On November 25, 1975, the day General Augusto Pinochet turned sixty, four delegations of secret police officers from the Southern Cone met in Santiago, Chile, at the invitation of the Chilean Intelligence Service (DINA). Their mission: “to create something similar to Interpol,” according to the secret meeting’s agenda, “but dedicated to subversion.”
During their secret three-day meeting at the Chilean War Academy, military officers from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay agreed to form a “cooperative system” to identify, locate, track, arrest and “liquidate” left-wing opponents of their regimes. At the conclusion of the conference on November 28, a member of the Uruguay delegation rose to toast the host country and proposed naming the new organization after Chile’s majestic national bird: the Andean condor.
According to a confidential summary of the meeting, the proposal was approved unanimously. Thus was born the transnational “Condor regime,” a stark symbol of the abuses of power of the past that tyranny could bring us in the future.
Half a century ago, the launch of the condor unleashed a wave of state-sponsored terrorism across the Western Hemisphere and beyond. “Operation Condor,” as the CIA defined it in top-secret reports, became a multinational agency of “cross-border repression,” as investigative journalist John Dinges wrote in his comprehensive history: The condor years“(whose teams went beyond the borders of member states to launch assassination missions and other criminal operations in the United States, Mexico and Europe.”)
During the active period of Operation Condor, between 1976 and 1980, Dinges and other investigators recorded at least 654 victims of cross-border kidnappings, torture and disappearances. The majority of these crimes against human rights were committed in the Southern Cone region. (In 1976, Brazil joined, and in 1978, Peru and Ecuador also joined together.) But a sub-directorate of the Condor River, has the code name Theseus – named after the heroic warrior-king of Greek mythology – he established an international death squad unit based in Buenos Aires that carried out 21 operations in Europe and elsewhere to assassinate opponents of the Southern Cone military regimes.
Creation in Chile
The creation of the condor must be attributed to the Pinochet regime, and more specifically to our president, Manuel Contreras. According to one CIA Condor member, he was “the man who invented the whole concept of the Condor and was the catalyst for its implementation.” Contreras personally invited his counterparts from Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay to attend the inaugural meeting in Santiago in November 1975. Chile also hosted the second meeting, held in Santiago on May 31, 1976, during which the Condor Sub-Directorate for International Assassinations was created. Theseus. To select the targets to be “liquidated,” according to a classified CIA intelligence report, Contreras “coordinated details and lists of targets with Chilean President Augusto Pinochet.”
Another CIA report noted that “Chile has numerous (unspecified) targets in Europe.” CIA sources also indicated that “it is possible that some AI leaders may be selected for inclusion on the target list.”
Santiago also served as the headquarters of the Central Data and Archives Office of Condor. But Condor’s operations, command and control division, known as KondorigeIts headquarters will be in Buenos Aires. Death squad special unit Theseuscomposed of specially trained agents from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, also used a base in Buenos Aires.
The agreement stipulates that “each representative will present his or her choice of target in the form of a proposal.” theseus, September 1976, acquired by the CIA. “The final selection of the target will be made by simple majority vote.” In the department Executing the goalThe text of the agreement continues: “This is the responsibility of the operational team that will (a) intercept the target, (b) carry out the operation, and (c) escape.”
The operational costs for these assassination missions were estimated at “$3,500 per person for ten days, with an additional $1,000 the first time for clothing costs.”
The role of the United States
We know these hackneyed details of such terrorist operations because Condor officials secretly shared them with the CIA. More than 40 years later, top-secret CIA intelligence documents have finally been declassified. The intelligence agency apparently learned of the Condor’s existence in March 1976, but intelligence gathering efforts intensified after the second Condor meeting in Santiago, having learned of the plan. Theseus.
The United States has often been accused of encouraging Operation Condor, but these accusations are inaccurate. To be sure, officials like Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had no problem with the “dirty wars” in the Southern Cone; The United States helped bring these repressive military regimes to power, supported the secret police forces in Southern Cone, and encouraged the exchange of intelligence among them.
However, American officials had a major problem with international assassinations, especially on the streets of allied countries in Europe, precisely because Washington was closely linked to the military junta that was behind Operation Condor. “At the international level, the Latin generals look like our boys,” Kissinger was informed on August 3, 1976, in a classified briefing document about the existence of Operation Condor. “They specifically associate us with Chile. This does us no good at all.”
When American officials learned of the operations TheseusThe CIA was in the midst of a mass killing scandal, sparked by the publication of a special Senate report in Washington that exposed the agency’s history of mass killings. Conspiracies Of assassinations against foreign leaders, such as Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and Chilean General Rene Schneider. For this reason, CIA officials considered this… Conspiracies The Condor was a time bomb for the agency. The head of the CIA’s Latin American Division, Ray Warren, warned in late July 1976 that “plans by these countries to conduct offensive actions outside their jurisdiction pose new problems for the Agency. Every precaution must be taken to ensure that the Agency is not unfairly accused of involvement in this type of activity.”
In fact, the CIA was so concerned about what Warren called “the negative political ramifications for the agency if Condors carried out assassinations” that it took preemptive steps to preempt Condor operations in Europe. A declassified US Senate study, based on top-secret CIA reports, stated that “the CIA warned the governments of the countries where assassinations were likely to occur – France and Portugal – which in turn warned the potential targets.”
Unfortunately, the CIA failed to detect or prevent Condor’s most dramatic mission: the assassination by car bomb of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young aide Ronnie Moffitt on September 21, 1976, in downtown Washington, D.C. To keep this daring operation secret, General Pinochet, who according to the CIA “personally ordered” the assassination of Letellier, and Colonel Contreras, avoided Tessio’s structure, but used Condor’s cooperation. According to the confessions of Dina’s killer, Michael Townley, he was informed of the existence of a group of “Red Condor” intelligence services that included Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, and that the Paraguayans were going to give them “official passports and obtain official visas to enter the United States.”
Justice and responsibility
It is an “historical irony,” as John Dinges has pointed out, “that these international crimes committed by dictatorial regimes led to investigations, including those culminating in the arrest of Pinochet in London, that would ultimately bring hundreds of military personnel responsible to justice.” In fact, condor crimes have come back to haunt their perpetrators. Chile’s first human rights trial after the return to civilian rule led to the conviction of Colonel Contreras and his deputy, Pedro Espinosa, for their role in the murder of Letelier Moffet. Pinochet himself was arrested in London under an Interpol arrest warrant issued by Spain under the European Convention against Terrorism. A major trial that ended in May 2016 in Buenos Aires led to the conviction of 15 Argentine soldiers for the Condor crimes. In September 2018, Chilean judge Mario Carrozza convicted 20 former DINA members for participating in the atrocities committed at Condor.
These investigations and judicial proceedings have created a dramatic and revealing historical record of the condor and its criminal consequences. Of course, there is still a lot to know: the armies of the former Condor nations have been hampered by the disclosure of their intelligence files; Other countries, such as France, Great Britain, and Germany, continue to maintain secret files on condors, and the United States has imposed extensive censorship on CIA documents, withholding information from those responsible for condor crimes.
All these files must be disclosed. As Francesca Lisa, author Condor TrialsHe added: “Hundreds of victims’ families are still waiting to learn the truth about what happened to their loved ones. They deserve answers as quickly as possible.”
Despite current efforts by politicians in the countries where Condor operates, such as Chile, Argentina and Brazil, to erase the past and pretend that these atrocities never happened, the available documents still deliver the indisputable verdict of history: guilty. 50 years after the creation of the Condor, credible evidence of coordinated human rights atrocities committed by military regimes in the Southern Cone can never be denied, covered up or justified.