Lessons Learned from Fifty Years of Operation Cóndor

In this blog, Tom Hindley, a final-year undergraduate at the UCL Institute of the Americas, writes on the recent Institute of the Americas’ public seminar about Operation Cóndor.

 Lessons Learned from Fifty Years of Operation Cóndor

Tom Hindley

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the latest instalment in the Institute of the Americas’ public seminar series. As a student at the Institute, I regularly attend these seminars, which offer an opportunity to connect with my academic interests (and grab some of the best empanadas available in London). However, this particular seminar really stood out as both a cutting remembrance of an important historical process, the coordinated policy of repression across several South American countries by military regimes in the 1970s that came to be known as Plan Cóndor or Operation Cóndor, and a reminder of a poignantly current political trend towards authoritarianism.

Fifty years after Operation Cóndor, to some, may sound like a conventional retelling of a conventional Latin American Cold War history that elicits the usual senses of shock and disbelief which accompany a raw account of violence and human rights abuse. However, through the broad perspectives of speakers Karinna Fernández Neira, Philippe Sands and Sebastián Smart, the idea of a concluded history – or of anything conventional at all – could not be further from the truth. Professor Sands, who advocated for Human Rights Watch in the prosecution of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet after his arrest in Marylebone in 1998, brought his varied and contextualising experiences of human rights law from across a decorated career to this talk. With references to the British memory of Northern Ireland, the Chagos Islands and continuing international human rights debates across the globe, Professor Sands noted that work in this field is still ongoing and that the attitudes of the Cóndor years are alive and well. Simultaneously, Professor Sands’ anecdotes of his further investigations after prosecuting Pinochet, which led him to write his new book 38 Londres Street, reminded the audience of how history has shaped the world today in relation to the memory of Operation Cóndor and the ongoing struggle to uncover truth in other post-conflict states.

Chilean human rights lawyer Karinna Fernández then built upon this discussion in great detail by explaining the living memories and active prosecution of Operation Cóndor criminals through her frontline experiences of preserving memory through justice. Fernández’s account highlighted the varied (and often creative) methods of achieving justice in scenarios where those in power pose an obstacle to justice. Although she herself has pursued legal recourse in her work relative to Operation Cóndor, she equally highlighted the important role played by civil society and the changing attitudes of the public in post-Cóndor Chile. These insights made this history painfully real, a feeling that is often elusive when considering events which occurred thirty years before my birth. I became keenly aware of the pain felt and the dangers faced by those prosecuting Cóndor perpetrators even after all these years, but also of the ongoing impunity in a world that so many of us see as changed, from the bygone days of transnational state terror. While Karinna Fernández’s experiences stirred these emotions for many in the talk, a balancing hope was felt through her perseverance and continued success in prosecutions to this day.

Sebastián Smart brought a sharp and modern focus to the talk with his presentation of plancondor.org, an invaluable online resource that has been created by the Plan Condor collaborative project – an initiative led by the Institute of the Americas’ own Dr Francesca Lessa (who chaired the seminar) bringing together UK universities and scholars, as well as human rights NGOs in South America’s Southern Cone. Smart highlighed how the necessity for the visibility of truth became a clear rationale for the creation of the website and an important focus when discussing the future of memory in relation to Operation Cóndor.  Smart’s informative walkthrough of the website, which serves to digitally preserve the history of Operation Cóndor and an ever-evolving database of information, not only displayed the amount of work and scale of transnational efforts involved in achieving justice but also gave insight into the complexity and nuance of Operation Cóndor. By effectively illustrating the work of lawyers such as Karinna Fernández who trawl through years of evidence, finding transnational and international precedent and drawing on the testimony of newly emerging survivors, Smart’s presentation reinforced the role that academics, professionals and civil society play in tandem.

As was highlighted throughout this talk, alongside the ongoing efforts to seek justice for victims, it is most important that the memory of Operation Cóndor is preserved in order to prevent its reappearance in the modern day. The growing trends of authoritarianism that are being mirrored across the Americas and are spearheaded by the current US administration display a worrying aesthetic of the same meeting that happened 50 years ago which resulted in the establishment of Operation Cóndor. It is important to equally note, that in today’s political world, these shifts are not clandestine or in the shadows as they once were with Cóndor, but open and obvious (e.g. Argentina voting against eliminating the use of torture) and therefore, in turn, open to obvious resistance by those who seek to preserve democracy, justice and peace.

To learn more about Operation Cóndor, see:

Roundtable – 50 Years after Operation Condor. Watch the recording of the event on which this post is based.

BBC: The Arrest. A timely release which encapsulates the histories recounted at this talk.

Operation Condor. An article by Dr Francesca Lessa.

Tom Hindley is a final-year undergraduate student at the UCL Institute of the Americas with a keen interest in Latin American Politics and Human Rights. Tom is studying for a BA in the History and Politics of the Americas and hopes to submit his dissertation at the end of this year on environmental politics and human rights in Argentina.