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RSN: The CIA's Secret Global War Against the Left
Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The CIA's Secret Global War Against the Left
01 December 20
Forty-five years ago, under a cloak of secrecy, Operation Condor was officially launched: a global campaign of violent repression against the Latin American left by the region’s quasi-fascist military dictatorships. The US government not only knew about the program — it helped to engineer it.
n Buenos Aires, a former Chilean general returns home, opens his garage door, and is blasted thirteen feet in the air when his car explodes, incinerating his wife. A conservative opponent of the country’s military dictatorship and his wife take an afternoon walk on the streets of Rome and are swiftly gunned down. On a rainy autumn morning, a car blows up in the middle of Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, killing two of the three inside: a leader of Chile’s opposition in exile and his newlywed American friend.
These were just some of the most prized scalps claimed by Operation Condor, officially inaugurated forty-five years and two days ago. With South America in the grip of military dictatorships and rocked by the same kinds of social and political movements that were demanding change all over the world in the 1960s and ’70s, a handful of the continent’s governments made a pact to work together to roll back the rising tide of “subversives” and “terrorists.”
What followed was a secret, global campaign of violent repression that spanned not just countries, but continents, and featured everything from abduction and torture to murder. To say it was known about by the US government, which backed these regimes, is an understatement: though even this simple fact was denied at the time, years of investigations and document releases since then mean that we now know the CIA and top-ranking US officials supported, laid the groundwork for, and were even directly involved in Condor’s crimes.
Zooming out, Condor was hardly some uniquely shocking case of anticommunist paranoia spiraling out of control. As its connections to anticommunist terror in Europe have become clearer, it looks more like a particularly successful example of the covert war the US national security state had set into motion all over the world against democracy and the Left, a war that saw it get into bed with fascists and that, in some cases, arguably constituted genocide. It was the system working exactly as intended, in other words, and a stark reminder of the lengths the global centers of power will go to keep things the way they are.
World War Three
The middle of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of people’s movements in Latin America that threatened to upend the rigid hierarchies of the hemisphere: feminist and workers’ movements, movements for indigenous rights, peasant-led movements for agrarian reform, and leftist movements, to name a few. Naturally, they had to be stopped.
Until then, Washington-backed juntas and dictatorships had successfully kept a lid on such social change, or simply overthrew whatever governments those movements succeeded in forming. Such changes, after all, directly threatened not just the power and privileges of the region’s long-standing elite, but Western business interests, too. So it was that, at the prodding of US-owned corporations like Chase Manhattan, Anaconda Copper, and Pepsi, former corporate lawyer and then-president Richard Nixon backed the military overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government in 1973, and its replacement by a vicious dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet.
But for the region’s paranoid leadership, even their internal campaigns of terror were not enough. So, in 1975, the governments of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay secretly met in Santiago, Chile, and agreed to work together to spy on and track “suspicious individuals” and organizations “directly or indirectly linked to Marxism.” Before long, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador joined up, too. The information-gathering initiative was dubbed “Condor,” in honor of the national bird of several of the participants, including the host country.
Despite what the minutes stated, this was no mere surveillance pact. What Operation Condor meant in practice was that the state kidnappings, torture, and murder that had run roughshod over the remaining pockets of dissent within these countries would now go beyond their national borders. If you were a leftist or anyone else the government saw as a threat, then escape, exile, and even asylum would no longer save you. There was nowhere to hide.
“Argentina was still a democracy at the time, and was a safe haven for many leftists who had been forced out of several countries in the Southern Cone,” says New York University associate professor Remi Brulin. “Suddenly, they realized that was not safe anymore.”
While Condor officially lasted only a few years, the region’s governments had long collaborated in less formalized ways to stamp out their political opponents. According to the Database on South America’s Transnational Human Rights Violations, between 1969 and 1981, such cross-border operations claimed at least 763 victims of atrocities ranging from kidnapping and torture to outright murder, nearly half of them Uruguayan, close to a quarter Argentine, and 15 percent of them Chilean. Most of these atrocities took place in Argentina, which saw 544 cases, with Uruguay a distant second at 129.
As explained in a 1976 report by Harry W. Shlaudeman, Richard Nixon’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, South American officials like Uruguay’s foreign minister Juan Carlos Blanco Estradé (“one of the brighter and normally steadier members of the group”) saw themselves as fighting a “Third World War,” with “the countries of the southern cone as the last bastion of Christian civilization.” Having come to power “in battle against the extreme left,” he noted, these repressive governments had “their ego, their salaries, and their equipment-budgets” inextricably wrapped up in this concept.
The result was a stream of often stomach-churning crimes. The typical Condor operation might go something like this: once a target was identified, a team — made up of nationals from one or more member countries — would find and surveil the individual, before a second team snatched and spirited them away to a secret prison, sometimes in the country they’d been found, sometimes elsewhere. There they would be held and tortured, including beatings, waterboarding, mock executions, electrocution, rape, and worse, sometimes for months on end. In some cases, family members were kidnapped and tortured, too, or even stolen from them, for no reason beyond sadism. According to the database, there are at least twenty-three cases of the kidnapping of victims’ children, passed off to their killers to be raised as their own.
Few survived, though more often than not, the exact fate of those who were taken isn’t clear. They were simply never heard from again. On occasion, survivors brought back word about the disappeared, such as witnesses who remembered Jorge Isaac Fuentes Alarcón, a sociologist arrested while crossing the Argentina-Paraguay border and accused of being a courier for the far-left Chilean group MIR. The stories were never pretty. Those witnesses later testified that they’d seen Fuentes arrive at the Villa Grimaldi death camp in Santiago covered in scabies, with one victim-turned-collaborator-under-duress recalling that he was chained in a doghouse full of parasites, mockingly referred to as “pichicho” (street dog).
Yet such testimony also spoke to the resilience of the human spirit and the sense of solidarity that knitted such leftist groups together. Fuentes was in good spirits, witnesses said, and bucked up other prisoners by singing. One young prisoner recalled how Patricio Biedma, another arrested MIR member, had been a father figure for him in prison, teaching him how to survive. Biedma’s wife and three children never learned what became of their loved one.
