Historical Organization of American States

Transcription

1 Historical Organization of American States Operation Condor Chairs: Cameron Krause, Grace Herdelin

2 Hey everybody! My name s Cameron and I will be one of your chairs at this year s SJMUN conference! First I d like to tell you all a little bit about myself. I graduated from Eastern High School in 2016 and am currently studying at Rutgers University with an intent to major in Accounting and Finance. I participated in Model UN each year in high school, an experience that culminated in my promotion to Secretary General of SJMUN At Rutgers, I am a staff member of the Institute for Domestic and International Affairs, the organization that works with Rutgers Model UN to run three conferences per year; this year, I am the director of SPECPOL at RUMUN This committee s topic is extremely controversial in the morality behind such actions by both the U.S. government and the South American leaders. Nevertheless, I expect each and every one of you to really take on your role as a member of this historical event and to find solutions that will further your goals. Good luck everyone and I will see you at the conference! Hi, everyone! My name is Grace Herdelin and I am a freshman at Rutgers University New Brunswick in the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program. I am majoring in Chemistry and am thinking of minoring in Anthropology or Mathematics. I am a member of the Conference Simulation Services team for RUMUN 2017 and intend to staff Rutgers Model Congress and Philadelphia Model United Nations, all organized by the Institute for Domestic and International Affairs. I graduated from Haddonfield Memorial High School this past June where I was on the Model U.N. team for three years, was a Model U.N. officer, and was Secretary General of HadMUN I am very excited to be returning to SJMUN and am very grateful to the Secretariat for inviting me. I hope that you are all prepared for a day of difficult yet invigorating debate. Good luck!

3 Committee Overview: Historical Organization of American States Summit The Organization of American States, founded on April , is a continental organization for the purpose of regional solidarity and cooperation among its member states. Its four primary regional goals are democracy, human rights, security, and development within the region. As it stands, the 35 permanent member states are the nations within the American continent. The OAS also has 70 permanent observers from nations around the world. For the purposes of this debate, all observers will be given full voting powers on directives, as well as the ability to act independently of the organization within their own governments. Topic Overview: Operation Condor Introduction Operation Condor stands as one of bloodiest events of the twentieth century involving covert efforts executed by the United States. Taking place throughout the 1970s, various South American countries began to undergo military coup d'etats, with Paraguay the first to experience such by General Alfredo Stroessner. Eventually, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina experienced the same fate, going through similar coups with various military leaders. These dictatorships began to collaborate in their efforts to suppress left-wing political dissidence in the form of Operation Condor, the means of which were kidnappings, disappearances, and murder. It was in the midst of this period of chaos that the United States decided to covertly support such operations in order to suppress communist, socialist, and anti-right sentiments held within these countries. With the Cold War in full effect by this point in world history, the U.S. was more than willing to support such endeavors if it meant less communist influence on the world stage.

4 Delegate Profiles Chilean General Augusto Pinochet was the military ruler of Chile between 1973 and His repressive government imprisoned, tortured, and kidnapped tens of thousands political and legal dissidents. He was one of the main proponents of Operation Condor, and under his rule the Chilean secret police force DINA carried out countless attacks against leftist subversives. As head of state, he can issue binding decrees to his citizens and command the Chilean army. Paraguayan General Alfredo Stroessner was the first right-wing dictator to rise to power in the Southern Cone, staging a coup in 1954 and ascending to the position of dictator. He was a staunch anti-communist and had close military and economic ties with the American government until the end of his rule in He kept his country in what he called a constant "state of siege" that overruled civil liberties and tortured and killed political opponents. As head of state, he can issue binding decrees to his citizens and command the Paraguayan army. Bolivian General Hugo Banzer became dictator of Bolivia in He instituted harsh restrictions on dissident speech and later banned all political activity outside of his appointed government. As head of state, he can issue binding decrees to his citizens and command the Bolivian army. Argentine General Jorge Rafael Videla was dictator of Argentina from 1976 to His administration oversaw the Argentine Dirty War, an effort to rid the country of leftist political dissidence through police force. As head of state, he can issue binding decrees to his citizens and command the Argentine army. Uruguayan President Aparicio Méndez was one of multiple officials in the civilian-military administration that came to power in Uruguay after the 1973 coup of president

