http://www.crimesofwar.org/special/condor.html

by J. Patrice McSherry

"...According to recently de-classified files, the U.S. aided and facilitated Condor operations as a matter of secret but routine policy.

In mid-April, 2001, Argentine judge Rodolfo Canicoba issued path-breaking international arrest warrants for two former high-ranking functionaries of the military regimes of Chile and Paraguay. These two, along with an Argentine general also summoned by the court, are accused of crimes committed within the framework of Operation Condor. Judge Canicoba presides over one of several cases worldwide investigating abductions and murders linked to Condor, a shadowy Latin American military network created in the 1970s whose key members were Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru and Ecuador. Condor was a covert intelligence and operations system that enabled the Latin American military states to hunt down, seize, and execute political opponents across borders. Refugees fleeing military coups and repression in their own countries were "disappeared" in combined transnational operations. The militaries defied international law and traditions of political sanctuary to carry out their ferocious anticommunist crusade.

The judge's request for the detention and extradition of Manuel Contreras of Chile, former chief of the gestapo-like Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), and former dictator Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, along with his summons for ex-junta leader Jorge Videla of Argentina, represents another example of the rapid advances occurring in international law and justice since the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998. In effect, the struggle against impunity is being "globalized."

As human rights organizations, families of victims, lawyers, and judges press for disclosure and accountability regarding human rights crimes committed during the Cold War, inevitable questions arise as to the role of the foremost leader of the anticommunist alliance, the United States. This article explores recent evidence linking the U.S. national security apparatus with Operation Condor. Condor took place within the broader context of inter-American counterinsurgency coordination and operations led and sponsored by the Pentagon and the CIA. U.S. training, doctrine, organizational models, technology transfers, weapons sales, and ideological attitudes profoundly shaped security forces in the region.

Recently declassified documents add weight to the thesis that U.S. forces secretly aided and facilitated Condor operations. The U.S. government considered the Latin American militaries to be allies in the Cold War, worked closely with their intelligence organizations, and promoted coordinated action and modernization of their capabilities. As shown here, U.S. executive agencies at least condoned, and sometimes actively assisted, some Condor "countersubversive" operations. ...

...Although the documentary record is still fragmentary and many sources continue to be classified, increasingly weighty evidence suggests that the U.S. national security apparatus sponsored and supported Condor operations. The new evidence reopens important ethical, legal, and policy issues stemming from the Cold War era. In fragile Latin American democracies today, civilian governments are still struggling to deal with the legacies of state terror and to control their still-powerful military-security organizations, while families are still trying to learn what happened to their disappeared loved ones.

For U.S. citizens, the new documentation provokes troubling questions about the country's central role in financing, training, and collaborating with institutions that carried out torture, assassination, and coups in the name of national security. During the Cold War, the ends were assumed to justify the means, resulting in appalling abuses that violated the human rights and fundamental freedoms the U.S. government publicly espoused. A process of truth and accountability is needed in this country to address the U.S. role in Latin American repression, as a number of lawyers and human rights activists have advocated. Moreover, U.S. officials should unequivocally reject security doctrines that rationalize violations of human rights as legitimate means to any end..."

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http://www.sundancechannel.com/film/?ixFilmID=6399&rname=The+Film+Finder

Director: Rodrigo Vasquez

"Argentinean filmmaker Rodrigo Vasquez investigates Operation Condor, a top-secret network of commando forces formerly supported by the CIA, the State Department and Interpol, that worked at the behest of rightist South American military dictators during the 1970s and '80s. Condor's operatives used brutal methods - including torture and assassination - to repress leftists, labor organizers and intellectuals. Veterans of this secret war now proudly claim it as the prelude to today's "war on terror." "Thought-provoking ... well-documented" - Variety."

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this film is a must see.

http://movies.aol.com/movie/imagining-argentina/19188/synopsis

"Accomplished British screenwriter Christopher Hampton directs the political drama Imagining Argentina, based on the novel by Lawrence Thornton. Set during the unsettling disappearances in Buenos Aires during the dictatorship of the 1970s, the film involves theater director Carlos Rueda (Antonio Banderas) and his wife Cecilia (Emma Thompson). Shortly after Cecilia writes an editorial commentary questioning the mysterious abductions, she is herself abducted and taken into police custody. Soon Carlos develops the supernatural ability to see into the future and he imagines his wife meeting an awful fate during an escape attempt. To make matters worse, their teenage daughter Teresa (Leticia Dolera) is also kidnapped. Imagining Argentina was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide"

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822318687/103-7320858-5066226?v=glance&n=283155

Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War (Paperback)

"This book is doubtless an important document about a too little understood period of Argentinean history and Taylor is careful to point out similarities of public response in the US and in other countries whose governments seem less and less For and Of and By the people."