“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.

Table of contents

Questions

1. What happened in Latin America during the 1960s?
2. Name at least three new far-right military coups in the region.
3. Choose one topic about Latin America that is not included in our syllabus but that you would like to discuss.
4. What was Operation Condor, and which Latin American countries participated in it?
5. How did US interventions and covert support influence military coups and authoritarian governments in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s?
6. What were the right-wing paramilitary groups and left-wing guerrilla organizations, such as the Montoneros, FARC, and Shining Path, and what were their goals and methods?

Corporations And Bullets: The Documented Night of Latin America

In 1952, Guatemala’s agrarian reform seized unused land from the United Fruit Company (Chiquita Bananas), which held approximately 550,000 acres, most of it uncultivated. The government offered about $627,000 in compensation, the value the company itself had reported for taxes. Washington demanded nearly 16 million dollars on the company’s behalf. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles had both worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, United Fruit’s law firm. In June 1954, Operation PBSUCCESS toppled Jacobo Árbenz, a fact the CIA confirmed in its own internal history, declassified in 1997.

The model spread. It failed in Cuba, but not in the rest of Latin America. In Brazil in 1964, Ambassador Lincoln Gordon’s cables and Operation Brother Sam, a US naval task force with fuel and weapons ready to support the coup, are documented in files at the Johnson Library. In Chile, the Senate’s Church Committee (1975) found that the CIA spent about 3 million dollars on the 1964 election and around 8 million dollars between 1970 and 1973 against Salvador Allende. ITT offered one million dollars to block his inauguration. Richard Helms’s handwritten notes from a meeting with Nixon on September 15, 1970, record the order to “make the economy scream.” The School of the Americas, operating in Panama since 1946, trained more than 60,000 Latin American officers. In 1996 the Pentagon admitted that its training manuals had advocated torture, blackmail, and executions of political dissidents.

The older dictatorships of the Caribbean and Central America had laid the foundation. The US Marines occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 and left behind the National Guard under Anastasio Somoza García, whose family governed from 1936 until 1979. Rafael Trujillo rose through the Dominican constabulary established during the US occupation of 1916 to 1924, ruled from 1930 to 1961, and in October 1937 ordered the slaughter of Haitians along the border, with estimates ranging from 12,000 to more than 20,000 dead. In Haiti, François Duvalier founded the Tontons Macoutes in 1959, and under the two Duvaliers an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 people were killed.

Then paramilitarism became doctrine. In February 1962, the General Yarborough mission from Fort Bragg recommended that Colombia form civilian groups for “paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities” against communist advocates (mostly professors, journalists, and peasants and workers’ unions). Colombia legalized armed civilian self-defense groups through Decree 3398 of 1965 and Law 48 of 1968. El Salvador created ORDEN in the 1960s, and Guatemala had the Mano Blanca and other death squads. In Argentina, the Triple A killed hundreds of people between 1973 and 1976, before the coup. Operation Condor, formalized in 1975, coordinated repression across the Southern Cone, as documented by Paraguay’s “Archives of Terror,” discovered in 1992. Paramilitaries and allied state forces account for at least 400,000 deaths in these countries during that period.

Armed resistance grew alongside the repression. The Cuban Revolution triumphed in January 1959. The Sandinista National Liberation Front was founded in 1961, Guatemala’s FAR in 1962, Colombia’s FARC and ELN in 1964, Chile’s MIR in 1965, Uruguay’s Tupamaros in the mid-1960s, and Argentina’s Montoneros and ERP in 1970. Ernesto Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia and executed on October 9, 1967, in La Higuera, with CIA officer Félix Rodríguez present. The guerrillas received training and support from Cuba, and they also killed, kidnapped, and executed people. Only the Sandinistas took power, in July 1979.

Tortured, Killed, and Disappeared. The Numbers

The numbers from official truth commissions, not activists, tell how the balance of violence fell. Guatemala’s UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification (1999) counted about 200,000 dead or disappeared between 1960 and 1996. It attributed 93 percent of the violations to the state and its paramilitaries and three percent to the guerrillas, and found that acts of genocide were committed against Maya communities. That same year, Bill Clinton acknowledged that US support for those forces had been wrong. El Salvador’s Truth Commission (1993) attributed about 85 percent of the cases it received to state agents and death squads and about 5 percent to the FMLN (left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front). Colombia’s Truth Commission (2022) estimated 450,000 homicides between 1985 and 2018, with paramilitaries responsible for about 45 percent, guerrillas about 27 percent, and state agents about 12 percent. According to Colombia’s National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH), the armed conflict between 1958 and July 2018 left 262,197 documented deaths. Paramilitary groups were held responsible for 94,754 (36.1 percent), state agents for 9,804 (3.7 percent), and all guerrilla organizations combined for 35,683 (13.6 percent). Paramilitaries and state agents together thus account for 40 percent of the total, nearly three times the share of all guerrillas. In 1999, at the height of paramilitary expansion, a submission to the UN Commission on Human Rights reported that paramilitaries were responsible for 78 percent of human rights violations, guerrillas for 20 percent, and state forces for 2 percent.

