Tracking the Origins of a State Terror Network

Abstract

Operation Condor was a secret intelligence and operations system created in the 1970s through which the South American military regimes coordinated intelligence information and seized, tortured, and executed political opponents in combined cross-border operations. Condor's key members were Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, later joined by Ecuador and Peru. In Condor operations, combined military and paramilitary commandos disappeared refugees who had fled coups and in their own countries and subjected them to barbaric tortures and death. Security forces in the region classified and targeted persons on the basis of their political ideas rather than illegal acts. The regimes hunted down dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, intellectuals, students, and teachers as well as suspected guerrillas (who are, in a lawful state, also entitled to due process). Long before the repressive network was formally institutionalized in 1975 and code-named Operation Condor, the militaries engaged in intelligence sharing and coordinated cross-border operations. A Brazilian intelligence officer disclosed in 2000 that in the 1960s, intelligence officers from other Condor countries came to three Brazilian bases for training in counterguerrilla warfare, interrogation techniques, and methods of (Gosman, 2000a; 2000b; Clarin, May 10, 2000). This former member of the intelligence apparatus Serviqo Nacional de Informaqoes (National Information Service-SNI) said that, beginning in 1969, combined teams gathered data, later used in the political repression (Notisur, July 7, 2000). Martin Almada, the Paraguayan educator who in 1992 discovered the Paraguayan police files known as the Archives of Terror, received information that Brazil