Operation Condor was a top-secret arrangement among South American military intelligence agencies, formally launched in 1975 by Colonel Manuel Contreras, head of Chile's National Directorate of Intelligence, or DINA. It was a highly sophisticated system of command, control, intelligence, and exchange of prisoners, formed to control opposition to member governments. The operation was jointly conducted by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
According to a declassified 1976 U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report, Condor had several aspects. The first was mutual cooperation among military intelligence services, including the exchange of intelligence information and coordination of political surveillance. The second was cross-border operations to detain dissidents. The third and most secret was known as Phase III, which was the formation of special teams of agents to travel worldwide to carry out assassinations of political foes. Politicians were targeted for their ability to mobilize world opinion against member countries. According to archives discovered in Paraguay in 1992, Operation Condor operations were responsible for over fifty thousand murders, thirty thousand “disappeared,” and four hundred thousand incarcerations from 1974to1978.
Pursuit of Justice.
The international prosecutions of human rights crimes of the military governments of the Southern Cone began in 1976, with cases brought in Spain, Argentina, Italy, and Chile against the leaders of Operation Condor. The foremost example is the Spanish case against the former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet starting in 1996. Spain charged that the leaders of Chile and Argentina had committed human rights crimes as part of a criminal cartel that financed their terrorist activities with the national budget, and whose victims include[d] Spaniards and also tens of thousands of citizens of other countries, who were assassinated, kidnapped, or “detained and disappeared” in actions committed in many states of America and Europe. The conspiracy … received the name Operation Condor (Dinges, “Blowback,” p. 2).In Argentina the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), formed in 1983, began investigating Condor-related human rights abuses. These investigations were ongoing in 2007. Among its successes, in 2006 the former Uruguayan president Juan María Bordaberry, his minister of foreign affairs, and six military officers, responsible for the disappearance in Argentina in 1976 of Uruguayan opponents to the regime, were arrested.
The United States and Operation Condor.
In recent years investigators have uncovered evidence of the United States' role in Operation Condor. The documentary record is still fragmentary, and many sources remain classified, but evidence suggests that at the least the United States supported and may have provided resources to some operations. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knew of Condor's existence within a month or two of its creation. U.S. intelligence agencies had excellent sources inside Operation Condor and were monitoring developments closely. Declassified U.S. documents make clear that U.S. security officers saw Condor as a legitimate counterterror organization that functioned as a counterweight to increasing Communist influence in the region.
For those looking back on this era, the new documentation provokes troubling questions about the U.S. role—in financing, collaboration, and training—in institutions that sponsored assassination, torture, and abduction. During the 1970s it seemed that the ends justified the means, resulting in abuses that violated both human rights and the values that the United States espoused.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. © 2008
Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved.
