Operation Condor

Antecedents

Operation Condor, which took place in the context of the Cold War, had the tacit approval and material support of the United States. In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter Jr. stated that: to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are ... endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises.

According to American historian J. Patrice McSherry, based on formerly secret CIA documents from 1976, in the 1960s and early 1970s plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies to deal with perceived threats in South America from political dissidents. A declassified CIA document dated 23 June 1976 explains that "in early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets". According to the CIA, Operation Condor was a cooperative mission enabled by Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. The cooperation between the countries for intelligence and security services had existed from as early as February 1974 to late May 1976 when it was formalized.

Members of Condor coordinated their activities with one another, established a special network for communication, and constructed various types of training. Some of which included psychological warfare.

The program was developed following a series of military coups d'état in South America:

General Alfredo Stroessner took control of Paraguay in 1954.

The Brazilian military overthrew president João Goulart in 1964.

General Hugo Banzer took power in Bolivia in 1971 through a series of coups.

A civic-military dictatorship seized power in Uruguay on 27 June 1973.

History

Cooperation among various security services had existed prior to the creation of Operation Condor, with the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion". During the Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on 3 September 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of information" between various services to "struggle against subversion".

In March 1974, representatives of the police forces of Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A death squad, to implement cooperation guidelines. Their goal was to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exiles in Argentina. In August 1974, the corpses of Bolivian refugees were found in garbage dumps in Buenos Aires. In 2007, McSherry also confirmed the abduction and torture during this period of Chilean and Uruguayan refugees who were living in Buenos Aires, based on newly declassified CIA documents dated June 1976.

On 25 November 1975, General Augusto Pinochet's 60th birthday, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor. According to French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School), General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces and former student of the French, developed the concept of Operation Condor.

Based on the governments' perception of threats, officially the targets were armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.), but the governments broadened their attacks against all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission. The Argentine "Dirty War", for example, which resulted in approximately 30,000 victims according to most estimates, kidnapped, tortured and killed many trade-unionists, relatives of activists, social activists such as founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, nuns, university professors, etc.

From 1976 onward, the Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, were the operation's front-line troops. The infamous "death flights", theorized in Argentina by Luis María Mendía – and previously used during the Algerian War (1954–1962) by French forces – were widely used. Government forces took victims by plane or helicopter out to sea, dropping them to their deaths in planned disappearances. It was said that from this military bombardment that OPR-33 infrastructure located in Argentina was destroyed. In May 1976, members of Plan Condor met in Santiago, Chile, at which the participating countries discussed "long-range cooperation... [that] went well beyond information exchange" and were given code names. In July, the CIA gathered intelligence that members of Plan Condor had the intention of striking "against leaders of indigenous terrorist groups residing abroad".

Revelations about Condor

The dictatorships and their intelligence services were responsible for tens of thousands of killed and missing people in the period between 1975 and 1985. Analyzing the political repression in the region during that decade, Brazilian journalist Nilson Mariano estimates the number of killed and missing people as 2,000 in Paraguay; 3,196 in Chile; 297 in Uruguay; 366 in Brazil; and 30,000 in Argentina. Estimates of numbers of killed and disappeared by member countries during the period of operation are 7,000–30,000 in Argentina, 3,000–10,000 in Chile, 116–546 in Bolivia, 434–1,000 in Brazil, 200–400 in Paraguay and 123–215 in Uruguay. While many sources combine these numbers into a single death toll attributable to Operation Condor, killings directly linked to Condor's cross-border military and intelligence cooperation between South American dictatorships are only a small subset of the total. McSherry, for example, estimated in 2002 that at least 402 individuals were killed or "disappeared" in Condor operations: "Some 132 Uruguayans (127 in Argentina, 3 in Chile, and 2 in Paraguay), 72 Bolivians (36 in Chile, 36 in Argentina), 119 Chileans, 51 Paraguayans (in Argentina), 16 Brazilians (9 in Argentina and 7 in Chile), and at least 12 Argentines in Brazil". McSherry added that "some 200 persons passed through Automotores Orletti, the key Condor detention center in Argentina", and cautioned that "these figures are likely underestimates". In 2009, McSherry offered a range of "hundreds, or thousands ... murdered in Condor operations", acknowledging that "the number still has not been finally determined".

