Bolivia notes from McSherry's predatory states operations

year?
A former Bolivian agent of Condor, Juan Carlos Fortún, told a Bolivian journalist in the early 1990s that an advanced system of communications was installed in the Ministry of the Interior in La Paz, along with a telex system interlinked with the five other Condor countries. He said that a special machine to encode and decode messages was made especially for the Condor system by the Logistics Department of the CIA.
The Condor network’s secure communications system, Condortel, enabled Condor controllers to exchange data on suspects, track the movement of individuals across borders on various forms of transport, and transmit orders to operations teams, as well as share and receive intelligence information across a large geographical area. Condortel allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor

Several sources indicate that the CIA provided powerful computers to the Condor system (and, in fact, no other country in the region was technologically capable of doing so). An Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact in 1976 that the CIA had played a key role in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states.


Populist General Juan José Torres fled Bolivia after the 1971 coup and settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lived even after the March 1976 coup that brough to power the right-wing General Jorge Videola. In early June 1976, General Torres was kidnapped and assassinated, most likely by right-wing death squads associated with the Videla government and Operation Condor.


1976?
In Bolivia, army officer Juan José Torres, who won the presidency in 1970, embarked on a populist program before he was overthrown in a 1971 coup (he was a Condor victim in 1976, abducted and found).
(for presidency, look at p179 of dunkerley’s rebellion in the veins)

Delle Chiaie was suspected of involvement in a major 1980 bombing in Bologna, Italy, blamed on the left at the time. He had many ties to Latin American military commanders and he participated in the 1980 coup in Bolivia, along with former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and Argentine military officers, an event that graphically illustrated the global nature of the anticommunist alliance.


1970
In 1970, Juan José Torres, a populist military officer, was named president in Bolivia after a series of military rulers. He nationalized a tin mine owned by U.S. interests, expelled the Peace Corps, closed a U.S. military base, and opened lines of communication with Bolivian left and labor movements and with Cuba. U.S. ambassador Ernest Siracusa (who later became ambassador to Uruguay) pressured Torres to change his policies to no avail.
Then-colonel Hugo Banzer, graduate of the Army School of the Americas and former military attaché in Washington, staged a coup in 1971 (his second attempt). He was supported by land-owning elites in Santa Cruz, the Brazilian and Argentine militaries, and the CIA. In fact, according to Minister of the Interior Jorge Gallardo—later a victim of Condor—the plot was organized in Argentina, and one crucial meeting included Banzer, several CIA officers, the chief of the U.S. military mission in Buenos Aires, and a Pentagon commander who flew in from Washington. When Banzer’s communications system failed during the coup, U.S. Air Force major Robert Lundin, who was based in Bolivia, put the U.S. Air Force radio system at his disposal. The multinational coup involved the direct participation of Brazilian officers and was partly funded by the Argentine military regime.115 One U.S. Embassy report noted that “recent events in Bolivia, in which GOA [Government of Argentina] was involved, may well encourage those in GOA who look to this kind of [military] solution.”116 A 1971 San Francisco Chronicle article reported that the Bolivian coup was “part of a far-reaching movement, backed by the U.S. CIA, to seize power in a total of six South American republics.” These six countries, later, became the key members of Condor. Banzer reversed the policies of Torres and instituted iron rule in Bolivia on the Brazilian model, carrying out brutally repressive measures, with the use of assassination and torture, against the population.

1973
For example, a Bolivian named Jorge Ríos Dalenz was detained-disappeared in Santiago in 1973 in an operation coordinated by Bolivia and Chile. Ríos had been a leader of the Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (Movement of the Revolutionary Left—MIR) in Bolivia (separate from the Chilean organization of the same name) until Banzer’s 1971 coup prompted him to flee to Chile. He lived there quietly until the September 1973 coup, when he was kidnapped by a military commando.66 In another case in November 1973, the former Bolivian interior minister under nationalist president general Juan José Torres, Jorge Gallardo Losada, was kidnapped by four armed men, two in military uniform, from his home in Santiago, where he had lived since the 1971 coup in his country. Gallardo had written a critical book detailing the multinational conspiracy that overthrew Torres. He was transported to Boliviaand then to Argentina, at a time when all aircraft traffic was tightly controlled by the Chilean junta.67 In another 1973 case, Brazilian police abducted Joaquim Pires Cerveira and João Batista Rita, two Brazilian exiles living in Buenos Aires.


The Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission later verified that Enríquez was first taken to clandestine detention centers in Argentina, including El Olimpo, Campo de Mayo, and ESMA, and then illegally transferred to Villa Grimaldi in Santiago. Enríquez was never seen again. The commission also confirmed that Regina Marcondes was taken in a combined operation by the Argentine federal police and DINA agents at the same time.7
Another emblematic case, that of the Rutilo family, illustrated one of the routine practices of Operation Condor: the seizure of infants after the killing of their parents, and the transfer of the children to military or police families, to ensure a “nonsubversive” upbringing. Often children were illegally taken across borders with altered identities. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina estimated that hundreds of children were victims of such trafficking; some of them have been recovered.
Graciela Rutilo Artes was an Argentine citizen married to a Uruguayan man, Enrique Lucas López, who belonged to the Tupamaro guerrillas. In 1976, Graciela Rutilo and their nine-month-old daughter Carla were living in a small Bolivian town. In April 1976, they were seized and transferred to La Paz, and Graciela was separated from her daughter. Graciela was subjected to brutal torture, with electric shocks, beatings, and cigarette burns, and sometimes the torturers brought in her daughter and hung her, naked and upside down, to torment her mother further. Bolivians and an Argentine team of federal police sent from that country carried out the torture. Carla was kept in an orphanage. After Graciela’s mother, Matilde Artes Company, made repeated depositions to the Red Cross, her daughter and granddaughter were located and visited by a Red Cross representative.
After this visit, Carla was transferred to another orphanage in La Paz, where Matilde could visit her granddaughter. But on August 25, 1976, a Bolivian squadron again seized Carla. Graciela and Carla were handed over to Argentine security forces on August 298 and brought to the notorious Orletti Motors, the Condor torture center under the command of the Argentine Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado, SIDE. Meanwhile, in September, Enrique Lucas was captured, tortured, and killed in Cochabamba. After the transfer to Argentina, Graciela Rutilo “disappeared,” and Carla was given to Eduardo Ruffo, one of Orletti’s most barbaric torturers and a former Triple A operative. Carla later told of vicious beatings she had received from her adoptive father. In 1983, immediately before the Argentine junta withdrew from government, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo found Carla living with Ruffo and instituted a legal proceeding to recover her. In 1985, she was reunited with her grandmother Matilde. It was one of the first cases of abducted children ever recovered by their biological families.9 Ruffo served eight years in prison for illegally appropriating the child. In 2001, Carla filed a lawsuit and a request for extradition against former Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer (then the elected president) and his wife before Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, for their role in the illegal transfer of her mother and herself from Bolivian to Argentine security forces.10 Banzer, who always denied the existence of Operation Condor, died in 2002.