5 Juan Maria Bordaberry, but Méndez was the one who was appointed to the position of President. Méndez sought and secured approval from the military but was more moderate in his take on fascism than other South American dictators. As head of state, he can issue binding decrees to his citizens and command the Uruguayan army. Brazilian President Ernesto Geisel was an important figure in the 1964 military coup d'état that overthrew the leftist President João Goulart, and became Chief of the Military Staff of President Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco before ascending to the presidency in Geisel adopted a more moderate stance with regards to political opposition, devising a national plan of gradual democratization. As head of state, he can issue binding decrees to his citizens and command the Uruguayan army. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was a key figure in providing United States aid to the Southern Cone nations. He had extensive contact with Condor operatives, and even expressed explicit diplomatic support for some of the coups which took place during the 1970s and preceded Condor. Secretary Kissinger heads the US State Department and has jurisdiction over all diplomatic proceedings of the United States. DINA Chief Manuel Contreras was the chief of the Chilean secret police under General Pinochet. He led several operations both within Chile and internationally with the goal of kidnappings, forced disappearances, and murders of leftists. He also had close ties with the CIA, collaborating with US intelligence and receiving support, sometimes monetary. He, behind Pinochet, has control of DINA and as such the operative forces of Condor. Father Gustavo Gutierrez was a Peruvian minister who founded the concept of liberation theology, a method of spiritual thinking which combatted state oppression and poverty

6 through religious beliefs and biblical study. He was a figurehead of those oppressed by the governments of the Southern Cone. While not a head of state and with no de jure power in government, Father Gutierrez has abundant influence in the Catholic church and among most Southern Americans. Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro was a key figure in the overthrow of the right-wing Batista government in Cuba in After the coup, Castro assumed military and political power as Cuba s Prime Minister. Castro was a Marxist-Leninist who converted Cuba into a socialist state, and as such openly supported the USSR in the Cold War while being the target of hostility from the United States. USSR Premier Leonid Brezhnev became leader of the USSR in 1964 and the first secretary of the Communist party in the Soviet Union. His heavy-handed approach to the Cold War abided by the principle that the USSR could intervene in the domestic affairs of any Soviet bloc nation if Communist rule were threatened. During the Cold War, Brezhnev provided support to Latin American revolutionaries and maintained close ties with socialist Cuba. KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov was the head of the KGB, the Soviet agency which acted as a security, intelligence, and secret police body throughout the Cold War. Historical Context Several circumstances in Latin American history made the region conducive to the type of political strife, violence, and foreign intervention observed during Operation Condor. The most significant and deep-rooted causes lie in the way the region developed politically following the movements for independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century. After three centuries of rule by an Iberian power in which all sovereignty was concentrated in the monarch,

7 a search for a new source of political legitimacy was fraught with uncertainty. Early governments in nations such as Venezuela and Chile wrote constitutions with weak executives and limited constituent representation in the 1810s, but by mid-century the overwhelming tendency in Latin American governments was to move away from this scheme in favor of 1 creating stronger, more centralized regimes. National governments changed hands rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century between those who sought power. Neither those in office or those seeking it consistently respected the provisions of the newly written constitutions. In some cases, the very authors of constitutions broke the rules laid out in them in order to gain influence or power in government. As such, extralegal maneuvers and the use of force became common elements of Latin American politics. Another consequence of Latin American independence which made the region conducive to unrest was the change in economic situation post-revolution. Before independence, Spanish colonies in Latin America were part of a common market under the Spanish empire, and provided resources to the mainland in return for limited trade. Unable to rely on old taxes for revenue and faced with military and bureaucratic expenses greater than those of the colonial regime, new governments commonly found themselves in tight financial straits. Their resulting weakness contributed to political instability, which at the same time impeded the reorganization 2 of economic systems. Latin America turned to financial investment provided by nations which had already begun to industrialize, notably Great Britain, France, and the United States. Dependence on these powers increased directly with financial investments. As time passed, the United States became the dominant foreign influence in Latin America. The passage of the Ibid.

