The Transnational Institute….

On 21 September 1976, Transnational Institute discovered the brutal cost of fighting for economic and social justice, when Chilean secret service agents set off a car bomb in Washington DC killing TNI’s director, Orlando Letelier along with Ronni Moffitt, a fundraiser for the Institute for Policy Studies. It has taken more than 30 years of struggle to bring some of those responsible to justice.

I wanted to highlight this section below that implicates the U.S. and in particular the de-classified CIA documents that show Henry Kissinger’s knowledge of the existence of Operation Condor in March 1976, described at the time by the CIA in favourable terms as a “cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.

Network of terror with US duplicity

Letelier and Moffitt were the most famous victims of Operation Condor, a covert program to murder political opponents that was carried out by a network of six South American secret police agencies – from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. A Chilean government commission later ascertained that Pinochet’s regime had assassinated at least 3,200 persons within Chile, tortured tens of thousands and forced hundreds of thousands into exile.

Furthermore, investigations showed that the US administration both turned a blind eye to these abuses but also condoned them through their active political, diplomatic and economic support to the Pinochet regime. These came to light most clearly in the 1975 US Senate Church Report and other official documents which were declassified during the Clinton administration.

via Transnational Institute | TNI and the Pinochet precedent.