(Wikipedia)
Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor), was a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing governments of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate alleged socialist and communist influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments.<1> Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor is highly disputed. The death toll is set at least over sixty thousand,<2> possibly more.<3><4><5> Condor's key members were the governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States participated in a supervisory capacity, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles.<6>
History
On 25 November 1975, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met, with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor.<7> However, cooperation between various security services, in the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion", previously existed before this meeting and Pinochet's coup d'état. Thus, during the Xth Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on September 3, 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of information" between various services in order to "struggle against subversion".<8> Furthermore, in March 1974, representatives of the police forces of Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A death squad, to implement cooperation guidelines in order to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exilees in Argentina.<8> In August 1974 the corpses of the first victims of Condor, Bolivian refugees, were found in garbage dumps in Buenos Aires.<8>
According to French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School), the paternity of Operation Condor is to be attributed to General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces and former student of the French.<9>
Operation Condor, which took place in the context of the Cold War, had the tacit approval of the United States. In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter stated that "In order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are...endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises." Condor was one of the fruits of this effort. The targets were officially armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.) but in fact included all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission.
The Argentine "Dirty War", for example, which resulted in approximatively 30,000 victims according to most estimates, targeted many trade-unionists, relatives of activists, etc.
From 1976 onwards, the Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, were its front-line troops. The infamous "death flights", theorized in Argentina by Luis María Mendía — and also used during the Algerian War (1954–1962) by French forces — were widely used, in order to make the corpses, and therefore evidence, disappear. There were also many cases of child abduction.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
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