8 Monroe Doctrine in 1823 put in writing America s perceived right to intervene in Latin American affairs, and placed Latin America squarely in the United States sphere of influence. As development in Latin America wore on, the export of natural resources provided the basis for most national economies, a trend which continued through the twentieth century. This market allowed for the creation of a wealthy elite who facilitated collection and export. The stratification of wealth created a sizable gap between the rich and the poor and left the lower class far removed from any possible licit influence in politics and dependent on the wealthy for patronage, or financial support. Endemic political and economic instability led to the emergence of caudillos, military leaders who often came to power through use of violence and dispensed patronage and exploited ties with the elite to gain influence in government. These strongman figures, while on occasion doing good for the nations over which they exerted power, mostly advanced the oligarchic trend of South American governance and contributed to normalization of force and coercion. Popular insurrections were often repressed: 100,000 were killed during the suppression of a Colombian 3 revolt between 1899 and 1902 during the Thousand Days' War. Origins of the Operation Condor Allyship By the second half of the twenty-first century, economic development and political reform in Latin America had progressed exponentially, and consistent violent turmoil was no longer the status quo. However, new realities presented by a post-wwii international community challenged the status quo in Latin America and evoked long-ingrained political traditions -- of 3 Ibid.

9 foreign involvement in Western hemispheric affairs (namely American involvement), and of governmental violence being a means of suppression of social or political unrest. By 1970, two nations in the Southern Cone of Latin America -- Brazil and Paraguay -- were taken over by military governments in the preceding decades. In the socially and politically unstable nation of Paraguay, General Alfredo Stroessner, a staunch anti-communist, overthrew president Federico Chávez in 1954, and began his 35-year rule. Ten years after, in 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew democratically-elected left-wing president João Goulart. Both these regimes were repressive of their nation's citizens. In Paraguay, General Stroessner declared a state of siege and ruled under what basically amounted to martial law for his entire tenure. Paraguay turned into a one-party state, with Stroessner s Colorado Party being heavily favored through rigging of elections. In Brazil, a 1964 scandal involving Cuban aid to internal subversion movements led to a string of inhumane torture and interrogation methods of suspected revolutionaries, as well as the arrest of about 300 journalists. In the 1970s, four more nations leaders were overthrown by military powers, starting in Bolivia in General Hugo Banzer, through a series of coups, ousted leftist president Juan José Torres, with financial and advisory assistance from both the United States and Brazil. In 1973, a civic-military dictatorship seized power from Juan María Bordaberry of Uruguay, forcing him to participate in a self-coup and giving him a nominal role in government until he was removed in Also in 1973, Chilean forces led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the first democratically elected Marxist ruler of a Latin American country, Salvador Allende. And in 1976, the Argentine military, led by General Jorge Rafael Videla, seized power from a highly unstable government of violent factional conflicts. With these four coups, all governments

10 in the region of South America known as the Southern Cone were military dictatorships. The primary concern of these dictators was maintaining power despite subversion efforts from leftist urban guerrilla groups such as the Chilean Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), the Argentine Peronist Montoneros, and the Uruguayan Tupamaros National Liberation Movement. 4 The growing threat of these resistance groups necessitated intergovernmental cooperation in the region, and from this necessity was born the alliance between the Operation Condor participants. Cooperation among various South American security services had existed prior to the creation of Operation Condor, with the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion." During the Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on 3 September 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of information" between various services in order to "struggle against subversion." In March 1974, representatives of the police forces of Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A death squad, to implement cooperation guidelines. Their goal was to destroy the "subversive" threat represented 5 by the presence of thousands of political exiles in Argentina. However, the official plan Operation Condor was not formed until On 25 November 1975, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret 6 police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor. General Rivero, intelligence officer of the Argentine Armed Forces and former student of the French, developed the concept

