5-29-08, 9:22 am
Investigators and researchers have long shown operational connections between exiled Nazis and US intelligence services who collaborated to target progressive movements in Latin American, reports the Cuban News Agency.
The forces that participated in Operation Condor — many of them former Nazi officers — were advised by US intelligence operatives.
Despite 40 years having passed since that brutal torrent of kidnappings and assassinations, many people continue to decry such incidents and continue looking for their “disappeared” relatives.
Writer Juan Gelman participated in the “Rally in Silence” this month. For the last 13 years, this has been held in the center of Montevideo, Uruguay, demanding truth and justice for what occurred during the 1973-1985 dictatorship.
Gelman, who is among those who spent years investigating that period, discovered the whereabouts of his granddaughter Macarena in 2000. After several attempts at negotiation, in 2005 he found that the family of an Uruguayan police officer had raised the child.
May 20 was selected to hold the “Rally in Silence” because on that same date in 1976, former Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Hector Gutierrez Ruiz and left militants Rosario Berredo and William Whitelaw were kidnapped and assassinated in Buenos Aires. That case was never solved.
Through the “Rat Route,” under the orders of Adolf Hitler a number of war criminals who committed atrocities in Europe were transferred to Latin American nations.
Their lives in remote areas of Latin America with different names provided them with safety, although their moral conduct continued as assassins, and many continued to enjoy torturing and killing their victims.
During the month of May, while families of the disappeared marched through Latin American cities demanding justice for the loss of loved ones during the military dictatorships, new evidence came out to light about former Nazi criminals that found refuge thanks to the so-called Rat Route.
International news agencies report that Dr. Aribert Heim, the most wanted Nazi war criminal, is alive and is living in the Chilean or Argentinean Patagonia.
According to Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, the criminal may well be living in the Patagonia because a daughter of his lives in Puerto Montt, some 600 kilometers south of Santiago de Chile.
There is also the probability that he is living in Bariloche, Argentina – a nation that was the home to Nazi war criminals and the stage at the time of the dictatorship for the torture and massacre of young revolutionaries.
Heim, 93, killed hundreds of people in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp using direct injections of gasoline into their hearts.
This “Dr. Death” was almost arrested in 1962 in the former West Germany, but someone warned him and was able to escape.
Although his family says he has passed away, a German police operation revealed that there was a bank account in his name in Berlin with over 1 million Euros.
If his children had proven that Heim was dead, they could have withdrawn the money from the account – but they did not, so investigators suspect that he remains alive.
The demand for justice by the victims of Operation Condor in Latin America continues, as does the condemnation of those individuals linked to the CIA and the former Gestapo who participated in those crimes.
Cuban News Agency
