Published this year in English, Operation Condor: The Pact that Terrorized a Continent (Casa Carlini, 2026) marks the 50th anniversary of Argentina’s 1976 military coup. Francesca Lessa, and illustrator Sebastián Santana began working on the book after she watched En esta casa (In This House) a short that traces the presence of children in an Uruguayan detention and torture center, which Santana illustrated. Both author and illustrator worked together since 2021 on the creation of the Plan Condor platform, an open-access platform that provides legal, historical and memory-related information on the transnational operation.
Interspersed with striking and sobering illustrations depicting an entire spectrum of political violence, Lessa and Santana situate Operation Condor in the historical context of the end of World War II, which saw U.S. foreign policy take an anti-communist stance as it vied for power against the Soviet Union. Central to future dictatorships, as the book points out, was the School of the Americas, founded in 1946 and now known as WHINSEC, originally located in Panama. The school taught U.S. National Security Doctrine to over 60,000 South American military officers. Another component was provided by the French School of Counterinsurgency, which in 1957 sent its officers to Buenos Aires to instruct Argentine forces in interrogation, intelligence and extermination of opponents. Lessa notes that from 1960 to 1981, “a permanent mission of French advisors operated within the Army General Staff in Buenos Aires.”
Interspersed with striking and sobering illustrations depicting an entire spectrum of political violence, Lessa and Santana situate Operation Condor in the historical context of the end of World War II.
On the opposite end of the political spectrum, resistance movements emerged across South America. In 1972 in Santiago, Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement, led by Miguel Enriquez, sought to establish an international organization to fight against U.S. imperialism during a meeting attended by resistance movements from Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. Prior to Operation Condor, Buenos Aires had become a base for resistance movements formed in exile.
In 1974, a secret summit attended by police chiefs from the mentioned countries met to discuss what they deemed subversive grounds. From this meeting, the foundations for surveillance of exiles was born. In discussing the early kidnappings and assassinations of several left-wing activists in Buenos Aires and Paraguay, Lessa portrays the systematic approach that Operation Condor would structure into a broad alliance. The case of Chilean MIR member Jorge Fuentes Alarcon and Argentinian Amilcar Santucho, leader of PRT-ERP (Workers Revolutionary Party-People’s Revolutionary Army) became the “pilot test” for Operation Condor, according to the 2016 Buenos Aires Federal Court ruling.
In setting up Operation Condor, delegates from Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil met in Chile in 1975 from November 25 to December 1. The Condor System was agreed upon on November 28 and the agreement took effect on January 30, 1976.
“Both military and civilian resources fueled Operation Condor’s transnational terror at the disposal of member states,” writes Lessa. “Military and police forces took part, along with diplomatic personnel through embassy and consulate networks – privileged sites for spying on militants in exile—and civilian border agents.”
Lessa’s writing holds a pace that is both gentle and urgent as she explains how Argentina became the epicenter of a transnational threat when General Rafael Videla took power through a military coup in March 1976. Orletti Motors, a detention and extermination center in Floresta, Buenos Aires, was most associated with Operation Condor in Argentina, while Ford Falcons became an emblem of violent kidnappings. The book mentions several kidnappings, extermination and disappearances happening in the city, some involving the participation of agents from other Condor countries.
As the dictatorship unleashed its brutality, rights organizations emerged to seek the disappeared. By 1977, evidence of kidnappings and disappearances started emerging, notably though the testimony of Uruguayan journalist Enrique Rodríguez Larreta Piera, who was kidnapped, tortured and transferred from Argentina to Uruguay, exposing, as Lessa writes, “the existence of repressive coordination between Argentina and Uruguay as early as 1977.”
The book gives a concise overview of each country’s democratic transition.
The book continues with other stories of militants who were abducted and disappeared. Three Argentinians and two Uruguayans abducted in Paraguay in March 1977 remain among the disappeared. Documents pertaining to this case come from Paraguay’s Archives of Terror—which were discovered after the government announced the citizens’ rights to access information about themselves collected by the government in 1992. Other documents from the archive also detail the joint interrogations, in which officers from Condor countries would travel to collaborate in torture and interrogations sessions.
Lessa describes the intelligence system used in Operation Condor. Condoreje, the operation axis, was run from Buenos Aires. In Santiago, a database contained information about subversive individuals and groups. In the Panama Canal zone, Condor used an encrypted communication system known as Condortel, through which the participating countries would exchange information. In addition, a secret unit known as Teseo, comprised of Chilean, Uruguayan and Argentinian agents, was tasked with murdering militants living in Europe.
These operations, Lessa notes, were either unsuccessful or called off. With Operation Condor in full swing, the South American dictatorships started enacting coverups for the targeted kidnappings, exterminations and disappearances, at times through fabricated information given to relatives.
The book gives a concise overview of each country’s democratic transition—with Bolivia being the first country to move towards democracy—documenting Argentina’s President Raul Alfonsin’s efforts to establish the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) which delivered its truth commission report in 1984.
In December 1986, however, Alfonsin signed the Full Stop Law, followed by the Law of Due Obedience in June 1987. Both laws ensured impunity for military officers involved in dictatorship crimes. From 1989 to 1990, Argentinian President Carlos Menem further extended impunity through pardons, including those who had been sentenced during the Trial of the Juntas in 1985. As a last resort, human rights lawyers sought justice in European courts for Argentinian victims of European descent. ”The prosecutions abroad pushed Argentine judges to reopen investigations into the dictatorship’s crimes in their own courts,” writes Lessa.
Judicial cases related to Operation Condor filed in Argentinian courts testify to the cross-border surveillance and complicity in murder and disappearances of political opponents. As the trials continued, other strands of Condor started to unravel with the declassification of documents ordered by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995, the efforts by Judge Baltasar Garzón to bring Pinochet to justice through an international arrest warrant for crimes related to Operation Condor, and the discovery of detention centers.
The final chapters of the book are slivers of testimony to the magnitude of dictatorship crimes committed during Operation Condor. The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, indefatigable in their efforts to bring back their grandchildren, solved 140 out of 500 cases. The Operation Condor and Automotores Orletti II trial amassed 100,000 pages of documents gathered from the initial six participating countries. Lessa writes, “It was the trial of Operation Condor itself.”
Statistical data included in the book’s epilogue, which draws upon the open-access platform, gives information about the number of criminal cases, where these were filed, and the victims’ nationalities. One notable snippet of information is Sebastian Santana’s discovery of the plane used to transport kidnapping victims from Asuncion to Buenos Aires, while working on audiovisual projects for the Plan Condor platform.
While the book is written in a very accessible manner and gives an overview that is easy to follow and absorb, Lessa’s explanations and Santana’s illustrations bring a depth that is unmatched when it comes to humanizing the historical aspect of Operation Condor. The book conveys the human cost of political violence to the reader, as well as the lingering ramifications in the search for truth and justice. Reading this book is an experience in absorption of knowledge, and feeling.
Ramona Wadi is a freelance journalist and book reviewer. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine and Latin America; the latter with a focus on Chile, Argentina and Cuba.