Operation Colombo
~snip~
BOB GARFIELD: The disappearances began between 1973 and 1975. At one point, 119 Chileans were murdered by the regime and were reputed to have been found in Argentina. Tell me about this. It's what they called Operation Colombo.
PETER KORNBLUH:
The regime had already disappeared hundreds of Chilean leftists. And now they faced this issue: how to make the disappeared reappear. And that was the crux of Operation Colombo.And essentially, it involved planting bodies on the streets of Buenos Aires, bodies that could not be identified - the hands were burned off, some of them were headless, or their faces were burned – with IDs on them identifying them as several of the Chilean disappeared.
BOB GARFIELD: And the idea was to suggest that they had been killed not by Pinochet's secret police but by their own fellow travelers. And they planted stories in the Argentine media, but they went to great lengths to do that.
PETER KORNBLUH: Worse than planting stories in the Argentine media, they simply created their own magazine. They called it Lea, which in English means "read." It was a magazine that was only published once. It ended up on the newsstands of all the kiosks in Buenos Aires three days after several of these bodies were found.
And it basically was an article that said that Chilean leftists had come to Argentina, they were fighting among themselves and killing themselves, and it gave a list of 60 Chileans, all of whom were disappeared in Chile, but now, according to this article, had been killed in fighting among each other in Argentina.
One week later, another propaganda piece appeared in a newsletter in Brazil, and it said the same thing, that they'd been fighting among themselves, simply killed one another.
BOB GARFIELD: It's phenomenal. And these stories were deemed sufficient enough evidence for the Chilean media to cite them as evidence that the leftists indeed were behind these murders.
There's one extraordinary headline in a Chilean paper. Tell me about it.
PETER KORNBLUH: In La Segunda, which was one of Chile's most leading newspapers, owned by Agustin Edwards, printed a headline that said, "Miristas exterminated like rats." Miristas is the name of the leftist group that Pinochet claimed all of these individuals belonged to.
Well, you have to understand that it wasn't just the disappeared in the press. A DINA agent, a secret police agent of Chile, carried these stories to the press. And then El Mercurio, the leading newspaper in Chile, printed a whole editorial basically that could have been written by the Chilean secret police itself, and this is what it said, quote:
"The politicians and foreign newsmen who ask themselves so many times about the fate of these leftists and blame the Chilean government for the disappearances of many of them, now have the explanation that they refuse to accept. Victims of their own methods, exterminated by their own comrades – every one of them demonstrates with tragic eloquence that violent people end up falling victims to the blind and implacable terror that they provoke."
So it was a whole manipulation of the truth of what had happened, but many Chileans, particularly upper-class Chileans, read this and said, ah-hah, we knew all along that, you know, the left kills each other. Pinochet is clean. He would never do such a thing.
More:
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2006/12/15/02~~~~~~~~~Kornbluh's book:
The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability
PINOCHET: A Declassified Documentary Obit
Archive Posts Records on former Dictator's Repression, Acts of Terrorism, U.S. Support
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 212
Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Yvette White
Posted - December 12, 2006Washington D.C., December 12, 2006 - As Chile prepared to bury General Augusto Pinochet, the National Security Archive today posted a selection of declassified U.S. documents that illuminate the former dictator's record of repression. The documents include CIA records on Pinochet's role in the Washington D.C. car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, Defense Intelligence Agency biographic reports on Pinochet, and transcripts of meetings in which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger resisted bringing pressure on the Chilean military for its human rights atrocities.
"Pinochet's death has denied his victims a final judicial reckoning," said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Chile Documentation Project. "But the declassified documents do contribute to the ultimate verdict of history on his atrocities."
Most of the documents posted today are drawn from a collection of 24,000 declassified records that were released by the Clinton administration after Pinochet's October, 1998, arrest in London. Many of them are reproduced in Kornbluh's book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
Pinochet died of complications from a heart attack on December 10, which was, by coincidence, International Human Rights Day.
More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB212/index.htm