50 years of Operation Condor: a coordinated strategy of repression in Latin America

Buenos AiresIn late November 1975, barely 50 years ago, a secret meeting took place in Santiago, Chile, between members of the intelligence services of Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. At this meeting, a transnational system of coordinated repression was formalized among these countries, with the objective of suppressing leftist opposition through the persecution and disappearance of people. The strategy, which Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil would later join, was called "Operation Condor," named after the emblematic Andean condor that watches over the continent from the heights and which, in the military sphere, is used to convey strength and dominance. Operation Condor sought to "complete the domination of the right," explains researcher John Dinges, who lived in Chile, working as a journalist, during the last year of Salvador Allende's government and for five years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship: "Condor was an alliance between civilians that embraced fascist ideas for building totalitarian governments." In the context of the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union vied for ideological hegemony, the right wing in Latin America deployed all its resources to ensure that communism did not spread in the region: "the objective of eliminating the left was international, therefore the solution had to be international as well." The targets were members of revolutionary movements, guerrilla groups, labor unions, and, in some countries, members of the Church who supported progressive movements more than conservative ones. Because this was a coordinated strategy between states, exile ceased to be a safe haven for dissent: Federico Jorge Tatter Radice is the son of Federico Jorge Tatter Morinigo, a Paraguayan communist activist who went into exile in Buenos Aires with his wife and three children, fleeing the dictatorship of Alfredo Videla and the Argentine armed forces under his regime.

Tatter Radice, who was only 17 when his father was taken from home, recalls a childhood of constant moves, changes of country, and secrecy: "In Argentina, they knew perfectly well who my father was, who his children were, who his wife was, and where we lived, long before the name Condor existed," he says. The countries shared databases that, although quite rudimentary compared to today's technology, served to monitor the cross-border movements of dissidents.

Crimes against humanity

And the repression, as such, had begun before 1975, as for example in Chile with the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. Alicia Lira, who was a communist activist at the time, remembers the years of the Popular Unity government as "unforgettable," full of "commitment, humility, a sense of community, and simplicity," until Pinochet's dictatorship took hold and took her husband away –"my black"—as she called him—in the early hours of the morning, dragged from his bed in the house they shared. "I went to identify him the next day at the forensic medical service: he had been executed on the way to the airport and left lying on the ground," she recounts in a conversation with ARA. She presides over the Association of Relatives of Politically Executed Persons of Chile. The 1970s and the first half of the 1980s also saw the weakening of the system of repression that had bound them together. Terror, a series of documents that confirmed the existence of the plan and that led to several investigations until reaching the trials for Operation Condor, which began in 2013 in Buenos Aires and later in other countries, such as Italy, under international jurisdiction.

In the trials, the legal principle of "crimes against humanity" was applied, which establishes that certain crimes do not have a statute of limitations and can be prosecuted in any country in the world. John Dinges asserts that a likely unexpected consequence of Operation Condor was the subsequent process of democratic reparations in Latin America: "Condor was a vaccine against repression and arbitrariness in the region, which during the 1990s and 2000s consolidated policies of memory, truth, and justice."

Although Condor was not a policy specifically created and implemented by the United States—as is sometimes claimed—it is well known that the authoritarian regimes in Latin America had the approval of the White House, with Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State. Regarding whether Donald Trump's current security policy, in coordination with right-wing governments like those of Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and Javier Milei in Argentina, could be considered Operation Condor 2.0, Dinges responds emphatically, "No," since doing so "would be to distort the original." However, he finds a similarity: "Condor was based on xenophobia, on suspicion of foreigners," and recalls how "in Chile, the military junta used to say that 'extremist foreigners are coming to kill Chileans.'" It is on this same geopolitical principle—hatred abroad—that Trump carries out his immigration policy, Dinges asserts, "which results in the murder of people on boats off the coasts of Latin America."