On 22 December 1992, torture victim Martín Almada and José Agustín Fernández, a Paraguayan judge, visited a police station in the Lambaré suburb of Asunción to look for files on a former political prisoner. They found what became known as the "Archives of Terror" (Portuguese: Arquivos do Terror), documenting the fates of thousands of Latin American political prisoners, who were secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The archives held a total of 60,000 documents, weighing 4 tons and comprising 593,000 microfilmed pages. Southern Cone Operation Condor resulted in up to 50,000 killed; 30,000 "disappeared"; and 400,000 arrested and imprisoned. Some of these countries have relied on evidence in the archives to prosecute former military officers. A higher number of 90,000 killed has been put forth by La Federación Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (FEDEFAM).

In September 1976, Orlando Letelier, a Chilean diplomat working in Washington D.C. was killed in a car bombing. The United States did not seem to have knowledge of this murder previously. Intelligence gathered that some Americans were threatened by Condor, but the US found it difficult to accept that their ally would plan to commit acts of terror on American soil.

Notable cases and prosecutions

Argentina

The civic-military dictatorship of Argentina existed from 1976 to 1983 by the military juntas under Operation Condor. Within this period, the Intelligence Service of the United States reported "Chile as being the Center of its operation". Whereas the operation members included Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. Countries who were most enthused about the course of the Operation were Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. On 20 September 1976, the Director of the Argentina Army Intelligence Service met "his Chilean counterpart in Santiago to deliberate on their next actions about the fundamental aims of the ‘condor.’” Following the meeting, and between the period of 24 to 27 September that same year, a joint coalition from the members of the Argentina States Secretaries for Information (SIDE), and the Uruguayan Military Intelligence Service worked to carry out an operation against the OPR-33, the Uruguay Terrorist organization in Buenos Aires. During this operation, the SIDE reported the destruction and elimination of the "entire OPR-33 infrastructure in Argentina".

As part of the effort to carry out effective mechanisms to locate, identify, haunt, and assassinate their victims, the member countries proposed the establishment of some secret team of special agents. The member countries never mind endorsing forgery and criminality as they agreed to provide "false documentation" as cover for their special agent, who themselves were either "individuals from one member nation or of patrons from various member nations". Apparently, such a "Special team" operated in Argentina, whose members were drawn from the Argentina Army Intelligence Service and the State Secretariat for Information.

The Argentine SIDE cooperated with the Chilean DINA in numerous cases of desaparecidos. They assassinated Chilean General Carlos Prats, former Uruguayan MPs Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, as well as the ex-president of Bolivia, Juan José Torres, in Buenos Aires. The SIDE also assisted Bolivian general Luis García Meza Tejada's Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, with the help of the Italian Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (see also Operation Charly). Recently, since the opening of confidential archives, it has been discovered that there were operative units composed of Italians, used at ESMA for the repression of groups of Italian Montoneros. This unit called "Shadow Group" was led by Gaetano Saya at the time Officer of the Italian stay behind next – Operation Gladio. In April 1977, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers whose children had disappeared, started demonstrating each Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada on the plaza. They were seeking to learn the location and fates of their children. The disappearance in December 1977 of two French nuns and several founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo gained international attention. Authorities later identified their remains among the bodies washed up on beaches in December 1977 south of Buenos Aires, victims of death flights. Other members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo continued the struggle for justice in the ensuing decades.

Bolivia

In 2009, Bolivian president Evo Morales discovered the "horror chambers" underneath Bolivia's Department of the Interior. Contractors excavated the basement and uncovered blocked hallways to discover cells "where around 2,000 political prisoners were held and tortured during the 1971–1978 military rule under General Hugo Banzer". Deputy Interior Minister Marcos Farfan described his own time in the prison, where he was placed in a flooded cell, electrified from the ground, needled under his fingernails, and shocked via his genitals and teeth to extract information about Che Guevara. Nazi leader Klaus Barbie was Banzer's advisor in the methods of torture. Evidence in 1999 linked these torture chambers to Operation Condor.