Though Condor ostensibly targeted “guerrillas” and “Marxists,” the people of South America learned early on and in an especially brutal way what US protesters and law-abiding Muslims would learn after the Bush years: that such malleable terms can be stretched to mean almost anyone.
“Operation Condor pursued many types of political opponents, including congressional representatives, former ministers, human rights advocates (including people in Amnesty International), constitutionalist military officers, peasant leaders, unionists, priests and nuns, professors and students,” says J. Patrice McSherry, professor emerita of political science at Long Island University. “Condor targeted not only the Left, but also the center-left and other democratic sectors that were fighting to demand their rights and make more inclusive the elitist democracies of the era.”
“First, the aim was to stop terrorism,” one operative from the Department of National Intelligence (DINA), Chile’s feared secret police, explained. “Then possible extremists were targeted, and later those who might be converted into extremists.” Or, as one Argentine general put it: “First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then their sympathizers; then those who are indifferent.”
Though this was supposed to be justified by the dire threat of left-wing violence, it’s hard to take such a threat seriously today. Not only were the Condor governments targeting individuals who were peaceful or unconnected to any revolutionary movements, but those movements had largely been defeated or even given up on armed struggle. As Shlaudeman put it to Henry Kissinger in 1976: “Both terrorists and the peaceful left have failed. This is true even in the minds of studious revolutionaries.” Fernando Lopez has argued that the regimes “grossly overstated the threat posed by the revolutionary movements” so they could go after their real target: the opposition in exile, who drew global sympathy and solidarity, and isolated the Condor governments internationally.
Their plans weren’t confined to the continent. Twelve of the victims of cross-border operations came from countries outside of the region, including the UK, Italy, France, and the United States, while some of the most high-profile targets were assassinated in European countries, making Condor not just a transnational operation, but a global one. As exiled left-wing and moderate opponents of Pinochet’s dictatorship planned to campaign for diplomatic isolation of the country, he plotted to take them out.
Agents of DINA planned attacks in Portugal and France, and tried repeatedly to kill Carlos Altamirano, general secretary of the Socialist Party of Chile: once in Mexico, when they showed up too late; several times in Paris, when they were foiled by French intelligence; and once in Madrid, where the attempt failed. Bernardo Leighton, the founder of Chile’s Christian Democrat Party, may not have been a radical — he opposed much of Allende’s program — but he was guilty of meeting with Socialist leaders to form an opposition front of exiles against the regime. He survived a gunshot to the back of the head in Rome, but was left with permanent brain damage, ending his opposition activities.
While Pinochet took a leading role, the targets weren’t just Chilean. Scotland Yard prevented the assassination of Uruguayan senator Wilson Ferreira Aldunate in London, while then-representative Edward Koch, later to become mayor of New York City, was warned by then-CIA director George H. W. Bush that there was a threat on his life, thanks to his successful amendment to end US military aid to Uruguay. In Buenos Aires, two Uruguayan legislators and two activists were kidnapped in the early morning and later found with shots to the head in a car left under a bridge. Meanwhile, as journalist John Dinges has pointed out, a slew of seemingly natural deaths in a few short years of opponents in exile of the continent’s various dictatorships raises further suspicions.
Perhaps the most famous victim of Condor was Orlando Letelier, Allende’s former ambassador to the United States. After being detained and tortured by the regime following the coup, diplomatic pressure allowed Letelier to escape and eventually return to Washington, DC, where he soon became one of the most visible and influential members of Chile’s opposition to exile. Set up in the heart of American power and hobnobbing with US officials and their families, Letelier led a successful legislative campaign to ban US arms sales to Chile, lobbied against a $63 million investment by a Dutch company into the country, and fiercely criticized Pinochet’s free-market economic reforms.
All of it made him a marked man. In 1976, two DINA agents entered the United States on passports from Paraguay, a fellow Condor member, and with the help of two exiled Cuban anti-communists, rigged a bomb to Letelier’s car that detonated right on DC’s Embassy Row, killing him and one of his two American passengers. Until September 11, 2001, it would remain the worst act of foreign terrorism on US soil.
The Dirty Work
For years, the official story was that the US government learned about Condor roughly around the same time as everyone else, in 1976. In fact, through declassifications, firsthand testimony, and the work of historians, we now know that this program of state terror had been sanctioned, facilitated, and encouraged by the US government.
Contrary to its denials at the time, a CIA report produced for Congress in 2000 would admit that “within a year after the [1973 Chilean] coup, the CIA and other US government agencies were aware of bilateral cooperation among regional intelligence services to track the activities of and, in at least a few cases, kill political opponents” — a “precursor” to Condor. Consider, too, that Manuel Contreras, the ruthless DINA chief knee-deep in Condor, was a (at one point, paid) CIA asset from 1974 to 1977, despite an internal 1975 report finding him “the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the junta.”
For decades, speculation has abounded about just how unintentionally oblivious segments of the US government really were to the Letelier operation specifically. Despite being repeatedly alerted to the DINA agents’ attempts to enter the United States, and its suspicious nature, the CIA did nothing. A mere five days before they killed Letelier, Kissinger backpedaled an order for US ambassadors in a handful of the Condor countries to express the US government’s “deep concerns” over the reported plans of overseas assassination. Earlier that year, Pinochet had personally complained to Kissinger about Letelier’s activities, in a conversation in which Kissinger assured the dictator that “we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do.”
But worse, evidence uncovered by figures like McSherry and Dinges suggest the US government wasn’t just aware of the crimes of Condor, but directly involved in them.
Archival documents show the CIA, FBI, and even US embassies providing intelligence and names of suspects to the Condor governments, with both hemispheres looking into suspects on their home turf at the other’s behest. That included Fuentes, the results of whose interrogation (including the names he gave up) the US embassy in Buenos Aires relayed to Chilean police. Contreras himself later insisted, in court and to reporters, that the CIA had been involved in both the murder of Letelier and Carlos Prats, the former Chilean general blown up in Argentina a year before Condor’s founding, and that he had given the FBI documents proving his claims in 2000.
There is strong evidence that US officers played a key role in the 1973 murder of two Americans, journalist Charles Horman and student Frank Teruggi, in the days that followed the coup, and that US intelligence was surveilling them. A 1979 Senate report stated that as early as 1974, the CIA had warned local authorities in France and Portugal about incoming Condor assassinations and discussed setting up a Condor headquarters with DINA in Miami — a move it rejected at the time but proceeded with a few years later with the Argentinians.
