About book The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents (2005)
I just happened to run across this book while browsing Amazon for something to read. I was intrigued by the title and I wanted to learn more about Pres. Pinochet in Chile back in the 1970s. He was an unsavory type who got together with five or so other countries of the Southern Cone in South America and developed Operation CONDOR (condor is the national bird of Chile). As a part of Operation Condor, these countries (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, etc.) who exchange info about leftist groups that they considered terrorists. They would help one another to find such individuals on one another's countries. Eventually, Operation Condor worked its way to conducting assassination missions across South America and ultimately into Europe and the United States. One such mission resulted in the death of Orlando Letelier (sp?) and an American in Washington D.C.; they put a remote-control bomb under his car. Anyway, I don't want to go through the whole story, but it was very interesting, especially considering that the CIA knew about the mission to kill the man in D.C. This book would lead into a deep discussion on 'rendition' and other aspects of fighting against those you consider terrorists. There is a lot to be said about turning a blind eye to threats to civil liberties in the pursuit of a goal (such as fighting terrorists). The book also makes a good point and not speaking out of both sides of your mouth diplomatically. For example, Henry Kissinger would send mixed signals to the South American military leaders by telling them that they are doing a good job fighting communism while only paying lip service to civil rights violations (death squads, round-ups, torture, throwing live people into the ocean from helicopters, etc.)If you are interested in spy craft, South America during the 1970s, international courts, and counterinsurgency techniques, then this is a good book to check out.The scholarship of the book is very good and makes a compelling read.
Truly exhausting and exhaustive. Yet much of the cloak and dagger remains cloaked, at least on the U.S. side. Are we to believe the CIA and U.S. military extensively trained hundreds of Argentine and Cuban-exile military men, reaped the rewards of their savage interrogations, and bent over backwards to cover up and pardon their misdeeds, while remaining innocent as lambs while these crimes against humanity were committed? The U.S. model of arming reprehensible characters continues through Guatemala, Bosnia, Iraq . . . yet the problem with unaccountability is that such power is often applied indiscriminately, beyond militants to mere political or even business rivals. Dinges strikes a balanced tone here, compared to some of the other Dirty War literature, but the "green-light, red-light" approach he describes of CIA/military/Kissinger on one hand and the pro-human rights elements of the State Department and Justice Department on the other were probably more divergent than has been documented. Still, a rare, comprehensive account and told with uncommon style and grace.
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Excellent overview of the Pinochet years and their context. Well written and well researched. Every now and then I would get a bit overwhelmed by the level of detail and have to go back and re-read, but that was me, not anything that was Dinges' fault.Read this if you want to see why the U.S. is so hated around the world. I was completely enraged at the role that our government had in partnering with this mass murdering monster and at our meddling in the political self-determination of the people of South America.
—Wanda
