Operation Condor was a CIA-backed campaign of political repression involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations that occurred in South America from 1975 to 1983 amid the Cold War.
In November 1975, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's spy chief Manuel Contreras invited 50 intelligence officers from Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to the Army War Academy in Santiago, where they formally created Operation Condor, a covert operation designed to prevent a communist takeover of South America. The United States and France were frequent collaborators and financiers of the covert operations. Around 50,000 Latin Americans were killed and another 30,000 disappeared and 400,000 imprisoned, many of them dissidents, leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests, monks, nuns, students, teachers, intellectuals, and suspected guerrillas. An infamous tactic was the "death flight," in which victims were dropped into the sea, large rivers, or mountains from airplanes or helicopters. The CIA used combatting terrorism and guerrillas as a pretext for the operation's brutality, even though the guerrillas were not substantial enough in numbers to control territory or gain material support by any foreign power. The operation came to an end with the overthrow of the Argentine dictatorship in 1984.
Operation Condor resulted in the weakening of South America's democracies, several human rights violations, and an exodus of Latin American refugees to countries like Costa Rica, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Sweden.