During the 1970s, Carlos Mena Burgos was commander of the intelligence unit of the Bolivian Interior Ministry, later minister of the interior, and then commander of the state intelligence apparatus. He was a key Condor figure in Bolivia, and, significantly, he was identified as one of the principal officers of the Bolivian armed forces with command power over paramilitary forces in that country.32 Mena received training in Argentina in interrogation and torture techniques.33 He signed the foundational act of the Condor system, on behalf of the Bolivian military, in November 1975.
Working with Colonel Rafael Loayza, commander of the State Intelligence Service under the Banzer dictatorship, Mena organized the intelligence apparatus of Bolivia and geared it to combat real and imagined subversion. He and Loayza were central architects of the countersurbversive mission in Bolivia. A Condor communications system was installed in the Interior Ministry under his supervision.34 Mena eventually became chief of intelligence.
Mena traveled frequently to Argentina, where he participated in interrogations of foreign political prisoners. Human rights advocate Roberto Calasich reported that a few days before the assassination of former Bolivian president Juan José Torres in Buenos Aires, Mena interrogated a Peruvian prisoner, and then arranged the illegal transfer of the Peruvian and a Chilean prisoner to Bolivia.35 Thus, Mena was in Buenos Aires when Torres was killed by Condor. According to a Peruvian investigation, Mena also was involved in drug trafficking.
In 1978, Bolivia entered a period of intense political conflict. In 1979, during a brief period of civilian rule, parliamentarian Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz initiated a congressional investigation to study and hold responsible dictator Banzer, Colonel Alberto Natusch, Colonel Mena, and others of human rights crimes and involvement in a transnational system of repression. (After Banzer’s coup, Quiroga Santa Cruz had fled into exile in Argentina; there, he was threatened by the Triple A.) Quiroga Santa Cruz had gathered documentation of the role of Operation Condor—although he was not aware of its code name—in the assassinations of Bolivians Juan José Torres, Jorge Ríos Dalenz, and Joaquin Zenteno in foreign countries, and of the disappearances of Argentines in Bolivia, including Graciela Rutilo.36 A month later, in November, Natusch led a coup and directed a repressive sweep that resulted in some 100 killings, 140 disappearances, and 204 wounded, a bloodbath that became known as the massacre of Todos Santos.37 Mena was identified by human rights groups as “a professional torturer” and as “a principle responsible for the massacre of Todos Santos.”38
That military regime was short-lived. After reasonably fair elections in 1980 in which a plurality voted for the left, the even fiercer “cocaine coup” occurred, led by military officer Luis García Meza and assisted by Argentine operatives and European neofascists (García Meza confirmed in 2000 that military attachés from the Argentine Embassy in La Paz were among those involved). Ac-cording to one source, the coup was planned in 1979 during the XIII Conference of American Armies in Colombia, with the Argentine junta playing a leading role.39 Italian terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie participated in the coup, as did Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo commander. The coup blocked the ascension of the democratically elected government of Dr. Siles Zuazo, from a leftist party. One of the first targets of the golpistas was the Bolivian Workers Center (Central Obrera Boliviana), where Quiroga Santa Cruz was meeting with unionists. Quiroga Santa Cruz was seized by the military, interrogated, tortured, and murdered. His documentation of the Condor system disappeared.40 Survivors of this operation reported that they were tortured by paramilitaries with Argentine accents. Later, a member of Quiroga’s political party (the Socialists) said that during his own torture, both Argentine and Bolivian interrogators were present. They repeatedly asked him which military officers had secretly collaborated with Quiroga to prepare the documentation on Condor, and assumed that Quiroga had obtained copies of Banzer’s secret decrees authorizing Condor operations.41 Banzer was a key supporter of both coups.

1980 cocain coup
Blystone wrote that the main topic of the meeting with the Argentine intelligence officer was “the RSO’s stay in Bolivia and how the political situation there was developing.” The Argentine-assisted “cocaine coup” in Bolivia occurred one month later, on July 17. On June 19, the date of Blystone’s memo, coup preparations in that country were well advanced. According to one study, on June 17 six of Bolivia’s major drug traffickers had met with military golpistas to arrange protection for their narcotics trade in exchange for financing military operations after the planned coup.126
The main conspirator was Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, a cousin of Bolivia’s main drug trafficker, Roberto Suárez. The Argentines, under the doctrine of “ideological frontiers” that was so conducive to Condor operations, sent at least 200 military and intelligence officers to Bolivia to help launch the coup, including Colonel Osvaldo Ribeiro. Stefano delle Chiaie, the Italian terrorist, was there, training an assassination squad called the Phoenix Commando, and Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal and one-time U.S. intelligence asset, was also involved in coup preparations.
An Argentine officer, a former counterintelligence director of SIDE who had taken courses at the SOA, spoke to me openly in 1992 of his participation in Bolivia as an advisor during this time. Another SIDE officer and Condor figure, Leandro Sánchez Reisse, told a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1987 testimony that drug trafficker Roberto Suárez had used some $30 million to finance the Bolivian coup—and that the coup had CIA support. He also said that Suárez used drug money, funneled through Sánchez Reisse’s money laundering base in Miami, to finance the Nicaraguan contras.128 After the coup, Arce Gómez embarked on a campaign of brutal repression in Bolivia and also released numerous drug traffickers from prison. Barbie and delle Chiaie organized paramilitary squads to protect the traffickers and their drug trade.

GOOD QUOTE
UNTIL THE LATE 1990S, the principal commanders and operatives of Operation Condor denied that the transnational system had ever existed. Condor was a top-secret organization, one whose very existence was classified. Yet as one Bolivian miner, persecuted by the Banzer regime, put it, “Like a monster that leaves tracks of blood and destruction in its way, Plan Condor left behind tracks and proof that can’t be erased by their executors.” José Antonio Aruquipa, “Banzer’s Involvement in Operation Condor,” Bolivian Times, January 17, 2002.

