So, in 1975, the governments of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay secretly met in Santiago, Chile, and agreed to work together to spy on and track “suspicious individuals” and organizations “directly or indirectly linked to Marxism.” Before long, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador joined up, too. The middle of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of people’s movements in Latin America that threatened to upend the rigid hierarchies of the hemisphere.īut for the region’s paranoid leadership, even their internal campaigns of terror were not enough. So it was that, at the prodding of US-owned corporations like Chase Manhattan, Anaconda Copper, and Pepsi, former corporate lawyer and then-president Richard Nixon backed the military overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government in 1973, and its replacement by a vicious dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. Such changes, after all, directly threatened not just the power and privileges of the region’s long-standing elite, but Western business interests, too. Until then, Washington-backed juntas and dictatorships had successfully kept a lid on such social change, or simply overthrew whatever governments those movements succeeded in forming. The middle of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of people’s movements in Latin America that threatened to upend the rigid hierarchies of the hemisphere: feminist and workers’ movements, movements for indigenous rights, peasant-led movements for agrarian reform, and leftist movements, to name a few. It was the system working exactly as intended, in other words, and a stark reminder of the lengths the global centers of power will go to keep things the way they are. As its connections to anticommunist terror in Europe have become clearer, it looks more like a particularly successful example of the covert war the US national security state had set into motion all over the world against democracy and the Left, a war that saw it get into bed with fascists and that, in some cases, arguably constituted genocide. Zooming out, Condor was hardly some uniquely shocking case of anticommunist paranoia spiraling out of control. To say it was known about by the US government, which backed these regimes, is an understatement: though even this simple fact was denied at the time, years of investigations and document releases since then mean that we now know the CIA and top-ranking US officials supported, laid the groundwork for, and were even directly involved in Condor’s crimes. What followed was a secret, global campaign of violent repression that spanned not just countries, but continents, and featured everything from abduction and torture to murder. With South America in the grip of military dictatorships and rocked by the same kinds of social and political movements that were demanding change all over the world in the 1960s and ’70s, a handful of the continent’s governments made a pact to work together to roll back the rising tide of “subversives” and “terrorists.” These were just some of the most prized scalps claimed by Operation Condor, officially inaugurated forty-five years and two days ago. On a rainy autumn morning, a car blows up in the middle of Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, killing two of the three inside: a leader of Chile’s opposition in exile and his newlywed American friend. A conservative opponent of the country’s military dictatorship and his wife take an afternoon walk on the streets of Rome and are swiftly gunned down. In Buenos Aires, a former Chilean general returns home, opens his garage door, and is blasted thirteen feet in the air when his car explodes, incinerating his wife.
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