OPERATION CONDOR

Opening

Operation Condor was a pact among the military governments of South America's Southern Cone to hunt their opponents across each other's borders. Its founding meeting opened in Santiago on 25 November 1975, Augusto Pinochet's 60th birthday, hosted by Manuel Contreras of Chile's secret police, DINA. Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia signed the closing act on 28 November. Brazil sent observers and joined in 1976. Peru and Ecuador joined later.

Exiles who fled one dictatorship could now be seized, tortured, handed back or killed in another. The pact reached as far as Washington, where Chilean agents killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in September 1976. American officials knew of Condor months before. The paper surfaced in 1992 in a Paraguayan police station, and courts in Argentina and Italy have since convicted dozens of officers.

Timeline

Early 1974Security officials from several Southern Cone countries meet in Buenos Aires to coordinate against leftist groups.

25 to 28 November 1975The founding meeting in Santiago. A Uruguayan motion names the system after Chile's national bird.

May 1976The exiled Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz are kidnapped and murdered in Buenos Aires.

June 1976Former Bolivian president Juan José Torres is murdered in Buenos Aires.

10 June 1976Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tells Argentina's foreign minister, César Guzzetti, "We want you to succeed."

3 August 1976Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman reports to Kissinger that the Condor countries plan to "find and kill terrorists" abroad.

23 August 1976A cable instructs ambassadors to warn the governments against assassinations.

16 September 1976Kissinger, travelling in Lusaka, cables that "no further action be taken" on the warning.

21 September 1976A car bomb kills Letelier, Chile's former ambassador to the United States, and his American colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt at Sheridan Circle, Washington.

28 September 1976FBI attaché Robert Scherrer cables from Buenos Aires describing a "third and most secret phase" of Condor involving assassination teams.

22 December 1992Martín Almada and Judge José Agustín Fernández find the "Archives of Terror" in a police station in Lambaré, near Asunción.

27 May 2016A Buenos Aires court convicts 15 of 17 defendants in the Condor trial, covering 105 victims.

9 July 2021Italy's Court of Cassation confirms 14 life sentences from the Rome Condor trial.

Key figures

Manuel Contreras, head of DINA, who convened the founding meeting and was later jailed in Chile for the Letelier murder.

Augusto Pinochet, Chile's dictator, on whose birthday the meeting opened.

Henry Kissinger and Harry Shlaudeman, who received the early warnings and handled the demarche.

Robert Scherrer, the FBI legal attaché who described Condor's assassination phase.

Martín Almada, a Paraguayan educator and former prisoner, who led the search that found the archive.

Reynaldo Bignone, Argentina's last military president, sentenced to 20 years in the 2016 trial.

Physical and documentary trail

Condor has an unusually thick paper record. The Archives of Terror held about 60,000 documents, some 593,000 microfilmed pages and roughly four tons of paper from Alfredo Stroessner's police, including Condor correspondence. In Washington, State Department, CIA and FBI documents declassified from the late 1990s, many published by the National Security Archive, show what US officials knew and when. The political scientist J. Patrice McSherry has counted at least 402 people killed in Condor operations.

The record also shows the warning that never went out. Ambassadors were told in August 1976 to raise assassinations with the Condor governments. Several objected to delivering it, and on 20 September Shlaudeman told his deputy to take no further action. Letelier was killed the next day.

The Secretary has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. No Condor killing took place in Paris. Operations against exiles in Europe were planned, and the French capital was among the targets discussed, but they were called off. The archive was found in Lambaré on the outskirts of Asunción, not in the capital itself.

Things you might not know

• It ran on American wires. Paraguay's armed forces chief, General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos, told a US official that Condor members communicated through a US communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone.
• A stolen baby was found in 1993. Mariana Zaffaroni, taken with her Uruguayan parents in Buenos Aires in 1976 when she was 18 months old, was located and recovered her identity in 1993.
• A garage was a prison. Automotores Orletti, a car repair shop in Buenos Aires, served as a detention and torture centre for Uruguayan and other foreign prisoners.
• The archive was found by a former prisoner. Almada, an educator, had been jailed and tortured under Stroessner in the 1970s before going into exile.
• Italy tried it too. The Rome trial dealt with victims of Italian descent. The appeal court in 2019 handed down 24 life sentences.

Competing explanations

A regional murder pact with US approval. Kissinger's words to Guzzetti and the cancelled demarche suggest Washington chose not to stand in the way. The Canal Zone communications link, if accurate, implies more than passive knowledge.

A regional pact the United States watched but did not run. The founding, the operations and the killings were the work of the South American governments. US cables recorded and in some cases tried to warn against assassinations. On this reading the US failure was one of not stopping, not of directing.

The details of US involvement are still contested. No declassified US document shows an order to Condor or a direct role in a specific killing. Some files, notably on the Canal Zone link, have never been fully released.

Later life of the case

Condor became a matter for the courts rather than historians. Argentina's 2016 verdict was the first to rule that Condor was a criminal conspiracy. Chile convicted Contreras and others for the Letelier murder in 1993. From 2016 to 2019 the US government released thousands more documents on Argentina's dictatorship under the Argentina Declassification Project.

Finding

Condor is documented and admitted. Five military governments formally agreed in November 1975 to track, seize and kill opponents across borders, others joined, and their own records and later court verdicts confirm it. US officials knew of the assassination plans before Letelier was killed, prepared a warning and then dropped it.

What still will not resolve: how far American help went beyond knowing. The Canal Zone link and some intelligence files have never been fully opened.