Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor; Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America, involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers in South America. Operation Condor formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to the Army War Academy in Santiago, Chile. The operation was backed by the United States, which financed the covert operations. France is alleged to have collaborated but has denied involvement. The operation ended with the fall of the Argentine junta in 1983.
Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. Some estimates are that at least 60,000 deaths can be attributed to Condor, with up to 9,000 of these in Argentina. This collaboration had a devastating impact on countries like Argentina, where Condor exacerbated existing political violence and contributed to the country's "Dirty War" that left an estimated 30,000 people dead or disappeared. Others estimate the toll at 50,000 killed, 30,000 disappeared, and 400,000 imprisoned. An investigative commission, relying on the Archives of Terror, among other sources, allowed for the identification of 20,090 victims of the Paraguayan Stroessner regime, including 59 who were extrajudicially executed and 336 who were forcibly disappeared. According to a database by Francesca Lessa of the University of Oxford, at least 805 cases of transnational human rights violations resulting from Operation Condor have been identified, including 382 cases of illegal detentions and torture and 367 murders and disappearances. American political scientist J. Patrice McSherry estimated between 400 and 500 killed in cross border operations. She further stated that of those who "had gone into exile" and were "kidnapped, tortured and killed in allied countries or illegally transferred to their home countries to be executed ... hundreds, or thousands, of such persons – the number still has not been finally determined – were abducted, tortured, and murdered in Condor operations".
Victims included dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests, monks and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals, and suspected guerrillas such as prominent union leader Marcelo Santuray in Argentina or general Carlos Prats in Chile. Condor operatives participated in tactics such as death flights. In Chile, anyone suspected of being a communist sympathizer could become regarded as a terrorist by Pinochet's government and targeted by Operation Condor. Condor's initial members were the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay; Brazil signed the agreement later on. Ecuador and Peru later joined the operation in a more peripheral role. However, a letter which was written by renowned DINA assassin Michael Townley in 1976 noted the existence of a network of individual Southern Cone secret polices known as Red Condor. Declassified documents revealed that US intelligence agencies had intimate knowledge of Operation Condor through inside sources and monitored the operation.
With tensions between Chile and Argentina rising and Argentina severely weakened as a result of Argentina's loss in the Falklands War to the British military, the Argentine junta fell in 1983. The ramifications led to more South American dictatorships falling. The fall of the Argentine junta has been regarded as marking the end of Operation Condor. J. Patrice McSherry has argued that aspects of Operation Condor fit the definition of state terrorism.
Antecedents
Operation Condor, which took place in the context of the Cold War, had the tacit approval and material support of the United States. In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter Jr. stated that:
to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are ... endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises.
According to American historian J. Patrice McSherry, based on formerly secret CIA documents from 1976, in the 1960s and early 1970s plans were developed among international security officials at the U.S. Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies to deal with perceived threats in South America from political dissidents. A declassified CIA document dated 23 June 1976 explains that "in early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets". According to the CIA, Operation Condor was a cooperative mission enabled by Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. The cooperation between the countries for intelligence and security services had existed from as early as February 1974 to late May 1976 when it was formalized.
Members of Condor coordinated their activities with one another, established a special network for communication, and constructed various types of training. Some of which included psychological warfare.
The program was developed following a series of military coups d'état in South America:
- General Alfredo Stroessner took control of Paraguay in 1954.
- The Brazilian military overthrew president João Goulart in 1964.
- General Hugo Banzer took power in Bolivia in 1971 through a series of coups.
- A civic-military dictatorship seized power in Uruguay on 27 June 1973.
- Chilean armed forces commanded by General Augusto Pinochet bombed the presidential palace in Chile on 11 September 1973, overthrowing democratically elected but unconstitutionally declared president Salvador Allende.
- General Francisco Morales Bermúdez took control of Peru after a successful coup in 1975.
- The Ecuadorian military overthrew dictator Guillermo Rodríguez in 1976.
- A military junta headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power in Argentina on 24 March 1976.
American journalist A. J. Langguth states in a 1978 book that the organization of the first meetings between Argentine and Uruguayan security officials, concerning the watching (and subsequent disappearance or assassination) of political refugees in these countries, can be attributed to coordination by the CIA, and that the CIA also acted as an intermediary in meetings between Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan death squads.
The National Security Archive reported, "Founded by the Pinochet regime in November 1975, Operation Condor was the codename for a formal Southern Cone collaboration that included transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination, according to the National Security Archive's documentary evidence from U.S., Paraguayan, Argentine, and Chilean files". Under this codename mission, several people were killed. As the report stated, "Prominent victims of Condor include two former Uruguayan legislators and a former Bolivian president, Juan José Torres, murdered in Buenos Aires, a former Chilean Minister of the Interior, Bernardo Leighton, as well as former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 26-year old American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, assassinated by a car bomb in downtown Washington D.C".
