A working group created today by the National Truth Commission will investigate the activities of Operation Condor, a military-political alliance of Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s, organized and led by the United States.
"Clarifying the facts, circumstances and perpetrators of serious cases of rape, torture, forced disappearances and concealment of corpses" are among the objectives of the group, according to the resolution for its foundation, published in the Official Journal of the Union.
Operation Condor is the name of the coordination-operations plan between the leaders of South American dictatorships which included Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and sporadically, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador. Overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, the plan was executed in the 1970s and 1980s.
According to declassified CIA files, the head of the Chilean secret police, Manuel Contreras, was invited in 1975 to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and after that visit, appeared as the "creator" of Operation Condor.
However, the U.S. investigator amd journalist Christopher Hitchens considered the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to be the real mastermind of that repressive action.
Indeed, Operation Condor was constituted into an international underground organization for state terrorism that orchestrated the murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of opponents of the aforementioned dictatorships, with most of the victims belonging to leftist political movements.
Unofficial estimates reported that more than 100,000 people were killed and another 400,000 tortured in Operation Condor actions in these countries while the plan was active.