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Operation Condor was more than a mere chapter of state terror; it was a concerted campaign to rewrite reality. Its methods—midnight kidnappings, clandestine torture centers, and the creation of the desaparecido (the disappeared)—were designed not only to eliminate individuals but to erase them from the historical record, to impose a future of silence and forgetting.
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Operation Condor was one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of the Cold War, a transnational terrorist consortium where South American military regimes collaborated to hunt, torture, and disappear their political opponents across borders. The image is one of a distinctly Latin American horror, orchestrated by generals in Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. Yet,
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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
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When one thinks of the Cold War dictatorships that scarred Latin America in the 1970s, the imagery of Argentina’s 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
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The Brazilian military dictatorship, inaugurated by the April 1964 coup, governed under the banner of “order” and anti-communism but relied on brutal repression and a technocratic developmental model. On March 31–April 1, 1964, army officers deposed President João Goulart – a left‐leaning reformist – after a bloodless revolt by junior officers and hostile governors in
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The 1954 coup that brought General Alfredo Stroessner to power inaugurated Paraguay’s longest-lasting dictatorship. Stroessner, an artillery officer and Colorado Party stalwart, overthrew President Federico Chávez on May 4, 1954 and quickly consolidated power . In a rigged July 1954 election he ran virtually unopposed and won 98% of the vote. Stroessner then combined military
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The U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) was founded in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone (Fort Gulick, near Fort Amador) as the “Latin American Ground School,” to provide technical and tactical training to Latin American allies. In July 1963 it was officially renamed the School of the Americas . From the beginning its
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Prelude to Repression: From Democracy to Dictatorship In March 1976, Argentina’s armed forces overthrew President Isabel Perón in a coup that inaugurated one of the darkest chapters in Latin American history. The new regime, calling itself the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process), promised to restore “order” and “Western Christian civilization.” In practice, it
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The Democratic Road to Socialism In September 1970, Salvador Allende Gossens—a lifelong Marxist and leader of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition—was elected president of Chile. His victory, achieved through free elections and within the bounds of a long democratic tradition, made him the first Marxist in the Western Hemisphere to come to power through
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In the mid-1970s, a clandestine network of South American dictatorships coordinated a continent‑wide campaign against leftist dissent known as Operation Condor. Institutionalized at a secret meeting in Santiago in November 1975, Condor united the intelligence and security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay in a joint counterinsurgency effort . Brazil formally joined the