11 of Operation Condor. [19] Based on the governments' perception of threats, officially the targets were armed groups which posed a threat to their authority. Atrocities Committed The Argentine Dirty War Plots aided by the regional cooperation provided by Operation Condor transpired in all member countries. Argentina, being a major contributor to the manpower conducting disappearances, had the means and the reason to launch their own attack on subversives and suspected subversives between the years 1974 and known within the nation as the Guerra Sucia, or the Dirty War. The nation saw two resurgences of leftist insurgency in recent history -- the 1955 ousting and exile of controversial president Juan Peron energized his populist-nationalist supporters into forming the urban insurgent group the Montoneros. In 1974, Marxist admirers of Che Guevara (the People s Revolutionary Army [ERP]) took control of the remote province of Tucuman and actually governed that part of the national territory. In 1975 the Army was ordered to Tucuman to eradicate the insurgents and restore the province to the Argentine state, and did so swiftly and ruthlessly. The ERP never again gained any real 7 governing power, but remained active in Argentina and had close ties with the Montoneros. With the ultimate goal of destroying these two movements, the military regime undertook widespread kidnappings, torture, and murder not only of the violent guerrilla left but also of 8 the nonviolent leftist political activists, their sympathizers, and their families. The junta closed the National Congress, imposed censorship, banned trade unions, and brought state and municipal government under military control. Throughout the country the regime set up Ibid.

12 hundreds of clandestine detention camps, where thousands of people were jailed and persecuted. Because leftist guerrillas were widely active in the country beginning in the late 1960s, the Argentine government, which maintained that it was fighting a civil war, initially faced little public opposition. The government essentially won, and by 1980 when guerrilla resistance was successfully wiped out, an estimated 30,000 Argentinians had disappeared -- seized by the 9 authorities and never heard from again. Kidnappings, Disappearances, and Murders From 1976 onwards, the Chilean secret police force, DINA, and its Argentinean counterpart, SIDE, were the operation s front-line troops, seizing revolutionaries and political opponents of the Southern Cone regimes and causing them to disappear. This new force operated in other member countries secretly, under the guise of a counter-terrorism effort. Disappearance of political dissidents was the most notable feature of Operation Condor. Infamous " death flights were widely used. Government forces took victims by plane or helicopter out to sea, dropping them to their deaths and planned disappearances. DINA and SIDE forces often crossed national borders to capture targets. In November 1978, with the consent of the Brazilian military regime, senior officers of the Uruguayan army secretly crossed the border and entered Porto Alegre, capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. There they kidnapped Universindo Rodriguez and Lilian Celiberti, an activist Uruguayan couple of the political opposition, along with her children, Camilo and Francesca, five and three years old. 10 Further investigation by two Brazilian journalists found 180 cases similar to Rodriguez and Celiberti s in Uruguay alone. 9 Ibid. 10

13 In April 1977, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers whose children had been disappeared, started demonstrating each Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada on the plaza. They were seeking to learn the location and fates of their children. The disappearance in December 1977 of two French nuns and several founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo gained international attention. Their remains were later identified as among those bodies washed 11 up on beaches in December 1977 south of Buenos Aires, victims of death flights. Chile and the Pinochet Regime The military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile was, along with Argentina, one of the most brutal governments in the Southern Cone. Pinochet ruled the country from 1974 to 1990, and during his reign an estimated 35,000 of his political opponents were 12 believed to have been tortured or disappeared. Among the crimes attributed to Pinochet during the Operation Condor years were several high-profile murders that stretched beyond Chile's borders carried out by DINA, which Pinochet organized in Prosecutors in Washington in 1999 began investigating Pinochet's role in the September 1976 car bombing on Embassy Row that killed Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean foreign minister, and his 25-year-old American assistant, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. 13 DINA was also known to have contacted Croatian terrorists, Italian neofascists and the Iranian Shah's 14 SAVAK to locate and assassinate dissidents in exile. Intelligence agencies under Pinochet's regime instituted secret detention and torture sites to conduct political repression. In total, Chile had 17 torture centers. On occasion, prisoners were

