In the past two decades, Larrabeiti’s story has been told and retold in half a dozen courts and tribunals around the world. Enough victims have survived, however, to tell stories that, when matched against a growing volume of declassified documents, amount to a single, ghastly tale. His father, Mario, who was a leftwing militant, probably died in the shootout when they were snatched by the police. Larrabeiti’s mother, Victoria, who was last seen in an Argentinian torture centre in 1976, is one of them. Hundreds were secretly disposed of – some of them tossed into the sea from planes or helicopters after being tied up, shackled to concrete blocks or drugged so that they could barely move. Most Condor victims disappeared for ever. Condor was the most complex and sophisticated element of a broad phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people across South America were murdered or disappeared by military governments in the 1970s and 80s. Condor effectively integrated and expanded the state terror unleashed across South America during the cold war, after successive rightwing military coups, often encouraged by the US, erased democracy across the continent. It has taken decades to fully expose this system, which enabled governments to send death squads on to each other’s territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies – real or suspected – among their emigrant and exile communities. It was called Operation Condor, after the broad-winged vulture that soars above the Andes, and it joined eight South American military dictatorships – Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador – into a single network that covered four-fifths of the continent. What Larrabeiti wants people to know is that his family were victims of one of the 20th century’s most sinister international state terror networks. “I have decided to live without hate,” he said. Today, he is a trim, smartly suited 47-year-old public prosecutor with hazel eyes and a shaven head. “He said that we had to come together, because we were brother and sister,” Larrabeiti told me when we met earlier this year in Chile’s capital, Santiago. A dental surgeon and his wife wanted to adopt, and when the magistrate in charge of the children asked the surgeon which sibling he wanted, he said both. After a few months, they had a stroke of luck.
The next day, the children were taken to an orphanage, and from there they were sent on to separate foster homes. How does a four-year-old who finds himself in Chile explain that he does not know where he is, that he lives in Argentina, but is really Uruguayan? All he knew was that he was in a strange place, where people spoke his language in a different way. Anatole was too young to make sense of what had happened.
It was as if they had dropped from the sky. No one could understand how the two children, whose accents marked them as foreign, had got here. But nobody came, so he called the local police. He invited them to sit on the ride, expecting some panicked parents to appear, looking for their lost children. Larrabeiti wandered around the square, hand-in-hand with his sister, until the owner of a merry-go-round ride spotted them. Witnesses recall two young, well-dressed children stepping out of a black car with tinted windows. It was probably Aunt Mónica who abandoned them in a large square, the Plaza O’Higgins, in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, on 22 December 1976. The closest thing they had to family was a jailer known as Aunt Mónica. Young children do not usually make epic journeys through three countries in as many months without parents or relatives. Larrabeiti remembers looking down on snowy peaks from the plane. A few days before Christmas, they were flown to a third country, Chile, in a small aircraft that climbed high above the Andes. The following month, in October 1976, Anatole and Victoria Eva were taken to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and held at the military intelligence headquarters. That was in another part of Buenos Aires, the city that their parents had moved to in June 1973, joining thousands of leftwing militants and former guerrillas fleeing a military coup in their native Uruguay.
At first, they were held in a grimy car repair garage that had been turned into a clandestine torture centre. Then Larrabeiti remembers being taken away by armed police, along with his 18-month-old sister, Victoria Eva. He remembers the shootout, the bright flashes of gunfire and the sight of his father lying on the ground, mortally wounded, outside their home in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his mother lying beside him. It was 26 September 1976, the day after his birthday. T he last time Anatole Larrabeiti saw his parents, he was four years old.