Operation Condor: the Transnational Network of State Terror in Latin America

In the autumn of 1975, intelligence chiefs and senior security officials from six South American nations gathered in Santiago, Chile, for a secret three-day meeting. The host was Manuel Contreras, director of Chile's feared secret police, DINA. The guests were their counterparts from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By the time the meeting ended on November 28, they had agreed to a formal framework for a system they named after Chile's national bird. Operation Condor — or Plan Condor, as it was known in Spanish — was the most ambitious and lethal network of transnational state repression in the history of Latin America. Over the following decade, it would be responsible for the killing, disappearance, and torture of tens of thousands of people across an entire continent, reaching into Europe and the United States with assassination operations of breathtaking audacity. It was sustained, advised, and in critical ways enabled by the United States government, whose Cold War priorities overrode any concern for the democratic values it claimed to champion. The story of Operation Condor is one of the most important, and still incompletely told, stories of the twentieth century.

The Cold War Context: Military Dictatorships Across South America

To understand Operation Condor, one must first understand the political landscape of South America in the early and middle 1970s. The continent had, within a very short span of years, come to be dominated by military regimes that shared a common ideological commitment: the destruction of the left, defined broadly to include not just armed revolutionary movements but labor unions, political parties, student organizations, journalists, priests, teachers, and anyone else who questioned the economic and social order.

In Brazil, the military had seized power in 1964, displacing a democratically elected government that the United States had feared was drifting leftward. The Brazilian regime, while eventually somewhat softer in its methods than its neighbors, established the template for authoritarian modernization in Latin America: rapid economic growth combined with systematic political repression. In Bolivia, a series of coups brought Hugo Banzer to power in August 1971, ending the government of General Juan Jose Torres, who had pursued nationalist and leftist policies. Banzer's regime was aggressively anti-communist and would prove one of the most enthusiastic participants in the Condor network. In Uruguay, President Juan Maria Bordaberry, originally elected in a disputed contest, dissolved the parliament in June 1973 with military backing and established what became a full military dictatorship, one of the most thorough in the region. In Paraguay, General Alfredo Stroessner had ruled since his 1954 coup — one of the longest dictatorships in the hemisphere. In Chile, Pinochet's coup of September 11, 1973 completed the transformation of the Southern Cone into a landscape of military rule.

Argentina was the major exception — until it was not. The country returned to elected government under Juan Peron in 1973, but political violence from both left and right spiraled out of control after Peron's death in 1974 and under the weak government of his widow Isabel Peron. On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military seized power in a coup that installed the most lethal of all the Southern Cone regimes. The military junta, led initially by General Jorge Rafael Videla, launched what it called a "Process of National Reorganization," known in Argentina as the Proceso. What the Process meant in practice was a campaign of systematic terror — kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and murder on a scale that would eventually account for an estimated thirty thousand deaths and disappearances. Argentina's entry into the Condor network added enormous capacity to the already formidable system of transnational repression.

The Founding Meeting: November 1975 in Santiago

The formal creation of Operation Condor took place over three days in late November 1975. Representatives of the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay gathered at the Santiago headquarters of DINA for what was officially designated the First Meeting of National Intelligence. The gathering was organized by Manuel Contreras and was essentially an invitation-only conclave of the Southern Cone's most feared secret police chiefs.