Verso Book of Dissent 1978

DOMITILA BARRIOS DE CHUNGARA 1978 Let Me Speak!
[The] miner is doubly exploited, no? Because, with such a small wage, the woman has to do much more in the home. And really that's unpaid work that we're doing for the boss, isn't it? . . .
In my case, for example, my husband works, I work, I make my children work, so there are several ofus working to support the family. And the bosses get richer and richer and the workers' conditions get worse and worse.
But in spite of everything we do, there's still the idea that women don't work, because they don't contribute economically to the home, that only the husband works because he gets a wage. We've often come across that difficulty.
One day I got the idea ofmaking a chart. We put as an example the price of washing clothes per dozen pieces and we figured out how many dozens of times we washed a month. Then the cook's wage, the babysitter's, the servant's. We figured out everything that we miners' wives do every day. Adding it all up, the wage needed to pay us for what we do in the home, compared to the wages ofa cook, a washer­ woman, a babysitter, a servant, was much higher than what the men earned in the mine for a month. So that way we made our compaii.eros understand that we really work, and even more than they do in a certain sense. And that we contribute more to the household with what we save. So, even though the state doesn't recognize what we do in the home, the country benefits from it, because we don't receive a single penny for this work
And as long as we continue in the present system, things will always be like this. That's why I think it's so important for us revolutionaries to win that first battle in the home. And the first battle to be won is to let the woman, the man, the children participate in the struggle of the working class, so that the home can become a stronghold that the enemy can't overcome. Because if you have the enemy inside your own house, then it's just one more weapon that our common enemy
267
can use toward a dangerous end. That's why it's really necessary that we have very clear ideas about the whole situation and that we throw out forever that bourgeois idea that the woman should stay home and not get involved in other things, in union or political matters, for example. Because, even ifshe's at home, she's part ofthe whole system of exploitation that her compaii.ero lives in anyway, working in the
mine or in the factory or wherever-isn't that true?
The wife cifa miner and mother ofseven children, Barrios de Chungara rose to promirtence as an activist with the militant Boliviart laborgroup Housewives' Committee. Shefoughtfor the liberation ofwomen, which she viewed as insep­
arablefrom socioeconomic, political, and cultural liberation.


2005 EVO MORALES
"Our Struggle Is against US Imperialism"
What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than 500 years. The will of the people was imposed this September and October, and has begun to overcome the empire's cannons. We have lived for so many years through the confrontation of two cultures: the culture of life repre­ sented by the indigenous people, and the culture ofdeath represented by the West.
I believe only in the power of the people. That was my experience in my own region, a single province-the importance oflocal power. And now, with all that has happened in Bolivia, I have seen the impor­ tance ofthe power ofa whole people, ofa whole nation . . . We may have differences among our popular leaders-and it's true that we have them in Bolivia. But when the people are conscious, when the people know what needs to be done, any difference among the differ­ ent local leaders ends. We've been making progress in this for a long time, so that our people are finally able to rise up, together.
312
In 2006, Morales became the first elected indigerzo11s president of Bolivia. Formerly a leadercifa cocafarmers' union and the Movementfor Socialism party, Morales has been an outspoken advocate cifindigenous rights and a sharp
critic cifneoliberalism.

1926 
As far as ideology is concerned, it was Gustavo Navarro – a socialist better known as Tristán Marof – who in his book La justicia del Inca (The Inca Legal System, 1926) set out the programme of the left for the twentieth century: the land for the people and the mines in the hands of the state – in other words, agrarian reform and nationalisation. What is noteworthy about this text is that whilst setting out what would go on to be the programme of revolutionary nationalism and, more broadly, that of the nationalist revolution of 1952, it makes a positive assessment of the way the Incas were organised and of their principles of justice. Therefore, from its inception, the left was made up of three components: the socialist tradition, the national question and the recovery of ethnic roots and local pre-hispanic history. The last component was to disappear from the Bolivian left in subsequent decades and only reappeared at the end of the last century.

1946 
The second great historical project of the left was set out in a document published by the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros (Trade Union Federation of Mineworkers), founded in 1938, which is known as the Tesis de Pulacayo (The Pulacayo Thesis, 1946). It is a workerist, socialist and anti-imperialist manifesto. From then on, the trade unions and their nationwide voice from 1952 onwards – the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers’ Confederation, COB) – were where the political programmes and projects of the Bolivian left were set out. The Communist Party and the Socialist Party drew up their programmes and political projects, and presented them to the trade unions and the COB for their approval as the official position of the workers’ movement.