Will Netanyahu unmask Israel?
By Jonathon Cook | Middle East Eye | October 27, 2017
NAZARETH – As Israeli legislators returned to parliament this week, ending the long summer recess, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced a packed agenda of reforms designed to push Israel further to the right.
Legislative proposals include weakening the supreme court’s powers of judicial review, cracking down on left-wing civil-society organisations, expanding Jerusalem’s boundaries to include more Jewish settlements and allowing the government to forcibly deport mainly African asylum seekers.
But none is likely to prove as controversial – or gain as much attention – as a measure concerning Israel’s status as a Jewish state.
This long-gestating bill is intended to join 11 existing Basic Laws – Israel’s equivalent of a constitution. Netanyahu appears to be basing his wider legislative assault on the success of the proposed Basic Law: Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Its purpose is to give a constitutional-like standing to Israel’s definition as a state that belongs not to its citizens – as is the case in a liberal democracy – but to all Jews around the world, including those with no connection to Israel.
Additionally, the bill is expected to downgrade the status of Arabic, the mother tongue of a fifth of Israel’s population. It will also require the Israeli courts to give due weight in their rulings to Jewish religious law and Jewish heritage.
Who opposes the law
Basic Laws are much harder to reverse than ordinary legislation. Various versions of the Jewish nation-state bill have been under consideration since a first draft was introduced in 2011 by Avi Dichter, a former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police.
But after eight years as prime minister, Netanyahu appears impatient for progress. He insisted in May that the legislation must pass as soon as possible. A special committee has been hastily drafting a final version during the past few weeks.
Opposition to the bill comes from three quarters in parliament, each with very different concerns.
The first is the Joint List, a coalition of parties representing Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens – one in five of the population – who are the chief targets of the proposed legislation. However, their voice carries no weight in either the parliament or the government.
The second group are the small hardline religious parties in the coalition government, who have always had an ambivalent, if not hostile, attitude toward Israel as a state. They believe that Jews can be sovereign only when the Messiah reveals himself. In practice, however, if the legislation is carefully phrased, then these parties may not put up much resistance.
Most troublesome for Netanyahu is likely to be the antipathy from the centre-left parties on the opposition benches, especially the former Labour party, now rebranded as Zionist Union. Most of its legislators reject the proposed Basic Law, but not necessarily because they disagree with its provisions.
The age-old deception revealed?
The Zionist Union’s attitudes towards the Jewish nation-state bill are complex. They are rooted in the party’s role in founding Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
Mohammed Zeidan is director of the Nazareth-based Human Rights Association, an advocacy group for Israel’s Palestinian citizens. He said that Labour’s leaders, especially the nation’s father, David Ben Gurion, carefully crafted Israel’s image in a way that would hoodwink most outside observers into believing it was a Western-style liberal democracy.
“The goal of the state’s founders was to conceal the structural discrimination,” he told Middle East Eye. “The mistake was to believe that a Jewish state can be a democratic one, and that it can uphold universal values and rights.”
In the centre-left’s view, Netanyahu’s Basic Law risks pulling the veil off that immensely successful deception.
In fact, tellingly, the chief objections from the centre-left to Netanyahu’s Basic Law are not that the measure is immoral or undemocratic in denying Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinians equal status with Jewish citizens but rather that it is “unnecessary,” “superfluous” or “gratuitous”.
In 2014, when a draft of the legislation was brought before the parliament, the then-leader of Zionist Union, Isaac Herzog, observed: “Only a prime minister lacking in self-confidence, without a vision and a plan, needs laws that deal with the obvious, that will not improve any Israeli citizens’ lives.”
Similarly, Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper has called the legislation “completely redundant”. Abraham Foxman, as head of the New York-based Israel lobby group the Anti-Defamation League, labelled it “well-meaning but unnecessary”.
In other words, the ideological successors to Israel’s founding generation reject the Basic Law not because it will fundamentally alter Israel’s character but because it risks dragging its ugliest secret – well-concealed for nearly seven decades – into the bright light of day.
They fear that the Israeli far right will show Israel’s hand by clearly codifying its status as a state belonging to, and privileging, Jews around the world rather than to its own citizenry, which includes a large proportion of Palestinians.
One law for Jews, another for Arabs
It is important to understand how Israel’s founders deliberately obfuscated the apartheid-like legal and administrative structures they created to appreciate why so much is at stake for today’s centre-left.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence, published at the state’s creation in May 1948, was effectively a sophisticated exercise in public relations. It famously promised to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”.
