Operation Condor was a secret pact among the military regimes of South America's Southern Cone to track, abduct, torture and kill political opponents across each other's borders. Formally set up in Santiago in November 1975 and lasting until the fall of Argentina's junta in 1983, it linked the intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, with Peru and Ecuador later playing a lesser part. Declassified records show that the United States knew of it in detail and gave the regimes assistance, while historians still debate how many deaths should be attributed to it.
A continent of dictatorships
Condor grew out of a wave of military takeovers: Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay from 1954, the Brazilian coup of 1964, Hugo Banzer in Bolivia in 1971, the Uruguayan dictatorship of June 1973, the Chilean coup of 1973 that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, and the Argentine junta of March 1976. Thousands of exiles from these regimes had fled to neighbouring countries, especially Argentina. Security chiefs began to cooperate against them from 1974, when police officials from several countries met in Buenos Aires.
The Santiago meeting
In November 1975 Manuel Contreras, head of Pinochet's secret police, the DINA, brought around 50 intelligence officers from the region together at the Chilean Army War Academy. They agreed to share information, build a common communications network and act jointly against "subversives". Its operations would later reach as far as Europe and the United States. In practice the targets came to include not only guerrillas but trade unionists, peasant leaders, clergy, students, teachers and other critics.
Killings abroad
Some of the most notorious attacks targeted prominent exiles. The Chilean general Carlos Prats and his wife were killed by a car bomb in Buenos Aires in September 1974, a murder for which the DINA has been held responsible. The Chilean politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife were shot and badly injured in exile in Italy in October 1975. In 1976 Condor's victims in Buenos Aires included the former Bolivian president Juan José Torres and two former Uruguayan legislators. On 21 September 1976 the exiled Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt were killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C.
The American role
Documents released from 1999 onwards showed that the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon had detailed knowledge of Condor, and, according to analysts at the National Security Archive, that the United States provided organisational, financial and technical help. Officials discussed warning the regimes against planned assassinations abroad in 1976, but the steps were never carried through. The role of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who met Pinochet privately in June 1976, remains a subject of controversy.
Counting the victims
The scale of Condor is disputed because it overlapped with each regime's domestic repression. Some estimates attribute 60,000 or more deaths to the wider system of repression; the political scientist J. Patrice McSherry put deaths in cross-border operations at roughly 400 to 500, while a database compiled at the University of Oxford has identified at least 805 cases of transnational human rights violations. In December 1992 the former political prisoner Martín Almada and a Paraguayan judge found a vast police archive in a suburb of Asunción, the "Archives of Terror", which documented the fate of thousands of prisoners and has since served as evidence in court.
Trials
Prosecutions came slowly, delayed by amnesty laws. In Chile, judges pursued Contreras and other DINA officers; in Uruguay, former president Juan María Bordaberry was convicted in 2010; and in Italy, courts in 2019 sentenced the former Peruvian ruler Francisco Morales Bermúdez to life imprisonment for the disappearance of Italian citizens. A trial in Buenos Aires that opened in 2013 dealt specifically with Condor, using declassified documents as evidence; in 2016 the Uruguayan colonel Manuel Cordero, its only non-Argentine defendant, was sentenced to 25 years. The operation forms one of the darkest chapters of the Cold War in Latin America and of Argentina's Dirty War.
On our maps
Our 1985 map shows the Southern Cone shortly after Condor ended, as civilian governments began to return.
From the atlas
Operation Condor in time and on the map
Operation Condor lasted from 1975 to 1989. Borders of Time has one world map from those years: 1985. The nearest maps from before and after are 1960 and 1994; compare them side by side.
Living through it, among others on this site: Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006), Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), Desmond Tutu (1931–2021), Elizabeth II (1926–2022), Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989), Fidel Castro (1926–2016), Hafez al-Assad (1930–2000), Hirohito (1901–1989), Idi Amin (1925–2003) and John Rawls (1921–2002).
Other events of the same years: Satsuma Rebellion (1877–2005), Nahda (1900–2000), Cold War (1945–1991), Decolonisation of Africa (1950–1975), Vietnam War (1955–1975), Dirty War (1955–1989), Space Race (1957–1975), The Troubles (1960–1998), Second-wave feminism (1960–1980) and Guatemalan Civil War (1965–1996).
Next to it in time on this site: before, Fall of Saigon (1975) and Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990); after, The Emergency (India) (1975–1977) and Soweto uprising (1976).
Quick answers
- When did Operation Condor happen?
- It began in 1975 and ended in 1989, lasting 14 years.
- Where did Operation Condor take place?
- Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
- How did the map change?
- Compare the atlas’s maps of 1960 and 1994 side by side.