On a relatively warm spring day on the 28th of November 1975 in Santiago, Chile, key dignitaries from an array of Latin American dictatorships met up to discuss the possibility of further collaboration between their respective states. What resulted from the meeting was a transnational system of repression, murder and disappearances unprecedented in global history.¹ Yet, the story of Operation Condor and its lasting legacy remains obscure. In recent years, even those countries that suffered directly from Condor have started to hide this history, particularly in the classroom, as the New Right in Latin America is attempting to whitewash the history books, particularly of those events that paint former dictators such as Pinochet (Chile) or Stroessner (Paraguay) in a bad light. Therefore, what follows is an outline of the events that took place exactly 50 years ago, the justice sought, and why Condor 2.0 is a worrying but realistic prospect in the eyes of many academics and human rights workers.

A Dark History

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many Latin American nations, particularly in the Southern Cone, fell to right-wing (often military) dictatorships. Perhaps the most famous case of this was the events that took place in 1974, which led to the fall and death of socialist President Salvador Allende in return for General Pinochet. Whilst relatively little is known about the origins of Operation Condor, it seems Pinochet was one of the spearheads of the plan, and in November 1975, representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay met.² The agenda for discussion was finding a way of defeating political opponents, particularly on the left, given their tendency to flee across borders and evade capture by their own autocratic government.³

For these countries, the answer was simple. If their opponents were crossing borders to escape capture, then their respective governments must act across borders to persecute them. And so a system of intelligence sharing, transnational hit squads and shared persecution of left-wing sympathisers took shape, even growing to incorporate Brazil by mid-1976. 

In terms of numbers, little is known about the exact numbers of kidnapped, killed and disappeared because of the clandestine and undocumented nature of the operation. Between all the states, there were tens of thousands of victims of political repression in Latin America, but directly related to transnational repression from Operation Condor, academics have found at least 805 victims.⁴ Most of the victims were kidnapped, disappeared and tortured within Argentina, but there were operations throughout Latin America and beyond the continent as well.⁵

In fact, perhaps the most infamous Operation that took place under Condor occurred on the streets of Washington, D.C. Orlando Letelier was the socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende’s Minister of the Interior, and after the coup that put General Pinochet in charge, Letelier fled to the US, where he worked for a number of policy groups and universities.⁶ But in September 1976, Letelier was killed along with an American colleague by a car bomb placed by the DINA (Chilean secret police) in Washington, D.C. Such a move proved to be one step too far for an administration in the US that, until then, had helped fund such operations, turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses taking place. Whilst killings related to Condor continued through Latin American countries until 1983, such an assassination proved to be the beginning of the end for the widespread campaign of terror and its international non-condemnation.

Justice after Condor

The road to justice for the victims of Condor is ongoing, often fought for by the relatives of those killed or disappeared in hopes of getting closure and the perpetrators of these crimes punished. However, the first key milestone to justice was in fact not long after the killing of Letelier when, in 1977, Uruguayan journalist Enrique Larreta spoke to a panel at Amnesty International discussing his abduction in Argentina in the previous year.⁷ The key component of Larreta’s testimony was explaining how he was transferred between Argentine and Uruguayan prisons and thus highlighting the coordinated and transnational nature of these crimes.⁸ Larreta’s testimony triggered a number of articles, investigations and new stories about Condor and the crimes being committed against political opponents in Latin America.

However, justice within the countries involved in Condor was not possible until the military dictatorships fell one by one. The first major dictatorship to fall was that of Argentina in 1983, followed by Brazil and Uruguay in 1985 and then a little later Chile in 1990. Whilst particularly in Argentina and Uruguay, great steps were made to find answers to the unsolved cases of Condor, such as the National Commission that Argentina set up in 1984 to investigate cases of disappearances.⁹ There were major setbacks, including a series of impunity laws passed in Argentina and Uruguay, which fundamentally blocked the ability for people to be prosecuted for crimes committed during the military dictatorships.¹⁰ Therefore, for most of the rest of the 20th century, little was done to prosecute those involved in these grave human rights abuses.  

A major shift took place in 1998 when, on the back of a court order by a Spanish judge, the British arrested General Pinochet whilst he was in London for a medical operation for crimes committed through Operation Condor. After this point, the number of cases throughout the Americas, but also in Spain and Italy, increased dramatically, and according to Professor Lessa of UCL, over 100 individuals have been sentenced to prison for crimes related to Condor.¹¹

However, as a result of Condor and the lobbying of victims and the relatives of victims, there have been major changes to international law to protect against transnational repression and, particularly, enforced disappearances, which until the late 1990s had no legal grounding in international law. Firstly, after much lobbying, enforced disappearances were included in the Rome Statute of 1998 as a crime against humanity, and thus the ICC is able to prosecute individuals on such a charge.¹²

Additionally, as a result of lobbying by a number of ex-Condor countries, the United Nations General

Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which further supported the recognition of such crimes within International Law in theory to stop such crimes from being carried out again.¹³

Condor 2.0?

With such advances in finding justice for those who suffered under Operation Condor, one would be excused in presuming that the lessons from Condor have been learnt. Yet, in recent years, there has been a trend of backsliding, particularly on both memory and education, over the dark history of this period. For example, the election of the self-proclaimed “narco-capitalist” right-wing leader Javier Milei in Argentina has led to efforts to understate human rights violations during the military dictatorship. In 2024, Javier Milei claimed that only 8,700 people disappeared during the military regime, whereas the number agreed upon by most human rights organisations is upward of 30,000.¹⁴  In the last five years, on separate occasions, the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay have attempted to remove Condor from much of the syllabus in schools despite the best efforts of human rights groups. Thus, there is considerable worry that the memory of Condor is slowly fading with time, and the crimes perpetrated under these regimes could repeat. Particularly, there is a worrying increase in the number of enforced disappearances in the Americas, not just in Condor countries but also in places like Mexico and, more recently, the USA and the ICE raids. 50 years on from Condor, it is more important than ever to remember the crimes that were committed and the people who were so incredibly harmed.