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RESEARCH SUPPLEMENT
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* THE CONSORTIUM *
For Independent Journalism
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- Volume 3, No. 19 (Issue 71) - September 28, 1998 -
-----
_________________________________________________________________
NAZI ECHO: ARGENTINA, DEATH CAMPS & THE CONTRAS
_________________________________________________________________
By Marta Gurvich & Robert Parry
- 19 September 1998 -
* * *
The tracks of secret financing for the Nicaraguan contra war
may cross a troubling money-raising tactic passed on from Adolf
Hitler's Nazis to their ideological heirs in Argentina: the
liquidation of property from victims killed in death camps.
An investigation in Spain is examining evidence that an
intelligence officer in Argentina's Dirty War was responsible for
selling the property of Argentines after they were "disappeared"
-- that is, taken to secret concentration camps and murdered.
Money from the victims' property may have ended up in Swiss bank
accounts maintained by Argentine military officers.
The Argentine intelligence officer accused of overseeing the
property liquidations is Raul Guglielminetti. In closed-door U.S.
Senate testimony in 1987, one of his accomplices also fingered
Guglielminetti as the manager of a Miami-based money-laundering
operation that funnelled tens of millions of dollars in Bolivian
drug money to the Nicaraguan contras and to other right-wing
paramilitary operations in Latin America.
The extent of the contra connection to various Bolivian drug
smuggling operations reportedly is one of the surprises contained
in the still-secret volume two of an internal CIA investigation
into contra-cocaine trafficking. But the CIA so far has refused
to release the 600-page volume two. CIA spokesmen say the agency
eventually may release an unclassified summary, but will likely
keep much of volume two secret.
In Spain, meanwhile, the property-liquidation case is one
part of a larger examination of Argentina's Dirty War by Judge
Baltasar Garzon. The judge has been investigating the fate of
Spanish citizens who "disappeared" in Argentina during the late
1970s and early 1980s when the military slaughtered some 10,000
to 30,000 people who were considered politically suspect.
Garzon's investigation is looking at evidence that
Guglielminetti oversaw the selling of property stolen from the
victims, with the proceeds allegedly deposited in nearly 100
Swiss bank accounts belonging to Argentine officers. Earlier this
year, the inquiry led to confirmation that at least six Argentine
military officers maintained secret bank accounts in Switzerland.
But it was not clear whether those accounts contained proceeds
looted from Dirty War victims or money from other sources.
Still, the historical echo of Hitler's financial strategies
is striking. During Hitler's World War II extermination campaign
against European Jews, the Nazis raised capital by selling the
possessions of death-camp victims, including gold melted down
from wedding bands and extracted from teeth fillings.
Hitler's government transferred large amounts of this wealth
through Swiss banks and used the money to buy vital goods from
neutral countries, including Argentina.
Argentina then was dominated by the quasi-fascist movement
of Gen. Juan Peron. The country harbored strong sympathies for
the Axis powers, especially Italian fascist leader Benito
Mussolini. After World War II, many Nazis escaped along "rat
lines" to Argentina and other South American countries which
protected war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele
and Klaus Barbie.
International Jewish groups long have suspected that
Argentina played a role, too, in laundering the Nazis' legendary
ODESSA funds to fascist survivors of the Third Reich. In the
decades that followed, some fascist and neo-fascist operatives
branched out, linking up to organized crime and earning money as
narcotics traffickers.
Others found jobs assisting Latin American intelligence
services suppressing leftist insurgencies. The ex-Nazis shared
their skills in torture and other intelligence techniques.
The Cold War further heightened the region's political
tensions, with terror and counter-terror campaigns reaching a
peak in the early 1970s. [For details on the Nazis in South
America, see Martin A. Lee's The Beast Reawakens; Henrik Kruger's
The Great Heroin Coup; and iF Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 1997.]
Into that combustible ideological mix stepped the shadowy
figure of Raul Guglielminetti. Born in 1941, Guglielminetti's
criminal history dates back to 1960, when he was investigated on
fraud charges but released.
