Reply #158: By Way of Conclusion = "truth and accountability is needed in this country"

[L. Coyote]

By Way of Conclusion

Although the documentary record is still fragmentary and many sources continue to be classified, increasingly weighty evidence suggests that the U.S. national security apparatus sponsored and supported Condor operations. The new evidence reopens important ethical, legal, and policy issues stemming from the Cold War era. In fragile Latin American democracies today, civilian governments are still struggling to deal with the legacies of state terror and to control their still-powerful military-security organizations, while families are still trying to learn what happened to their disappeared loved ones.

For U.S. citizens, the new documentation provokes troubling questions about the country’s central role in financing, training, and collaborating with institutions that carried out torture, assassination, and coups in the name of national security. During the Cold War, the ends were assumed to justify the means, resulting in appalling abuses that violated the human rights and fundamental freedoms the U.S. government publicly espoused.

A process of truth and accountability is needed in this country to address the U.S. role in Latin American repression, as a number of lawyers and human rights activists have advocated. Moreover, U.S. officials should unequivocally reject security doctrines that rationalize violations of human rights as legitimate means to any end.

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J. Patrice McSherry is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University and author of Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997) and numerous articles on Condor and the Latin American military. She began studying Condor in the early 1990s and has conducted research in Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, and the United States.