Peter Kornbluh on #OperationCondor

25.5.18

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Operation Condor - From: Columbia University | By: John Dinges

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | From 1975 to 1977 military regimes in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina rounded up thousands of people who were suspected of having affiliations with radical leftist movements and put them into concentration camps and secret detention centers. Many "disappeared"--they were tortured, interrogated, executed and secretly buried.

Dissidents fortunate enough to escape their home countries were located, captured and interrogated through the efforts of Operation Condor, a multinational intelligence organization. Often, the dissidents were returned to the disappearance apparatus of the military governments they fled.

Through declassified archives, investigation and interviews, John Dinges, a reporter and professor of journalism at Columbia University, crafted this chilling account of Condor's overall development and repressive practices.

The discovery and release of previously secret documents, along with aggressive new judicial investigations, are shedding new light on South America's worst era of political repression. The US government is helping by ordering the declassification of long-secret files, but the new information also is confirming a more active cooperation with the regimes' antiterrorist activity than has been previously acknowledged.

Human-rights crime wave in South America's Southern Cone

For three years, 1975 through 1977, the countries in what is known as the Southern Cone of South America underwent a human-rights crime wave of a magnitude not seen before or since in the region. Military regimes in place for more than a decade in Brazil and Paraguay were joined by like-minded military rulers who overthrew civilian regimes in Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia in the 1970s. Political police--described even by sympathetic US military observers as "Gestapo-like"--rounded up countless thousands of people who were suspected of affiliation with radical leftist movements.

Concentration camps and secret detention centers proliferated. The military carried out a political extermination campaign that resulted in the mass murders of more than 10,000 people in Argentina and more than 3,000 in Chile. A new word, "disappearance," was added to the vocabulary of international human-rights law. It referred to the process of secret arrest, torture and interrogation of suspects, followed by execution and secret disposal of bodies--often in makeshift crematoriums, in mass graves or at sea, where drugged prisoners were dumped out of helicopters. Similar tactics involving lesser numbers of murders--in the hundreds--were used in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia.

Perhaps the most closely guarded secret was a system of international cooperation among the dictatorships, known as Operation Condor. As one civilian government after another fell to the military, political refugees flowed across borders, in some cases seeking safe haven to organize revolutionary movements against the military. Operation Condor was an intelligence organization in which multinational teams tracked down dissidents outside their home countries, captured and interrogated them, and in many cases delivered them back to the disappearance apparatus of the military governments they had fled.