You reap what you sow

Osama Bin Laden wasn't the only figure associated with violence and terror who met his maker in the last few days. The unarmed Bin Laden's apparent death came only three days after that of Enrique Arancibia Clavel, a man whose hands were heavily stained with the blood of his victims, yet whose killing received little coverage outside of Chile and Argentina. Arancibia Clavel was an agent in  General Pinochet's secret police, the brutal DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional), and heavily involved in the murderous reign of terror, otherwise known as Operation Condor, that was unleashed on left-wing dissidents and sympathisers and their families in the Southern Cone in the seventies.

Operation Condor was devised and then mercilessly implemented by the Pinochet regime hand in hand with the military dictatorships of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil that ruled at the time. It was a 'clean-up' system of eradication in which death squads hunted potential opponents of the dictatorships across Latin America and even into Europe, and was responsible for the murder and disappearance of thousands of people. The cooperation between the regimes allowed prisoners to be kidnapped and transported by government agents or secret police regardless of which country they happened to be in. Working in unison, the authorities were able to exterminate swathes of opponents and cow the populace into subjugation.

One of the most famous victims of Operation Condor was General Carlos Prats, head of the army and then Chilean Vice-President under the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Following the military coup in 1973 that resulted in the death of Allende, Prats, as the dead president's staunchest supporter, went into exile in Argentina. Yet the military authorities of  Chile still viewed him as a threat, a potential opposition figurehead, and in 1974 he was killed along with his wife in a car bomb in Buenos Aires.

In 2000, Arancibia Clavel was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Prats and his wife. He was also convicted in 2004 for the kidnap and torture of two Chilean women. He had originally left Chile for Argentina in 1970 following the assassination of another Chilean army general and Allende supporter, Rene Schneider, by an extreme-right militant group of which Arancibia Clavel was a member. Once in Argentina, he began to liaise with Argentinian secret police and eventually became Pinochet's contact there, playing an invaluable role in the sharing and distribution of information between the dictatorships as the tentacles of Operation Condor spread across the continent, resulting in an estimated 50,000 victims.

When the dictatorships of Chile and Argentina fell out over sovereignty of the Beagle Channel in 1978, Arancibia Clavel was arrested in Argentina and charged with espionage. He remained in prison until 2007 and, following his release, lived in Buenos Aires. In was in his apartment there that, last Thursday 28th April, he was found dead with several stab wounds. There have been no arrests and the motives behind his murder are unclear. Yet whether or not his death will bring any satisfaction to the relatives of the thousands of victims of Operation Condor is debatable.

While in the United States the death of Bin Laden has seen a wave of euphoria sweep the country, the death of Arancibia Clavel is unlikely to trigger the same effect. For despite the trauma and suffering of 9/11, the bereaved are able to find solace in knowing what happened to their loved ones, and Bin Laden's demise brings a form of closure to their grief. For the families of the disappeared of South America, the death of Enrique Arancibia Clavel is just one more unanswered question to be faced.