US determination to destroy opposition to its domination in Latin America stemmed from its defeat in Vietnam. The 1972 team in Paris helping Kissinger negotiate with the Vietnamese included current US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, and Vernon Walters, later a key adviser to Ronald Reagan, then Army Attache at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. In those days George Bush Sr. was ambassador to the UN.

By 1975 Bush Sr. was head of the CIA and working together with Kissinger and Vernon Walters to develop Plan Condor--a coordinated operation against opposition movements throughout Latin America. Plan Condor involved using illegal covert means such as the assassination team coordinated between the Chilean DIN security service and Miami Cuban terrorists like Orlando Bosch, Guillermo Novo and Luis Posada Carriles. It also meant supporting brutal government policies of mass repression in countries throughout South America. Plan Condor was an ambitious and successful attempt to coordinate that repression.

Plan Condor moves to the Isthmus By 1980, the priorities for President Reagan's Latin American team were to defeat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, stop the revolutionary movements in Guatemala and El Salvador and to wipe out the popular movment in Honduras.

By the end of 1981 many now familiar people were in place. Elliot Abrams (now Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs on the National Security Council) was Assistant Secretary of State for, incredibly, human rights and humanitarian affairs. John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras and John Maisto ambassador to Nicaragua. John Poindexter, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Otto Reich, Roger Noriega, all worked on Latin America under Reagan. All were brought back into the White House by George W. Bush after the Republican packed Supreme Court effectively validated the Florida voting fraud in the 2000 US presidential elections.

Early in 1980, Argentinian army and naval officers arrived in Guatemala to provide counterinsurgency training for the Lucas Garcia regime. Together with advisers from Chile and Israel they assisted the Guatemalan death squads, originally created by the CIA in the 1960s. An estimated 200,000 people were killed by the Guatemalan military during the long popular resistance to that country's US supported dictatorships. In August 1981, the deputy director of the CIA, Vernon Walters, arranged a meeting in Guatemala City with the aim of consolidating an anti-Sandinista terrorist force with training from Argentina.

Between 1981 and 1983, members of Argentina's Battalion 601, the unit responsible for much of the terror in Argentina itself, worked with Israeli trainers out of Guatemala. From 1983 onwards, the Israelis trained Carlos Castaño and other current leaders of the Colombian AUC paramilitary death squads.

It may seem strange now that Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte would have facilitated Argentinian fascists (who refined their torment of Jewish victims back in Buenos Aires by torturing them beneath portraits of Adolf Hitler). But Abrams and Negroponte did just that.

As US ambassador in Honduras, John Negroponte displayed cynical contempt for US Congress and legitimacy, shamelessly violating the 1983 Boland Amendment restricting aid to the Contra. On Negroponte's recommendation, the Reagan government gave Alvarez Martinez the Legion of Merit in 1983 for "encouraging democracy." Alvarez Martinez was reponsible for disappearing over 140 trades unionists, students and other leaders of the Honduran popular movement between 1981 and 1984.

That training did not come free. Who paid for it? Mostly the US taxpayer via military aid to Argentina and Israel. But when legal funds were hard to come by, illegal sources served, including drugs proceeds and money siphoned through the fraudulent Bank of Commerce and Credit International, courtesy of links between George Bush Sr., the Saudi royal family and the Bin Laden family. BCCI folded afer revelations that it laundered money from the Colombian Medellin drugs cartel, later to figure in the Iran Contra affair.

Richard Armitage, one of the Iran-Contra plotters, was a board member of Database Technologies (DBT)/ChoicePoint Inc before taking office under George Bush Jr. Before becoming Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld was on BP Amoco's advisory board. BP-Amoco? Sounds like Bridas-Pan American Energy. In the early 1990s Bridas obtained oil exploration concessions in Turkmenistan. By 1997 they were negotiating with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to build a pipeline there. Bridas found itself in competition vying for Taliban favor with Unocal, a US oil company heavily criticised for its operation in army controlled Myanmar (Burma).

Richard Armitage worked for Unocal along with another Iran-Contra figure, Robert Oakley. The Taliban favoured a deal with Bridas. Bridas and Unocal ended up fighting it out in the US courts. Bridas lost. At the same time, through 1997 and 1998, US policy on Afghanistan turned sour. Between November 2000 and August 2001, Argentina had its financial guts ripped out by US banks and the international finance markets.

This is a fine illustration of the Bush Doctrine: no country will be permitted to pose a threat to the perceived interests of the United States, not even a friendly former terrorist client state like Argentina. Bridas could see how things were going and went with the flow. In 1997 it teamed up with BP-Amoco. Reborn as Panamerican Energy, Bridas is working with BP-Amoco to exploit gas and oil reserves throughout Latin America, but mainly in Argentina and, controversially, Bolivia. BP-Amoco gets the benefit of Bridas assets in Central Asia.

Plan Condor--alive and well The progression from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay through Central America to present day Venezuela and Colombia is clear. The same actors appear time after time. Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, John Maisto Roger Noriega and Otto Reich all move between comfortable jobs in US government and the corporate plutocracy that dictates US government policy.

Every one of them participated one way or another in the Iran Contra conspiracy to mislead Congress.