Thousands of Arabs were driven from their land during the Nakba of 1948 (creative commons)
But, Zeidan said, for many decades Israel has avoided enshrining the principle of equality in any of the Basic Laws. Instead, it has embedded inequality at a foundational level – in Israel’s citizenship legislation.
What is most noticeable is that Israel has two citizenship laws. These confer different rights, based on whether a citizen is Jewish or not. In the United States during the mid-1950s, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision amid the civil rights struggle that “separate is inherently unequal” – and so it has proved in Israel too.
Israel’s Law of Return of 1950 opened the door to all Jews around the world, allowing mass Jewish immigration. Any Jew who landed in Israel could instantly receive citizenship, as many hundreds of thousands of Jews did during the next seven decades.
But Israel wanted exactly the opposite outcome for Palestinians. The result? It created a separate law, the Citizenship Law of 1952, for non-Jews. Its primary purpose was to strip the right to return home from the 750,000 Palestinians expelled by Israel four years earlier, during the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe”.
Longer term, however, the Citizenship Law was designed to guarantee a large perpetual Jewish majority by blocking access to citizenship for non-Jews.
Today, there is only one path by which a non-Jew can gain citizenship in Israel – by marriage to an Israeli citizen. This exception is allowed because only a few dozen non-Jews qualify each year, thereby posing no threat to Israel’s Jewishness.
Under legal challenge, Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law in 2003 to ensure that the vast majority of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and Arabs from many neighbouring states, cannot qualify for Israeli residency or citizenship under the marriage provision.
National rights trump citizenship
The Law of Return and the Citizenship Law are two of nearly 70 Israeli laws – the number is growing – that explicitly discriminate based on whether a citizen is Jewish or Palestinian. A legal group, Adalah, representing Israel’s Palestinian citizens, has compiled a database of such measures.
But Netanyahu’s Basic Law threatens to expose the deeper significance of this bifurcated citizenship structure.
Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinian citizens, observed Zeidan, are discriminated against in a way that goes beyond that practiced against minorities in democratic states: that is, by the arbitrary, informal or unregulated decisions of officials and state bodies. In such democracies, officials are usually breaking the law when they discriminate against minority groups.
But in Israel, Zeidan pointed out, “officials are often breaking the law if they do not discriminate. It is their job to discriminate.”
This state-sanctioned racism is achieved by establishing “nationalities” separate from citizenship. The primary nationalities in Israel are “Jew” and “Arab”. The state has refused to recognise an “Israeli nationality,” a position supported by the Israeli supreme court, precisely to sanction a hierarchy of rights.
Individual rights are enjoyed by all citizens by virtue of their citizenship, whether they are Jews or Palestinians. In this regard, Israel looks like a liberal democracy. But Israel also recognises “national rights,” and reserves them almost exclusively for the Jewish population.
National rights are treated as superior to individual citizenship rights. So if there is a conflict between the two, the Jewish national right will invariably be given priority by officials and the courts.
How this hierarchy of rights works in practice is neatly illustrated by Israel’s citizenship structure. The Law of Return establishes a national right for all Jews to gain instant citizenship – as well as the many other rights that derive from citizenship.
The Citizenship Law, on the other hand, creates only an individual citizenship right for non-Jews. Israel’s Palestinian minority can pass their citizenship “downwards” to offspring but cannot extend it “outwards,” as a Jew can, to members of their extended family – in this case, the millions of Palestinians who were made refugees by Israel in 1948 and their descendants.
This privileging of Jewish national rights is equally clear in the way Israel treats its most precious material resources: land and water.
The commercial exploitation of these key resources is treated effectively as a national right, reserved for Jews only. In practice, noted Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, access to these resources is restricted to Jews through hundreds of rural communities across Israel, including the best-known – the kibbutz.
These rural communities are the places where Israel has made available vast swaths of land and offers subsidised water. As a result, almost all commercial agriculture and much industry is located in these communities.
But these resources can be exploited only by the Jewish population because each community is governed by an Admissions Committee, which blocks entry to Israel’s Palestinian citizens on the grounds that they are “socially unsuitable“.
“The committees govern entry to 550 communities in Israel, ensuring that the resources they control are available only to their Jewish populations,” Zaher told MEE. “These committees are one link in a chain of racist policies, segregation and exclusion by the state towards Palestinian citizens.”
