The history of Operation Condor, the clandestine terrorist network of 1970s South American dictatorships, is often told through a lexicon of male-dominated power: juntas, generals, comandantes, and militants. The canonical images are of men in uniform, men in suits, and men holding rifles. Yet, to confine the narrative to this sphere is to miss its beating, brutal heart. The full story of Condor—its mechanisms, its impact, and its ultimate undoing—is inextricably linked to the experiences of women. They were not peripheral actors but central figures, cast in roles that reveal the deepest pathologies of the state terror apparatus and the most profound depths of human resilience.

This article argues that Operation Condor, as a patriarchal alliance, systematically targeted women with uniquely gendered forms of repression, viewing them as crucial vectors of political ideology and social cohesion. Simultaneously, in response, women forged a parallel, transnational network of resistance—an “anti-Condor”—that weaponized their traditional roles as mothers, caregivers, and moral authorities to challenge the regimes, preserve memory, and pioneer a new form of human rights advocacy. The relationship between women and Condor was a double-edged sword: one blade cut with the specific cruelty reserved for them, while the other was wielded by them to dismantle the very system that sought their silence.

The Gendered Logic of Repression: Woman as Target

The National Security Doctrine, the ideological bedrock of the Condor regimes, framed the fight as a war against a “cancerous” internal enemy—an ideology that threatened the traditional, Christian, and patriarchal family unit, which the state claimed to protect. Within this worldview, women who stepped outside prescribed roles were doubly dangerous: they were not only political subversives but also gender traitors. Their repression, therefore, was often specifically designed to punish, dismantle, and reassert control over their bodies, their families, and their societal function.

The Political Militant: Beyond the Combatant

Women were active participants in the leftist movements that the dictatorships sought to eradicate. From the Tupamaros in Uruguay to the Montoneros in Argentina, women served as militants, intelligence gatherers, and leaders. When captured, they faced the same brutal physical torture as men: electric shocks, beatings, and the picana (cattle prod). However, their interrogation frequently took on a gendered dimension. Torturers, often acting on intelligence shared through Condor channels, would specifically target their identities as women. Interrogations focused on their sexuality, their relationships with male comrades, and their maternal roles. The goal was not merely to extract information but to break them psychologically by violating the most intimate aspects of their being, reinforcing the message that their political involvement was an unnatural act that had to be violently corrected.

The “Women Behind the Men”: Kinship as a Weapon

Perhaps the most insidious strategy was the targeting of women who were not necessarily militants themselves but were related to one. Wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of wanted men were considered legitimate targets. The regimes operated on the patriarchal assumption that women were the emotional core of the family and that by torturing them, they could pressure their male relatives into surrender or confession. A wife could be detained and tortured in a cell adjacent to her husband, her screams used as a tool to break his will. This practice weaponized kinship, turning familial love into an instrument of state terror. It was a cost-effective form of repression: by terrorizing one woman, the state could target an entire family network.

Maternity Under Siege: The Ultimate Crime

The most chillingly specific form of repression targeted women’s reproductive capacity. This was not a byproduct of the torture regime but a calculated policy, most systematically implemented in Argentina’s ESMA naval mechanics school and other clandestine centers with direct Condor connections.

· Forced Pregnancy and Baby Theft: Pregnant political prisoners were often kept alive until they gave birth. They were subjected to inadequate nutrition and medical care, yet their pregnancies were meticulously monitored. Immediately after giving birth, often in captivity, they were almost universally executed, becoming part of the universe of the desaparecidosDesaparecidos Full Description: Victims of state terrorism who were secretly abducted, detained, and murdered without legal process or public record. The state denied all knowledge of their whereabouts, trapping families in a permanent state of anguish and uncertainty.Desaparecidos refers to a specific technique of repression where the state erases the existence of its victims. People were snatched from their homes or streets, taken to clandestine detention centers, tortured, and then secretly disposed of (often thrown from aircraft into the ocean). By refusing to acknowledge the arrest or the body, the regime stripped the victim of all legal rights and humanity. Critical Perspective:Disappearance is a form of psychological warfare against the community. It denies the families the right to grieve and creates a pervasive atmosphere of terror where anyone could vanish without a trace. It allows the state to maintain “plausible deniability” regarding its crimes while simultaneously signaling its absolute power over life and death. (the disappeared). Their babies were then systematically stolen by the security forces, who saw them as “spoils of war” to be re-educated in “morally sound” (i.e., regime-loyal) families, often those of the very officers involved in the repression. This practice, documented by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, was a genocidal tactic designed to literally eliminate the “subversive” gene pool and re-engineer the nation’s social fabric.
· Children as Hostages: Beyond infancy, young children of the disappeared were also vulnerable. In numerous cross-border Condor operations, such as the kidnapping of Uruguayan teacher Sara Méndez in Buenos Aires, children were taken alongside their parents. Simón, Méndez’s 20-day-old son, was confiscated and given to a Uruguayan police family to raise, while his mother was tortured in Automotores Orletti. The destruction of the mother-child bond was a central objective, a way to obliterate the primary unit of political and cultural transmission.

