Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

DIRTY WAR(S) • 153Chilean agents had assassinated General Carlos Prats Gonzáles,the army commander under President Salvador Allende who resignedhis commission and went into exile in Argentina rather thanjoin the military junta, by a bomb placed inside his car outsidehis home in exile in Buenos Aires. A former Chilean intelligenceagent, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, was arrested in January 1996 oncharges of having arranged the bombing. Similarly, the formerchief of Chile’s military secret police, General Manuel ContrerasSepulvade, was convicted in May 1995 for the 21 September 1976assassination of Orlando Letelier, the former foreign minister ofthe Allende government, who was also killed by a bomb in his caroutside his home in Washington, D.C. These actions can be viewedas extensions of the dirty war of Chile against its enemies beyondits national boundaries.U.S. diplomatic documents released in October 2002 revealed thatU.S. officials had been aware that Operation Condor was being directedat leftist dissidents of those countries in exile. Although U.S.Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had ordered U.S. diplomats on23 August 1976 to convey official “deep concern” over OperationCondor to the governments involved, this order was rescinded on 20September 1976 by a senior State Department official in charge ofLatin American affairs for fear that the message would antagonizeChilean President Augusto José Ramón Pinochet and the other headsof state. The next day, former Chilean foreign minister Letelier andRonni Moffitt, an American associate, were both killed by a bombrigged into the ignition system of Letelier’s car.In early 2003 the Mexican government permitted the publicationof a history text, History of Mexico: An Analytical Approach, byClaudia Sierra Campuzano, that described the government crackdownon student protestors that occurred on 2 October 1968 at TlatelolcoPlaza in which army troops fired on thousands of protestors,allegedly killing hundreds, followed by the arrests and persecutionof student leaders. At that time the students had been protesting thebulldozing of tenement housing undertaken to build the site for theMexico City Olympics in 1968. The government cracked down onthe protestors and at that time acknowledged at most about 40 deaths.The official campaign against leftists continued during the next 15years but was never officially acknowledged until the presidency ofVicente Fox.