Preview

What Is The Us Involvement In Operation Condor

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1301 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Is The Us Involvement In Operation Condor
The United States’ Involvement in Operation Condor Operation Condor was a collaboration between several South American authoritarian regimes to eliminate and repress perceived threats, particularly left-wing supporters. The U.S. was a supporter and sponsor of several military coups in countries that would later participate in Operation Condor. Furthermore, countries coordinated Operation Condor by establishing a communications system using encryption machines from Crypto AG, a Swiss company secretly owned by the CIA. The CIA was essentially “supplying rigged communications gear to some of South America’s most brutal regimes” and putting itself in a position to gather intelligence on the atrocities perpetrated by Operation Condor. However, no …show more content…
Victims were known as the desaparecidos, meaning the missing in Spanish. By “disappearing” their targets, the military government could effectively erase their existence and dissent. Yet of course, victims still exist in the memories of their family members and friends, who knew about the “death flights” and detention centers where people were raped and tortured, and searched desperately for traces of their loved ones. The U.S. likely knew all about the human rights violations and brutalities occurring in Argentina as well as in other countries participating in Operation Condor, and did not step in. Furthermore, the U.S actively supported the right-wing authoritarian regimes of Operation Condor, including the violent Argentine military regime, in an effort to eradicate communism from South America. They provided Operation Condor with the machinery necessary for their communications system and spied on their activity. Though the U.S claims to be an enforcer of human rights, they actively ignored and supported human rights violations occurring before their …show more content…
Due to Letelier’s opposition to him and his capitalist reforms in Chile, Pinochet took action by assassinating Letelier, using a car bomb planted by his secret police. Before 9/11, “the Letelier-Moffitt assassination was considered the most egregious act of international terrorism ever committed in Washington D.C”. Furthermore, documentation shows that the CIA knew that Pinochet organized the bombing and even “withheld information from the State Department on Condor plotting for weeks in the summer of 1976”. On September 20th, the day before Letelier’s assassination, a cable from Henry Kissinger’s top deputy on Latin America “instructed U.S. ambassadors in the region to ‘take no further action’ on deterring Condor plots because ‘there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme’”. The CIA and the U.S. government never had any intention of fighting against the atrocities committed by Operation Condor and even participated in the atrocities by providing the equipment necessary for the countries involved to communicate and target their

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    The year is 1954. Government agencies resurrect secret plans previously discarded until a more forceful administration comes to power. Behind the scenes, the CIA and State Department are fervently working in over time trying to engineer a government overthrow against a populist nationalist in their own backyard who has the dare audacity to threaten both US economic and geopolitical interest. Accusations of communism and Soviet penetration permeate the discourse and heat up the rhetoric; swift action must be taken to stabilize the hemisphere. Intervention by any means necessary. Exiled opposition leaders are paid off, trained, equipped, and installed. Propaganda transmits through jammed radio towers and warns the peasant population of invasion and liberation. Psychological warfare in conjunction with paramilitary covert operation is launched. The target—Guatemala, a third world poverty stricken country in which the fruits of revolution and conflict are as ripe as the bananas that dot the landscape. Such a riveting story could easily fill the pages of Tom Clancy’s next best-selling and fictional political thriller but instead, it is the true story unearthed through extensive investigation by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, who with Bitter Fruit, meticulously detail a thought provoking and well-documented historical account of the Guatemalan coup d’état. The sowing of the seeds, subsequent cultivation, and ultimately the dangerous harvest of these bitter fruits is the basis for this compelling chronicle of one of the most controversial and…

    • 3196 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The massacre at El Mozote is a book about all the horrible series of events that occurred at El Mozote. When one looks at the massacre, it is obvious the United States aided in these events. The United States government chose turn its eye and pretended as if nothing happened. This book introduces one to the events in El Salvador in 1981. The author gives a reconstruction of the events and shows it importance. The massacre is not to be forgotten.…

    • 1192 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The tensions between the classes, the halves and the halve-nots are therefore represented by the two warring factions. The harrowing events in Mark Danner’s Massacre at El Mozote investigates and questions three central issues; the Massacre, the role of American Policies in the region during the Cold War and the executive cover-up of the events as Propaganda. One of the concerns is what responsibility (if any) did the U.S. government have for the massacre at El Mozote?El Mozote was “uniquely” different from most villages because it had resisted the Liberation Theology taught by left-leaning Catholic Priests and according to the author was “as as stronghold of the Protestant evangelical movement” (pg 19) . The villagers of El Mozote had their own chapel and referred themselves as born-again Christians and as Danner states were known for “their anti-communism” (pg 19). The villagers of El Mozote did not support the guerillas. According to Danner the Massacre at El Mozote takes place when American trained Salvadoran Armed forces called the Atlacatl Batallion arrived at the village and began systematically killing men, women and children by various means such as torturing, hangings, decapitation, and shooting. The U.S government was responsible for the massacre at El Mozote for a plethora of reasons. First, The Reagan…

    • 1359 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    CIA planned for exiles (“La Brigada”) to invade Bay of Pigs, start an uprising, and overthrow Castro. It failed. EPIC…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    in the plot for the assassination of Kennedy. The CIA were not happy with JFKs…

