Fernandez attended the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Panama, a military training institute that taught soldiers to fight left-wing movements in Latin America. Many of the military dictatorships that once ruled over the countries of the region had their military officers receive training at the school.
Fernandez was also part of the 1973 coup against elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile. In an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department, he pleaded guilty to Orlando Letelier’s murder as an accomplice in exchange for being able to live and work in the United States after serving his sentence, with the assurance that he would not be extradited to Chile under any circumstance.
Townley was a former CIA operative who worked in Argentina and Chile and was heavily involved in Operation Condor, a coordinated U.S. effort to eliminate opposition to dictatorships in South America from 1970s to 1980s, and 50,000 are estimated to have been killed or forcibly disappeared.