Barbie's long-term presence in Bolivia, and his role as advisor to Hugo Banzer, can be traced back to Barbie's relationship with US intelligence at the end of World War II. Historians writing for the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) established that the U.S. Army Intelligence Counterintelligence Corps had recruited Barbie for intelligence work in West Germany in April 1947, before facilitating his escape to South America "via a 'ratline' operating through Italy". Barbie's cooperation with American intelligence was confirmed in a U.S. High Commission for Germany (HICOG) letter to New York Senator Jacob Javits. The letter established that "Barbie was arrested by the United States Occupation Forces in Germany and his wartime activities were investigated. He was released when the results of this investigation proved inconclusive...From 1948 to 1951 Barbie was, as were many other Germans, an informant for the United States Occupation forces". Once in Bolivia, Barbie adopted the pseudonym "Klaus Altman", and lived in La Paz under the cover of working for the Gehlen Organization-affiliated MEREX A.G. company, which facilitated arms deals with anti-communist Third World governments. Barbie's identity was revealed in the early 1970s, but he was not extradited to France to stand trial for war crimes until 1983. During his trial, his relationship with US intelligence became more public. Allan Ryan, Director of the Office of Special Investigations, concluded in a 1983 memorandum that "officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law".

Brazil

President Fernando Henrique Cardoso ordered the release of some military files concerning Operation Condor in 2000. There are documents that prove that, on that year attorney general Giancarlo Capaldo, an Italian magistrate, investigated the "disappearances" of Italian nationals in Latin America, likely due to actions of Argentine, Paraguayan, Chilean and Brazilian military personnel who tortured and murdered Italian citizens during the military dictatorships in Latin America. In the case of Brazilians accused of murder, kidnapping and torture, there was a list with the names of eleven Brazilians in addition to many high-ranking military personnel from other countries involved in the operation.

In the words of the Magistrate, on 26 October 2000, "[...] I can neither confirm nor deny because until December Argentine, Brazilian, Paraguayan and Chilean militaries [military personnel] will be subject to criminal trial..."

According to an official statement by the Italian government, it was unclear whether the government would prosecute the accused military officers or not, As of November 2021, nobody in Brazil had been convicted of human rights violations for actions committed under the 21 years of military dictatorship because of the Amnesty Law has secured both governmental officials and leftist guerrillas over their crimes.

The Condor Operation expanded its clandestine repression from Uruguay to Brazil in November 1978, in an event later known as "o Sequestro dos Uruguaios", or "the Kidnapping of the Uruguayans". With the consent of the Brazilian military regime, senior officers of the Uruguayan army secretly crossed the border and entered Porto Alegre, capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. There they kidnapped Universindo Rodriguez and Lilián Celiberti, an activist Uruguayan couple of the political opposition, along with her two children, Camilo and Francesca, five and three years old.

The illegal operation failed because two Brazilian journalists, reporter Luiz Cláudio Cunha and photographer João Baptista Scalco from Veja magazine, had been warned by an anonymous phone call that the Uruguayan couple had been "disappeared". To check on the information, the two journalists went to the given address: an apartment in Porto Alegre. When they arrived, the journalists were at first taken to be other political opposition members by the armed men who had arrested Celiberti, and they were arrested in turn. Universindo Rodriguez and the children had already been clandestinely taken to Uruguay.

Chile

When Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 in response to Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón's request for his extradition to Spain, additional information concerning Condor was revealed. One of the lawyers seeking his extradition said there had been an attempt to assassinate Carlos Altamirano, leader of the Chilean Socialist Party. He said that Pinochet met Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie during Francisco Franco's funeral in Madrid in 1975 and arranged to have Altamirano murdered. The plan failed. Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia eventually established a precedent concerning the crime of "permanent kidnapping": since the bodies of victims kidnapped and presumably murdered could not be found, he deemed that the kidnapping was thought to continue, rather than to have occurred so long ago that the perpetrators were protected by an amnesty decreed in 1978 or by the Chilean statute of limitations. In November 2015, the Chilean government acknowledged that Pablo Neruda might have been murdered by members of Pinochet's regime.

General Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert were killed by a car bomb on 30 September 1974, in Buenos Aires, where they lived in exile. The Chilean DINA has been held responsible. In Chile, Judge Alejandro Solís terminated the prosecution of Pinochet in January 2005 after the Chilean Supreme court rejected his demand to revoke Pinochet's immunity from prosecution (as chief of state). The leaders of DINA, including chief Manuel Contreras, ex-chief of operations and retired general Raúl Itturiaga Neuman, his brother Roger Itturiaga, and ex-brigadiers Pedro Espinoza Bravo and José Zara, were charged in Chile with this assassination. DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel has been convicted in Argentina for the murder.

