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- author, Francesca Lisa
- Author title, Conversation*
Fifty years ago, on November 25, 1975, military intelligence officers from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Santiago, the capital of Chile, to establish what they called the “Condor System.”
This operation, known as Operation Condor or Plan Condor, was a secret transnational terrorist network that allowed the repressive regimes in these countries to persecute dissidents in exile.
He left a legacy of torture, as well as hundreds of kidnappings, disappearances and murders.
The Condor system is built on three main operational pillars.
First, all intelligence relating to alleged subversive activities in the region was compiled in a database in Santiago.
Second, the encrypted communications channel allowed state agents to communicate confidentially and efficiently.
Third, the so-called Forward Command and Coordination Office oversaw joint operational activities.
Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay also created a Theseus unit against exiles from those three countries who lived in Europe.
Although Operation Condor ended at the end of 1978, bilateral operations, in which Argentina cooperated mainly with Brazil, Paraguay and Chile, continued until early 1981.
The Condor Plan allowed South American leaders to attack people who had fled their home countries and continued to denounce dictatorships from abroad.
Due to the top-secret nature of Plan Condor, there are no official lists of casualties.
However, my research has confirmed that there were at least 805 casualties between August 1969, when several South American regimes began to cooperate informally, and February 1981.
Although the victims came from diverse backgrounds, the majority were political and social activists, as well as members of revolutionary armed groups, mostly from Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.
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In search of justice
Since 1976, when Plan Condor’s repressive operations reached their peak, evidence has been collected about atrocities committed by member states.
In 1977, for example, Uruguayan journalist Enrique Rodríguez Larreta made statements to Amnesty International in London about his kidnapping in Buenos Aires the previous year. He had traveled there to search for his missing son.
Rodriguez Larreta recounted how he was arrested and tortured in three secret prisons in Argentina and Uruguay, before being released six months later. His testimony provided compelling evidence of secret coordination between South American military regimes.
In 1979, American journalist Jack Anderson published an article in the Washington Post in which he revealed the role of Operation Condor in the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier. Letelier was a minister in the government of former Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende.
Progress toward justice was limited as long as South American dictatorships remained in power. However, the collapse of many regimes in the region in the 1980s opened a window of opportunity.
This period saw groundbreaking achievements, such as the Never Again report published by the Argentine National Commission on Disappearing Persons in 1984.
In addition to investigating the military dictatorship’s systematic practices of disappearing people, the Commission was the first official state body to recognize the transnational terror mechanism of Operation Condor.
However, the possibility of bringing the perpetrators to trial for their crimes has been postponed once again.
The democratic governments of Argentina and Uruguay passed so-called impunity laws in 1986 and 1987, effectively blocking judicial proceedings against people accused of crimes during military dictatorships.
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These laws were passed mainly to appease the military and prevent new uprisings after the return to democracy. The laws of Argentina and Uruguay were added to the existing amnesty laws of Brazil and Chile.
The situation finally began to change in 1998. That year, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London to face charges of human rights violations, including atrocities committed under Plan Condor.
Pinochet escaped trial for medical reasons. However, significant progress has since been made in investigating, prosecuting, and convicting state agents for atrocities committed during Plan Condor.
More than 100 civilian and military officers have been sentenced to prison terms in South America for crimes committed during Operation Condor.
My research has identified 50 criminal trials since 1976 that have attempted to shed light on some of these atrocities. To date, guilty verdicts have been obtained in 40 of these trials, and more than 100 people have been sentenced to prison.
Among them are such prominent figures as former dictators Reynaldo Penone of Argentina and Juan María Bordabere of Uruguay. Several high- and middle-ranking military officers were also imprisoned, such as Chilean Colonel Manuel Contreras, Argentine Admiral Antonio Vanek, and Uruguayan Colonel José Niño Gavazo.
The majority of these trials took place in South America, with 13 judgments in Argentina, 11 in Uruguay, and seven in Chile.
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In September 2025, retired military intelligence officers Carlos Alberto Rosell and Gluco Iannone in Uruguay were sentenced to 12 years in prison.
These men were convicted of kidnapping and torturing political activists Universendo Rodriguez and Lillian Ciliberti, as well as Ciliberti’s two children, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1978.
This ruling is considered important, despite its delay for four decades. In February 1984, Rodriguez and Celebrity were the first to file a lawsuit in Uruguay for the crimes they suffered at the hands of Plan Condor. At that time, Uruguay was still under a military dictatorship.
The Italian criminal courts issued five rulings. In October, a Rome court sentenced Jorge Troccoli, a former Uruguayan naval officer, to life imprisonment.
Troccoli was convicted of killing Italian Raffaella Filipazzi, Argentine José Agustín Potenza, and Uruguayan Elena Quinteros between 1976 and 1977. Troccoli holds dual Uruguayan and Italian citizenship and fled to Italy in 2007 to avoid prosecution in Uruguay.
According to Alicia Merluzzi, a lawyer I consulted before writing this article, this operation not only once again confirmed the existence of Plan Condor, but also investigated its violent operational mechanisms and structures.
Merluzzi added that the trial “revealed the modus operandi of agents of repression outside borders, as well as the specific, planned and systematic organization of the atrocities to which the three victims were subjected.”
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Although significant progress has been made to achieve justice for the victims of Plan Condor, many of their crimes remain hidden under a cloak of impunity and silence.
As the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recommended in 2021, all former member states of Operation Condor must cooperate to clarify the scope of the crimes of this transnational network.
*Francesca Lisa is Associate Professor of American International Relations at University College London.
This article was published in The Conversation and is reproduced under a Creative Commons license. Click here To read the original version.
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