McSherry later found yet another damning document, this one a 1978 cable from the then-US ambassador to Paraguay. The cable reported that Condor governments “keep in touch with one another through a US communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone” (“CONDORTEL”), using it to “co-ordinate intelligence information among the Southern cone countries.” This was just two years after Shlaudeman informed Kissinger of the “paranoia” of South American governments, who were increasingly targeting “non-violent dissent from the left and the center left” and “nearly anyone who opposes government policy,” and after the US embassy in Buenos Aires warned Kissinger that Argentinian security forces, in collaboration with neighboring governments, were involved in brutal “excesses . . . often involving innocent people.”
In fact, it was precisely those at the very top, like Kissinger, who gave their approval to the Condor governments’ plans. Upon being told by Brazil’s newly installed dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici in 1971 that the South American country was planning to help overthrow Chile’s elected socialist government, Nixon offered money and aid for the effort, telling him the two governments needed to work together to “prevent new Allendes and Castros and try where possible to reverse these trends.” It was during those meetings, according to a later memo, that Nixon asked Médici for support “in safeguarding the internal security and status quo in the hemisphere,” which one general read as a request for Brazil to “do the dirty work.”
Kissinger himself infamously told the foreign minister of Argentina in June 1976, in between repeatedly assuring him the US government hoped for the new junta’s success: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”
Behind the Throne
But the US government’s role in the birth of Condor went well beyond diplomatic winks and nods.
The methods and strategies employed by Condor operatives had their roots in the US training that Latin American militaries received through vehicles like the notorious School of the Americas (SOA), which aimed to pass on the battlefield and counterinsurgency lessons the US military had learned over its past decades of war-making. The SOA’s “graduates” eventually comprised one of every seven members of the DINA command staff, after learning the very things they would soon become feared for in their home countries: assassination, extortion, coercion against family members, psychological manipulation and the use of drugs, and torture techniques, including electrocution and even the specific, sensitive nerve points it could be applied to — just to name a few.
Before Condor, the earliest laboratories for this training were Guatemala and Vietnam. Guatemala saw around 200,000 people killed between the 1954 coup and 1996, many of them victims of, first, a US-led assassination and paramilitary war program in the 1950s, and, through the 1960s, a counterinsurgency program that featured bombing, kidnapping, torture, and murder of “communists and terrorists” — the first instance of mass disappearances in Latin America, and all taught and facilitated by US security forces.
Running parallel to this was the CIA-led Phoenix Program in Vietnam, in which US forces financed, directed, and oversaw a campaign of assassination, terror, and torture carried out by South Vietnamese locals against the Viet Cong and, especially, their civilian sympathizers. The resulting atrocities didn’t stop the Phoenix experience from informing the training manuals for future Condor operatives.
Besides this, the United States also laid the groundwork for Condor by instigating and formalizing a unified, anti-communist front among the powerful Latin American militaries. The US government had been warning its commanders about the communist menace since at least 1945, with US money, arms, and training soon following. This escalated after the 1959 Cuban revolution, with President John F. Kennedy issuing the internal defense and development (IDAD) doctrine encouraging military repression in the region, and the Conference of American Armies (CAA) held annually from 1960 on. As one 1971 state department cable later outlined, “it is especially desirable that such neighboring countries as Argentina and Brazil collaborate effectively with the Uruguayan security forces and where possible we should encourage such cooperation.”
Like the SOA and US telecommunications networks, the CAA was a piece of the hemisphere’s wider US national security structure that eventually became the skeleton for Condor. The CAA’s charter defined its member armies’ mission as “protect[ing] the continent from the aggressive action of the International Communist Movement,” and early meetings revolved around many of the hallmarks of Condor: fighting “communist aggression,” intelligence-sharing on subversives, and systems of schools, telecommunication networks, and training programs for this purpose. In one 1966 meeting, Argentina’s military dictator floated the creation of “an intelligence center coordinated among Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay,” while seven years later, the head of Brazil’s army suggested to “extend the exchange of information” among attendees to “struggle against subversion.”
The United States then took a leading role in establishing the post-coup dictatorships’ spy agencies who provided the foot soldiers of Condor, including Paraguay’s La Técnica, Brazil’s SNI, and, of course, DINA. Contreras would later charge that the CIA officers sent down to do the honors actually “wanted to remain in Chile, in charge of the principal DINA posts,” an idea Pinochet nixed.
While sanctioned by its security forces and high-ranking officials, US involvement sometimes elicited objections, even horror from those lower down. The US embassy in Argentina warned Kissinger in 1976 that the “kind of counterviolence” employed by the country’s dictatorship “could eventually create more problems than it solves” and that “many who formerly supported the govt [sic] have been alienated by its tolerance of excesses on the part of the security forces — often involving innocent people.” It echoed the more unabashed outrage of one Guatemalan embassy official in 1968, who asked: “Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an acceptable counter-insurgency weapon?”
The more information we learn only deepens US government complicity. This year’s revelation that the Swiss encryption company Crypto AG was secretly a CIA front that gave the agency a back door to the encrypted communications of the governments that used it suggests the US government was likely aware of what Condor members were up to in real time. Condor countries had, after all, built their entire communication network around Crypto AG’s hardware.
“There Are No Rules”
That the US government was behind a secret, continent-wide campaign of political terror and repression speaks to the paranoia of the country’s elites, inflamed by the rising power of the Soviet Union and the movements they viewed as manipulable by it. As the 1954 Doolittle Report put it, when “facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means . . . there are no rules in such a game,” “acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply,” and “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.”
No wonder the blood-soaked officials of Condor countries saw kindred spirits in their US counterparts. “The only thing separating us is our uniforms, for the men of the armies of America, I believe, have never before understood one another as we do at this moment,” the commander of Uruguay’s joint chiefs told a 1975 CAA meeting. “There exists a coordination among the armies of the continent to combat and impede Marxist infiltration or whatever other form of subversion.”
What this meant in practice is that the US government got in bed with not just authoritarians and dictators, but even out-and-out fascists.