In 1964, he got into more hot water over alleged illegal
trafficking in contraband and illegal possession of weapons. His
first conviction was in 1965 for car theft.
Back on the street in 1970, Guglielminetti started his
career as a political henchman. He helped suppress a labor strike
and earned the favorable notice of police in the province of
Neuquen. Friendly police officials set him up with a job as a
journalist at the newspaper, Sur Argentino.
Later, Guglielminetti moved to Bahia Blanca in Buenos Aires
province where he led ultra-right storm-troopers and declared
himself a Nazi. In the mid-1970s, as the violence between
rightists and leftists escalated, Guglielminetti joined a
right-wing death squad, known as the Argentine Anti-communist
Alliance.
In 1976, Argentina's right-wing generals mounted a coup
which ousted Isabel Peron, a weak president who had taken office
after Gen. Peron's death. The generals then launched a full-scale
Dirty War with thousands of Argentines "disappearing" off the
streets and into secret concentration camps where they faced
torture and death.
The Dirty War also meant new employment opportunities for
the 33-year-old Guglielminetti. He joined the military
intelligence service, known as the SIDE, and worked in the
infamous Batallion 601. A later government investigation would
identify him as a member of a paramilitary squad that kidnapped,
tortured and killed leftist activists.
According to that investigation, Guglielminetti was put in
charge of selling the victims' properties which the military
government had stolen. In the early days of the Dirty War, the
military and police simply plundered the valuables, taking money,
jewels and other personal items.
Later, the federal police chief ordered a more systematic
handling of the confiscated property, according to
Guglielminetti's own testimony in an Argentine court. The booty
was transferred to the chiefs of the military brigades and then
turned over to government authorities for liquidation and use in
various projects.
Guglielminetti claimed that he never personally took money
from the people he arrested, but acknowledged receiving rewards
of as much as $50,000 for successful seizures of funds belonging
to subversive organizations.
According to a book about Guglielminetti's exploits,
entitled La Pista Suiza [The Swiss Clue] by Juan Gasparini,
Guglielminetti's squad earned extra money by kidnapping
businessmen, many of them Jewish. The businessmen were held for
large ransoms while the government blamed the kidnappings on
leftists.
Gasparini reported that Guglielminetti was involved in at
least six such kidnappings, making him a wealthy man.
Guglielminetti once entered Spain carrying $1 million, which he
said belonged to a friend.
After crushing their internal enemies, the victorious
generals expanded their anti-communist crusade beyond Argentina.
As part of that strategy, Guglielminetti shifted his base of
activities to Miami.
There, he allegedly oversaw a secret money-laundering
operation that moved drug proceeds to anti-communist forces
around the Western Hemisphere, including support for the
Nicaraguan contras.
In testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, another
Argentine intelligence officer, named Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse,
described that operation. A financial expert, Sanchez-Reisse said
he had been recruited by Argentine intelligence in 1976 and
specialized in the service's international operations. In the
Miami money operation, he said his boss was Guglielminetti.
Sanchez-Reisse testified that the Miami operation was based
in two front companies: Argenshow, a promoter of U.S.
entertainment acts in Argentina, and the Silver Dollar, a pawn
shop that was licensed to sell guns.
He asserted the real activity of the companies was to
transfer more than $30 million -- much of it from drug lords --
into various political and paramilitary operations in South and
Central America. He claimed the operation was approved by the
CIA, which maintained close ties to the Argentine generals.
According to Sanchez-Reisse, the money operation's first
major activity was funnelling drug proceeds into a 1980 coup to
overthrow an elected center-left government in Bolivia. That new
government had offended Bolivia's powerful cocaine barons,
including Roberto Suarez, then one of the biggest traffickers in
the world.
Suarez and his key ally in the Bolivian army, Gen. Luis
Garcia Meza, struck back by organizing a coup d'etat with
Argentine assistance. Sanchez-Reisse said Suarez provided the
money that was funnelled through Guglielminetti's financial
network.