This gendered repression was transnational by design. A Uruguayan woman seeking refuge in Argentina could be hunted down by a joint task force, her status as a mother or wife making her just as targetable as her political activities. Condor created a pan-continental web where no woman connected to the “enemy,” however tangentially, was safe.

The Anti-Condor: Weaving a Network of Resistance

If the dictatorships wielded a double-edged sword, so did the resistance. The very identities that made women targets—their roles as mothers, grandmothers, and moral guardians—became the foundation for a powerful and innovative form of opposition. While the regimes collaborated through secret cables and intelligence reports, women built their own transnational network, rooted in public protest, clandestine solidarity, and an unshakeable demand for truth.

The Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: The Power of “Irrelevance”

The most iconic manifestation of this resistance was the emergence of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Beginning in 1977, a small group of mothers, defying the paralyzing fear that gripped the nation, began gathering in the historic Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, demanding to know the whereabouts of their disappeared children.

Their genius lay in their strategic use of identity. In the hyper-masculine, militaristic culture of the juntaJunta Full Description: A military or political group that rules a country after taking power by force. These military councils suspended constitutions, dissolved congresses, and banned political parties, claiming to act as “guardians” of the nation against internal corruption and subversion. A Junta is the administrative body of a military dictatorship. In the Southern Cone, these were often composed of the heads of the different branches of the armed forces (Army, Navy, Air Force). They justified their seizure of power as a “state of exception” necessary to restore order, presenting themselves as apolitical technocrats saving the nation from the chaos of democracy. Critical Perspective:The Junta represents the militarization of politics. By treating the governance of a nation like a military operation, these regimes viewed distinct political opinions not as healthy democratic debate, but as insubordination or treason to be court-martialed. It replaced the messy consensus-building of democracy with the rigid hierarchy of the barracks., these middle-aged and elderly women were initially perceived as politically “irrelevant.” They were not armed guerrillas; they were madres. This perception granted them a sliver of political space that no other opposition group enjoyed. Their weekly marches, wearing white headscarves embroidered with the names of their children, became a living, silent accusation against the state. They wielded their motherhood as a moral authority that the regime, for all its guns and torture chambers, could not easily dismantle. When the regime dismissed them as “las locas de Plaza de Mayo” (the madwomen of the Plaza de Mayo), they reclaimed the label, turning it into a badge of honor.

Their work was inherently transnational. They collected testimonies and information about cross-border kidnappings, providing early evidence of what would later be fully understood as Operation Condor. They traveled the world, meeting with Pope John Paul II and testifying before the United Nations and the Organization of American States, becoming the voice of the disappeared on the global stage and piercing the wall of silence the regimes had tried to erect.

The Grandmothers: From Protest to Forensic Science

The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo took this resistance a step further, evolving from protesters into pioneering forensic investigators and legal advocates. While the Mothers demanded “Aparición con vida” (Return them alive), the Grandmothers had a more specific, urgent mission: to find the estimated 500 children stolen during the dictatorship.

Faced with a state apparatus that had meticulously erased identities, the Grandmothers built their own scientific and legal counter-apparatus. They created a detailed genetic database of families with disappeared children, a monumental task in the pre-digital age. They worked with international geneticists to develop the use of mitochondrial DNA and the “Grandmother Index,” a statistical method to prove kinship, which allowed them to identify stolen grandchildren even when the adoptive parents refused to cooperate. This was a revolutionary form of activism: they used the very tools of modern science—the domain of the powerful—to expose the regime’s primitive barbarism. Every child identified and returned to their biological family was a direct victory against Condor’s plan to disappear an entire generation.

