Operation Condor - Antecedents

Antecedents

In 2007, the American professor Patrice McSherry of Long Island University, through a secret CIA document, dated June 1976, confirmed the abduction and torture of Chilean and Uruguayan refugees in Buenos Aires. She said those plans emerged in the sixties in the School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies. A declassified CIA document dated June 23, 1976, and explains that "in early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets ". McSherry found that "(...) a CIA document, dated June 23, 1976, found that one year before the official emergence of Operation Condor, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets. "

In 1954, General Alfredo Stroessner took control of Paraguay. The Brazilian military overthrew the democratic and popular government of João Goulart in 1964. Through a series of coups General Hugo Banzer took power in Bolivia in 1971. On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet bombed the presidential palace La Moneda, overthrowing the democratically elected president Salvador Allende in Chile. Likewise, only three years later, March 24, 1976, a military junta headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla, seized power in Argentina. Condor was an operation similar to the strategy of tension used in Italy in the seventies, which was led by the so-called Operation Gladio, of which Licio Gelli was a member.