Fifty years ago on November 25 1975, military intelligence officers from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay gathered in the Chilean capital of Santiago to set up what they called the “Condor System”.

Better known as Operation Condor, this was a secret transnational terror network that allowed repressive regimes in these countries to persecute opponents living in exile. It left behind a legacy of torture, as well as hundreds of kidnappings, disappearances and murders.

Condor was built on three main operational pillars. First, all intelligence information about perceived subversive activities across the region was centralised in a database in Santiago. Second, an encrypted communications channel let state agents communicate secretly and efficiently. And third, the so-called office for coordination and advanced command oversaw joint operational activities.

Argentina, Chile and Uruguay also set up the Teseo unit to target exiles from those three countries who were living in Europe. And while Operation Condor ended in late 1978, bilateral operations which mainly saw Argentina collaborate with Brazil, Paraguay and Chile continued until early 1981.

A map showing the member states of Operation Condor.
Operation Condor allowed South American leaders to target people who had fled their home countries and continued to denounce the dictatorships from abroad. Plancondor.org

Because of Operation Condor’s top-secret nature, there are no official lists of victims. But my research has confirmed there were at least 805 victims between August 1969, when several South American regimes began collaborating in informal ways, and February 1981.

While victims came from a variety of backgrounds, they were mostly political and social activists plus members of revolutionary armed groups, primarily from Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.

Seeking justice

From 1976, when Condor’s repressive operations peaked, evidence was being compiled on the atrocities committed by member states. In 1977, for example, a Uruguayan journalist called Enrique Rodriguez Larreta gave evidence to Amnesty International in London about his abduction in Buenos Aires the previous year. He had travelled there to search for his missing son.

Rodriguez Larreta recounted how he was detained and tortured in three secret prisons across Argentina and Uruguay, before being released six months later. His testimony provided undeniable evidence of the clandestine coordination between South America’s military regimes.

Further proof of Operation Condor’s atrocities was provided in 1979, when American journalist Jack Anderson wrote an article in the Washington Post revealing Condor’s role in the assassination of Orlando Letelier in 1976. Letelier was a minister in the government of Chile’s socialist former president, Salvador Allende.

Wider progress towards justice was limited while South America’s dictatorships remained in power. But the collapse of several regimes across the region in the 1980s opened a window of opportunity.

This period saw some groundbreaking achievements including the Nunca Más (Never Again) report, published in 1984 by Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons. Beyond investigating the military dictatorship’s systematic practice of disappearing people, the commission was the first official state body to recognise Operation Condor’s transnational terror machinery.

However, the possibility of seeing perpetrators stand trial for their crimes was again delayed. So-called impunity laws were sanctioned by democratic governments in Argentina and Uruguay in 1986 and 1987, effectively preventing proceedings against people accused of committing crimes during the military dictatorships.

These laws were passed primarily to quell military dissent and prevent further uprisings after the return to democracy. The laws in Argentina and Uruguay accompanied existing amnesty laws in Brazil and Chile.

The tide of justice finally began to turn in 1998. That year, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was detained in London to face charges for human rights abuses, including Condor atrocities.

Pinochet was spared from trial on medical grounds. But there has been considerable progress since then in the investigation, prosecution and sentencing of state agents for the atrocities committed by Operation Condor.

My research has mapped 50 criminal trials since 1976 that endeavoured to shed light on some of these atrocities. Convictions have been handed down in 40 of these trials so far, with over 100 people sentenced to prison.

These include high-profile figures like former dictators Reynaldo Bignone of Argentina and Juan María Bordaberry of Uruguay. Several high- and middle-ranking military officers, such as Chilean colonel Manuel Contreras, Argentine admiral Antonio Vañek and Uruguayan colonel José Nino Gavazzo, have also been jailed.

Most of these trials have taken place in South America, with 13 verdicts handed out in Argentina, 11 in Uruguay and seven in Chile. In September 2025, retired military intelligence officers Carlos Alberto Rossell and Glauco Yannone were sentenced in Uruguay to 12 years in prison. These men were found guilty of abducting and torturing political activists Universindo Rodríguez and Lilián Celiberti, as well as Celiberti’s two children, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1978.

This sentence is significant, despite a four decade-long delay. In February 1984, Rodríguez and Celiberti were the first people to file a lawsuit in Uruguay for the crimes they had suffered at the hands of Operation Condor. At that time, Uruguay was still in the grips of its military dictatorship.

Five verdicts have also been delivered by Italian criminal tribunals. A Rome court sentenced Jorge Troccoli, a former officer in the Uruguayan navy, to life imprisonment in October. He was convicted for the murders of Italian Rafaela Filipazzi, Argentine José Agustín Potenza and Uruguayan Elena Quinteros between 1976 and 1977. Troccoli is a dual Uruguayan-Italian national and fled to Italy in 2007 to avoid prosecution in Uruguay.

According to Alessia Merluzzi, a lawyer I consulted prior to writing this article, this prosecution not only once again confirmed the existence of Operation Condor, it also “probed deeper into its violent and operative mechanisms and structures”. Merluzzi added: “It revealed the modus operandi of the repressive agents beyond borders – and the specific, planned and methodical organisation of the atrocities suffered by the three victims”.

While significant progress has been made towards achieving justice for victims of Operation Condor, many of its crimes remain shrouded in impunity and silence. As the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recommended in 2021, all former Condor member states should work together to uncover the extent of this transnational network’s crimes.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Francesca Lessa, UCL

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Francesca Lessa’s projects "Operation Condor" and "Plancondor.org" received funding from University College London, the University of Oxford John Fell Fund, The British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the University of Oxford ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, the European Commission under Horizon 2020, and the Open Society Foundations. Lessa is also the Honorary President of the Observatorio Luz Ibarburu, a network of human rights NGOs in Uruguay, as well as the principal researcher and the coordinator of the Plancondor.org collaborative project.