Noam Chomsky has pointed out the parallels between fascist thought and the “national security doctrine” that drove the Latin American dictators’ repression, with its belief in the preeminence of the state over the individual and of permanent war. But US officials noticed it, too. As Shlaudeman noted, the Latin American dictatorships were driven not just by anti-Marxism, but by a nationalist “developmentalist” ideology in which military establishments partnered with technocrats to deliver industrialization.
“National developmentalism has obvious and bothersome parallels to National Socialism,” he wrote. “Opponents of the military regimes call them fascist. It is an effective pejorative, the more so because it can be said to be technically accurate.”
These parallels were more horrifyingly clear in the militaries’ treatment of dissidents. As figures like photographer João de Carvalho Pina and historian Daniel Feierstein have noted, the overcrowding, starvation, tortures, and general dehumanizing treatment of prisoners by the Condor dictatorships bore obvious similarities with the conditions of Nazi concentration camps.
But it went beyond mere parallels. Argentine camps were suffused with Nazism: decorated with swastikas and portraits of Hitler, recordings of Nazi speeches ringing through facilities, prisoners painted with swastikas and forced to yell “Heil Hitler,” with especially sadistic tortures reserved for Jewish captives. Escaped former Nazis had, after all, been welcomed into Latin American military dictatorships, including the former head of Gestapo in Lyon, Klaus Barbie. Wanted in France for unspeakable crimes, Barbie instead resettled in Bolivia, teaching torture and repression to military officers across the continent, before eventually helping organize the country’s 1980 “Cocaine Coup” and taking up a role in the military dictatorship that followed.
Ex-fascists “infiltrated various sectors of the Argentine Society,” Argentine journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez explained. “It would be useful to ask whether it is only a coincidence that the use of torture attained such heights of cruelty and sophistication. We should continue to ask ourselves whether or not the appearance of concentration camps, mass graves, and hundreds of bodies floating in Argentine rivers after 1974 is merely coincidental.”
This connection to European fascists links Condor to another secret, continent-wide anti-communist initiative: the NATO-led stay-behind program in Europe, the most famous of which was Operation Gladio in Italy. Like Condor, the stay-behind armies were a US-devised and US-backed network of local right-wing paramilitaries, meant to activate in case of communist invasion or simply electoral victory, and who, in the meantime, carried out a campaign of assassinations, destabilization, and general political violence in their home countries. And like Condor, they employed current and “former” fascists, usually in direct alliance with the countries’ high-ranking security forces.
The connections between the two programs were numerous. Before helping Barbie escape to South America, the US government used him as a stay-behind recruiter in Europe. CIA officials like Vernon Walters and Duane Clarridge cut their teeth on Eurasian stay-behind operations before overseeing right-wing repression south of the border.
It was the Gladio-linked neofascist organization Avanguardia Nazionale, contracted by DINA, that carried out the failed attempt on Bernardo Leighton’s life. DINA agents and even Pinochet himself met in advance of the assassination with its leader, Stefano Delle Chiaie, who later worked for DINA and, he claimed, helped create it, before going to serve alongside Barbie in Bolivia’s coup government. Delle Chiaie also happened to meet personally with Pinochet just days before the Chilean dictator formalized the creation of Condor, and he arrived in Chile to get to work shortly thereafter.
Particularly notable was the powerful fascist businessman Licio Gelli (“I am fascist and will die a fascist,” he once proclaimed), grandmaster of the right-wing Italian Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Due (P-2), whose members spanned virtually every segment of the Italian establishment, including future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Gelli and P-2 worked closely with the CIA and the Gladio network to manipulate Italian politics, “carefully ensuring that the Communist party should never emerge,” as he explained in 2008. Through the 1970s, he and the lodge pulled double duty in Argentina, inserting themselves into the highest levels of business and government in the country, with Gelli “a key mover in the development of the continuity between democracy and state terrorism over the period that spans from 1974 to 1981,” as sociologist Claudio Tognonato wrote.
There is, in other words, more than a hint, as McSherry has argued, that “US forces transferred the stay-behind model to Latin America” in the form of programs like Condor. As the Pentagon Papers revealed, the US government had already done so in another Cold War theater, Vietnam, where in 1956 it tasked a special forces unit “with the initial mission of preparing stay-behind organizations in South Vietnam just below the 17th Parallel, for guerrilla warfare in the event of an overt invasion by North Vietnamese forces.”
But the evidence also hints at something darker: at a “global anti-Marxist agreement,” in the words of the court testimony of Michael Townley, the DINA agent behind the Prats, Leighton, and Letelier assassinations.
Coming Full Circle
Though Condor has long been over, its language and practices continue to echo today.
According to Brulin, it was with the ascent of Ronald Reagan from 1981 on that the bellicose political discourse around terrorism that had suffused the Condor countries infected the United States, with Reaganite “anti-terror” rhetoric initially focused on Central America. As the years passed, its spirit continued to haunt US politics, even as the focus shifted to the Middle East.
“Everything the US has been saying after 9/11 is something Reagan is saying about Central and South America in the 1980s, and what US officers are saying to Latin American dictators in the 1950s and 1960s,” says Brulin. “And always based on the same lie: how strong the enemy was, and what we are doing about them, which in the real world is using death squads.”
Of course, it wasn’t just discourse. It’s impossible to talk about the details of Condor without thinking of the “war on terror” launched by George W. Bush nearly twenty years ago.
“We witnessed the use by US counterterrorist forces of disappearances, cross-border renditions, torture, secret ‘black sites’ located in other countries, and so on, approved by civilian authorities,” says McSherry. “All of these methods characterized Operation Condor.”
“There have been other manifestations of Condor-like practices that have taken place and are taking place in the decades since,” says Francesca Lessa, who is researching the crimes of and accountability for Condor at the University of Oxford. “If you think about the practices of clandestine rendition in the war on terror, for example — those have all of the hallmarks of what Condor used to be in Latin America several decades earlier.”
Even the torture employed by Condor operatives, such as threatening to kill or rape loved ones, squalid conditions forcing total dependence on one’s captors, and simulated drowning, was in many cases exactly the same as the techniques used by US forces against accused terrorists and taught to Latin American forces by US officers decades before that.
