At the beginning of the 1970s, almost all of South America was ruled by military dictatorships or right-wing authoritarian regimes. Even though the exercise of power varied, they all had one thing in common: they were radically anti-communist and allies of the United States. This alliance against communism was formalized in 1975 under the name „Operation Condor.“ From the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego to the northern foothills of the Amazon, communists, dissidents, Trade unionist and hunted journalists.
Alliance of Terror
Late November 1975, they met in Santiago, Chile high-ranking representatives of intelligence agencies and security apparatuses from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. There they agreed on cross-border cooperation against political opponents. Brazilian delegation was, according to later reconstructions, likely represented as an observer. They concluded a pact: Together, they want to take action against „enemies of the state“ and „terrorists.“ Across the borders of the countries, a Hunt started.
Left-wing opposition figures, priests, trade unionists, and representatives of human rights organizations were the targets of intelligence-orchestrated abductions, torture, and assassinations. They gave the Undertake the nameOperation Condor. Around 50 intelligence officers from the six countries participated in the meeting, invited by Manuel Contreras, Pinochet's intelligence chief. They agreed on cross-border operations, suspension of jurisdiction, and confidentiality.
Operation Condor: Kidnappings, Torture, and Car Bombs
The conspirators of Operation Condor also immediately got to work. On September 21, 1976 detonate a car bomb in Washington, D.C. The attack killed Orlando Letelier, former Chilean Foreign Minister and former ambassador to Washington. After his imprisonment under Pinochet, he lived in exile in the USA, where he became a prominent critic of the dictatorship. According to later declassified US documents, there is compelling evidence that Pinochet ordered the murder personally ordered. A court ruling that convicted him as the mastermind exists but not. Letelier was merely a prominent victim of Operation Condor.
What was decided in Santiago was further demonstrated in practice: The secret services of the involved dictatorships exchanged information, coordinated cross-border pursuits, and abducted regime opponents across national borders, even in exile. Political refugees were no longer safe anywhere. How this cooperation worked, for instance, was shown 1978 in Porto Alegre, when Brazilian authorities kidnapped Uruguayan opposition figures and took them to Uruguay.
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean general who came to power in 1973 through a CIA-funded coup. Before that, the socialist Salvador Allende had won the Chilean presidential election. Pinochet's reign as dictator of Chile is marked by massive human rights violations and repression against his own population. Many of these atrocities occurred under Operation Condor. Pinochet ruled Chile until 1990 and died in Santiago, Chile, in 2006 at the age of 91.
Death flights: Communists throwing from helicopters
However, Operation Condor was not only directed against political opponents in exile. Within the dictatorships, the same logic of disappearance was employed even more brutally. In Argentina in a particularly cruel form, against which 1977 civil resistance also began to organize. There, the human rights organization „Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo“ (from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) in coming to terms with the crimes. In 1977, the women demonstrated in front of the Argentinian Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires with the aim of finding people kidnapped by the regime, the so-called „The Disappeared“. The weekly demonstrations were met with great enthusiasm, and soon more members of civil society joined the demonstrators.
But the repression of Operation Condor did not stop even before them. The regimes branded countless female activists as „enemies of the state“ or „socialists“ and kidnapped them. Among them were the founders Azucena Villaflor, Esther Ballestrino, María Ponce de Bianco and the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet. A team of forensic scientists discovered years later that all of them, during so-called „Death flights“had been murdered. They were thrown from an airplane. Others also report death flights by helicopter. The victims were usually drugged and thrown from great heights while still alive.
The Role of the USA: The Eagle and the Condor
The role of the United States is, to this day not complete clarified. In 2000 and 2001, U.S. authorities published Intelligence documents, which show that the FBI and CIA knew about the South American regimes' misdeeds and provided them with technical and logistical support.
In addition to delivering equipment, the US also supported its South American allies through the „School of the Americas“a training center in Panama where U.S. instructors trained senior officers
The End of Operation Condor
1978 the relations between Pinochet's Chile and Argentina are deteriorating. Although the operations continued until 1983 further, however, the alliance gradually fell apart as a result of the dispute. With the democratization of Argentina from 1983 Operation Condor finally ended. Until 1992 Operation Condor remained and its extent secret, until a lawyer in Paraguay stumbled upon documents during research that described atrocities of the dictatorships. His findings are known today as the „Archives of Terror.“.
The revelations that followed these disclosures showed a chilling tally. During the relatively short lifespan of Operation Condor, the participating military dictatorships, according to estimates from human rights organizations, murdered around 50.000 People. 35.000 have disappeared and are round 400.000 been captured. All without a trial or any other jurisdiction. Only in recent decades have courts in a series of trials imposed Prison sentences against those responsible for Operation Condor. But most have already passed away.
