Operation Condor

1975MajorContested

The military regimes of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia agree in Santiago to share intelligence and hunt down exiled opponents across borders. Hundreds are kidnapped, tortured or killed.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Death of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms → Seleucid Empire founded → Parthian Empire founded → Sasanian Empire → Birth of Muhammad → Muhammad's first revelations → The Hijra → Conquest of Mecca → Death of Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphate → Arab conquests → Abbasid Caliphate → Battle of Talas → Paper reaches the Islamic world → House of Wisdom → Al-Khwarizmi and algebra → Fibonacci's Liber Abaci → Bills of exchange → Medici Bank → Double-entry bookkeeping → Muscovy Company → English East India Company → Seven Years' War → Stamp Act → Boston Tea Party → American Revolution → Declaration of Independence → Articles of Confederation ratified → Shays' Rebellion → U.S. Constitution → Louisiana Purchase → Austin's colony in Mexican Texas → Texas Revolution → United States annexes Texas → Mexican-American War → Compromise of 1850 → Kansas-Nebraska Act → Lincoln elected president → Fort Sumter → U.S. Civil War → National Banking Act → Federal Reserve → Great Depression → Nazis take power → Munich Agreement → Nazi-Soviet Pact → Invasion of Poland → World War II → Atomic bomb → Cold War begins → Cuban Revolution → Salvador Allende elected in Chile → Coup in Chile → Operation Condor

Contested history

Consensus: South American dictatorships ran a joint program to track and kill opponents abroad, documented by Paraguay's 1992 'Archives of Terror' and later court verdicts.

Cross-border kidnapping and killingEstablished

Paraguay's police archives and a 2016 Argentine court verdict that convicted officers for Condor crimes document it.

US officials knew and did not stop itEstablished

Declassified records show the CIA reported on Condor by mid-1976 and Kissinger was briefed on its plans to kill opponents abroad.

The US created or directed CondorDebated by scholars

Washington backed the regimes and shared intelligence, but documents show the South American services ran Condor themselves.