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      From the archive: Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America. – podcast

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 20 March - 05:00


    We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

    This week, from 2020: During the 1970s and 80s, eight US-backed military dictatorships jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of their political opponents. Now some of the perpetrators are finally facing justice by Giles Tremlett

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      The big picture: an image that defined Chile’s brutal 1973 coup

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 3 September, 2023 - 06:00 · 1 minute

    Koen Wessing, a young Dutch photographer, flew to Santiago 50 years ago and showed the world what General Pinochet’s rule would mean for the country

    When news broke of the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s elected government in Chile, 50 years ago this month, the Dutch photojournalist Koen Wessing took the first plane to Santiago. He was one of the few journalists on the ground to witness the mass arrests of Allende supporters and book burnings in the aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup. This picture shows groups of Allende supporters forced at gunpoint to remove democracy slogans from city walls. The man walking by, hands in pockets on the deserted street, completes the scene. He may affect indifference to what he is witnessing, like some parts of the international community at the time, but the automatic weapons of the trio of Pinochet’s henchmen are still aimed casually at the back of his head.

    Wessing was 31 when he went to Chile. He had become famous in the Netherlands during the student riots of 1969 when he evaded a police cordon around the University of Amsterdam by creating a high footbridge between two buildings to make sure his film of the protests got out. Fearing the seizure of cameras in Chile, he employed similar determination and cunning to get his story to the world, enlisting the help of an air hostess to smuggle his film back to newspapers in Europe. A book of 24 of Wessing’s images, Chil e, September 1973 , printed without introduction or captions, became a definitive document of the initial repression of Pinochet’s regime, graphic evidence of the brutality of the dictator’s methods. Wessing was due to attend the first public exhibition of his work in Santiago when he died in 2011. By then, the accepted figure for the number of political prisoners tortured or killed by Pinochet had risen to 40,018. The Santiago exhibition of Wessing’s work was titled Indelible Images .

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      ‘Hi, Mom. I love you’: US man kidnapped as child in Pinochet’s Chile reunited with family

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 25 August, 2023 - 10:00

    Under the brutal 1973-1990 dictatorship, tens of thousands of babies were taken from their parents and adopted by foreigners

    A man who was kidnapped as a newborn in Chile four decades ago and raised in the US by a family who had no idea says he is grappling with a range of emotions after getting to meet his biological mother for the first time.

    “Nothing compares – it was a clash of feelings for me,” 42-year-old Jimmy Lippert Thyden told the Guardian after USA Today this week documented his emotional reunion with his birth mom, María Angélica González. “It was a clash of feelings for me – happiness over all of them, [but] I was hurt by the time lost.

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