Kit Klarenberg exposes how Operation Condor—a 1970s CIA-backed alliance of Latin American dictatorships—became a global assassination network, enabled and shielded by Washington despite its spiraling brutality.
On November 25th, 1975, the 60th birthday of Chile’s CIA-installed dictator General Augusto Pinochet, high-ranking representatives of the repressive secret police forces of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay gathered in Santiago for a covert three-day summit. There, the quintet of US-sponsored Latin American fascist juntas forged an incendiary agreement. Dubbed ‘Operation Condor’ after Chile’s national bird, over the next eight years the endeavour blazed a gruesome trail of repression, torture, and murder throughout the hemisphere and beyond.
Declassified records of the summit contain little trace of the horror that was to come. They primarily outline the establishment of regular meetings between the oppressive agencies, formal and routine exchange of information, and the creation of a shared database “on people and organizations linked to subversion” in the region - in particular, individuals and entities “directly or indirectly linked to Marxism.” The only hint of belligerence is a brief snippet on the Operation being concerned with “attacking subversion related to our countries.”
Within months, Condor evolved into a transnational death squad nexus, with “subversives” the world over marked for execution. Of particular focus was the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR), an exile coalition of left-wing Latin American revolutionaries opposing the governments behind the Operation - which by 1976 also included Brazil. That July, a Condor meeting was convened, about which US intelligence learned. It was planned to insert operatives into Paris, where JCR was headquartered, to conduct intelligence gathering and ultimately, assassinations. A heavily redacted contemporary CIA memo noted:
“The basic mission of ‘Condor’ teams being sent to operate in France would be to liquidate top-level [JCR] leaders…Chile has ‘many’ (unidentified) targets in Europe…The Uruguayans also are considering targets…such as…opposition politician Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, if he should ever travel to Europe. Some leaders of Amnesty International might be selected for the target list.”
While the CIA installed all Condor’s constituent governments via military coups invariably involving mass disappearances and slaughter of political opponents, the Agency was extremely anxious about its Latin American proxies conducting “offensive action outside their own jurisdictions,” as a late July 1976 CIA memo recorded. Not least because it raised the prospect of the Agency being “wrongfully accused” of responsibility for “this type of activity.” The State Department was also intensely worried about the Operation’s extraordinarily broad range of targets. (more...)
Operation Condor: Transnational murder syndicate
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