In the Sites of Operation Condor: Memory and Afterlives of Clandestine Detention Centers.

• Date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Welch, Michael
• Published date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Welch, Michael

Recent events in Latin America serve as a reminder of earlier social, political, and military conflicts dating back to the 1970s, especially those complicated by US involvement. Consider the developments, for instance, in Venezuela, where President Madura has struggled to maintain power amid economic collapse. Compounding the crisis, the White House has threatened to intervene. President Trump warned: "all options are on the table." Vice President Pence said the United States would use "the full weight of our diplomatic and economic pressure," while contemplating ways to transfer Venezuelan assets and oil revenues to the opposition-run national assembly (Daniels et al. 2019). US National Security Advisor John Bolton weighed in on larger regional matters by welcoming Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro as a "positive sign" for Latin America, hailing him as a new ally against what Bolton called a '"troika of tyranny': Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua" (Borger 2018).

In her 1999 Social Justice article on Operation Condor, J. Patrice Mc-Sherry outlines in detail the secret program designed to eliminate perceived political threats in the Southern Cone of Latin America in the 1970s. In concert, dictatorships in several nations coordinated a brutal apparatus of repression with wide-scale abduction, detention, torture, assassination, and extermination. Alongside brazen impunity, Operation Condor benefited from financial, logistical, and ideological support from the United States and its intelligence community. Much of what is now known about Condor is made possible through the discovery of a massive archive in Paraguay in 1992, followed by the release of a series of declassified documents under the Clinton administration beginning in 1999. Since then, the work of McSherry has expanded into a book titled Predatory States (2005), joining an impressive catalogue of related volumes by Dinges (2004) and Kornbluh (2013). Altogether, their research provides ample evidence of human rights atrocities which for decades have been denied by South--and North--American perpetrators and their apologists.

This form of state terror, it is important to emphasize, occurred in specific places, namely clandestine detention centers. By the early 2000s, many of those sites have been identified and recovered by governmental and human rights organizations which, in turn, opened them to the public. These spaces serve as physical manifestations of memory that reflect on the multitude of crimes committed by military dictatorships, including Operation Condor. Indeed, these former detention centers are storytelling institutions that issue narratives through their sitedness, a reminder that performance and spectacle continue to shape national identity in postconflict societies (Clark Sc Payne 2011, Taylor 1997). Still, those accounts are rarely unified. In her insightful book Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictator- ship Latin America, Susana Draper (2012) examines former detention sites in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in an effort to expose the continuity of power and economic structures. Some of those sites have been repurposed as memorials and museums dedicated to human rights. Others have been transformed into shopping malls that embrace neoliberal consumerism, thereby masking a deeper melancholy of underachieved goals. With that observation in mind, Draper furthers Huyssen's (2003,9-10) critique of the ways "memory and forgetting pervade real public space, the world of objects, and the urban world we live in" (see also Huyssen 1995). Focusing on the "politics of amnesia," Draper (2012, 4-5) refines the notion of "afterlife," which "acquires the sense of a mode of experiencing the echoes of a past that is lost to history but has the potential to be heard or legible. It is a missed possibility that keeps open the promise of that which did not/could not take place" (see also Jelin 2003, Jelin & Kaufman 2000).

To be sure, scholarly concern over memorialization dwells on the more profound aspects of the phenomenon. The oft-cited Pierre Nora (1989) suggests that whereas history is attached to events, memory clings to places. Indeed, it is within "les lieux de memoire where memory crystalizes and secretes itself" (ibid., 7). Especially compared to history, which remains a representation of the past, memory is affective and nourishes recollections that may be out of focus, thereby "tying us to the present" (ibid., 8). Nora continues by casting history as prosaic, particularly against the dynamics of memory that bind certain people together. As we shall detect in this analysis, "memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces ... [becoming] sites for anchoring its memory" (ibid., 9). Sitedness is paramount to this project since it helps us sort out the nuances of space and place. Michel de Certeau (1984) explains that place is where things and people are ordered; space, by its very nature, is the use of space (see Casey 1997). The two concepts are deeply intertwined given that many of the detention centers are precise locations where atrocities occurred. In their afterlife, they are strategically transformed into spaces for memorialization. Hence, the paradox: such "memoryscapes"require that the sites retain enough authenticity to facilitate mourning for victims without repelling visitors participating as secondary witness (Bilbija & Payne 2011, Sevcenko 2004, Taylor 1997).

