The Feathers of Condor: Transnational State Terrorism, Exiles and Civilian Anticommunism in South America by Fernando López (review)

With the continued release of previously classified or hidden documents, we are starting to understand more about Operation Condor, the coordinated effort developed by five South American dictatorships to terrorize and exterminate their political opponents in the mid-1970s. Founded in 1975 by the Chilean military government of Augusto Pinochet, it was responsible for intelligence sharing and murders across the continent. Fernando López’s exhaustively researched book aims to provide a fresh perspective on the existing literature (especially the work of J. Patrice McSherry, who wrote the preface).

The book has three intertwined arguments. First, these countries had much greater difficulty joining forces than typically realized. Second, the role of civilians— from both the Left and the Right—needs more attention. Third, the militaries intentionally overstated the threat posed by the Junta de Coordinación Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Coordinating Group, or JCR), a regional unified Marxist guerrilla force. Instead, the primary goal of the endeavor was to attack the political opposition and disrupt its connections to transnational human rights organizations.

López argues that for the involved countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) internal problems paved the way for what were otherwise unlikely partnerships. Historically, these countries did not generally have close ties and at times were even actively hostile. Indeed, Argentina and Chile almost went to war during Operation Condor. Hence, they had no prima facie reason to cooperate closely even when they sought to crush what they considered to be the same enemies. The regimes faced economic recession, difficulties establishing legitimacy given their undemocratic nature, and international condemnation for repression. López argues that, when combined, these factors prompted governments to look outward as a way to shore up political support in a manner that otherwise might not have occurred. Chile, which suffered acutely from these problems, was by this logic a probable candidate to spearhead such an effort. Overall this is a reasonable hypothesis, though one wishes that Lopez had explained why aggression might also have been a logical outcome. For example, problems at home helped prompt the Argentine military regime to launch a quixotic attack against Great Britain in the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas in 1982.

Responding to a call by Che Guevara in his “Message to the Tri-Continental,” four guerrilla groups created the JCR in 1974. Its members were able to launch armed operations such as kidnappings. On the whole, however, the JCR suffered from a lack of ideological coherence and from internal dissent, insufficient funding, a dearth of weapons, ambivalence from Cuba (which supported guerrilla groups unevenly), and poor planning. López goes into extensive detail about how guerrilla movements struggled. They were either defeated militarily or very nearly so, with their leaders killed or scattered into exile. The intelligence services of South American dictatorships were well aware of this but continued to frame their new cooperation in grossly exaggerated security terms.

As López tells us, there is much more to this story. Dictators and their intelligence officials were intent not just on killing their opponents. They saw the bigger picture, which included the growing importance of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), a phenomenon that constructivists in the international relations literature have analyzed in regard to human rights in U.S. policy. Those NGOs had important international connections, including to several increasingly interested members of the U.S. Congress starting in the 1970s. In the Chilean case, Salvador Allende’s widow Hortensia Bussi de Allende traveled extensively to criticize the military junta’s human rights abuses. Operation Condor was set up in part to intimidate NGOs and break their contacts with the opposition. Dictatorships found it galling that members of the U.S. Congress criticized them, as did officials in the Nixon and Ford administrations. The administration stonewalled critics, who then made even more contacts with international NGOs, which were able to provide information about the human rights...