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When one thinks of the Cold War dictatorships that scarred Latin America in the 1970s, the imagery of Argentina’s desaparecidos (the disappeared) or Chile’s violent coup under Pinochet often comes to the fore. Yet, nestled between its larger neighbors, Uruguay cultivated a regime of such methodical and pervasive control that it earned a chillingly clinical nickname: “the torture chamber of Latin America.” This moniker, however, only tells part of the story. Uruguay was more than a chamber; it was a laboratory—a testing ground for sophisticated techniques of surveillance, psychological repression, and transnational terror that would be exported and refined across…