14 released after being confined and tortured. However, many detainees were also killed and 15 "disappeared." American Support of Operation Condor Despite the blatant human rights violations emblematic of Operation Condor, the United States was a significant collaborator with the Southern Cone countries, mostly driven by fear of communist influence overtaking the continent. Operation Condor took place in the historical context of the Cold War, a decades-long ideological struggle between capitalism and communism for dominance on the world stage. The United States had significant traction in South America in terms of claiming it safe from communism -- America was the principal trading partner and source of loans, grants, and private investment for almost all countries in the 16 region, and Latin American leaders considered its favour worth having. This alliance was put into writing in 1947 when a mutual defense treaty called the Rio Pact was signed by America and 17 Latin American states. A year later, further progress was made when twenty Latin American states signed the Charter of the Organization of American States and formed the Organization of American States (OAS), pledging to fight communism on the American 17 continent along with the United States. However, the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959 and his claiming of the nation as a Marxist-Leninist state startled United States policymakers. So, too, did the rise of leftist guerrilla movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s, professing affinity for the radical economic and social policies Castro s Cuba had enacted. The United States, fearing communist encroachment 15 Ibid

15 and eventual takeover, resolved to aid South American nations in eliminating Marxist subversion, bolstering their alliances with these countries while rooting out violent leftist threats. Washington provided the Operation Condor nations with financial assistance, advanced computers, and sophisticated tracking technology. During its years of operation, Condor employed a telecommunications system, Condortel, to coordinate its intelligence, planning, and operations against political opponents. In 1978, Paraguayan military general Alejandro Fretes Davalos identified the Panama Canal Zone base of the U.S. military as the site of a secure transnational communications center for Condor. According to Fretes Davalos, intelligence chiefs from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay used "an encrypted system within the U.S. telecommunications net[work]," which covered all of Latin America, to "coordinate intelligence information", uncovering the fact that Condortel was an American 18 contribution to the Operation. An Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact in 1976 that the CIA had played a key role in setting up the computerized links among the 19 intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states. The United States also provided military intelligence and training to the Southern Cone nations during Operation Condor. The Panama base also housed the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the U.S. Special Forces, and the Army School of the Americas (SOA), among other facilities, during the Operation Condor years. Tens of thousands of Latin American officers were trained at the SOA, which used torture manuals released by the Pentagon and the CIA. Latin American officers trained in Panama have confirmed that the base was the center of the hemispheric anticommunist alliance. One military graduate of the School Ibid.

16 said, "The school was always a front for other special operations, covert operations." A Uruguayan officer who worked with the CIA in the 1970s said that the CIA not only knew of Condor operations, but also supervised them. In September 2000, the CIA itself disclosed that DINA chief Manuel Contreras was a CIA asset between 1974 and 1977, and that he received an unspecified payment for his services. During these same years Contreras was known as "Condor 20 One," the leading organizer and proponent of Operation Condor. A CIA report from 1976 entitled The Third World War and South America revealed that by that year, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that US intelligence services were quite aware of the infrastructure and goals of Operation Condor. They realized that "Operation Condor" was the code name given for intelligence collection on "leftists," Communists, and Marxists in the Southern Cone Area. The intelligence services were aware that it was security cooperation among several South American countries' intelligence services (such as Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia) with Chile as the epicenter of the operation, and that operations were already being carried out. 21 The second part of the report, however, demonstrates the United States' understanding of Operation Condor's more nefarious operations. The report notes, "the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations to include assassinations against terrorist or supporters of terrorist organizations." The report also highlighted the fact that these special teams were intelligence service agents rather than military 22 personnel. The justification for the United States support of the Condor participants governments despite the atrocities committed was the ultimate goal of ridding South America of leftist 20 Ibid Ibid.

