Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

South American dictators ganged up in hunt for Che


La Higuera, Bolivia … where Che was caught.
Photo: Reuters

October 9, 2007

VALLEGRANDE, Bolivia: South American dictators of the 1960s co-ordinated efforts in
their attempt to track down the Marxist guerilla Ernesto "Che" Guevara, killed by
Bolivian forces in 1967, according to a previously secret document uncovered by a researcher.

The co-operation predates Operation Condor, the secret plan hatched by right-wing military governments
in Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay in the 1970s to eliminate their political opponents.

The confidential report, dated October 3, 1966, from the head of Paraguay's
secret service, informs his Brazilian counterpart of Guevara's arrival in South America.

"It is the first time that we find the name of Che Guevara linked to the dictatorships
before the elaboration of Operation Condor," said Martin Almada, a Paraguayan
researcher who in 1992 uncovered documents showing the existence of Operation Condor.

"Che Guevara left Corumba a Brazilian town on the border with Bolivia] under the false
name of Oscar Ferreira," read the document. Guevara had a beard and was sailing aboard the Victoria
dos Palmares, which was likely to arrive at dawn. The document warned: "He is in charge of a mission."

Mr Almada, 70, helped uncover the existence of Operation
Condor from five tonnes of paperwork that Paraguay's secret
service abandoned in 1989 after the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner..
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Documents Link Chile's Pinochet to Letelier Murder
Vernon Loeb .. The Washington Post, 14 November 2000

Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, asked the government of neighboring Paraguay to issue phony passports in 1976 ..
Michael V. Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios, Chilean military intelligence operatives who ultimately pleaded guilty
to .. the assassination of, .. Orlando Letelier, a former opposition leader .. Chilean diplomat .. killed along with an
American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bombing at Sheridan Circle on Sept. 11, 1976 .. documents released yesterday.
..for the first time directly link Pinochet to the ASSASSINATION .. 16,000 formerly secret State Department, CIA, FBI, Pentagon
and Justice Department .. documents .. the fourth and final round of a government-wide effort to declassify as
much information as possible about political violence and human rights abuses in Chile from 1968 to 1991.

President Clinton ordered the review following Pinochet's .. arrest in London .. 1998 .. PINOCHET, of course, died a
rotten old natural, at 91 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16139367/ .. little new light on CIA activities surrounding the 1973 coup
.. Senate select committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) concluded in 1975 that the agency was not directly

AS THEY WEREN'T/AREN'T INVOLVED IN TORTURE TORTURE
State Department cables report that Pinochet personally called
Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner in the summer of 1976 .. documents show that State Department officials realized almost
immediately that the visas they had stamped in the men's passports had been falsely obtained. Those visas were quickly
canceled, but Townley and Fernandez Larios still managed to enter the United States in August 1976 using false names on
Chilean passports. The documents show that the State Department also discovered this, and notified the FBI. But the US
government failed to investigate .. Peter Kornbluh, an expert on Chile at the nonprofit National Security Archive ..
pointed to other cables showing that the CIA had briefed the State Department months before Letelier's assassination on
"Operation Condor," a Chilean intelligence program for assassinating opponents of the regime. After the briefing, the
State Department directed the US ambassador in Santiago, David Popper, to meet with Pinochet and express concern .. also
.. to instruct the CIA's station chief to express similar objections to Manuel Contreras, head of Chilean military
intelligence .. But Popper refused to raise the subject with Pinochet, saying in a cable to Washington that the general "might
well take as an insult any inference that he was connected with such assassination plots."

SO POPPER, A DIPLOMAT REFUSED A STATE DEPARTMENT ORDER?

The CIA also failed to raise Operation Condor with Contreras until after the Letelier assassination. Contreras
ultimately was convicted and imprisoned in Chile .. for the car bombing. Kornbluh said a CIA memorandum .. states that in
1991, the agency destroyed a security file on Contreras - a file that Kornbluh said may have detailed Contreras' activities
as a paid CIA asset. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield denied that allegation ..

.. documents .. also show that the name and address in Santiago of Frank Teruggi were in US intelligence files a year before
the coup. Teruggi, an American journalist, was tortured and killed as a suspected subversive within days of the 1973 coup.
Kornbluh said the documents "beg the question" of whether US intelligence officers gave Teruggi's name to the Chileans before
the coup, in effect fingering the American as a leftist. The CIA and State Department have long denied any involvement in Teruggi's murder.

Kornbluh and Thomas Blanton, the executive director of the National Security Archive, hailed yesterday's release of
documents as a model for the handling of US government documents on political repression in foreign countries. "It's a spectacular,
phenomenal, historic release," .. 150 volumes were made public yesterday,
including 90 from the State Department, 30 from the Pentagon and 16 from
the CIA. The CIA released a total of 1,550 documents, many from its
clandestine Directorate of Operations, including 750 that CIA Director
George J. Tenet had withheld in August .. But Blanton and Kornbluh
faulted the CIA for heavily censoring some documents and withholding
others that formed the basis of a recent report to Congress on covert
activities in Chile. "We still have the problem of CIA censorship
of history. .. covert operations more than 30 years ago .. "and
it is still being kept secret." Mansfield, the CIA spokesman, responded that the "redactions were done to protect intelligence
sources and methods, which we are obligated to do under the law.
The fact is, a very significant amount of information was released." .. Copyright 2000 The Washington Post

http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?page=pin-docs_141100
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was overthrown. He said he only recently discovered the Guevara
document "because I have many documents and have not finished examining them all".

AM GUESSING that on as he would have fewer documents, cables
etc.. to go through following this Bush administration.

Guevara, the iconic Argentine-born doctor who became a guerilla leader and fought in the Cuban revolution,
led a small band of rebels in Bolivia for 11 months trying to spread revolution. The Bolivian army and two CIA agents captured him in a village and shot him on October 9, 1967. He was 39.

YET, ANOTHER POLITICAL ASSASSINATION IN WHICH MANY IN
AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND SECURITY ORGANIZATION WOULD HAVE
BEEN INDIRECTLY INVOLVED AND ONE IN WHICH TWO IN THE CIA,
IT SEEMS, WERE MOST DIRECTLY INVOLVED IN THE MURDER.

THE MURDER OF CHE GUEVARA A LEADER OF A SMALL BAND SEEKING TO
BRING SOME SEMBLANCE OF FREEDOM FROM DICTATORSHIP IN SOUTH AMERICA
WAS MURDERED BY THE CIA AND BOLIVIAN COHORTS ON OCTOBER 9, 1967.

Agence France-Presse

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/south-american-dictators-ganged-up-in-hunt-for-che/2007/10/08/11916....