What was Operation Condor?
In the 1960s and 1970s, populist, nationalist, and socialist movements emerged throughout the class-stratified nations of Latin America, challenging the entrenched privileges of local oligarchies as well as U.S. political and economic interests. In this context, U.S. national security strategists (who feared “another Cuba”) and their Latin American counterparts began to regard large sectors of these societies as potentially or actually subversive. Cold War NationalSecurity Doctrine–a politicized doctrine of internal war and counterrevolution that targeted “internal enemies”–incorporated U.S. and French counterinsurgency concepts and anticommunist ideology. The doctrine gave the militaries a messianic mission: to remake their states and societies and eliminate “subversion.” Political and social conflict was viewed through the lens of countersubversive war; the counterinsurgents believed that world communism had infiltrated their societies. During these years, militaries in country aft
