Operation Condor: Pinochet's Secret Assassination Pact
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In the 1970s, South America's military dictatorships clubbed together to hunt down and eliminate left-wing dissidents across national borders, as part of a secret plan known as "Operation Condor".
Hundreds of people who fled abroad were killed as part of the US-backed state terror programme involving Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, on top of the thousands murdered on their home soil.
As Chile marks 50 years since the 1973 coup that ousted socialist president Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, we look back at the covert cross-border war he and other South American leaders waged against the left.
Condor was formally created in Chile in November 1975, when Pinochet's spy chief invited intelligence officers from other dictatorships to a meeting in Santiago.
The head of Chile's fearsome secret police, Manuel Contreras, was convicted in 1995 for the part he played in several assassinations but Pinochet, who died in 2006, escaped trial over Condor and other human rights abuses.
Most of the dissidents killed or kidnapped under Condor were nabbed in Argentina, where many Uruguayans, Chileans and Paraguayan activists had gone into exile before that country's leftist president was overthrown in 1976.
One of the first victims of the cross-border hits was Carlos Prats, former head of the Chilean army under Allende, who was assassinated with his wife in Buenos Aires in 1974 in a car bomb attack.
In 2008, Contreras was convicted in Chile of their murders.
At a garage in Buenos Aires, Argentine and Uruguayan forces detained and tortured hundreds of activists of various nationalities.
Fifteen former military officers were jailed in 2016 in Argentina for their role in the atrocities.
Opponents were pursued as far away as Rome, where Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife escaped an attempted assassination in 1975.
The most high-profile killing took place a year later in Washington, where Orlando Letelier, a former minister under Allende, and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, were killed by a car bomb.
The United States knew about Condor but did not oppose it, seeing South American dictatorships as a bulwark against communism.
"If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures," then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Argentina’s foreign minister in 1976, declassified US intelligence documents show.
The Letelier-Moffitt murders changed US policy, prompting Washington to distance itself from South American rights abusers.
On a visit to Argentina in 2016, then-president Barack Obama admitted the US had been "too slow" to condemn the dictatorship but stopped short of an apology.
Details of Condor only began emerging in the early 1990s after the discovery in Paraguay of a trove of documents that became known as the "Archives of Terror," about the collaboration between South American spy services.
Documents subsequently declassified by the United States shed light on Washington's role.
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