1 October 2013
An Argentine judge has issued arrest warrants against four officials of the Franco regime. The arrest warrant follows upon a lawsuit filed by a group of Spaniards claiming to have suffered torture by the officials. They had previously failed to get redress in Spain, where such crimes are covered by a 1977 amnesty law. In the New York Times, Victoria Sanford, professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, commented that even if Spain eventually refuses to extradite its citizens, the request from Argentina is in itself ‘a very important moral sanction on the Franco regime, which also shows Franco’s victims that they can count on international support.’
Source: The New York Times | Argentine Judge Seeks to Put Franco Officials on Trial
8 March 2013
On 5 March, a human rights trial began in Argentina to investigate the crimes committed during the so-called ‘Operation Condor‘, involving six states, in response to the populist and socialist movements emerging throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
The six participating states were Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and Brazil. The operation resulted in tens of thousands of people being kidnapped, tortured and killed by military regimes across the continent. Those who fled repression in one state were often targeted in another state. Al Jazeera quotes from a United States (US) intelligence report from 1976: ‘Intelligence representatives from Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile and Argentina decided at a meeting in Santiago early in June to set up a computerised intelligence data bank – known as “Operation Condor”…’ Al Jazeera also notes that Operation Condor was executed with knowledge of the United States.
Source: Al Jazeera | Tracing the shadows of 'Operation Condor'