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  • Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America
  • Susana Kaiser
Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. By J. Patrice McSherry. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. Pp. xxx, 284. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $82.50 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Operation Condor was a joint venture coordinating intelligence and repression integrated by the military regimes of Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, and later by Peru and Ecuador. Focusing on its activities in the 1970s, McSherry sketches a veritable globalization of covert operations whose origins she traces to the aftermath of the Second World War and the special left-behind forces in Europe. This trajectory then moves into the Americas, particularly the Southern Cone, and expands to Central America in the 1980s. The book is a carefully documented chart of covert wars describing in detail the functioning of what the author defines as parallel state(s) and how the United States participated in their design, structure, implementation, and financing.

Faced with the difficulties of studying covert operations, such as extensively redacted U.S. declassified documents, the author supports her arguments with a variety of sources ranging from scholarly publications to testimonies from former torturers. The result is a well-researched book, an important reference source, and a welcome addition to the literature about state terrorism and covert wars. Predatory States is organized chronologically and thematically: The structure and methods of Operation Condor; the global context of the coordination of security and the crusade against communism during the Cold War; early operations of Condor and its evolving phases; key cases of abductions and assassinations illustrating Condor's scope; [End Page 468] the training of torturers and killers; profiles of some of its operatives; and Operation Condor's actions in Central America.

McSherry exposes Operation Condor as a "multinational, cross-border hunter-killer force" (p. 58) fulfilling a key function in the implementation of terror and fear in the region, and aimed at crushing and deterring movements for social change. The militarization of states and societies, and the targeting of "subversives," reveals a comprehensive system of policies orchestrated by several actors and institutions. We learn about the roles played by governments and their elected officers, by political and economic elites, the military, intelligence agencies, and that of French and U.S. instructors in counterinsurgency techniques. The cases presented describe Condor's meetings, training courses, abductions, tortures, disappearances, and executions. This discussion focuses on the coordination of intelligence after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, assassinations of prominent exiles in Argentina and Washington, D.C., the transferring of prisoners to be tortured and killed in detention centers throughout the Americas, the Condor station in Paris where many exiles were living, and links with sectors of the Cuban exile community involved in drug trafficking.

Different situations reveal consistent patterns. For example, there was the employment of major human rights abusers such as Nazi Klaus Barbie from the stay-behind armies in Europe or the Argentine "dirty warriors" who trained Contra forces in Honduras, in both cases to combat communism. The trajectories of some of Condor's operatives illustrate their power and economic resources to benefit from impunity, often recycling themselves as business entrepreneurs. Predatory States barely uncovers the tip of the iceberg and we could learn more about the whereabouts of the thousands who participated in these operations. But McSherry alerts us about the need to find out what former assassins and torturers, and those who give the orders and benefit from them, are doing now.

The book also presents ample evidence of the involvement of the United States, which the author argues is motivated by political and military goals linked to economic interests. This involvement includes U.S. officials' knowledge in advance of Condor's operations, the direct participation of U.S. military intelligence and the CIA's collaboration with Condor's communication apparatus, even the continuing operations during the Carter years. Furthermore, the author analyzes the deniability allowed by covert operations and argues that, by deceiving the U.S. Congress and public, Operation Condor and the structures of these parallel states damaged U.S. democracy.

Extending over six decades, this study highlights the...

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