Operation Condor and Human Rights: A Report from Paraguay's Archive of Terror

Abstract

In May 1995, General Manuel Contreras, head of Chilean intelligence during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, was sentenced to seven years in prison for ordering the 1976 assassination, in Washington, D.C., of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier. The assassination was allegedly the work of Condor, a secret network that reportedly connected the intelligence services of the military dictatorships that ruled South America's Southern Cone during the 1970s and into the 1980s. Using this network (purportedly masterminded by Contreras), these repressive regimes exchanged information on subversive groups or individuals operating within their countries; and ultimately coordinated the detention, deportation, torture, and killing of political prisoners. In addition to this exchange of information and prisoners, Operation Condor also served as a source of international hit squads (such as the one that killed Letelier) that struck at enemies of the participating regimes-Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, and Paraguay. The recent discovery in Paraguay, of a huge archive of government documents-known as the Archive of Terrorfrom the years of Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship (1954-1989) sheds light on this internationalization of repression and offers clues as to the existence and dimensions of Operation Condor. No comparable cache of publicly available documents exists in any of the other countries of the Southern Cone from this period of military rule. Therefore, the Paraguayan archive provides the best source of official documentation for analyzing the coordination of this repression and the functioning of Operation Condor.