In 2001, elder statesman Henry Kissinger was staying in a fancy hotel in Paris.
While he was there, a French judge named Roger Le Loire called for a summons of this prominent
US figure.
He managed to skip town that day, but Le Loire wanted to question Kissinger about some of
his actions decades ago.
He wanted to know about several French nationals who were amongst the many thousands of the
‘disappeared’, a term for those captured, tortured, and killed by the governments of
South American military dictatorships.
Le Loire wanted to question Kissenger’s connection with something called Operation
Condor, a brutal series of coups, and mass killings that scars Latin America to this
day.
A scar that came with a lot of help from Washington.
Let’s talk about this dark chapter of the Cold War.
Hi, I'm Tristan, and this is Step Back.
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This should go without saying, but seriously heavy content warning on this one.
It’s one of the darker chapters of Human history, and that’s saying quite a bit.
The United States has been messing with Latin American countries since…
well as long as there have been Latin American Countries.
You might not remember the president, but the Munroe Doctrine is a famous, or infamous
depending on who you ask part of American foreign policy.
It s basically the rule that the US has the self-declared right to interfere with it’s
sphere of influence, that being basically the entire western hemisphere.
Back then it was to prevent Spain from trying to reclaim former colony countries, but today
it really means forcing Latin American governments to bend the knee.
Bit of an aside, but for example, look how hard the US is currently trying to pressure
Venezuela into an elite-ruled right-wing government…
Now, Operation Condor was a product of the Cold War.
It was part of a larger operation to recruit and use security forces in countries all around
Latin America in order to make sure these countries stayed friendly to US interests,
and out of the orbit of Moscow.
This work mostly happened with the help of the CIA.
It began with ideas drawn up at the infamous School of the Americas, which could be its
own video, but in short, it's like Hogwarts if instead of witchcraft and wizardry it was
for dictators and death squads, either way, infamous place.
The ideas came into action in 1974, where declassified documents show a meeting occurred
between different officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
The idea was to coordinate their efforts against “subversive targets”.
It sounds like its trying to stop guerilla fighters, but more meant anyone who threatened
these dictatorial regimes that took over all the countries listed earlier plus Brazil from
1954, to 1976.
The first actions were the support and direction of groups called death squads.
They’re about as nice as the name implies.
They’re basically teams that execute extrajudicial killings, as an act of terrorism in order
to repress a population or commit genocide.
You see these in many authoritarian regimes from the Cheka in revolutionary Russia as
a preamble to the gulag system, and the Einsatzgruppen in Germany as part of the Holocaust.
Their first targets were political exiles living in Argentina.
Anyone associated with the old governments or anyone displaced for being socialists were
now finding themselves victims of these squads.
Estimates are as high as 80,000 people died in these killings.
On top of that, the program included kidnapping, assassinations, and torture.
Socialist leaders like Juan Jose Torres, democrats like Bernardo Leighton Guzman, and former
diplomats like Orlando Letelier, who was murdered by a car bomb in Washington DC.
In 1975, representatives from the military intelligence of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,
Paraguay, and Uruguay collaborated with the chief of the Chilean secret police called
the DINA on plans to fight their political opponents under the guise of targeting armed
resistance fighters like Montoneros in Argentina.
Let’s talk about a few examples, beginning with Argentina.
One example of these operations is something called the Argentinian Dirty War.
During this time, the Argentinian military police murdered activists, trade union leaders,
clergy members such as nuns, university professors, and their families in order to suppress dissent.
Sometimes committing horrific murders such as death flights, where they would kidnap
someone and throw them from an aircraft into a body of water.
Oh, and the alt-right people talking about helicopters are directly referring to this,
because you know, they’re big proponents of freedom of speech and all that.
There were also many cases of taking children from their families, and illegally adopting
them to loyal families.
Just one of several nasty techniques employed under the explicit goals of crushing dissent.
The dirty war ran from 1976 until the end of Argentina’s dictatorial regime.
The Argentine secret police called the SIDE were the chief perpetrators of this violence
but had plenty of help from their counterparts in Chile.
They carried out a number of assassinations of dissidents from their country and others
in their little alliance who were hiding out in Argentina.
Heck, they even took help from Nazi War criminals to do it.
In 1977, they disappeared two French Nuns, the ones from the opening story, who were
part of an activist group of mothers whose children had been disappeared called the Madres
de la Plaza de Mayo.
They were found later to be victims of the death flights, but the mothers still fight
on to get justice for the disappeared to this day.