Bernardo Leighton and his wife were severely injured by a failed assassination attempt on 6 October 1975, after settling in exile in Italy. The pistol attack left Bernardo Leighton seriously injured and his wife, Anita Fresno, permanently disabled. According to declassified documents in the National Security Archive and Italian attorney general Giovanni Salvi, who led the prosecution of former DINA head Manuel Contreras, Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Michael Townley and Virgilio Paz Romero in Madrid in 1975 to plan the murder of Bernardo Leighton with the help of Francisco Franco's secret police. In 1999, the secretary of the National Security Council (NSC), Glyn T. Davies, declared that the declassified documents established the responsibility of Pinochet government in carrying out the assassination of Bernardo Leighton, as well as Orlando Letelier and General Carlos Prats. a failed assassination attempt on 6 October 1975.

Paraguay

The United States backed Alfredo Stroessner's anti-communist military dictatorship and played a "critical supporting role" in the domestic affairs of Stroessner's Paraguay. For instance, when Stroessner established a special branch of the secret police, subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs – the National Directorate of Technical Affairs (Dirección Nacional de Asuntos Técnicos, DNAT), US Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thierry was sent to help set up the organization and find recruits, ultimately settling on Antonio Campos Alum as head of this organization (nicknamed La Technica) which would carry out disappearances and torture in Paraguay. Another branch, the Department of Investigations of the Metropolitan Police (Departamento de Investigaciones de la Policía de la Capital, DIPC), headed by Pastor Coronel, interrogated their captives in tubs of human vomit and excrement and shocked them in the rectum with electric cattle prods. They dismembered the Communist Party Secretary, Miguel Ángel Soler, alive with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on the phone. Stroessner demanded the tapes of detainees screaming in pain to be played to their family members.

In a report to Kissinger, Harry Shlaudeman described Paraguay's militaristic state as a "nineteenth-century military regime that looks good on the cartoon page". Shlaudeman's judgments adopted a tone of paternalism, but was correct in noting that Paraguay's "backwardness" was leading it toward the fate of its neighbors. Although the United States viewed conflict from a global and ideological perspective, many decolonized nations defined national security threats in terms of neighboring nations and longstanding ethnic or regional feuds. Shlaudeman notes the incredible resilience that Paraguay showed against the superior military might of its neighbors during the Chaco War. From the perspective of the government in Paraguay, the victory against its neighbors over the course of several decades justified the lack of development in the nation. The report further states that the political traditions in Paraguay were anything but democratic. This reality, combined with a fear of leftist dissent in neighboring nations, led the government to focus on the containment of political opposition instead of on the development of its economic and political institutions. An ideological fear of its neighbors compelled them to protect its sovereignty. Therefore, the fight against radical, leftist movements within and without the country motivated many policymakers to act in the interest of security. In 2020, French writer Pablo Daniel Magee published the book Opération Condor prefaced by Costa Gavras. The book follows the life of Paraguayan victim of the Condor Operation Martín Almada.

Peru

The Peruvian legislator Javier Diez Canseco declared that he and twelve colleagues (Justiniano Apaza Ordóñez, Hugo Blanco, Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, Valentín Pacho, Ricardo Letts, César Lévano, Ricardo Napurí, José Luis Alvarado Bravo, Alfonso Baella Tuesta, Guillermo Faura Gaig, José Arce Larco, and Humberto Damonte), all prominent opponents of the dictatorship of Francisco Morales Bermúdez, were kidnapped in Peru, expatriated in 1978 and handed over to the Argentine armed forces in the city of Jujuy. Diez Canseco added that there is declassified documentation of the CIA and cable information which account for the links of the Morales Bermúdez government with Operation Condor.

Uruguay

As per usual with Southern Cone 1970s dictatorships, Juan María Bordaberry proclaimed himself a dictator and banned the rest of political parties. The de facto government spanned from 1973 to 1985, in which period a considerable number of people were murdered, tortured, illegally detained and imprisoned, kidnapped and forced into disappearance, in the purported defence against subversion. Prior to the 1973 coup d'état, the CIA had acted as a consultant to the law enforcement agencies in the country. Dan Mitrione, the best known example of such cooperation, had trained civilian police in counterinsurgency at the School of the Americas in Panama, known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation after 2000.