    • 625 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The Bay of Pigs invasion was an unsuccessful military attack of Cuba fueled by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group, Brigade 2506 on April 17th, 1961. The strategy was planned to takeover and overthrow Fidel Castro the leader of Cuba who was promoting communism. The invasion utterly failed and led to many problematic ties between The United States and Cuba as well as Cuba’s supporter the Soviet Union. Kennedy was quoted saying to an official within his administration: "I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." One problem Kennedy had after the invasion was that he appeared pathetic and inexperienced. The CIA became aggravated with Kennedy’s lack of support for the invasion and blamed it as a major reason as to why the invasion failed. Kennedy’s frustration with the CIA left numerous people in the organization losing their jobs. For example, Allen Dulles who was the head of the CIA was forced to take blame of the mission, which led to his termination in 1961, and then replaced by John McCone.…

    • 1565 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    John F. Kennedy's foreign policy contributed immensely to the conflicts with the Soviet Union in Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a result of Kennedy's implementation of a foreign policy that wasn’t effective with resolving problems between the opposing nations in the middle of the Cold War (Bay of Pigs happened in 1961). The Cold War represents a time of distress for the United States, as the population faced a growing threat of communism. The president realized that his tactics were inoperative while carrying out the invasion - the invasion that had been fabricated by the former president, Eisenhower. The invasion would go on to increase tensions between the two powers, rather than resolve them. The Bay of Pigs invasion supports the belief…

    • 3633 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Some of the techniques used by the CIA were sexual harassment and sleep deprivation to name a couple. One of the most creative operations where the CIA caught terrorists abroad, so were out of our jurisdiction, which in turn meant handing them over to a country for enhanced interrogation.…

    • 2285 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Operation Just Cause

    • 1384 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Manual Noriega had been directed as the dictator of Panama by US government in 1960’s. The relationship between Noriega and the United States had become strained in the 1980’s because he had been accused of murder, drug trafficking and election fraud by one of his lieutenants. Within in the last two years leading up to Operation Just Cause Noriega succumbed to anti-American rhetoric. During this time, he directed…

    • 1384 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Nearly three years ago, in 2013, Edward Snowden – a former American National Security Agency (N.S.A.) contractor – leaked anywhere from a hundred to two hundred thousand classified documents, that proved the existence of massive global surveillance, including of American citizens as well as top world leaders, run by the USA with the active cooperation of many allied governments as well as telecommunication and technology companies.…

    • 694 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Charles Horman

    • 315 Words
    • 2 Pages

    I would definitely assert that the U.S. government is largely responsible for the death and abuse of Charles Horman. Horman was not overstepping boundaries, simply trying to discover the truth after being exposed to constant human rights violations all around him. He was a victim of human rights abuses, and is now a symbol of the injustices of that time. Obviously if Horman would have never asked questions and not participated in the government of the country he had lived in for a few years then he most likely would not have been murdered. But that is what people do, they like to know the affairs of the place where they are — whether or not they are citizens of a country. You participate and are exposed to the legal and governmental propositions for the country in which you live. And when you view excessive abuse and human rights violations, it is your time to react and make known the truth. Charles Horman was not at fault for getting too involved in Chilean politics, but rather serves as an example of the extent of abuses. The Chilean government, backed by the support of the U.S., enforced unnecessary violence — violence should never be necessary as a means to control. The junta with U.S. support destroyed any hint of a Marxist or socialist agenda, any hint of opposition to their policies. As we saw in the scene where the Chilean representative tells Jack Lemmon’s character that if he was to go to New York and snoop around in affairs of the Mafia, there’s nothing anyone could do for him either. He then says, “If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned.” The reality is Horman was searching for justice and eventually the voice of the people will be heard. Horman now stands as an example of a martyr for…

    • 315 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    To this day, many people still do not know what happened to their family and friends when they “disappeared.” Many families were also displaced during the civil war and have yet to come back to the country. More recently, human right’s activist found the secret files from the civil war in an abandoned building thought to be storing explosives. The human rights activists hoped that the Guatemalan government would take steps in dealing with “the legacy of decades of state repression” (Watts). Furthermore, this war shows how the U.S has not changed in its tactics, meaning that when the U.S goes into a country to help, they end up starting a war and then leave the country to deal with it. To this day this is still occurring. An example of that is the Iraq war. The U.S went there during the 1980’s and created and funded the Taliban to rise up against the government for social and economic reform. However, as the years progressed and the U.S vacated the country, the Taliban turned into what it is today. This goes to show that the U.S help is not actually help at all but rather a way of implementing our ways into countries where it may not…

    • 1468 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    sdvcsd

    • 370 Words
    • 2 Pages

    From late 2003 to early 2004, during the Iraq War, military police personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency[1] committed human rights violations against prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison. They physically and sexually abused, tortured,[2][3][4] raped,[2][3] sodomized,[4] and killed[5] prisoners.…

    • 370 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Dirty War that occurred between 1976 and 1983 was organized and executed by military and dictatorship against suspected rebels. Approximately 30,000 Argentines were detained, tortured, and were never seen again. In addition they murdered their children or gave them away to be raised by others. Since then these Argentines have been known as the disappeared.…

    • 548 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    NSA leaked

    • 1272 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Eight months later, media outlets around the world have published more than 100 revelations in over a dozen languages. We now know that the NSA has tracked private American citizens’ phone calls, emails and social connections; monitored Internet traffic in and out of the U.S.; and spied on allied countries and foreign companies alike. What we have learned so far suggests that the agency has gone from protecting national security to facilitating the United States’ political and economic advantage on the world stage.…

    • 1272 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays