Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System

Abstract

opening up of formerly secret state archives on both sides of the East-West divide, as well as truly astonishing developments in human rights and international law. Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon's request for the arrest and extradition of General Augusto Pinochet in October 1998 was perhaps one of the most astounding of these developments, not least because this case involved a former ally of the U.S. government in the Cold War. Clearly, the collapse of the Communist bloc and the end of the bipolar system were major structural changes on the international level, allowing concerns with human rights and justice to emerge with new strength and begin to challenge the limits set by Cold War geopolitics. In effect, the struggle against impunity is becoming globalized, a positive aspect of the larger phenomena of globalization. Yet profound questions remain. If a new threat to global U.S. interests were to emerge or a powerful challenge to the hegemony over the Western political and economic model were to arise, would concerns with human rights again be swept aside in the name of national security? Would the ends again justify the means? The arrest of Pinochet refocused world attention on the dirty wars of the Cold War era in Latin America. A key focus of Garzon's investigation is Operation Condor, a shadowy Latin American military network whose key members were Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil. Condor represented a striking new level of coordinated repression among the anticommunist militaries in the region, and its existence was suspected, but undocumented, until fairly recently. Condor enabled the Latin American military states to share intelligence and to hunt down, seize, and execute political opponents in combined operations across borders. Refugees fleeing military coups and repression in their own countries who sought safe havens in neighboring countries were disappeared in combined transnational operations. The militaries defied international law and traditions of political sanctuary to carry out their shared anticommunist crusade. This article shows that Condor was a parastatal system that used criminal methods