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excerpts from the book
Predatory States
Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America
by J. Patrice McSherry
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005, paperbackpxviii During the Cold war, highly politicized and ruthless militaries in Latin America, aided and abetted by Washington, used the methods of terror to wage their anticommunist wars in secrecy. Counterinsurgent forces created a vast parallel infrastructure of clandestine detention centers and killing machinery to avoid national and international law and scrutiny, and utilized disappearance, torture, and assassination to defeat "internal enemies." ... Six military states in South America extended ... parastatal structures and extralegal methods across borders - with a "green light" from the U.S. government - in a transnational repressive program known as Operation Condor (or Plan Condor). The militaries in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay were the key protagonists of Condor, spreading dirty war throughout the region and beyond. For them, the ends justified the means; torture, extrajudicial executions, and abductions were considered legitimate if employed against "subversives." During the Cold War, tens of thousands of Latin American men, women, and children were tortured and murdered as a result of such methods, hundreds of them killed within the framework of Operation Condor. ~snip~ p2 The legacies of the colonial hacienda system, with its tiny land-owning elites and vast rural worker and peasant sectors, contributed to persisting inequality. So did traditions in many countries of autocratic and elitist governments that remained indifferent to the plight of their poor.
p2
Movements for change were often met with repression. Foreign governments also played a role, especially the United States, which had supported "friendly" dictators in the region and often sent in the Marines to secure U.S. economic and political interests.
p3
U.S. national security strategists (who feared "another Cuba") and their Latin American counterparts began to regard large sectors of societies as potentially or actually subversive. They especially feared leftist or nationalist leaders who were popularly elected, thus giving their ideas legitimacy. Washington responded to the Cuban revolution by strengthening Latin American military-security forces and honing a security doctrine that targeted "internal enemies." National security doctrine - a politicized doctrine of internal war and counterrevolution that targeted the enemy within-gave the militaries a messianic mission: to remake their states and societies and eliminate "subversion".
p3
In the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s, U.S.-backed armed forces carried out military coups throughout Latin America, moving to obliterate leftist forces and extirpate leftist ideas. The militaries installed a new form of rule - the national security state.
p4
Operation Condor, formed in the 1970s, extended the dirty wars across borders. The system's key members were the military regimes of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, later joined by Ecuador and Peru in less central roles. Condor also enjoyed organizational, intelligence, financial, and technological sustenance from the United States, acting as a secret partner and sponsor... in 1980 Condor operations and methods appeared in Central America. Condor was a secret strike force of the military regimes, and it signified an unprecedented level of coordinated repression in Latin America.
p4
The Condor system consisted of three levels. The first was mutual cooperation among military intelligence services, to coordinate political surveillance of targeted dissidents and exchange intelligence information. The second was covert action, a form of offensive unconventional warfare in which the role of the perpetrator remains concealed. Multinational Condor squadrons carried out covert cross-border operations to detain-disappear exiles and transfer them to their countries of origin, where most disappeared permanently. The third and most secret level was Condor's assassination capability, known as "Phase III." Under Phase III, special teams of assassins from member countries were formed to travel worldwide to eliminate "subversive enemies." Phase III was aimed at political leaders especially feared for their potential to mobilize world opinion or organize broad opposition to the military states.
p6
In his landmark study, E. V. Walter argued that state elites manipulate fear as a mean of controlling society and maintaining power. Terror is used to engineer compliant behavior not only among victims, but also among larger target populations. While victims suffer direct consequences, broad sectors of society are the principal target. The underlying goal of state terrorism is to eliminate potential power contenders and to impose silence and political paralysis, thereby consolidating existing power relations. The proximate end is to instill terror in society, the ultimate end is control. Condor's targets were persons who espoused political, economic, and social programs at odds with the ideologies and plans of the military dictatorships, their elite allies, and their sponsors in Washington. Through the use of terror, the military states sought to extinguish the aspirations for social justice and deeper democracy held by millions of people during the 1960s and 70s. The evidence suggests that Operation Condor, and the generalized repression of the Cold War years in Latin America, represented a military "solution" to an age-old problem: the distribution of power and wealth in human
p8
Under Operation Condor, military intelligence organizations created special clandestine detention centers for foreign prisoners outside of the normal prison system, hidden in military bases or abandoned buildings. Torture and execution were rife in such centers. Exiles and refugees who were legally arrested could be passed into the covert Condor system, at which point all information available to the outside world about the person ceased. Prisoners were transferred across borders without passports, on unregistered flights, and like the other disappeared, their detention and imprisonment were denied by the state. To avoid detection, Condor disposed of victims by burning their bodies or throwing them into the sea. The pervading sense of ambiguity, unreality, and dread created by the parallel state was a key element of the terror used by the militaries to consolidate power over society.
p9
Condor employed a computerized database of thousands of individuals considered politically suspect and had archives of photos, microfilms, surveillance reports, psychological profiles, reports on membership in organizations, personal and political histories, and lists of friends and family members, as well as files on all manner of organizations. Several sources indicate that the CIA provided powerful computers to the Condor system (and, in fact, no other country in the region was technologically capable of doing so). An Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact in 1976 that the CIA had played a key role in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states. A former Bolivian agent of Condor, Juan Carlos Fortün, told a Bolivian journalist in the early 1990s that an advanced system of communications was installed in the Ministry of the Interior in La Paz, along with a telex system interlinked with the five other Condor countries. He said that a special machine to encode and decode messages was made especially for the Condor system by the Logistics Department of the CIA.
The Condor network's secure communications system, Condortel, enabled Condor controllers to exchange data on suspects, track the movement of individuals across borders on various forms of transport, and transmit orders to operations teams, as well as share and receive intelligence information across a large geographical area. Condortel allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor.
More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Predatory_States_Condor.html
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