Using ambulances, the Argentine generals delivered weapons
and other military equipment to right-wing Bolivian paramilitary
forces.
The money for the 1980 coup came from "drug traffickers [in
Bolivia who] were interested to overthrow the government of
Bolivia," Sanchez-Reisse testified before a Senate subcommittee
in 1987.
The money "was shipped from Bahamas to United States. ... It
was money [that] belonged to people connected with drug traffic
in Bolivia at that time, specifically Mr. Roberto Suarez in
Bolivia."
Explaining how he knew the money came from cocaine
trafficking, Sanchez-Reisse said, "I know that Mr. Roberto Suarez
doesn't make his money growing peanuts."
Besides the weapons from Argentina, the Bolivian putschists
got help from an international band of ex-Nazis and neo-nazis led
by Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon for his work in
Hitler's Gestapo.
In July 1980, the coup overthrew the Bolivian government and
slaughtered many of its supporters. Some victims were tortured by
Argentinean experts flown in to demonstrate their expertise.
The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup,
installed Garcia Meza and other drug-connected military officers
who promptly turned Bolivia into South America's first modern
narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important
to the development of the Medellin cartel in the early 1980s.
[For details on the coup, see The Big White Lie by former
DEA agent Michael Levine; Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott
and Jonathan Marshall; and iF Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 1997.]
Many of the Argentine intelligence officers who assisted in
the Cocaine Coup followed up their victory in Bolivia by moving
northward into Central America to train a ragtag force of
Nicaraguan contras. Sanchez-Reisse said the Argenshow-Silver
Dollar money was soon flowing in that direction as well.
Over 18 months, Sanchez-Reisse testified, more than $30
million went through Guglielminetti's operation. The money
supported the Bolivian coup, the contras and other right-wing
paramilitary activities in Central America.
Sanchez-Reisse said the money moved through accounts from
around the world -- Switzerland, the Bahamas, Grand Cayman,
Liechtenstein and Panama.
Soon, the contras were serving as an international brigade
in Argentina's war against leftist subversion. In December 1980,
Argentine intelligence dispatched a contra assault team to attack
a Costa Rican radio station which was broadcasting information
critical of the Argentine Dirty War. Three Costa Ricans were
killed in the raid. [See The Nation, Oct. 7, 1991]
Working with anti-communist Honduran officers, the contras
began murdering scores of political dissidents in Honduras and
other Central American countries. A later Honduran government
investigation described the "disappearances" of nearly 200
victims in that country alone.
The Honduran investigation, completed in 1994, singled out a
dozen Argentine "advisers" for blame in the Honduran Dirty War.
One of those Argentine advisers was Sanchez-Reisse,
Guglielminetti's partner in the Miami money-laundry.
In 1981, President Reagan formally authorized the CIA to
collaborate with the Argentine intelligence services in building
up the contra army. In the contra operation, Sanchez-Reisse said,
Guglielminetti befriended John Hull, a CIA-connected farmer who
let contras use his ranch in northern Costa Rica and later faced
accusations of drug trafficking. [For more details on Hull, see
The Consortium, Aug. 10, 1998, or iF Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 1998.]
But the secret U.S.-Argentine collaboration had unintended
consequences. The Argentine junta apparently thought that the
Reagan administration would tolerate the seizure of the Falkland
Islands from Great Britain. In 1982, the generals invaded the
islands off Argentina's coast.
Washington, however, sided with its longtime allies in
London. British forces quickly routed the Argentines. The
disgraced generals relinquished power in 1983.
With the election of a civilian government, Sanchez-Reisse
said the financial records for the secret money operation were
spirited away by plane to Switzerland. The book, La Pista Suiza,
also suggests that Guglielminetti might have hidden the list of
"disappeared" victims in either Spain or Switzerland.
