Exposing the Legacy of Operation Condor
January 24, 2014, 5:00 am
Exposing the Legacy of Operation Condor
By LARRY ROHTER
In 1975, six South American military dictatorships conspired to concoct a secret plan to eliminate their left-wing opponents. Not only would the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay trade information with each other and kidnap, disappear and kill their own domestic foes, they would also cooperate in identifying and killing exiles from partner countries who had taken refuge elsewhere.
By the time Operation Condor ended in the early 1980s, as many as 60,000 people may have been killed. Precise numbers are hard to come by, because of the clandestine undertaking, and in the years since, political amnesties, the destruction or decay of public records and the reluctance of survivors to revisit the trauma of their imprisonment and torture have impeded the compilation of a definitive history.
But those were only some of the challenges that the Portuguese photographer João de Carvalho Pina, 33, faced a decade ago when he began a project to document Operation Condor. The torture and detention centers themselves have also been largely abandoned or converted to conventional uses, and there was a larger overarching conceptual problem for Mr. Pina to solve: how to illustrate something that by its very nature was both abstract and hidden.
Still, Mr. Pina, who has worked for The New York Times and The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek and other magazines, kept at it, and his labors are now bearing fruit. He has a book coming out this year, and he will be exhibiting about 100 of his photographs with a multimedia show at the Paço das Artes in São Paulo beginning in late September.
More:
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/exposing-the-legacy-of-operation-condor/?_php=true&_type=blogs&=&_r=0
Photos at link.