Bill Clinton ordered a large declassification of US-Argentinian relations in the late 90s
finding that the US was complicit in these actions.
The Argentina government fell in 1983, and the new democratic government set up a national
commission to find the fates of the disappeared.
It resulted in powerful testimonies of the depths these programmes went, and resulted
in the trial and life imprisonment of many of the high ranking Argentinian officials
involved, but gave many military officers amnesty after the army pressured the government.
Since then, there have been a number of high profile trials and sentences for those involved,
even some military officials.
Brazil is a different story.
Noone has yet come under prosecution for their involvement in Operation Condor, which came
to Brazil in 1978.
The Uruguayan military,with consent from the Brazilian military government, crossed over
to capture a couple in the Uruguayan opposition as well as their young children.
Some wrong place and wrong time journalists managed to expose this operation, and are
credited with saving their lives.
The Uruguayan military kidnapping Uruguayan nationals in Brazilian territory became a
scandal.
The Brazilian government captured the couple themselves, tortured them, and sent them to
an Uruguayan prison where they stayed until the restoration of democracy in Uruguay in
1984.
I think it's important to mention the countries that took in refugees from this violence during
this period.
Costa Rica, Canada, France, the UK, Spain, and Sweden took in many refugees, but none
took as many as Mexico.
Operation Condor officially ended in 1983, when the Argentinians overthrew their dictatorship
after losing the Falklands War.
In 1992, a victim of torture, and a Paraguayan judge uncovered a collection of documents
known today as the Archives of Terror.
These were the records of those kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the governments of
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with tacit support from Colombia,
Peru, and Venezuela.
There were four tonnes of documents, outlining tens of thousands killed, 30,000 people disappeared,
and hundreds of thousands imprisoned.
The document cache has been used in prosecutions of some of the perpetrators.
One of the most infamous of these dictators would be Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
A dictator put in power with help of the CIA overthrowing the democratically elected Salvadore
Allende on September 11th, 1973.
Thousands died under his regime, and to this day more than 1,000 are still unaccounted
for including likely the poet Pablo Neruda.
I do think the regime of Pinochet could be expanded upon as its own video, but his role
in Operation Condor could not be understated.
Also, details are sparse because Chile has been, less than cooperative bringing details
of his regime to light.
That being said, a little information about his involvement came out when the Spanish
arrested Pinochet in 1998.
What they found was several collaborations with fascists in Europe to organize the assassination
of socialist leaders in Chile as well as a host of other dissidents.
One project under the Chilean government was Operation Silence, which tried to remove witnesses
from Chile before too much information about the Pinochet regime could come to light.
Lastly, we have some evidence from Paraguay.
A US army officer reported he was sent from Washington to work on the development of a
prison and interrogation centre called La Technica as part of Operation Condor.
It became an infamous site of torture.
The details of which I really don’t want to get into in this video.
Woof, real quick, if you want to get important videos like this one in your email instead
of coming to Youtube, there’s a link down in the description to get it.
On that note, let’s talk about the United States.
Documents from the Archives of Terror as well as declassified documents from the CIA show
the US was a key part of Operation Condor, giving assistance with technology, money,
and organization.
In 1976, the CIA published an article saying that the countries of Condor felt embattled
by encroaching communism.
They also wrote about the advantages of these six regimes having a common purpose.
The head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras was a paid CIA contact until 1977.
Henry Kissinger met with the Argentinian foreign minister telling him they were on his side.
Often, and remember this one folks, these operations were wrapped up in the language
of counterterrorism.
As for Kissinger himself, the evidence that he has committed war crimes in South America,
as well as Vietnam and Cambodia, have been mounting for decades, but he seems immune
to the law.
Even the New York Times came to defend him, saying that it was just part of the game of
fighting communism.
New York Times opinion pieces are kind of immortal in their nuclear hot takes I see.
This is a pretty hard story to tell cohesively.
Many different things were going down at different times, and many of these states, including
the US are keeping a lot secret.
It might be many more decades before we know the full extent of what dark things occurred
as part of Operation Condor.
If you or anyone close to you was affected by this dark period of South American history,
know that you have my deepest sympathies as well as, I hope, many of the viewers.
The most I can do is tell this story and hope that knowledge of Operation Condor gets out
there.
Now I kinda get why President Maduro in Venezuela isn’t interested in American aid, no matter
how much John Oliver scolds him.
How do you rebuild trust after this?
If all this murder, imprisonment, and torture was in the name of stopping communism, I guess
I should just ask each and every one of you.
Was it worth it?
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Come back next week for more Step Back.