While in Switzerland himself, Sanchez-Reisse was jailed in
connection with a kidnapping-extortion case. Guglielminetti came
to his partner's defense. Guglielminetti wrote to the Swiss
courts and asserted that he was with Sanchez-Reisse either in
Florida or on a Caribbean boat trip at the time of the
kidnapping. But Sanchez-Reisse still spent two years in Swiss
jails.
For years, Guglielminetti dodged the legal consequences for
his intelligence activities. Through his contacts in the army, he
became a bodyguard for civilian president Raul Alfonsin. Only
after Guglielminetti's Dirty War deeds were made public was
Alfonsin embarrassed by the association.
According to the Spanish newspaper, El Pais, Guglielminetti
moved to Spain in 1984 and lived in a luxurious mansion at La
Moraleja, near Madrid. El Pais estimated Guglielminetti's fortune
at $11 million, apparently generated from kidnappings and other
illicit enterprises.
In 1985, Alfonsin's government finally lodged criminal
kidnapping charges against Guglielminetti in the case of a
murdered businessman. Guglielminetti was arrested in Spain and
extradited to Argentina. Eventually, he was convicted in 1987 on
charges of armed assault. He served four years in prison.
Meanwhile, Sanchez-Reisse decided that his best course of
action was to talk about his experiences. He supplied information
that appeared in the book, La Pista Suiza, including the
disclosure that secret records about the Dirty War were hidden in
Swiss banks.
Then, facing an Argentine extradition request, he fled to
the United States where he gave testimony about the drug aspects
of the operations before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee
on narcotics and terrorism. The closed hearing, chaired by Sen.
John Kerry, D-Mass., was held on July 23, 1987. The transcript
was declassified several years later, but received no press
attention beyond an Oct. 7, 1991, article in The Nation.
In 1996, an investigative series in the San Jose Mercury
News renewed interest in the contra-drug issue. That fall, Jack
Blum, former counsel to Kerry's subcommittee, appeared before the
Senate Intelligence Committee and recalled Sanchez-Reisse's
"remarkable testimony."
Blum said Sanchez-Reisse "told the subcommittee that ... the
Argentine military intelligence people used the profits from
their control of the Bolivian cocaine market to finance an
anti-communist 'battalion' which operated all over the continent.
.... I should remind this committee that the Argentines were the
ones who first trained and supported the contra resistance
movement."
The first volume of a two-part CIA report on contra-drug
trafficking -- released earlier this year -- also revealed
connections between the contras and Bolivian cocaine. For
instance, the report cited a 1982 trip by two contra-connected
drug traffickers to Honduras, where they met with contra
commander Enrique Bermudez.
He urged them to help raise money and advised that "the ends
justify the means." The drug traffickers, Norwin Meneses and
Danilo Blandon, then continued on to Bolivia to complete a
cocaine deal, according to the CIA report. [For details on CIA
volume one, see iF Magazine, Mar.-Apr. 1998.]
Though Sanchez-Reisse's testimony had little impact in the
United States, his declarations had more effect in Europe. His
disclosure of the hidden financial records in Switzerland
prompted the Spanish judge, Garzon, to seek Swiss cooperation in
tracking down stolen money and, possibly, documents about the
Dirty War.
Garzon's interest led to the discovery earlier this year
that at least a half dozen Argentine officers -- and possibly
many more -- maintained secret bank accounts in Switzerland.
Back in Argentina, Guglielminetti continued to live on the
edge of the law as his far-right allies regained some of their
political influence. He benefitted from a court pardon given to
lower-level Dirty War officers who were found to have followed
orders from superiors.
His old partner was less lucky. This year, Sanchez-Reisse
was arrested in the city of Rosario on charges of stealing a
painting from a museum.
Recently, Guglielminetti's name has surfaced in new acts of
political violence and government corruption, but mostly he has
kept a low profile. Even 15 years after the end of the military
dictatorship, he remains a mysterious and sinister figure, with
many dangerous secrets and many powerful friends.
Copyright 1998 The Media Consortium. All Rights Reserved.
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