Colombia’s Truth Commission (2022) estimated 450,000 homicides between 1985 and 2018, with paramilitaries responsible for about 45 percent, guerrillas about 27 percent, and state agents about 12 percent. According to Colombia’s National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH), the armed conflict between 1958 and July 2018 left 262,197 documented deaths. Paramilitary groups were held responsible for 94,754 (36.1 percent), state agents for 9,804 (3.7 percent), and all guerrilla organizations combined for 35,683 (13.6 percent). Paramilitaries and state agents together thus account for 40 percent of the total, nearly three times the share of all guerrillas. In 1999, at the height of paramilitary expansion, a submission to the UN Commission on Human Rights reported that paramilitaries were responsible for 78 percent of human rights violations, guerrillas for 20 percent, and state forces for 2 percent.

Argentina’s CONADEP documented 8,961 disappearances, while human rights organizations estimate 30,000, and the “death flights” were substantiated by former naval officer Adolfo Scilingo in 1995. Chile’s Rettig and Valech commissions recognized more than 3,000 dead or disappeared and about 38,000 survivors of political imprisonment and torture. None of this is a conspiracy thesis. It is in the archives of the governments that orchestrated it. The almost 9,000 disappearances recorded by Argentina’s CONADEP were corroborated cases, not necessarily the total number of victims; human-rights organizations approximate that as many as 30,000 people vanished. The same applies to Chile, where official figures increased as new evidence surfaced. The absence of documentation for every victim does not mean those victims did not exist. These crimes are supported by testimonies, forensic evidence, official investigations, and government archives—not conspiracy theories.

Measured by the official and academic figures, the violence of the left-wing guerrillas in Latin America was real. With one major exception, it was also a fraction of the violence committed by states and their paramilitary partners. This is not an opinion. It is arithmetic, which the powerful typically prefer to omit from the story. The guerrillas did not appear out of nowhere. They emerged after generations of dictatorships, of uniforms that tortured in the name of order, of death squads that murdered in the name of freedom. And yet the official story insists on reversing cause and effect: the dictatorships were a natural response to subversion, the massacres a regrettable reaction, the coups a form of self-defense. As if the plots of the banana and mining companies had never existed. As if the CIA had not overthrown elected governments, from Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973, and then seated the generals in the presidential chair and kept them there. As if the history of the continent had begun on the day the first guerrilla picked up a rifle, and not decades earlier, when democracies were being demolished and popular movements suppressed. As if torture, disappearances and broken constitutions could be absolved by pointing at the victim. That is the oldest trick of those who chronicle history: first they ignite the fire, then they blame the smoke.

In Uruguay, the MLN-Tupamaros caused a total of 60 victims, while the state incarcerated thousands and the dictatorship that followed tortured on a massive scale.

In Argentina, even the highest tally, from an association led by Victoria Villarruel, attributes 1,094 murders to Montoneros and the ERP combined, compared with 8,961 disappearances documented by CONADEP and some 30,000 estimated by human rights organizations, plus the hundreds killed by the Triple A before the coup.

In Colombia, the Truth Commission found that paramilitary groups killed 205,028 people (45 percent), while the guerrillas killed 122,813 (27 percent), of which 96,952 were attributed to the FARC, although the perpetrator was unknown in 52 percent of cases.

In Guatemala and El Salvador, truth commissions attributed 93 percent and 85 percent of violations, respectively, to the state and its death squads, against three or five percent for the guerrillas.

Peru is the clear exception: Shining Path killed about 31,000 people, roughly 46 percent of the conflict’s deaths, more than the state forces. Two cautions keep the comparison honest: (1) the FARC and Shining Path figures belong mostly to the 1980s through 2000s, not the 1960s and 1970s, and (2) the guerrillas’ smaller numbers do not erase their responsibility for executions, kidnappings, and attacks on civilians. But the overall pattern documented by the region’s own truth commissions is unmistakable: in most of Latin America, the violence of armies and paramilitaries, trained, financed, or supported by Washington in the name of fighting communism, preceded and exceeded that of the insurgents by a wide margin, often by a factor of ten or more.

«A concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later. This should be done with a view toward development of a civil and military structure for exploitation in the event the Colombian internal security system deteriorates further. This structure should be used to pressure toward reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.»

(Gen. William P. Yarborough. Colombia, February 1962)

Operation Mockingbird and the CIA’s Cultural Cold War

The name is employed today for the CIA’s extensive effort, from the late 1940s on, to recruit journalists and shape coverage at home and abroad. Its architect was Frank Wisner, head of the Office of Policy Coordination, who reportedly labeled his network of friendly media outlets the «Mighty Wurlitzer,» an organ he could play at will. Allen Dulles, CIA director from 1953 to 1961, expanded it.