Other cases

Edgardo Enríquez, Chilean leader of the MIR, "disappeared" in Argentina, as did the MIR leader Jorge Fuentes. Alexei Jaccard and Ricardo Ramírez were "disappeared", and a support network to the Communist party was dismantled in Argentina in 1977. Cases of repression in the country against German, Spanish, Peruvian, and Jewish people were also reported. The assassinations of former Bolivian president Juan José Torres and former Uruguayan deputies Héctor Gutiérrez and Zelmar Michelini in Buenos Aires in 1976 were also part of Condor. The DINA contacted Croatian terrorists (i.e., Ustashe émigrés and descendants), Italian neo-fascists, and the Shah's SAVAK to locate and assassinate dissidents in exile.

According to reports in 2006, resulting from trials of top officials in Argentina, Operation Condor was at its peak in 1976 when Chilean exiles in Argentina were threatened; many went underground or into exile again in other countries. Chilean General Carlos Prats had been assassinated by DINA in Buenos Aires in 1974, with the help of former CIA agent Michael Townley. Cuban diplomats were assassinated in Buenos Aires in the Automotores Orletti torture center, one of the 300 clandestine prisons of the dictatorship. These centers were managed by the Grupo de Tareas 18, headed by former police officer and intelligence agent Aníbal Gordon, earlier convicted of armed robbery, who reported directly to General Commandant of the SIDE, Otto Paladino.

Automotores Orletti was the main base of foreign intelligence services involved in Operation Condor. José Luis Bertazzo, a survivor of kidnapping and torture who was detained there for two months, identified Chilean, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Bolivian nationals held as prisoners and who were interrogated by agents from their own countries. The 19-year-old daughter-in-law of poet Juan Gelman was tortured here along with her husband, before being transported to a Montevideo prison. There she delivered a baby which was immediately stolen by Uruguayan military officers and placed for illegal adoption with friends of the regime. Decades later, President Jorge Batlle ordered an investigation and finally, Macarena Gelman was found and recovered her identity.

According to Dinges' book Los años del Cóndor (The Years of the Condor), Chilean MIR prisoners in the Orletti center told José Luis Bertazzo that they had seen two Cuban diplomats, 22-year-old Jesús Cejas Arias and 26-year-old Crescencio Galañega, tortured by Gordon's group. They were interrogated by a man who had travelled from Miami to interrogate them. The Cuban nationals had been responsible for protection of Cuban ambassador to Argentina, Emilio Aragonés. They were kidnapped on 9 August 1976, at the corner of calle Arribeños and Virrey del Pino, by 40 armed SIDE agents, who blocked the street with their Ford Falcons. (These were the car models used by the security forces during the dictatorship.)

Prominent victims

Martín Almada, educator in Paraguay, arrested in 1974 and tortured for three years

Víctor Olea Alegría, member of the Socialist Party, arrested on 11 September 1974 and "disappeared" (Manuel Contreras, head of DINA, was convicted in 2002 for this crime)

Guillermo Roberto Beausire Alonso (Anglicised as William Beausire), British-Chilean commercial engineer, abducted at Ministro Pistarini International Airport on 2 November 1974. Returned to Chile, Beausire was held in various DINA torture and detention centres before his enforced disappearance on 2 July 1975.

Volodia Teitelboim, member of the Communist Party of Chile, targeted for murder in Mexico with Carlos Altamirano in Mexico in 1976

Juan José Torres, former socialist president of Bolivia, was kidnapped and assassinated by right-wing death squads in June 1976.

"Disappearance" of two Cuban diplomats in Argentina, Crecencio Galañega Hernández and Jesús Cejas Arias, who transited through Orletti detention center in Buenos Aires (9 August 1976 – see Lista de centros clandestinos de detención (Argentina)); both were questioned by the SIDE and the DINA, with the knowledge of the FBI and the CIA

Andrés Pascal Allende, nephew of Salvador Allende and secretary general of the MIR, escaped an assassination attempt in Costa Rica in March 1976

Carmelo Soria, Spanish diplomat, civil servant of the CEPAL (a UN organization), assassinated on 21 July 1976

Jorge Zaffaroni and María Emilia Islas, possible members of the Tupamaros, "disappeared" in Buenos Aires on 29 September 1976, kidnapped by the Batallón de Inteligencia 601, who transferred them to the Uruguayan OCOAS (Organismo Coordinador de Operaciones Anti-Subversivas)

US involvement

Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.

The United States documentation shows that the US provided key organizational, financial, and technical assistance to the operation into the 1980s.