The primary purpose of these rural communities is to enforce Israel’s “nationalisation” of 93 percent of its territory. This land is “nationalised” not for Israeli citizens – as no Israeli nationality is recognised – but for a global Jewish nation.
Meanwhile, the fifth of the population who are Palestinian are confined to less than three percent of Israeli territory, after most of their lands were confiscated by the state and are now held in trust for Jews around the world.
No new Palestinian community has been built since Israel’s creation 70 years ago, while dozens of Palestinian villages have been “unrecognised” by a 1965 Planning and Building Law. The 120,000 inhabitants of these villages, criminalised by this planning law, cannot build a home legally and are denied public services.
The real danger of Basic Law
Observers say that Netanyahu’s Basic Law risks exploding a seven-decade-old myth about Israel: that it is a liberal democracy where Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians alike enjoy equal rights.
The combination of the Law of Return, which entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship, and Israel’s land laws, which reserve ultimate ownership to Jews as a global nation, has emptied citizenship of its accepted meaning.
Instead, according to Israel’s existing legal structure, the state belongs to Jews collectively around the world rather than to the country’s citizenry. The Jewish state is “owned” by world Jewry, even if many individual Jews have failed to actualise their citizenship by coming to live in Israel.
As Israeli scholars have noted, Israel should be classified not as a liberal democracy but as a fundamentally non-democratic state called an ethnocracy.
Ariel Sharon, a famous general and later a prime minister, once described world Jewry as the “landlords” of Israel. That leaves Palestinian citizens, one in five of the population, as little more than resident aliens or temporary guest workers, on licence so long as they do not threaten the state’s Jewishness.
Israel’s modern centre-left, Ben Gurion’s heirs, rightly fear that Netanyahu and the far-right are about to air Israel’s very dirtiest secret in public. Their Basic Law will reduce a complex and opaque system of laws and practices to one simple and easily intelligible Basic Law that may evoke comparisons with apartheid-era South Africa.
Or as Zaher observed, if Netanyahu’s Basic Law is passed, it will “send a clear and dangerous political message to Palestinian citizens of Israel that you are not wanted, that you are not equal citizens, that, in fact, the state is not yours”.
Today’s far right cares much less about world opinion than Israel’s founders did. In their zealotry, they wish to eradicate the last hold-outs among the liberal Jewish establishment – such as the supreme court, civil society and parts of the media – so that they can advance their more aggressive brand of Zionism, launch a new wave of anti-democratic legislation and intensify the settlement project.
The real danger of Netanyahu’s Basic Law is not that it will change what Israel is, warned Zeidan. “What it does instead is provide a much more solid platform for what the far right in Israel intends to come next.”
Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis
By Neil Clark | RT | October 28, 2017
Fifty-five years ago this weekend the world appeared to be on the brink of nuclear war as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. What are the lessons that can be learned today about the events of October 1962?
It was the great filmmaker Charles Chaplin who commented that life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot. Perspective is everything. If we take a ‘close-up’ view of the Cuban missile crisis, we fail to see the wider issues involved. We’re also likely to fall for the dominant narrative, which has the Soviet Union as the aggressor and the US as the side acting in self-defense. In fact, it was the other way round.
We call it the ‘Cuban missile crisis, ’ but in truth, it was only partly about Cuba. It was just as much about Turkey, and in particular, the fifteen offensive nuclear-tipped intermediate-range Jupiter missiles that had been provocatively deployed there by the US in 1961.
The Soviet Union felt threatened by them and rightly so. They could if launched in a pre-emptive ‘first-strike,’ obliterate entire cities in the western USSR, such as Minsk, Kiev, and Moscow, within minutes.
Moreover, the so-called ‘missile gap’ which Kennedy had campaigned on in 1960 against Richard Nixon, actually existed in the US’ favor. The US had around nine times as many nuclear warheads as the Soviet Union. “By 1962, a million US soldiers were stationed in two hundred foreign bases, all threatening the Soviet Union, from Greenland to Turkey, from Portugal to the Philippines,” write Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing, in their book ‘Cold War.’ “Three and a half million troops belonging to America’s allies were garrisoned around the Soviet Union’s borders. There were American nuclear warheads in Italy, the United Kingdom, and Turkey.”
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader in 1962, had to do something to quickly change the situation, or else his country was in danger of nuclear annihilation. Remember President Kennedy had already seriously considered the ‘first-strike’ option. Fred Kaplan, the author of The Wizards of Armageddon, records how on July 13, 1961, Kennedy held a National Security Council meeting. Among the items on the agenda: “steps to prepare war plans which would permit the discriminating use of nuclear weapons in Central Europe and… against the USSR.”
America’s aggressive policies toward Cuba gave Khrushchev an opportunity to improve his country‘s security. When the cigar-smoking Fidel Castro first come to power in 1959, sweeping away the US-backed leader Batista in a popular uprising, he had not declared his revolution to be a Marxist one. But his program which involved nationalization and clamping down on the business activities of mobsters like Meyer Lansky, inevitably put him on a collision course with Washington.
In December 1960, the Eisenhower administration had already endorsed a scheme to invade Cuba to topple Fidel. John Kennedy, who became President in January 1961, inherited this ’cunning plan’ and went along with it. The result was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Blackadder’s Baldrick really couldn’t have come up with anything more disastrous.
Understandably, Castro now declared a socialist revolution and turned to Moscow for assistance. Khrushchev saw a golden opportunity to “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants.”
An agreement was made with the Castro brothers, whereby Cuba would be a site for Soviet missiles. They would not only defend the island from a US-led invasion- but also in Khrushchev’s own words help to “equalize” the balance of power with the US.
Of course, when the US learned what was going on, there was indignant outrage of the sort US leaders do best. The second best quote from the whole of the Cuban missile crisis (after Khrushchev’s hedgehog one), came from Kennedy when he was told about the missile sites under construction. “It’s just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs (missiles) in Turkey! Now that’d be goddamned dangerous, I would think.”’
To which his National Security Adviser, George Bundy replied: “Well, we did, Mr. President.”
Kennedy mulled over his options and decided that a blockade, to stop Soviet ships delivering their missiles, was the best call. Never mind that the Soviet action to ship missiles to an ally was legal and that a blockade most certainly wasn’t. But what to do about the missiles that had already arrived?
The President was presented with plans from his generals for air strikes and a full-scale invasion of Cuba. “But it was estimated that the ten days of fighting tied to an invasion, the US would suffer 18,500 casualties. Kennedy would have to do a deal,” note Isaacs and Downing.
A deal was done, but it was not one which the US administration could publicly acknowledge. In return for Soviet missiles being withdrawn from Cuba, the US agreed not to invade the island and to remove its Jupiters from Turkey which it did about six months later.
The US media hailed a great victory, but in fact, Washington had been forced to make concessions. It’s likely that if Khrushchev hadn’t played such a high line in 1961, the Soviet Union would have faced a pre-emptive strike sometime in the 1960s, very probably from the missiles situated in Turkey. The citizens of Moscow, Minsk, and Kiev have much to thank him for.
After 1962, the US knew that they had to tread warily. For the next seventeen years, détente was pursued by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Yes, the CIA continued to plot to overthrow the Cuban government, and of course subvert democratic processes around the world if the wrong candidates got elected, or look like they were going to get elected, but after the events of October 1962, the US was more frightened of directly provoking the Kremlin.
It was only in the late 1970s that the position began to change once again. A pivotal battle as I noted in an earlier OpEdge was between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, a man of peace who genuinely wanted to maintain good relations with Moscow, and the uber-hawkish Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been appointed President Carter’s National Security Adviser. ‘Zbig’ won, and the results for mankind were catastrophic.
Neocons who had loathed détente began to crawl out of the woodwork. Again there were calls for a ‘pre-emptive’ strike on the Soviet Union.
Mikhail Gorbachev, a genuinely nice man who sadly had learned nothing from history, became Soviet leader in 1985 and surrendered his country’s bargaining chips in return for promises which weren’t worth the paper they weren’t written on.
The subsequent fall of the USSR was toasted by ‘muscular’ liberals and Trotskyites alike, but older and wiser heads knew that with no real counterbalance to US power we were heading for perilous waters. I always remember reading an article by the conservative commentator and staunch anti-communist Peregrine Worsthorne, in the Sunday Telegraph from around this time in which he said that in time people might well look back at the Cold War with some nostalgia as a period of relative peace and stability. He was absolutely right.
With no Soviet Union around to keep them in check The Project for a New American Century crowd got going. The result was two decades of wars and ‘liberal interventions’ which killed millions, hugely boosting the cause of terrorism and leading to a refugee crisis of Biblical proportions. It’s obvious none of this would have occurred if the USSR had still existed, but of course, in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy,’ we weren’t supposed to say it.
