Some individual crimes committed under Operation Condor had already
been the subject of previous trials. Friday's verdict was the first to
focus on participation in the plan itself.
Argentina's former
President and Army Chief Reynaldo Bignone sits in a courthouse during
the first day of his trial, accused of participating in "Operation
Condor", in Buenos Aires March 5, 2013.
15 ex-military officials were
found guilty by an Argentine court on Friday of conspiring to kidnap and
assassinate leftist dissidents as part of the Operation Condor program.
The ruling was hailed by rights activists.
Condor
was coordinated by dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay,
Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia to hunt down and kill exiled opponents in
the 1970s and '80s.
Former Argentine dictator Reynaldo Bignone,
88, the highest ranking figure on trial, was sentenced to 20 years in
jail. Fourteen of the remaining 16 defendants got eight to 25 years
behind bars. Two were found not guilty.
Some
individual crimes committed under Operation Condor had already been the
subject of previous trials. Friday's verdict was the first to focus on
participation in the plan itself.
"This ruling,
about the coordination of military dictatorships in the Americas to
commit atrocities, sets a powerful precedent to ensure that these grave
human rights violations do not ever take place again in the region," Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, said in a phone interview.
Friday's court decision cited the disappearance of 105 people during Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship.
"It
determines not only that state terrorism in Argentina was an criminal
conspiracy but that it was coordinated with other dictatorships," said Luz Palmas Zaldua, a lawyer with the Center for Legal and Social Studies (Cels), which represented many of the plaintiffs in the case.
"They
got together to maximize efforts to persecute political opponents of
each of the dictatorships, and to 'disappear' or eliminate those who
were considered subversive," she told reporters after the ruling was
read out in court.
Operation Condor, named after
the broad-winged birds that inhabit the cordillera mountain range on the
Chile-Argentine border, was coordinated from a joint information centre
at the headquarters of Chile's notorious secret police in Santiago.
In a state visit to Argentina in March, President Barack Obama
said the United States was too slow to condemn atrocities by the
dictatorship, but he stopped short of apologising for Washington's early
support for the military junta.
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