As the “war on terror” progressed, we’ve seen some of the hallmarks of Condor operations increasingly turned on the domestic US population. This is particularly so with Donald Trump, who, sometimes to the enthusiastic applause of liberal politicians, has repeatedly railed against socialists and other domestic enemies, and more recently engaged in a range of behavior that would be familiar to the victims of Condor: law and order rhetoric, threats to declare dissidents terrorists, and massively overstating the power of the groups he opposes. Perhaps more alarmingly, street kidnappings and other counterinsurgency tactics have now apparently become legitimate elements of domestic law enforcement under his presidency.
Ironically, this has happened at the same time that the perpetrators of Condor and its member governments have increasingly found themselves facing justice, exposing more about its workings in the process. While impunity held fast in the hemisphere as late as the 2000s, campaigns and legal efforts by survivors and victims’ families have changed all that, assisted by a vast and incriminating archival paper trail created, ironically, by the program’s highly organized and transnational nature.
According to the numbers compiled by Lessa in her Operation Condor project, since the 1970s, there have been forty-four criminal investigations into Condor-related crimes across eight countries. Those include not just Condor member nations, but Italy, France, and the United States, too.
Twenty-eight of these investigations have concluded with at least an initial sentence, says Lessa, which have seen 118 defendants convicted for crimes against 213 victims. Those include the twenty DINA agents tried for Condor activities in 2018, the 2016 conviction of eighteen former Argentine military officers for their participation in Condor, and Contreras himself, who was sentenced to 526 years in prison in 1995 and died in jail two decades later. By Lessa’s count, there are currently two ongoing trials and twelve investigations at the pretrial stage.
In a rare bit of real-world poetic justice, it is now the perpetrators of Condor who seem to have nowhere to hide. Years of pressure from those pushing for justice were given a boost by Pinochet’s arrest and nearly two-year-long detention in London, whose warrant was based partly on a Condor crime, and which firmly established that individuals really could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity regardless of where they were, where the crimes were carried out, and the nationality of everyone involved. Though he escaped extradition, it opened the door to his 2004 indictment in Chile, which in turn paved the way for further attempts at retroactive justice for the dictatorship’s crimes.
“The Pinochet case in 1998 was indeed critical in galvanizing international justice efforts in South America and beyond,” says Lessa. “But if the preexisting demand and justice efforts had not been there even before, the Pinochet case might not have been enough on its own.”
The reverberations were felt beyond Chile. Pinochet’s arrest and the investigation of Argentine military officials in foreign courts spurred a raft of new cases and even arrests and indictments in Argentina over Condor-era crimes, leading to the 2003 annulment of the country’s amnesty laws, used to protect human rights abusers for decades. A year later, an Argentine court declared that the statute of limitations didn’t apply to human rights crimes, in a case that concerned the 1974 murder of Carlos Prats.
Transnational repression has given way to borderless justice, it seems. The year 2019 alone saw Adriana Rivas, Contreras’s former secretary and allegedly one of DINA’s “most brutal torturers,” arrested in Australia (her extradition to Chile was approved last month), while a former Uruguayan naval officer was sentenced to life in prison in Italy over his role in Condor. The most recent sentence was handed down just days ago, with four former Argentine security personnel convicted for a slew of crimes, including the kidnapping and detention of two young children, privy to their mother’s torture and later abandoned in a public square in Chile.
All the while, we continue to learn more about the once-shadowy program. In 2019, the US government released tens of thousands more pages worth of previously secret files relating to Argentina’s dictatorship during the Condor years. Among the revelations: that in September 1977, “representatives of West German, French, and British intelligence services had visited the Condor organization secretariat in Buenos Aires . . . to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversive organization similar to Condor.”
With veterans of France’s brutal counterinsurgent wars in Algeria and Vietnam having passed on their own training and experience to their Latin American counterparts, perhaps one day we will find out that the “global anti-Marxist agreement” Condor was a part of was even broader than once thought.
A History Rewritten
As typically recounted, the story of the twentieth century goes something like this: after briefly uniting to defeat fascism, the United States and the Soviet Union turned the rest of the century into a clash of ideologies, one that always threatened to erupt, but never quite did, into outright great-power war. With nary a shot fired, free-market capitalism won out, thanks to the hearts and minds won by the power of television, cheeseburgers, and convenient home appliances.
But programs like Operation Condor cast that history in a very different light. With them in mind, that triumph looks intensely violent — one in which the US government swiftly allied with autocrats and even fascists to attack democracy and brutally put down people’s movements of all kinds the world over, lest their goals of a more just, egalitarian world threaten Western strategic and business interests. And with that economic system now sputtering under the weight of several crises, the repressive measures long reserved for the rest of the world are becoming more visible at home, as an agitated US public turns ever more unruly in the face of their own long-declining living standards.
It’s an episode especially relevant to the post-Trump era, where agencies like the CIA have successfully rebranded as defenders of democracy and liberal values against impending fascism. It reminds us of the unvarnished, well-organized brutality that lies behind the global order Trump and his predecessors inherited, a sometimes neo-fascist brutality engineered and led by those same agencies to protect elite power and business interests.
A well-founded fear of fascism and democracy’s subversion will remain a key part of US political discourse well beyond Trump. Examining the legacy of Operation Condor should prompt us to think about which institutions in American life have been most hostile to democracy and, when the time calls for it, eager to align with fascists. But it’s also a reminder that, in the face of popular struggle, even this violence has a shelf life, and impunity doesn’t last forever.
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
RSN: Bess Levin | Trump's Legal Outlook Continues to Look Grim. The Matthew Calamari Edition
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Bess Levin | Trump's Legal Outlook Continues to Look Grim. The Matthew Calamari Edition
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "The ex-president's bodyguard turned COO is reportedly being investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney, too."
s part of its criminal investigation into Donald Trump, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has, for many months now, been trying to get Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who knows where all the bodies are buried and could likely put the dots together for a jury, to flip. Thus far, it doesn‘t appear as if he’s done so, but the fact that Weisselberg could reportedly face charges this summer presumably ups the chances he’ll cooperate to save himself. In the meantime, though, Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office is apparently looking into another figure who may have some extremely helpful information to share.
