The Condor Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

simply a data bank, an exchange of information, and a communication system. But U.S. intelligence reports referred almost universally to “Operation Condor,” capturing more accurately the organization’s aggressive, activist nature.
    The Santiago meeting and the creation of Operation Condor is a central event in one of the darkest periods in Latin American history, from 1973 through 1980, when countries previously renowned for democracy and civilized virtues submerged themselves in terrorism, clandestine warfare, and systems of repression not experienced before or since. The Condor Years stand for the destruction of more than one hundred years of virtually uninterrupted democracy and rule of law in Chile and Uruguay. Argentina and Brazil had spottier records, going in and out of authoritarian rule, but both were modern societies with enormous economies. Argentina was considered the most “Europeanized” country in Latin America, whose elegant capital, Buenos Aires, was compared in its architecture and broad avenues with Paris. The same sophisticated Argentina that tended to look down on its neighbors as less cultured, less European, was transformed during the Condor Years into the country with a mass-murder body count in the tens of thousands.
    Until the late 1960s and 1970s “revolution” usually connoted military imposition of one ruler to replace another. Opponents were arrested and mistreated, even tortured and sometimes killed. It is not to diminish the gravity of the crimes of earlier eras to point out that they differed by many orders of magnitude from the practices of the Condor Years—when the mass arrests, secret prisons, concentration camps, even the use of extermination methods and crematoriums are comparable only with the worst practices of the Nazi era.
    Operation Condor itself was responsible for a relatively small proportion of the total deaths and violence, but it represents the final, worst departure from the rules of law and civilized society. States at their highest level of authorityentered into an agreement to cooperate in the enterprise of state terrorism. They discarded not only the human rights protections of their own citizens, but conspired to violate the norms of international protections: the right to sanctuary, asylum, protection of refugees, habeas corpus, and the carefully crafted procedures for extradition of those charged with crimes in one country and arrested in another.
    As a secret treaty, Condor elevated human rights crimes to the highest level of state policy, under the direct control and manipulation of the heads of state and ministers of government. Its existence as an official policy instrument of six nations made it impossible for those regimes to write off their human rights crimes as isolated acts of aberrant officials or rogue agents.
    The story of the Condor Years would be miscast, however, if it were told only as a litany of human rights violations. The story requires an objective and realistic recounting of the Marxist revolutionary side as well. In retrospect, the movements that brandished incendiary rhetoric and real weapons against states they denounced as bourgeois and corrupt may seem in hindsight predestined to defeat. But at the time, the outcome was by no means clear in Latin America. Both the right (ranging from the radical anti-Communism of the traditional land- and business-based rightist parties to the moderately liberal movements whose priorities were democracy and social reform) and the left (populist movements such as Peronism, Soviet-line, and other types of Communist parties, Social Democratic, and Marxist Socialist parties) took seriously the challenge represented by the “extreme” left. The revolutionaries inspired by the example of Cuba and Ernesto “Che” Guevara were convinced they were winning (for a time) and that their pockets of underground guerrilla warfare would become a catalyst for a countrywide, perhaps even continent-wide, uprising