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The Process of Seeking Justice for Operation Condor Participants

Ian Chinich

· Operation Condor
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Ian Chinich is a Rhode Island health care customer service agent who has been involved in ensuring the seamless rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Passionate about politics and history, Ian Chinich is presently at work on a documentary that examines social movements that resisted Operation Condor and associated dictatorships.

A September 2020 article in the Guardian on the 45th anniversary of its inception looked back at Operation Condor, described as one of the most “sinister international state terror networks” of the 20th century. Encouraged and in many cases coordinated by the United States, the network was unprecedented in the way it brought together eight military dictatorships across South America, including those of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

Designed to suppress popular threats to government stability posed by leftists, the operation left thousands of people “disappeared’ and presumed murdered across the 1970s and 1980s. A major roadblock to exerting justice in the years since has been the cross-border nature of many kidnappings and killings. Taking cases to court in one country often leads to a new case that must be documented, presented, and tried in another country’s judicial system.
Despite this, the effort to root out the causes and effects of Operation Condor has been dogged and persistent. Working in much the same manner as Nazi hunters during the postwar years, survivors, investigators, attorneys, and academics have banded together and worked to ensure accountability for international war crimes.
An example of how laborious this process is can be seen by the first major Condor-related criminal investigation started two decades ago in Rome. It was not until 2019 that life sentences were handed out to 24 people, including Peru’s former president and the former military intelligence chief of Chile. The defendants are now involved in an appeal process that should reach a conclusion in late 2021.