In a United States Department of State briefing for Henry Kissinger, then the Secretary of State, dated 3 August 1976 written by Harry Shlaudeman and entitled the "Third World War and South America", the long-term dangers of a right-wing bloc and their initial policy recommendations were considered. The briefing was a summary of Southern Cone security forces. It stated that the operation was an effort of six countries in the southern cone of Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) to win the "Third-World-War" by wiping out "subversion" through transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and assassination. The report opens by considering the cohesiveness felt by the six nations of the Southern Cone. It was the assumption of the Shlaudeman's briefing that the countries in the Southern Cone perceived themselves as "the last bastion of Christian civilization" and thus they consider the efforts against communism as justified as the "Israeli actions against Palestinian terrorists". Shlaudeman warns Kissinger that in the long term the "Third World War" would put those six countries in an ambiguous position because they are trapped on either side by "international Marxism and its terrorist exponents", and on the other by "the hostility of uncomprehending industrial democracies misled by the Marxist propaganda". The report recommended that US policy toward Operation Condor should emphasize the differences between the five countries at every opportunity, to depoliticize human rights, to oppose rhetorical exaggerations of the "Third-World-War" type, and bring the potential bloc-members back-into our cognitive universe through systematic exchanges. According to the final statement, these suggestions were part of an attempt to convince the nations involved that the Third World War is not desirable.

Based on 1976 CIA documents stated that from 1960 to the early 1970s, the plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies to deal with political dissidents in South America. A declassified CIA document dated 23 June 1976, explains that "in early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets". US officials were aware of what was going on.

Declassification and reflection

In June 1999, by order of President Bill Clinton, the State Department released thousands of declassified documents revealing for the first time that the CIA and the State and Defense Departments were intimately aware of Condor. One DOD intelligence report dated 1 October 1976, noted that Latin American military officers bragged about it to their U.S. counterparts. The same report described Condor's "joint counterinsurgency operations" that aimed to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities"; Argentina, it noted, created a special Condor team "structured much like a U.S. Special Forces Team". A summary of material declassified in 2004 stated that:

The declassified record shows that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its "murder operations" on 5 August 1976, in a 14-page report from [Harry] Shlaudeman [Assistant Secretary of State]. "Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys", Shlaudeman cautioned. "We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good." Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche, approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries to meet with the respective heads of state about Condor. He instructed them to express "our deep concern" about "rumors" of "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad."

Kornbluh and Dinges conclude that "The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart the Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented". Shlaudeman's deputy Hewson Ryan later acknowledged in an oral history interview that the State Department was "remiss" in its handling of the case. "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. ... Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know", he stated in reference to the Letelier-Moffitt bombing. "But we didn't".

Other declassified documents further demonstrate the level of knowledge the CIA and State Department had about Condor. In a comprehensive intelligence report from 1 October 1976, the Department of Defense Intelligence stated which Southern Cone countries were participating in the operation, noting that Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile were the most "enthusiastic" about providing intelligence. The document also detailed a joint operation between Uruguayan intelligence agents and Argentine State Secretariat members that targeted a section of the Uruguayan group, OPR-33, in Argentina. The prospect of the operation Condor having the possibility to result in assassinations is noted as well, showing that the U.S. aware of this outcome.

Role of Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was well aware of the Condor plan and was closely involved diplomatically with the Southern Cone governments. He was Jorge Videla's personal guest to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, after his tenure as Secretary of State concluded. According to the French newspaper L'Humanité, the first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, and the right-wing death squad Triple A, set up in Argentina by Juan and Isabel Perón's "personal secretary" José López Rega, and Rodolfo Almirón (arrested in Spain in 2006).

Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State at the time, was deeply involved in Operation Condor plans. He was well aware of the movement to illegally remove or assassinate leftist and assumed communists, to push forward a dictatorship. CIA documents declassified in 2023 reveal Kissinger's involvement with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. On 8 June 1976, Kissinger met privately with Pinochet. Their conversation was documented. Prior to this meeting, Kissinger had been briefed about the ongoing crisis of human rights violations under Pinochet's rule in Chile, as well as the observations of Chile as a tyrannical state. Kissinger claimed to be 'sympathetic' to what they were doing in Chile. He argued that the Chilean government was fighting the Communists and the propaganda of the communist media. While recognizing the human rights issues that needed to be addressed to avoid legislative restrictions, Kissinger assured Pinochet that they were on the same team, "you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist". Kissinger recognized that the US could not openly assist a human rights violation, but would not undermine Pinochet.

