Operation Condor Research Articles

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

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.

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Operation condor

Operation Condor: Mexico's Antidrug Campaign Enters a New Era

In recent years Mexico has demonstrated the capacity to cultivate, process, ship, and transship vast quantities of illegal narcotic drugs. Such activity has traditionally been geared to the realities of domestic poverty, enormous profit, and American demand. Mexican marijuana dominated the U.S. market until quite recently. More importantly from the American viewpoint were the tons of Mexican heroin which saturated U.S. cities in the mid-1970s. Furthermore, Mexico is still the source of vast quantities of psychotropics and an increasingly popular conduit for South American cocaine.According to Craig (1978), U.S. officials long sought to convince their Mexican counterparts that the key to any effective antidrug program lay in eliminating the illicit product at the source. Until such time that herbicides were applied on a massive scale against marijuana and opium poppies, they argued, the annual Mexican campaign would prove an exercise in futility.

Operation Condor

Operation Condor