[clarification needed] In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter Jr. stated that: in order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are ... endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises.

A declassified CIA document dated 23 June 1976 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".

[64] A 2016 declassified CIA report dated 9 May 1977, titled "Counterterrorism in the Southern Cone", underscored one "aspect of the program involving Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina envisages illegal operations outside Latin America against exiled terrorists, particularly in Europe".

One of Condor's "initial aims" was the "exchange of information on the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (RCJ), an organization...of terrorist groups from Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay" whose "representatives" in Europe were "believed to have been involved in the assassinations in Paris of the Bolivian ambassador to France last May and an Uruguayan military attache in 1974".

[citation needed] In the late 1990s, due to attacks on American nationals in Argentina and revelations about CIA[82] funding of the Argentine military, and after an explicit 1990 Congressional prohibition, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered the declassification of thousands of State Department documents related to U.S.-Argentine activities going back to 1954.

[citation needed] Following continuous protests by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other human rights groups, in 2003 the Argentine Congress, counting on President Nestor Kirchner and the ruling majority on both chambers full support, repealed the amnesty laws.

Deputy Interior Minister Marcos Farfan described his own time in the prison, where he was placed in a flooded cell, electrified from the ground, needled under his fingernails, and shocked via his genitals and teeth to extract information about Che Guevara.

[95] The illegal operation failed because two Brazilian journalists, reporter Luiz Cláudio Cunha and photographer João Baptista Scalco from Veja magazine, had been warned by an anonymous phone call that the Uruguayan couple had been "disappeared".

According to declassified documents in the National Security Archive and Italian attorney general Giovanni Salvi, who led the prosecution of former DINA head Manuel Contreras, Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Michael Townley and Virgilio Paz Romero in Madrid in 1975 to plan the murder of Bernardo Leighton with the help of Francisco Franco's secret police.

[119] In 1999, the secretary of the National Security Council (NSC), Glyn T. Davies, declared that the declassified documents established the responsibility of Pinochet government in carrying out the assassination of Bernardo Leighton, as well as Orlando Letelier and General Carlos Prats.

According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the terrorist organization CORU's leadership, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those elected to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll.

[125] According to National Security Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh, Pinochet's reaction to the attack and death of Rojas "contributed to Reagan's decision to withdraw support for the regime and press for a return to civilian rule".

[130] Interviewed in the early 21st century by Dinges, Koch said that George H. W. Bush, then CIA director, informed him in October 1976 that "his sponsorship of legislation to cut off U.S. military assistance to Uruguay on human rights grounds had provoked secret police officials to 'put a contract out for you'".

[citation needed] The Peruvian legislator Javier Diez Canseco declared that he and twelve colleagues (Justiniano Apaza Ordóñez, Hugo Blanco, Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, Valentín Pacho, Ricardo Letts, César Lévano, Ricardo Napurí, José Luis Alvarado Bravo, Alfonso Baella Tuesta, Guillermo Faura Gaig, José Arce Larco, and Humberto Damonte), all prominent opponents of the dictatorship of Francisco Morales Bermúdez, were kidnapped in Peru, expatriated in 1978 and handed over to the Argentine armed forces in the city of Jujuy.

These centers were managed by the Grupo de Tareas 18, headed by former police officer and intelligence agent Aníbal Gordon, earlier convicted of armed robbery, who reported directly to General Commandant of the SIDE, Otto Paladino.

According to Dinges' book Los años del Cóndor (The Years of the Condor), Chilean MIR prisoners in the Orletti center told José Luis Bertazzo that they had seen two Cuban diplomats, 22-year-old Jesús Cejas Arias and 26-year-old Crescencio Galañega, tortured by Gordon's group.

He quotes a cable sent from Buenos Aires by FBI agent Robert Scherrer on 22 September 1976, in which he mentioned that Michael Townley, later convicted for the assassination of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., had taken part in the interrogations of the two Cubans.

It stated that the operation was an effort of six countries in the southern cone of Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) to win the "Third-World-War" by wiping out "subversion" through transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination.

Shlaudeman warns Kissinger that in the long term the "Third World War" would put those six countries in an ambiguous position because they are trapped on either side by "international Marxism and its terrorist exponents", and on the other by "the hostility of uncomprehending industrial democracies misled by the Marxist propaganda".

[153] The report recommended that U.S. policy towards Operation Condor should emphasize the differences between the five countries at every opportunity, to depoliticize human rights, to oppose rhetorical exaggerations of the "Third-World-War" type, and bring the potential bloc-members back-into our cognitive universe through systematic exchanges.

A declassified CIA document dated 23 June 1976, 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".

[165] A 1978 cable from the US ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, to the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance revealed that the South American intelligence chiefs involved in Condor "[kept] in touch with one another through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone which cover[ed] all of Latin America".

[40] Patricia M. Derian, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs from 1977 to 1981, said of Kissinger's role in giving the green light to the junta's repression: "It sickened me that with an imperial wave of his hand, an American could sentence people to death".

[174] According to the French newspaper L'Humanité, the first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, and the right-wing death squad Triple A, set up in Argentina by Juan and Isabel Perón's "personal secretary" José López Rega, and Rodolfo Almirón (arrested in Spain in 2006).

While recognizing the human rights issues that needed to be addressed to avoid legislative restrictions, Kissinger assured Pinochet that they were on the same team, "you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist".

[188] In 1957, Argentine officers, among them Alcides Lopez Aufranc, went to Paris to attend two-year courses at the École de Guerre military school, two years before the Cuban Revolution, and before the rise of anti-government guerrilla movements in Argentina.

[16] Marie-Monique Robin also showed ties between the French far right and Argentina since the 1930s, in particular through the Roman Catholic fundamentalist organization Cité catholique created by Jean Ousset, a former secretary of Charles Maurras (founder of the royalist Action Française movement).

[201] Chilean Enrique Arancibia Clavel was convicted and sentenced in Argentina for the assassination of Carlos Prats and of his wife; in a 2011 court verdict, life terms were handed down to Alfredo Astiz, Jorge Acosta, Antonio Pernias, and Ricardo Cavallo.

[208] According to French newspaper L'Humanité: in most of those countries legal action against the authors of crimes of "lese-humanity" from the 1970s to 1990 owes more to flaws in the amnesty laws than to a real will of the governments in power, which, on the contrary, wave the flag of "national reconciliation".

It is sad to say that two of the pillars of the Condor Operation, Alfredo Stroessner and Augusto Pinochet, never paid for their crimes and died without ever answering charges about the "disappeared" – who continue to haunt the memory of people who had been crushed by fascist brutality.