In New York on 7 October 1976, Henry Kissinger met with the Argentine foreign minister, Cesar Guzetti. They discussed the current regime and the eradication of the left. Kissinger was not against the oppressive regime. The declassified document shows the willingness of Kissinger to assist Guzetti and the Argentine dictatorship removing leftists. When referring to the humanitarian crisis, Kissinger acknowledges the 'civil war' and the humanitarian issues within Argentina, while expressing to Guzetti that the government needs to move fast in the removal of supposed communists, "the quicker you succeed the better".

On 31 May 2001, French judge Roger Le Loire requested that a summons be served on Kissinger while he was staying at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. Le Loire wanted to question the statesman as a witness regarding alleged U.S. involvement in Operation Condor and for possible US knowledge concerning the "disappearances" of five French nationals in Chile during military rule. Kissinger left Paris that evening, and Loire's inquiries were directed to the U.S. State Department.

"French connection"

French journalist Marie-Monique Robin found in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the original document proving that a 1959 agreement between Paris and Buenos Aires set up a "permanent French military mission" of officers to Argentina who had fought in the Algerian War. It was located in the offices of the chief of staff of the Argentine Army. It continued until François Mitterrand was elected President of France in 1981.

In 1957, Argentine officers, among them Alcides Lopez Aufranc, went to Paris to attend two-year courses at the École de Guerre military school, two years before the Cuban Revolution, and before the rise of anti-government guerrilla movements in Argentina. "In practice", said Robin to Página/12, "the arrival of the French in Argentina led to a massive extension of intelligence services and of the use of torture as the primary weapon of anti-subversive war in the concept of modern warfare". The "annihilation decrees" signed by Isabel Perón were inspired by earlier French documents.

During the Battle of Algiers, police forces were put under the authority of the French Army, and in particular of the paratroopers. They systematically used torture during interrogations and also began to "disappear" suspects, as part of a program of intimidation. Reynaldo Bignone, named President of the Argentine junta in July 1982, said, "The March 1976 order of battle is a copy of the Algerian battle".

On 10 September 2003, French Green Party deputies Noël Mamère, Martine Billard and Yves Cochet petitioned for a Parliamentary Commission to be established to examine the "role of France in the support of military regimes in Latin America from 1973 to 1984" before the Foreign Affairs Commission of the National Assembly, presided by Édouard Balladur. The only newspaper to report this was Le Monde. Deputy Roland Blum, in charge of the commission, refused to allow Marie-Monique Robin to testify. The government's report in December 2003 was described by Robin as being in the utmost bad faith. It claimed that no agreement had ever been signed on this issue between France and Argentina.

When French Minister of Foreign Affairs Dominique de Villepin traveled to Chile in February 2004, he claimed that there had been no cooperation between France and the military regimes.

Europe

As showed in a declassified CIA document, in 1977 intelligence agencies from Britain, France and West Germany looked into using the tactics employed in Operation Condor against leftwing "subversives" in their own countries. The agencies sent representatives to the Condor organization secretariat in Buenos Aires in September 1977 to discuss how to establish an "anti-subversion organization similar to Condor", where the agencies would pool their resources into a single organization. The intention was for the agencies to act in a coordinated fashion against subversives within member countries in Europe.

Legal actions

Italy

In December 2000, the Italian Justice began the trial of eleven Brazilians, all military and police. They were accused of the disappearance of three Argentines of Italian descent. The Brazilians were active in Operation Condor. Due to the secrecy of justice, the results of the trials and the punishments of the criminals, if any, were not reported. In December 2007, they were enacted by Italian authorities, preventive arrests of several people involved, including the deceased João Figueiredo (former president) and Octávio Aguiar de Medeiros (former head of the SNI).

In July 2019, in a landmark ruling, the Italian courts sentenced former Peruvian dictator Morales Bermudez to life imprisonment, together with former Prime Minister Pedro Richter Prada and General Germán Ruíz Figueroa, for the disappearance of Italian citizens.

Argentina

In Argentina, the CONADEP human rights commission of 1983, led by writer Ernesto Sabato and René Favaloro among other respected personalities, investigated human rights abuses during the dictatorship. The 1985 Trial of the Juntas convicted top officers who ran the military governments for acts of state terrorism. The amnesty laws (Ley de Obediencia Debida and Ley de Punto Final) of 1985–1986 stopped the trials until 2003, when the Congress repealed them, and in 2005 the Argentine Supreme Court ruled they were unconstitutional.

