On the fifteenth anniversary of the discovery of the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, the National Security Archive posted Spanish-language documents that reveal new details of how the Southern Cone military regimes collaborated in hunting down, interrogating, and disappearing hundreds of Latin Americans during the 1970s and 1980s.
The collaboration, which became officially known as “Operation Condor,” drew on cross-border kidnapping, secret detention centers, torture, and disappearance of prisoners—rendition, interrogation and detention techniques that some human rights advocates are comparing to those used today in the Bush administration’s counterterrorism campaign.....
....The posting includes communications between “Condor 1” (Chile) and “Condor 4” (Paraguay), records of meetings between the D-2 of the Paraguayan intelligence service, and officials from SIDE (the State Intelligence Service) in Argentina, and SID (the Defense Intelligence Service) in Uruguay, and documents related to the coordinated efforts to capture
Montoneros in Asunción in 1980—among other facets of the Condor coordination during the era of military dictatorships in the Southern Cone.....
....Since 1998, the National Security Archive has worked with the Paraguayan Center on Documentation and Archive for the Defense of Human Rights (
CDyA) that oversees the Archive of Terror. The National Security Archive has collaborated with the Center to create a fully digitalized collection of more than 300,000 records—the Digital Archive of Terror (ATD). This unique data base, now being posted in sections on the world wide Web, is designed to facilitate ongoing research on human rights crimes, and the discovery of new evidence on the history of state-sponsored terrorism in the Southern Cone.