The Wall Street Journal reports that New York prosecutors are investigating Matthew Calamari, Trump’s bodyguard turned chief operating officer, and the question of whether or not he was the recipient of “tax-free fringe benefits,” as part of their probe into the company possibly giving out such perks to employees as a way to avoid paying taxes. Calamari has reportedly lived for years in an apartment at the Trump Park Avenue building on the East Side and driven a Mercedes leased through the Trump Organization. His son, Matthew Calamari Jr., also lives in a company-owned building (Junior joined the family business in 2011 right after graduating high school and was named corporate director of security in 2017, according to a LinkedIn profile.) While neither Calamari has been accused of wrongdoing, prosecutors recently advised both men to hire lawyers, sources told the Journal, which is generally not a great sign.
Receiving benefits—such as free apartments, subsidized rent or car leases—from an employer, and not paying taxes on such benefits, can be a crime, although experts said prosecutors rarely bring cases on such perks alone…. Such a recommendation is often a sign that prosecutors’ interest in a subject is intensifying, but doesn’t mean the Calamaris will be charged with wrongdoing.
In 2019 testimony before the House Oversight Committee, former longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen mentioned the elder Mr. Calamari as among employees who could attest to what Mr. Cohen described as Mr. Trump’s practice of inflating his assets to insurance companies. The elder Mr. Calamari has worked at the Trump Organization for nearly four decades. He began working for Mr. Trump as his bodyguard after he tackled hecklers at a 1981 U.S. Open women’s semifinal, Mr. Calamari told Bloomberg in 2015. He said Ivana Trump, Mr. Trump’s wife at the time, asked for his name on her husband’s behalf. Mr. Calamari was ultimately promoted to chief operating officer.
In his 2004 book, Trump: How to Get Rich, Mr. Trump wrote, “After getting to know Matthew, I realized he had a lot more to offer than his job title warranted.” He described both Mr. Calamari and Mr. Weisselberg, among others, as “home-run, grand-slam people” in the acknowledgments section.
Weisselberg has not been accused of wrongdoing. Last month, The Washington Post reported that Vance’s office had assembled a grand jury that had already begun hearing evidence, a development that suggests the probe had “reached an advanced stage” after more than two years, and that charges against the ex-president could be coming.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
ALSO SEE: House Progressives Demand Action After Voting Rights Bill Fails
Voting Rights Bill Blocked in Senate Despite United Democrats
David Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "Joe Biden suffered a significant setback on Tuesday as one of his top priorities, a set of reforms to protect voting rights and shore up American democracy, was defeated in Congress."
READ MORE
Community activist India Walton in Buffalo, N.Y., on Dec. 15, 2020. (photo: Lindsay DeDario/Reuters)
Buffalo Appears to Have Elected a Socialist Mayor in Big Upset Over 4-Term Incumbent
Peter Weber, The Week
Weber writes: "Assuming India Walton keeps her lead, she is the presumptive mayor-elect."
emocratic primary voters in Buffalo, New York, appear to have selected nurse and political newcomer India Walton over four-term incumbent Mayor Byron Brown on Tuesday, in what Politico calls "a stunning loss for one of the most prominent figures in New York's Democratic establishment." Walton, a socialist, leads Brown by 1,507 votes with all in-person votes tallied, a number about equal to the absentee ballots remaining to be counted. Brown has not conceded the race.
Assuming Walton keeps her lead, she is the presumptive mayor-elect. Buffalo hasn't picked a Republican mayor since the Kennedy administration, and Republicans didn't even field a candidate this year. Walton would be the first woman ever elected mayor in Buffalo as well as the first socialist, and Buffalo, with 260,000 people, is on track to be the largest city led by a socialist since Milwaukee's Frank Zeidler left office in 1960. Walton was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and also the Working Families Party, an influential progressive third party in New York.
Brown, a former state senator and recent chairman of the state Democratic Party, was first elected mayor in 2005. He is a close ally of embattled Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), appearing with him at four press briefings in the past few months, Politico notes, which is "twice as many as any other elected official in the state."
A police officer stands near the scene of a fatal afternoon shooting in the Brooklyn borough of New York City in 2020. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The White House Announces New Steps to Try to Curb Surging Gun Violence
Alana Wise, NPR
Wise writes: "With cities across the country witnessing spikes in violent crime, the White House on Wednesday announced a new plan to tackle gun violence, building on President Biden's vow to make it his priority to curb America's gun violence epidemic."
ith cities across the country witnessing spikes in violent crime, the White House on Wednesday announced a new plan to tackle gun violence, building on President Biden's vow to make it his priority to curb America's gun violence epidemic.
Citing the uptick in violence since the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of Americans out of work and into their homes for extended periods, administration officials said Biden on Wednesday will announce a five-point proposal that includes:
- Cracking down on gun sellers who violate federal laws, with a new zero-tolerance policy.
- Giving additional support to local law enforcement to help with summer crime increases.
- Investing in community violence intervention programs.
- Expanding summer employment and services, particularly for teens and young adults.
- Helping formerly incarcerated individuals successfully reenter their communities.
A senior administration official told reporters Tuesday night that the Treasury Department will also inform states that they can use funds allotted by the American Rescue Plan to aid in reducing gun violence. Monies awarded via the COVID-19 relief law can be used to hire additional police officers and pay out overtime, as well as to assist in funding employment opportunities for youths and at-risk adults.
"President Biden believes that the surge in gun violence that has affected communities across the country over the last year and a half is unacceptable," the White House said in a fact sheet outlining the plan, "and his Administration is moving decisively to act with a whole-of-government approach as we enter the summer months when cities typically experience a spike in violence."
Biden has faced criticisms from gun safety advocates who say that the White House has not made gun reform enough of a priority, despite Biden's promises to work to curb violent crime.
In the early months of Biden's presidency, the nation saw a number of mass shootings that prompted new calls for gun reform, including the March 16 Atlanta spa shootings and the March 22 grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colo.
Since then, Biden has signed a series of executive actions on gun laws, calling America's gun violence an "international embarrassment."
The Department of Justice has also issued model legislation from which states can craft their own so-called red-flag laws to temporarily remove guns from certain people.
A voter arrives at a polling station set up at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on New York's primary election day, in New York, NY, June 22, 2021. (photo: Anthony Behar/CNN)
NYC Democratic Mayoral Primary to Proceed to Ranked-Choice Counting After No Candidate Wins Majority Outright
Gregory Krieg and Ethan Cohen, CNN
Excerpt: "The New York City Democratic mayoral primary winner will be determined using ranked-choice voting tabulation, CNN projected on Tuesday night."
he New York City Democratic mayoral primary winner will be determined using ranked-choice voting tabulation, CNN projected on Tuesday night.
