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Fidel attends launch of Operación Condor, Pacto
Criminal
BY PEDRO DE LA HOZ—Granma daily staff writer—
THE public led by President Fidel
Castro, who attended the February 15 launch of the
book Operación Condor, Pacto Criminal
(Operation Condor, Criminal Pact), by Argentine
Stella Calloni, shared with the author the need to
defend dignity and justice in face of the threat of
perpetual terror and war – the preference of
current U.S. president – throughout the world.
 For
this journalist and investigator, who has devoted
more than a decade to revealing the innards of that
transnational of death devised by the authorities
and agencies of the United States, the organs of
repression under the Southern Cone dictatorships of
the ‘70s and the anti-Cuban mafia, the book launch
was enormously symbolic. It was held facing the
black flags studded with white stars hoisted in
front of the U.S. Interests Section building, in
memory of the Cuban victims of terrorism carried
out, encouraged, and protected by the same “hand
that rocked the cradle” of barbarism in Latin
America during those years.
The colloquium was led by
Calloni’s colleague, Arleen Rodríguez Derivet, and
followed attentively by relatives of the five Cuban
anti-terrorism fighters; intellectuals, editors and
other invited guests to the 15th International Book
Fair, and hundreds of young people. Calloni
explained how the book developed after the discovery
in 1992 of the so-called Files of Horror in Paraguay
by former political prisoner Martín Almada. Since
then, the investigation has grown with rigor,
perseverance, great attention to detail and fidelity
to the real history, arming itself with irrefutable
proof, essential to justice being done and for
impunity to end.
“My intention with this book was
not to create literature or become a star, but to do
my duty to memory,” the journalist affirmed. The
relevance of its pages is shown by the continuity of
Condor’s perversity in the worldwide practices of
the George W. Bush administration: the torture at
Abu Ghraib, the secret prisons, and the clandestine
transfers of prisoners all repeat the methods that
were used before.
Calloni spoke of anticipated
revelations that point to the implication of
Condor’s agents in the deaths of presidents Omar
Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Roldós of Ecuador in
1981, who were “considered bothersome to the empire
and dictatorships in secret documents that were
investigated,” and possibly in the death of Swedish
Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.
The book launch included the
performance of combative and challenging songs by
trova musicians Santiago Feliú and Gerardo Alfonso,
and the insurgent rock music of Argentine Federico
Bonasso, with backup by musicians from the Habana
Ensemble band. |
