In 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.

In recent days, following the violent incidents in Torre Pacheco (Murcia), Vox leader Santiago Abascal has once again deployed his harshest rhetoric, calling irregular immigration a plague. In a press conference on July 14, he described the situation as a "genuine plague" nationwide. Other members of his party have demanded mass deportations and refuse to condemn calls by extremist groups to "hunt" migrants. The choice of word is not innocent: plagues are destructive, invasive, impossible to control; they provoke disgust and fear, and must be exterminated. For now, admittedly, Vox doesn't go that far: its platform doesn't literally propose "hunting" or extermination, but rather the immediate and widespread expulsion, even of the children of migrants already born in Spain. But then the words are: when it becomes normal to call a human group a plague, the next step—"hunting" or "extermination"—begins to be considered socially justifiable.