excerpt - On General Augusto Pinochet’s 60th birthday, November 25, 1975, four delegations of Southern Cone secret police chieftains gathered in Santiago, Chile, at the invitation of the Chilean intelligence service, DINA. Their meeting—held at the War College building on la Alameda, Santiago’s downtown thoroughfare—was called “to establish something similar to INTERPOL,” according to the confidential meeting agenda, “but dedicated to Subversion.” During the three-day meeting, the military officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay agreed to form “a system of collaboration” to identify, track, capture and eliminate leftist opponents of their regimes. As the conference concluded on November 28, a member of the Uruguayan delegation rose to toast the Chileans for convening the meeting and proposed naming the new organization after the host country’s national bird, the condor. According to secret minutes of the meeting, there was “unanimous approval.”
Chilean records refer to Condor as “Sistema Condor.” CIA intelligence reports called it Operation Condor. It was, as John Dinges writes in his comprehensive history, *The Condor Years*, an agency of “cross-border repression, [whose] teams went far beyond the frontiers of the member countries to launch assassination missions and other criminal operations in the United States, Mexico and Europe.” His investigation documented 654 victims of kidnapping, torture and disappearance during Condor’s active operational period in the Southern Cone between 1976 and 1980. A subdivision of Condor codenamed “Teseo”—for Theseus, the heroic warrior king of Greek mythology—established an international death squad unit based in Buenos Aires that launched 21 operations in Europe and elsewhere against opponents of the military regimes. full - *https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-11-26/operation-condor-network-transnational-repression-50-years <https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-11-26/operation-condor-network-transnational-repression-50-years>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41845): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41845 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119496001/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