But the question that will dominate the coming process is much simpler: Can Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who raced out to a lead after an initial count of early and primary day in-person voting, hold on to his advantage?
Adams, a retired captain in the New York Police Department, came out to chants of "the champ is here" -- Muhammad Ali's famous boast, sampled in a Jadakiss song -- at his headquarters in Brooklyn late Tuesday and, after acknowledging the ranked-choice process to come, spoke as if the race was over.
"We know that this is going to be layers, this is the first early voting count -- we know that. We know there's going to be twos and threes and fours -- we know that," Adams said. "But there's something else we know. That New York City said, 'Our first choice is Eric Adams.' "
The claim, though likely to be true, was premature. The city has yet to count absentee ballots, a process that is scheduled to begin on June 28.
The Democratic mayoral nominee is expected to be determined by mid-July and, with Republicans barely putting up a fight, is heavily favored to win the general election in November. The winner will be charged with guiding the city into a new era, up and out from the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. But that rebuilding job will be complicated by a spike in crime intertwined with the trauma and lost opportunities of Covid-19. The demands for an equitable economic recovery, along with public safety free from police abuse will present the new mayor with a series of challenges unlike any in a generation.
Before the general election can begin, Adams will hope -- and he clearly expects -- to maintain his early lead over former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and civil rights attorney Maya Wiley, his two closest competitors in the initial vote preferences.
Those results could change once absentee ballots are included and the ranked-choice tabulation is run, a point Garcia stressed in her own election night remarks.
"This is going to be a ranked choice election," Garcia said. "This is not just about the ones. It's going to be about the twos and threes."
Wiley sounded a similar note -- a mix of caution and hope.
"It is simply fact that 50% of the votes are about to be recalculated," she said
While Garcia and Wiley hope that they can add enough to their tallies as the ranked-choice process thins the field and reallocates support from the lowest vote-getters, former 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang said on Tuesday that he is ready to move on.
"I am not going to be the mayor of New York City based on the numbers coming in tonight," Yang told supporters, conceding the race and ending a campaign that, for a brief period in its early stages, dominated a race that had not yet been overtaken by voters' anxieties over a rise in violent crime.
It was that pivot, as the city's vaccination rates went up and its pandemic anxieties began to diminish, that cleared the way for Adams to surge. In his speech in Brooklyn, Adams -- who criticized Yang in increasingly personal terms as the race drew on -- offered a lecture to the media wrapped in one last jab at his rival.
"My advice to the younger reporters is that Twitter is not academic research," Adams said. "What some candidates misunderstood is that social media does not pick a candidate. People on social security pick a candidate."
The people have indeed spoken, but what exactly they have said remains to be seen. And it's going to take a while to find out.
Since no candidate will win a majority of the first-choice votes, tabulation will continue in rounds. The candidate with the fewest votes after the initial count will be eliminated and all ballots for that candidate will be reallocated to the next highest-ranked candidate selected. That process will continue with the remaining candidates until two are left with the winner determined by who has the most votes in that final round.
New York City's Board of Elections plans to release the first set of results from this ranked-choice voting process on June 29, but those results will only include votes from early in-person and election day voters, not absentee ballots.
The board will release the results of the ranked-choice voting process again on July 6, this time including as many absentee ballots as they've been able to process. They'll report results again every Tuesday until all the ballots have been counted.
Also on Tuesday, CNN projected that Curtis Sliwa would win the Republican mayoral nomination in his party's primary, beating Fernando Mateo. The activist and founder of Guardian Angels will take on the winner of the Democratic primary in November's general election for mayor.
Letters on a main street in Bogota, Colombia, last month read 'disappeared.' (photo: Daniel Munoz/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Police Brutality in Bogota Columbia
Leaves 1 Dead, 40 Injured
Colombians Have Thronged to Anti-Government Protests. Hundreds Have Gone Missing.
Ana Vanessa Herrero, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Protesters and human rights advocates say they're seeing the revival of a familiar tactic from Colombia's long civil conflict: disappearances."
uan Esteban Torres left his home on the afternoon of May 18 to join an anti-government protest in Caldas, Colombia. Millions across the country had taken to the streets in daily demonstrations against rising poverty, inequality and police brutality. Torres, his brother says, believed they deserved support.
Security camera footage gathered by his family shows the 27-year-old walking between the protest and his home. No one has seen him since.
“We said goodbye,” Daniel Torres said, “and we never saw him again.”
While many of the thousands of demonstrations that have roiled Colombia over the last two months have been peaceful, security forces have responded to some with force. The government ombudsman reported 548 human rights violations through June 7, and 20 deaths.
Now protesters and human rights advocates say they’re seeing the revival of another familiar tactic from Colombia’s long civil conflict: disappearances. Hundreds of people in the South American nation have gone missing since the protests erupted in late April. According to the attorney general’s office, 84 remain unaccounted for. Advocates say this is the first time they’ve seen so many disappearances associated with demonstrations.
José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch, called that number “terrifying.”
“These cases have occurred in a context of brutal abuses by the police, including massive arbitrary detentions,” he said. “Prosecutors need to urgently redouble their efforts to look for these people in police stations, in hospitals, and in the streets, and investigate any police involvement.”
Luz Marina Monzón is director of the Unit for the Search of Disappeared Persons, established to account for the people who went missing during the half-century-long conflict.
“Patterns that happened during the conflict years ago seem to be reproducing,” she told The Washington Post. “In a democratic country, this should not be normal.”
The White House has taken notice. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki urged authorities last month to “continue to work to locate all missing persons as quickly as possible.” The government of President Iván Duque has said it’s doing all it can.
The Colombian attorney general’s office says it received 572 reports of people “not located” from April 28 to June 15. Of those, the office said, 335 people have been found and 153 reports were inadmissible.
In most cases, the office told The Post, the reports “correspond to the normal dynamics of people who voluntarily left their family circle, or who, due to circumstances different from those presented in the demonstrations, lost contact with close people.”