History
Cooperation among various security services had existed prior to the creation of Operation Condor, with the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion". During the Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on 3 September 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of information" between various services to "struggle against subversion".
In March 1974, representatives of the police forces of Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A death squad, to implement cooperation guidelines. Their goal was to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exiles in Argentina. In August 1974, the corpses of Bolivian refugees were found in garbage dumps in Buenos Aires. In 2007, McSherry also confirmed the abduction and torture during this period of Chilean and Uruguayan refugees who were living in Buenos Aires, based on newly declassified CIA documents dated June 1976.
On 25 November 1975, General Augusto Pinochet's 60th birthday, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor. According to French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School), General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces and former student of the French, developed the concept of Operation Condor.
Based on the governments' perception of threats, officially the targets were armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.), but the governments broadened their attacks against all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission. The Argentine "Dirty War", for example, which resulted in approximately 30,000 victims according to most estimates, kidnapped, tortured and killed many trade-unionists, relatives of activists, social activists such as founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, nuns, university professors, etc.
From 1976 onwards, the Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, were the operation's front-line troops. The infamous "death flights", theorized in Argentina by Luis María Mendía – and previously used during the Algerian War (1954–1962) by French forces – were widely used. Government forces took victims by plane or helicopter out to sea, dropping them to their deaths in planned disappearances. It was said that from this military bombardment that OPR-33 infrastructure located in Argentina was destroyed. In May 1976, members of Plan Condor met in Santiago, Chile, at which the participating countries discussed "long-range cooperation... [that] went well beyond information exchange" and were given code names. In July, the CIA gathered intelligence that members of Plan Condor had the intention of striking "against leaders of indigenous terrorist groups residing abroad".
In June 1976, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received a Briefing Memorandum from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The briefing concluded that evidence supported Argentina's state security forces taking part in extrajudicial killings. However, there was not sufficient evidence to show that other South American governments (Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) were running a targeted assassination program. "There is no evidence to support a contention that Southern Cone governments are cooperating in some sort of international "Murder Inc." aimed at leftist political exiles resident in one of their countries". However, in Argentina, "assassinations are the work of right-wingers, some of whom are security personnel. Argentine President Videla probably does not condone or encourage what is happening, but neither does he appear capable of stopping it".
This conclusion was somewhat contradicted in a report written from Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Harry W. Shlaudeman to Henry Kissinger on 3 August 1976, it was reported that the military regimes in South America were coming together to join forces for security reasons. They were concerned about the spread of Marxism and the implications that this could have on their grasp on power. This new force operated in other member's countries in secrecy. Their goal: to seek and kill terrorists of the "Revolutionary Coordinating Committee" in their own countries and in Europe. Shlaudeman expressed concern that the "siege mentality" that permeated the members of Operation Condor could lead to a larger chasm between the military and civilian institutions in the region. He was also fearful that this could lead to increasing isolation of these countries from developed Western nations. He believed that there was justification to some of their fears, noting that Uruguayan Foreign Minister Blanco's use of the term "Third World War" seemed intended to justify harsh and sweeping "wartime" measures, and emphasizing the international and institutional aspect, thereby justifying the exercise of powers outside national borders. Yet he felt that by reacting too strongly these countries could engender a strong terrorist counter reaction similar to the PLO in Israel. In a report later that month dated 30 August, sent to Kissinger, Shlaudeman expresses repeated concern that assassinations' could seriously damage these countries international reputation, which were U.S. allies. In this memo to Kissinger, Shlaudeman says: "What we are trying to head off is a series of international murders that could do serious damage to the international status and reputation of the countries involved". One month later in September, there is evidence that there was disagreement between Kissinger and the State Department over telling these nations to discontinue assassinations'.
U.S. documents dated 17 April 1977, listed both Chile and Argentina as active in using communications media for the purpose of broadcasting propaganda. The objective of the propaganda had two purposes. The first purpose was to defuse/counter criticism of the governments involved by foreign media and the second was to cultivate national pride in the local populace. One propaganda piece created by Chile entitled, "Chile after Allende", was distributed amongst the governments acting under Condor. However, the document notes only that Uruguay and Argentina were the only two countries to acknowledge the agreement. Paraguay's government was listed only as using the local press, "Patria", as its main propaganda producer. A meeting that was to have taken place in March 1977, discussing "Psychological warfare techniques against terrorists and leftist extremists", was canceled due to the restructuring of the intelligence services of both Argentina and Paraguay.
In late 1977, due to unusual storms, numerous corpses washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires, producing evidence of some of the government's victims. There were also hundreds of cases of babies and children being taken from mothers in prison who had been kidnapped and later disappeared; the children were handed over in illegal adoptions to families and associates of the regime. The CIA also reported that Operation Condor countries took very well to the idea of working together, and developed their own communications network and combined training initiatives in areas such as psychological warfare.