BUENOS AIRES: Participants in Operation Condor, in which six South American dictatorships collaborated to torture and assassinate their opponents, will face judgement on Friday, four decades after their actions and three years into their trial.

The Argentine court trying 18 former army officers is the first to address the crimes committed under the repressive plan, in which the military regimes of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay helped each other track down and kill leftist dissidents.

The plan, which had the backing of the United States, began in the 1970s at the height of the Cold War, and is blamed for scores of executions and kidnappings — 89 in Argentina alone.

Prosecutors based their case partly on declassified US intelligence documents showing how the South American regimes worked together to identify political exiles in neighbouring countries and kill them or send them back to their home countries.

The documents go into grisly detail about the bureaucracy of repression — such as the formal authorisation Uruguay’s intelligence services had to assassinate opponents in Argentina or ask the ruling junta there to take them out.

The various regimes communicated with each other using a telex system dubbed “Condortel”, which officers were trained to operate at the infamous School of the Americas in Panama, a US training centre that drilled repressive Latin American regimes in counter-insurgency tactics.

“The trial has allowed us to better understand Operation Condor,” victims’ lawyer Luz Palmas said. “Until now, historians and journalists were the only ones who had carried out investigations.”

The cases include harrowing stories, including that of Maria Garcia and Marcelo Gelman, a militant anti-regime couple arrested in Argentina on Aug 24, 1976 and taken to an auto workshop that regime agents had transformed into a torture chamber.

Gelman was killed. Garcia, who was Uruguayan, was transferred to her home country under Operation Condor. Seven months pregnant at the time, she was then “disappeared”. Her family still does not know exactly what happened to her.

Her daughter was born in captivity and given to a family of regime sympathisers to raise. She learned her real identity only through blood testing in 2000, when she was 23 years old.

Two ex-presidents accused

Hundreds of army officers and police have been tried in Argentina for atrocities carried out during the dictatorship (1976 to 1983).

Amnesty laws have protected others, notably in Brazil.

Operation Condor itself had never been the subject of a trial until the current case opened in February 2013.

“It’s the first verdict on Operation Condor as a coordinated structure for repression,” said Gaston Chillier, head of Argentine rights group CELS.

There are 17 Argentine officers and one Uruguayan on trial.

Prosecutors sought numerous suspects in other countries, but their extradition requests were refused.

The last general to rule Argentina, Reynaldo Bignone (1982-1983), is among the accused. Now aged 88, he faces 20 years in prison, on top of the 15 he is already serving for the theft of babies born to political prisoners.

Fellow dictator Jorge Videla, who ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1981, also faced charges, but died in prison in 2013, at age 87, while serving sentences for the abduction of babies and killing of dissidents.—AFP

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2016