Human rights groups say they’ve recorded up to 700 cases, with some difficulty. Many families, they say, are not coming forward; most of the cases on their list have been gathered from social media.
“Some people, when they are arrested, shout out their name and ID and sometimes, we only have that information and photos or videos that protesters manage to get with their phones,” said Gloria Gómez, coordinator of the Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared. “This makes locating them very difficult.”
The attorney general’s office is investigating 84 cases of missing persons, four of them as forced disappearances. The others lack the necessary elements to meet the legal definition, the office says.
Juan Esteban Torres is one of the four. He participated in protests near his house on May 18 — “a day filled with tension between protesters and authorities,” according to Liberty Legal Corp., a legal advocacy group that’s advising the family. After running from police, the group said, Torres and others sought refuge in a house nearby. He was last seen by a friend between 10 and 11 p.m.
Torres’ supporters say they have reviewed footage showing him near his home at 2 a.m. May 19.
Three weeks after Torres’s disappearance, his family still hopes to see him walk in. They were recovering from the death of his mother when he disappeared.
“It’s like a movie,” Daniel Torres said. “We have been everywhere — hospitals, police — and I still don’t know what happened to him.”
Members of Extinction Rebellion hold a banner reading 'Make Ecocide a Crime' in Parliament Square on August 28, 2020 in London, England. (photo: Peter Summers/Getty Images)
Ecocide: How a Fast-Growing Movement Plans to Put Environmental Destruction on a Par With War Crimes
Sam Meredith, CNBC
Meredith writes: "A campaign to criminalize acts of widespread environmental destruction is quickly gathering pace."
Ecocide, which literally translates from Greek and Latin as “killing our home,” is an umbrella term for all forms of the mass damage of ecosystems, from industrial pollution to the release of micro plastics into the oceans.
The term has been debated by academics, climate activists and legal professionals for more than half a century. However, it’s only in recent years that the idea has become increasingly widespread, with Pope Francis, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and French President Emmanuel Macron all endorsing the movement to recognize ecocide as an international crime.
Now, a team of top environmental lawyers is working to define it. A panel convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation will publish the legal definition of ecocide on Tuesday, seeking to pave the way for acts of environmental destruction to be incorporated into the International Criminal Court’s mandate. It could see ecocide established alongside war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in the Hague.
“There have been working definitions in the past, but this is the first time that something has been convened globally and in response to political demand,” Jojo Mehta, co-founder of the Stop Ecocide campaign, told CNBC via telephone.
“What that shows is that the space is opening up in the political world to actually look at a solution like this. This conversation is no longer falling on deaf ears and, indeed, it is actually gathering momentum at quite a pace,” Mehta said.
How did we get here?
The term ecocide was first coined in 1970 to characterize the massive damage and destruction of ecosystems, although it would remain on the fringes of the environmental movement for decades thereafter.
It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later that a campaign to progress ecocide as an international crime would celebrate its biggest public step forward yet. That moment came as the tiny South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu addressed the ICC’s annual Assembly of States Parties on Dec. 2, 2019.
“We believe this radical idea merits serious discussion,” John Licht, Vanuatu’s ambassador to the European Union, said at the time. The call was soon echoed by the government of the Maldives.
The climate crisis poses an existential threat to the island states of Vanuatu and the Maldives, with both countries facing the imminent prospect of losing significant amounts of territory as a result of rising sea levels. The actions that have caused rising global temperatures have taken place almost entirely elsewhere, however.
Proponents of the Stop Ecocide campaign argue that a standalone law to punish decision-makers at the top level is required in order to create “a moral red line” to widespread environmental destruction.
“There are encouraging signs. You wouldn’t have believed how quickly ecocide erupted over the last couple of years,” Rachel Killean, senior lecturer in law at Queen’s University Belfast, told CNBC via telephone.
“I think there are still huge political barriers because ecocide impacts powerful states, but I wouldn’t have predicted we would be where we are today. So potentially there’s enough of a groundswell around environmental issues for us to see it come through.”
Why does it matter?
Advocates of the Stop Ecocide campaign say there are a number of benefits when it comes to recognizing the term in international criminal law. These include the expansion of international accountability and deterrence, opening the door to the enhanced rights of nature, access to reparations and improved public understanding of the scale and scope of the ecological crisis.
“If we had ecocide, what it might mean is that you could prosecute crimes against the environment potentially without there needing to be a connection to some widespread human atrocity. You could also prosecute environmental crime that is happening at a time of peace: It is a different way of looking at what atrocity looks like,” Killean said.
“It’s a declaration that we have got to a point where we need to stop destroying the planet. The people that are destroying the planet are actually fairly few in number and are causing massive harm to our home and communities all around the world through their actions. So, there needs to be something to say you can’t do that anymore. Ecocide is potentially one part of that,” she added.
What about the challenges facing ecocide law?
There are a number of potential stumbling blocks. The international criminal law would only apply to individuals, for instance, raising the question of whether the recognition of ecocide at the ICC can, in effect, have a meaningful impact on business practices.
It is also thought some states are likely to be unwilling to place themselves at a perceived economic disadvantage by enforcing criminal penalties domestically.
What’s more, should ecocide be criminalized, countries would not be obliged to ratify the ICC’s ruling and there are several states with heavy environmental footprints — such as the U.S., China, India and Russia, among others — that are not party to the ICC’s Rome Statute.
Stop Ecocide’s Mehta argued that a period of transition would help to alleviate some of these concerns and noted the ICC has broader applicability than one might think, with non-members able to be referred via the U.N. Security Council, for example.
When it was suggested ecocide should not be considered as a “silver bullet” to eradicate environmental destruction, Mehta replied: “I think that is absolutely correct … But the way we see it is, I suppose you could say, an acupuncture needle in the sense that there is a pressure point here.”
“At the moment, if you are campaigning for human rights and social justice, at least you know that mass murder and torture are beyond the pale. They are criminal and they are condemned. But, if you are in the environmental arena, you don’t have that. You’re standing on a void. There’s a missing foundational piece that says this much damage is simply not allowed.”
“It’s very difficult,” she said. “Ask any conservationist and we’ll tell you so.”
Mehta said that while ecocide law is not likely to be sufficient to deal with the crises incurred in many areas environmentally, “it is necessary.” She estimated it would take four to five years to put ecocide law into practice.
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