Clandestine Networks and the “Politics of Care”

Beyond the iconic public protests, a vast, informal network of women operated in the shadows, conducting a silent war of solidarity. This was the “anti-Condor” in its most grassroots form. Women ran clandestine communication networks, smuggling letters and messages across borders to inform families of arrests and transfers. They provided safe houses for exiles fleeing one dictatorship only to find themselves threatened in a neighboring country. They organized soup kitchens and support groups, practicing a “politics of care” that directly countered the state’s “politics of fear.”

These women, often operating under the radar of historical archives, were the vital connective tissue of the resistance. They understood that defeating the terror required not only public confrontation but also the daily, quiet work of sustaining life, preserving community, and protecting the social bonds the regimes were determined to sever.

Case Study: The Transnational Odyssey of María Claudia García de Gelman

The story of María Claudia García de Gelman encapsulates the full, horrifying scope of Condor’s gendered violence and the relentless cross-border search for justice it provoked.

María Claudia, a 19-year-old Uruguayan, was a member of the Communist Youth. In 1976, she and her husband, Marcelo Gelman (son of the renowned Argentine poet Juan Gelman), were living in exile in Buenos Aires. On August 24, 1976, in a classic Condor operation, they were kidnapped by Argentine security forces acting on behalf of, and with intelligence from, Uruguay.

Marcelo was tortured and executed. María Claudia, seven months pregnant, was disappeared. She was held captive, likely in the notorious ESMA detention center, until she gave birth to a daughter in November 1976. After the birth, María Claudia was executed, her body added to the anonymous thousands. Her daughter, Macarena, was stolen and given to a Uruguayan police officer involved in the repressive apparatus, who registered her as his own.

The case is a microcosm of Condor’s machinery: the cross-border kidnapping, the torture and murder of militants, and the specific, calculated theft of a child to erase her identity. For over two decades, Juan Gelman waged an international campaign to find his granddaughter. His search, supported by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, stretched from Argentina to Uruguay and beyond, following the twisted trail left by the transnational repression. In 2000, thanks to DNA testing and relentless pressure, Macarena was located in Uruguay. She was 23 years old. Her recovery was a monumental victory, a direct result of the forensic and legal frameworks pioneered by the women-led resistance.

Legacies: Shaping Modern Justice and Feminism

The struggle of women against Operation Condor did not end with the return of democracy. Their efforts have left an indelible mark on the fields of transitional justice, human rights, and contemporary feminism in Latin America.

Pioneers of Transitional Justice: The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo created a global paradigm for the right to identity. Their work established that the forced disappearance of children and the suppression of their identity are crimes against humanity, not subject to statutes of limitation. The legal and scientific methodologies they developed are now studied and applied in post-conflict zones worldwide. They transformed the search for their grandchildren from a personal quest into a foundational principle of international law.

Forging a Human Rights Feminism: The experience of state terror fundamentally shaped the feminist movements that emerged in the Southern Cone. It produced a distinct political philosophy that inextricably links the fight for women’s rights with the broader struggle against state violence and impunity. The slogan “Nunca Más” (Never Again) resonates deeply with the cry of “Ni Una Menos” (Not One [Woman] Less). The understanding that the state can be a primary perpetrator of violence against women, as it was during the dictatorships, informs a deep-seated mistrust of patriarchal institutions and a demand for a feminism that is actively anti-fascist and rooted in human rights.

The mothers and grandmothers demonstrated that the “private” spheres of family and motherhood are, in fact, intensely political. By bringing their personal grief into the public square, they challenged the very division between public and private life, a central tenet of feminist thought. Their activism proved that care, memory, and love are not passive sentiments but powerful political weapons.

Conclusion

Operation Condor sought to impose a new, silent, and terrified order across South America. In targeting women with such specific, gendered ferocity, it revealed a profound, if twisted, understanding of their power as the reproducers of culture, the nucleus of the family, and the keepers of memory. The regimes rightly feared that a politically conscious woman was a threat to their project.

And they were correct. For in failing to break these women, the dictatorships exposed their own fundamental weakness. The story of women under Condor is not a sidebar to the main narrative of military operations and political intrigue. It is the core of the story. It is the story of how a sophisticated, transnational machine of death and oblivion was met, matched, and ultimately unmasked by a transnational network of life, memory, and an unbreakable, love-fueled defiance. The laboratory of repression, in the end, was no match for the sanctuary of resistance that women built in its shadow.