17 influence. As long as the nominal goal of Operation Condor was to eliminate South American Marxists, the United States would provide support. Even before the official beginning of Operation Condor, the United States influenced South America by backing right-wing regimes and coups run thereby -- some of the Southern Cone governments had come into power with the aid of the United States. Washington had a particularly heavy hand in the Chilean coup which installed General Augusto Pinochet and overthrew President Salvador Allende, the first 23 democratically elected Marxist leader of a Latin American country. A Bigger Picture: The Cold War Operation Condor took place within the larger historical context of the Cold War, which was an ideological struggle between capitalism, backed by the United States and its allies, and communism, backed by the Soviet Union and its allies, which started at the end of World War I and lasted until While there were not any actual fronts on which the Cold War was fought, there were major regional conflicts, called proxy wars, supported by both sides. Both sides also provided significant aid to nations who adhered to their ideological system. The most significant South American development in favor of communism in the time period of the Cold War was the Cuban revolution in On January 1, dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country in the face of revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. Under Castro s rule, Cuba became a socialist nation; Castro nationalized American-owned property, allied himself with the Communist Party, and grew friendlier with the Soviet Union. 24 After establishment of diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in 1959, Cuba became increasingly dependent on Soviet economic markets as well as military aid and was a close ally of the Russians during the Cold

18 War. In 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev implemented a nuclear warhead installation plan in Cuba in response to NATO positioning their nuclear missiles in Turkey. This gave the Russians a holding point in the Western Hemisphere, in proximity to both South America and to the United States. In 1972, Cuba joined the COMECON, an economic organization of states 25 designed to create cooperation between the planned socialist markets of the world. It was common in the Cold War for the Soviet Union and the United States to back various nations with their respective ideological alignments in struggles while not directly fighting themselves. These conflicts, called proxy wars, were tools with which each side advanced their causes. Another common tactic was the backing of regimes, however otherwise flawed, which aligned with their ideologies. Operation Condor was in part propped up by this backing by the United States, and a significant part of delegates responsibilities in committee will be deciding whether to perpetuate or end this extensive foreign aid in the name of, respectively, security or human rights. Committee Proceedings What-if In recorded history, Operation Condor continued until the 1980s, when most all of the traces of leftist insurgency in the Southern Cone were destroyed. Because of the covert nature of the operation, no international action was taken to counter the efforts of the secret police and the nations governments. The extent of Operation Condor s atrocities were not made known until 1992, when human rights lawyer Martin Almada stumbled upon archives in Paraguay describing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans who had been secretly killed, kidnapped, and tortured 25

19 by Condor operatives. Prosecution of generals and heads of state during Condor did not begin until The totality of the Southern Cone governments control over the citizenries of their nations allowed for no significant backlash, and the operation was completed without much conflict. This committee will begin in 1976, when all six Southern Cone nations have been taken over by right-wing dictators and the Letelier assassination has taken place. The events taking place as a part of Operation Condor -- kidnappings, torture, military conspiracy -- are presumed to be carried out continually even past this date, as the Operation is still happening. Historical context will be established at the beginning of committee, and delegates will assume that history is accurate up until that point. During committee, an element of increased foreign intervention will be added to enhance the historical context in which the committee takes place. Left-wing proponents from Communist nations, such as Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan heads of state, as well as people who advance the ideology of revolution on the left, such as grassroots and religious leaders, will be represented in the committee and will be able to use their respective responsibilities in their home countries and on the world stage to participate in the international effort to either aid or end Operation Condor. The addition of these delegates will add a what-if layer to the committee s proceedings and allow for more speculation concerning how South American citizens and the international community responded to Operation Condor, and how these efforts affected the success of the effort. Questions to Consider As various international figures with varied capabilities, delegates have a wide-ranging

20 toolbox of resources they can use to either perpetuate Operation Condor and anti-leftist efforts or aid South American revolutionaries. Delegates should keep in mind the following points while proceeding in committee and issuing their directives: Are you aiming to abet Condor operatives or stop the operation? Why? Are leftist organizations a threat to regional or national security -- are Southern Cone governments justified in pursuing their repression? What military or intelligence support can you provide to Condor operatives, or the revolutionaries? Is any independent military action needed? Can humanitarian aid be provided to those targeted by Operation Condor? Is restructuring of Southern Cone governments necessary, either to prevent threat to capitalist systems or to prevent political repression from occurring? Which other nations or figureheads can you side with in your efforts, and how can these alliances be translated into effective directives?