Things have only changed in recent years, as Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has re-emerged as a global player and a counterweight to US imperialism. Syria is the first place since the end of the old Cold War where the ambitions of US neocons have been thwarted. Aleppo will hopefully prove to be their Stalingrad.
When we look back at the events of October 1962, is that it’s clear the US only cedes ground when it fears what the other side can threaten it with. To get Uncle Sam to stop being such an obnoxious bully, you have to throw or threaten to throw a hedgehog at his pants, to use Khrushchev’s memorable phrase. Being nice, like Gorbachev was, only gets you trampled on.
Gaddafi, like Saddam, surrendered his weapons program and was rewarded with a bayonet up his anus and the cackling laughter of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Milosevic generously hosted ’The Balkans Bull’ Dick Holbrooke offering him his best slivovitz, and ended up being denied the proper medical treatment during his US-instigated show trial at The Hague.
Kim Jong-un, by contrast, tests missiles for fun and shows Washington the finger and his country hasn’t been bombarded. He’s clearly studied closely what happened fifty-five years ago and also since 1990.
Khrushchev’s decision to send missiles to Cuba, a country under genuine threat of invasion, was not only legal but also wise. Far from endangering the peace, it actually made war less likely. The nuclear Armageddon that was feared in Cold War 1.0 didn’t occur because the US feared the Soviet response. In fact looking back at 1962 the only regret was that more missiles hadn’t arrived. Then Moscow would have been able to gain even more concessions.
Which brings us back to today. Could a new Russian deployment of missiles to Cuba as the Communist Party of Russia called for last year in response to the Pentagon’s plan to deploy HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) in Turkey be a means of obtaining the removal of NATO from Russia’s borders, and getting US hawks to pipe down?
Put another way, if there were already Russian missiles situated just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, do we think the US would be quite so belligerent in its foreign policy? Merely to ask the question is to answer it.
Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66
Budapest vetoes Ukraine-NATO summit, says Kiev’s new law a ‘stab in the back’
RT | October 28, 2017
Budapest has vetoed the upcoming NATO-Ukraine summit, the Hungarian foreign minister said, adding it is impossible to support the country’s bid to join the alliance after Kiev adopted a controversial education law “brutally mutilating” minority rights.
“Hungary cannot support Ukraine’s integration aspirations, so it vetoed the NATO-Ukraine summit in December,” Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Friday.
Szijjarto said there is no way to bypass Hungary’s veto, as a unanimous vote of all members is needed to call a meeting of NATO-Ukraine Commission (NUC). The commission is the decision-making body responsible for developing the NATO-Ukraine relationship.
Ukraine enjoyed a non-aligned status up until 2014, meaning the country abstained from joining military blocs and nurtured ties with both Russia and the West. Things changed dramatically after the Euromaidan coup, with the new government taking a decidedly pro-Western course.
Earlier in July, Kiev officially proclaimed that NATO membership is a key foreign policy goal. Draft legislation supported by the parliament asserted that the move would help Ukraine “strengthen national security, sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “stop Russian aggression.”
In the Friday statement, Szijjarto also said Budapest had been the most vocal supporter of Kiev’s NATO accession bid, but considered the adoption of a new Ukrainian education law that outlaws education in minority languages as a “stab in the back.” The law is a serious step backwards in safeguarding “minority rights,” the minister said, adding that “we cannot leave it without speaking up.”
Earlier in September, the minister also announced that Budapest “will block all steps within the European Union that would represent a step forward in Ukraine’s European integration process.”
The law that all classes in secondary schools will be taught in Ukrainian is expected to gradually enter into force between September 2018 and September 2020. It was approved by parliament in early September and signed into law by President Petro Poroshenko.
It is expected to affect hundreds of thousands of children studying in over 700 public schools which offer instruction in minority languages. The majority of these children are ethnic Russians, but other minorities include Romanians, Hungarians, Moldovans, and Poles. The law provides minor concessions for “EU languages,” English, and some minorities that have no national states of their own.
Syria Rejects Report of Joint Inquiry of UN and OPCW
Al-Manar | October 27, 2017
Syria has rejected the report of joint inquiry of the UN and Organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons (OPCW), which was announced yesterday, stressing that it came in implementation of the instructions of the US administration and Western countries to exert more political pressures and threats to Syria’s sovereignty.
