, later admitted that: "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976… Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know. But we didn't."
CONTINUED w/links, sources...
http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcondor.htm
Thank you for remembering Lori Berenson, olddots. Peru didn't throw the book at her, just the parts having to do with supporting the commie rebels. She has lived up to her side of the agreement, coming back from a furlough to the USA to finish serving her sentence in Peru.
While Peru wasn't an original member of CONDOR, it later did join officially and participate in the continental fight against communism cough anti-capitalism. It is estimated 60,000 people lost their lives, 30,000 "disappeared," and more than 400,000 arrested in Operation CONDOR.