Chilean Enrique Arancibia Clavel was convicted and sentenced in Argentina for the assassination of Carlos Prats and of his wife; in a 2011 court verdict, life terms were handed down to Alfredo Astiz, Jorge Acosta, Antonio Pernias, and Ricardo Cavallo. In 2016, Reynaldo Bignone, Santiago Riveros and twelve others were convicted.

Most of the Junta's members are in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Former military officers from Argentina and Uruguay went on trial in 2013 in Buenos Aires for their human rights abuses in Operation Condor. The cross-border conspiracy of dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s to "eradicate 'subversion,' a word which increasingly translated into non-violent dissent from the left and center left". These prosecutions were enabled by massive releases of formerly classified documents to the national Security Archive which were then used as evidence against the accused. "The documents are very useful in establishing a comprehensive analytical framework of what Operation Condor was", said Pablo Enrique Ouvina, the lead prosecutor in the case. Of the 171 Condor victims cited in the indictments, approximately forty-two survived and one hundred twenty others were killed and/or disappeared. "Condor was a latter day rendition, torture and assassination program", noted Carlos Osorio, who directs the Archive's Southern Cone Documentation project. "Holding these officials accountable for the multinational crimes of Condor", he said, "cannot help but set a precedent for more recent abuses of a similar nature".

The victims of Operation Condor included former Bolivian president Juan Torres, who was murdered in Buenos Aires in 1976.

Chile

Chilean judge Juan Guzmán—who arraigned Pinochet upon his return to Chile after being arrested in London—started prosecution of some 30 torturers, including ex-DINA head Manuel Contreras, for the disappearance of 20 Chilean victims of the Condor plan.

On 3 August 2007, General Raúl Iturriaga, another former head of DINA, was captured in the Chilean city of Viña del Mar on the Pacific coast. He had previously been a fugitive from a five-year jail term, after being sentenced for the kidnapping of Luis Dagoberto San Martin, a 21-year-old opponent of Pinochet. Martín was captured in 1974 and taken to a DINA detention center, from which he "disappeared". Iturriaga was also wanted in Argentina for the assassination of General Prats.

According to French newspaper L'Humanité:

in most of those countries legal action against the authors of crimes of "lese-humanity" from the 1970s to 1990 owes more to flaws in the amnesty laws than to a real will of the governments in power, which, on the contrary, wave the flag of "national reconciliation". It is sad to say that two of the pillars of the Condor Operation, Alfredo Stroessner and Augusto Pinochet, never paid for their crimes and died without ever answering charges about the "disappeared" – who continue to haunt the memory of people who had been crushed by fascist brutality.Among the Chilean victims of Operation Condor were former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 26-year-old American colleague Ronni Moffitt who were assassinated by a car bomb in downtown Washington D.C. in 1976.

Uruguay

Former Uruguayan president Juan María Bordaberry, his minister of Foreign Affairs and six military officers, responsible for the disappearance in Argentina in 1976 of opponents to the Uruguayan regime, were arrested in 2006 and placed under house arrest in 2007. In 2010, Bordaberry was convicted of violating the constitution, nine counts of "forced disappearance" and two counts of political homicide and sentenced to 30 years. In 2016, ex-Uruguayan Colonel Manuel Cordero was convicted in the lengthy Buenos Aires trial (he was the only non-Argentine defendant) and sentenced to 25 years.

Prominent Uruguayan victims of Operation Condor included two former legislators.

Legacy

The political scientist J. Patrice McSherry has argued that parts of Operation Condor fit the definition of state terrorism.

Fictional references

Don Winslow's 2005 book The Power of the Dog is based on the actions and some of the consequences of Operation Condor.

Nathan Englander's novel, The Ministry of Special Cases (2007), is set in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. Its main characters are Kaddish and Lillian, a Jewish couple whose son Pato is "disappeared" shortly after the Videla junta takes power.

Memorias de un desaparecido / Memoirs of a Disappeared (1996)

In DC Comics, the father of the superheroine Fire was a key figure in Operation Condor.

In the criminal series Numb3rs episode "Assassin", Operation Condor becomes a main point of focus.

Colm Tóibín's novel, The Story of the Night (1996) follows a gay Argentine man's account of aiding the CIA's political influence shortly after the fall of the military junta government.