A source at Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said Friday that Syria reiterates its complete commitment to Non-Proliferation of Chemical Weapons Convention and that it no longer has any toxic chemicals banned in accordance with the Convention.
It considers the use of chemical weapons an immoral and condemnable act anywhere, at any time and under any circumstances, the ministry said.
The ministry’s source said that Syria strongly condemns the direct and indirect accusations against it which were included in this report and the previous one since they represent a falsification of the truth and distortion of all accurate information about what happened in Khan Sheikhon.
It also condemns dependence of the Joint Investigative Mechanism on the statements of criminals who committed this immoral act in Khan Sheikhon and suspicious witnesses in addition to what they call open sources.
Uruguayan Deputy Sheds Light on Decades-Long CIA Backed Espionage
Sputnik – October 27, 2017
A massive CIA-backed espionage network operated for decades in Uruguay, deputy Gerardo Nunez, chairman of the parliamentary commission investigating the plot has told Sputnik, unveiling the details of systematic leaks of classified information that took place in the Latin American country after the end of the dictatorship.
The disclosure of a three million-page archive shed light on the immense power the Armed Forces of Uruguay had exercised between 1985 and 2004: the documents revealed how members of a CIA-backed espionage network infiltrated political parties, trade unions, and social movements.
Following the release of the secret papers, the reform of the national intelligence system has become a centerpiece of the Uruguayan parliamentary session. Gerardo Nunez, chairman of the Investigating Commission on Military Espionage at the Chamber of Deputies of Uruguay, explained to Sputnik Mundo how the spies operated.
The collection of documents entitled “The CIA’s operation in Uruguay” suggests that besides direct payments, the intelligence agents were also granted with overseas trips, paid vacations for them and their families and real estate, according to Nunes.
For its part, the CIA gave at least 37 monetary bribes to officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uruguay in exchange for secret information, the Uruguayan politician said. Despite the fact that the spy mechanisms used by Washington have been uncovered, it is still unclear what data was handed to the US.
The Commission, led by Nines, wrote a letter to the Uruguayan Interior Ministry asking to assess the possibility of summoning US Ambassador Kelly Keiderling for an explanation.The first pages of the archive were discovered in 2005, when The Broad Front, an Uruguayan center-left coalition of parties, came to power. Some of the documents were found in Defense Ministry facilities. It was called the “Berrutti Archive” after then Minister of Defense Azucena Berrutti. Other documents were discovered during a search at the house of Elmar Castiglioni, a colonel of the Army of Uruguay.
“There are a lot of documents but we still do not know where they originate from. We have learned about espionage methods exploited by the US, but we want to know the causes behind this systematic, well-planned and orchestrated work,” Nunes, the deputy of the Communist party, told Sputnik.
The agents and informants were mostly military men. They obtained data from public organizations, with some of the intelligence agents infiltrating the entities. According to Nunes, some of the spies not only handed over secret information but also tried to undermine the organizations from within, for example, by causing riots during demonstrations.The documents also mention illegal searches conducted by the secret agents disguised as plumbers, which allowed them to enter houses of party members and organizations under the pretext of fixing broken appliances.
“They made a sort of itinerary of everything that was in the house: paintings, books, flags. That [allowed] them to make an ideological profile of the family and figure out whether the members of the family were Marxists-Leninists or Broad Front participants [who worked underground in times of dictatorship in Uruguay],” the deputy explained.
Sometimes the agents conducted a technical inspection of buildings, which was done “for further intelligence operations,” he noted.
The Commission is expected to continue investigating the matter until December 2017, but given the enormous amount of documents, it may be extended for a longer period, according to the deputy.
“While we have obtained convincing arguments, we need to sort the things out to present clear evidence of violations of the Constitution, laws, rights, and freedoms of ordinary Uruguayans to the judiciary,” Nunes emphasized.
Commenting on the discovery of confiscated files on the bulky archive at the residence of Elmar Castiglioni, Samuel Blixen, a journalist who had been engaged in the investigation for the newspaper Brecha, told Sputnik in 2016 that the discovery revealed that “that the military intelligence strategy and policy has not changed with the transition from dictatorship to democracy [in Uruguay] in 1985.”The military dictatorship of Uruguay ruled the country for twelve years, from June 27, 1973, following the coup d’état, to February 28, 1985. In 1985 military and political leaders negotiated the return to a constitutional government.