To expand on critical notions of memory, this research explores former detention centers once used by military regimes in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago (Chile), Asuncion (Paraguay), and Montevideo (Uruguay). In-depth interpretations of those sites are informed by an array of curatorial techniques designed to reconstruct events for purposes of pedagogy and memorialization. As we shall see, Operation Condor continues to resonate in the psyche of postdictatorship societies in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Moreover, the spatial transitions of confinement speak to the dynamics of memory as well as the residue of forgetting, amnesia, and denial. Discussion begins with a brief summary of Operation Condor then segues to a city-by-city and site-by-site examination of the afterlives of confinement. Implications for human rights and social justice are addressed throughout. (1)

Operation Condor and Beyond

In the aftermath of the 1973 coup, Chilean intelligence agents extended their power by forging a regional and international security network. Under the instructions of dictator Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Contreras, director of the Chilean secret police, embarked on an anticommunist campaign by lobbying other nations for their support. In late summer of 1975, Contreras returned to Washington, DC, to meet with CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters. That trip--the second in less than two months--allowed Contreras to pitch his plans for what would become Operation Condor. Contreras then met with the Venezuelan intelligence service in Caracas on August 27. Years later, Venezuelan intelligence officer Rafael Rivas Vasquez disclosed that Contreras was "building up this grandiose scheme of a very big and powerful service that could have information--worldwide information"

(Kornbluh 2013, 344). Contreras's vision of Operation Condor crystalized in October 1975 when he invited his counterparts in the Southern Cone to join him in Santiago (Chile) for the first inter-American conference on national intelligence. The invitation outlined their strategy for combatting "subversives"and stressed that the meeting would be "strictly secret in nature" (ibid., 331, 364). From November 25 to 28, 1975, and again in June 1976, delegates from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay agreed to cooperate in a joint intelligence mission (later supported by Peru and Ecuador). Contreras, who for a time was on the CIA payroll, would earn significant backing from the Nixon administration and its intelligence agencies. Adding symbolic significance, the operation was named after the Chilean national bird of prey, the condor (Dinges 2004, Lessa 2019, McSherry 2005).

As a shadowy intelligence network, Operation Condor assembled a highly centralized computerized system and data bank that would navigate abductions, detention, torture, and ultimately assassinations. The transnational reach of Condor would soon become its defining trait. Argentina was selected as the network secretariat and base for Sistema Condor. It was also reported, however, that the hub of that system was located in the US military installation in the Panama Canal Zone (Kornbluh 2013, 347). In one of the first of a series of spectacular crimes, Condor agents abducted and murdered Zelmar Michelini and Hector Gui terrez Ruiz in 1976; at the time, the two Uruguayan legislators were living in exile in Buenos Aires. The next month, former president of Bolivia Juan Jose Torres was assassinated in Buenos Aires. In what is often described as the most audacious mission of Operation Condor, former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his US colleague Ronni Moffitt were killed by a car bomb in Washington, DC, on September 21, 1976 (Branch & Propper 1982, Dinges & Landau 1980).The path of lethal violence was channeled through black propaganda coupled with psychological warfare directed at the wider population, thereby making it appear as though the staged shootings and bombings were the work of leftist militants. By doing so, those tactics were designed to spread the misconception of a "dirty war" involving "subversives" (Marchak 1999, Taylor 1997).

It remains unclear when Operation Condor officially disbanded. During the peak years of activity, 1975 to 1977, Condor agents in the Southern Cone murdered--or disappeared--hundreds of victims. Moreover, following the 1976 coup in Argentina, an estimated 15,000 exiles from neighboring countries found themselves "trapped by the increasingly coordinated, regional...