"Juan Bordaberry, 83; was president, dictator in Uruguay during 1970s" July 18, 2011|By Raul O. Garces, Associated Press
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - Juan Maria Bordaberry, the former president turned dictator, died yesterday in his home, where he was serving a sentence for leading efforts to eliminate leftist dissent in the 1970s....
A wealthy conservative landowner, Mr. Bordaberry was elected president in 1971 during a chaotic time in Uruguay, when wealthy elites and Tupamaro guerrillas both saw armed revolution as a path to power.
The Tupamaros were already crushed when Uruguayans awoke to tanks surrounding the legislative palace on the cold winter day of June 27, 1973. The military had become so powerful that Mr. Bordaberry had to give up control in order to survive politically. Rather than lose a minor political fight in Congress, he suspended the constitution, banned political parties, ordered tanks into the streets, and ruled by decree until the generals ousted him three years later. Democracy was not restored until 1985. His coup launched more than a decade of military rule in Uruguay.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bordaberry lived quietly out of public view. As the dictatorship ended, Uruguay’s Congress approved amnesties that protected both military figures and former guerrillas, including Uruguay’s current president, former Tupamaro leader Jose Mujica.
That pact threatened to break on Nov. 16, 2006, when a judge ordered Mr. Bordaberry arrested in the killings of four Uruguayans who had fled to Argentina. Weeks later, another judge added charges of especially aggravated homicide in the killing of 10 leftist detainees. Both sets of crimes were determined to be beyond the scope of the amnesties....
Mr. Bordaberry’s family considered him to be a victim of political pressure from the Broad Front coalition of center-left parties, unions, and social movements that has governed Uruguay since 2005.
But his prosecution marked the beginning of efforts by this small South American country of 3.5 million people to end impunity for those responsible for the disappearances and torture of hundreds of Uruguayans and the exile of thousands of political dissidents. A peace commission found in 2003 that the dictatorship killed 175 leftist political activists, 26 of them in clandestine torture centers.
Earlier, the Tupamaros also committed killings and other crimes after taking up arms in 1963 against democratically elected governments, and many of the guerrillas who were not killed served long prison terms. Mujica, for one, spent more than a decade behind bars.
See: Uruguay Says Up Yours, AmeriKa!
Investigative judges linked Mr. Bordaberry to the abductions and killings in May 1976 of Senator Zelmar Michelini, a leftist, and House leader Hector Gutierrez of the traditional National Party, prominent lawmakers who were seized from their homes in exile in Buenos Aires. Their bullet-riddled bodies and those of suspected Uruguayan guerrillas William Whitelaw and Rosario Barredo were found days later. Human rights groups maintain that they were killed as part of Operation Condor, a secret pact between South America’s dictatorships to eliminate political opponents who had fled to neighboring countries....
Related:
"Cable ties Kissinger to Chile controversy" by Pete Yost, Associated Press Writer | April 10, 2011
WASHINGTON --As secretary of state, Henry Kissinger canceled a U.S. warning against carrying out international political assassinations that was to have gone to Chile and two neighboring nations just days before a former ambassador was killed by Chilean agents on Washington's Embassy Row in 1976, a newly released State Department cable shows.
Whether Kissinger played a role in blocking the delivery of the warning against assassination to the governments of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay has long been a topic of controversy.
Discovered in recent weeks by the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization, the Sept. 16, 1976 cable is among tens of thousands of declassified State Department documents recently made available to the public.
In 1976, the South American nations of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were engaged in a program of repression code-named Operation Condor that targeted those governments' political opponents throughout Latin America, Europe and even the United States.
A CIA PROGRAM, readers!!
Based on information from the CIA, the U.S. State Department became concerned that Condor included plans for political assassination around the world....
--more--"
Odd that the obituary would obfuscate the U.S. role in Condor, 'eh?