The only CIA document that employs the name, the «Family Jewels» compiled in 1973 and declassified in 2007, refers to «Project Mockingbird,» a 1963 wiretap on two Washington columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, to identify their leaks. The label was applied to the wider media program later, notably by Deborah Davis in her 1979 book on the Washington Post.

The broader program itself is thoroughly documented. The Church Committee (1976) determined that about 50 US journalists or media employees had clandestine relationships with the agency, and that the CIA owned or subsidized hundreds of newspapers, news services, and publishing houses overseas, including in Latin America, which then reached US readers through cable stories. In 1977, Carl Bernstein reported in Rolling Stone that more than 400 American journalists had undertaken assignments for the CIA over 25 years, including executives and correspondents at CBS, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, which the publications disputed in part. In Chile, the Church Committee confirmed that the CIA financed El Mercurio with about 1.5 million dollars and inserted articles and editorials across the region against democratically elected president Salvador Allende.

The Church Committee also concluded that the CIA employed several hundred academics at more than 100 US colleges and universities for recruitment, research, and authorship, frequently without their institutions’ awareness. MIT’s Center for International Studies was founded in 1951 with CIA financing; its scholars, including Walt Rostow, molded modernization theory, which supplied the intellectual basis for US development policy in Latin America. In 1966, Ramparts divulged that Michigan State University’s advisory program in South Vietnam had concealed CIA officers, and in 1967 it exposed that the National Student Association had been covertly funded by the agency for years.

Under MKUltra (195-1973), the CIA sponsored mind-control and drug experiments through 44 colleges and universities, frequently using unwitting participants. In Chile, the Chicago Boys arose out of a 1956 exchange program between the University of Chicago and the Catholic University, financed by the US aid agency and not by the CIA. But the Church Committee reported that CIA collaborators helped devise the economic plan that later directed the junta’s decisions.

The principal operation here was more about persuading over intellectuals than eradicating them. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, established in Berlin in 1950 and covertly bankrolled by the CIA through foundations like the Farfield Foundation, supported journals, conferences, and writers in 35 countries. Its Latin American publications showcased Cuadernos and, from 1966 to 1971, Mundo Nuevo, edited in Paris by Emir Rodríguez Monegal to entice Boom writers away from Cuba’s Casa de las Américas. Historian Patrick Iber has documented how CCF figures campaigned in 1963-64 to weaken Pablo Neruda as a Nobel contender.

When the New York Times and Ramparts disclosed the funding in 1966 and 1967, the Congress imploded in scandal. Meanwhile, U.S. agencies retained files on writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, surveilled by the FBI for decades, and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS (1967-1974) spied on U.S. students and dissidents, in violation of its charter.

How the CIA Bankrolled the Left (1950-1967)

In June 1950, in a divided Berlin, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was born. It reached offices in 35 countries, sponsored more than twenty prestige magazines and gathered the finest pens of the West to defend freedom of thought. The thought had a sponsor: the Central Intelligence Agency, which paid the bills through front foundations such as Farfield. Washington had understood something conservatives never grasped: the most effective way to fight the left was not to silence it but to finance it, selecting which rebellion was acceptable and which was dangerous.

The method was simple and elegant. Encounter in London, Cuadernos (1953-1965) and later Mundo Nuevo (1966) in Paris spoke to Latin American intellectuals in their own language, offering a left that criticized everything except the empire. For more than a decade, the CIA also secretly funded the US National Student Association. Through the Independent Research Service, it sent young Americans to the communist-organized youth festivals in Vienna (1959) and Helsinki (1962). Among them was a young Gloria Steinem, years before she became the face of American feminism. Meanwhile, in 1958 and 1959, a touring exhibition carried abstract expressionist painting through eight European countries as proof that only capitalism produced free artists.

The scaffolding collapsed in March 1967, when the magazine Ramparts exposed the student funding. Two months later, Thomas Braden, the agent who had run the program, published an article titled «I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral’» and admitted it all, with the pride of a man who believes the ends absolve the means. In 1975, the Church Committee in the Senate confirmed the operation’s ties to cultural and media organizations. Two years later, Carl Bernstein reported that more than 400 American journalists had carried out assignments for the agency.

Many of the writers and students never knew who was paying. That was precisely the point. Censorship is crude and leaves fingerprints; patronage is invisible and leaves gratitude. The empire did not need to forbid ideas. It only needed to decide which ones would get a grant, a magazine and a plane ticket.

A Few Discretionary Coins

The CIA’s budget is classified. The public only learns the aggregate total for the 18 US intelligence agencies: 73.3 billion dollars appropriated for fiscal 2025, and 81.9 billion requested for 2026. The CIA’s own allocation has been disclosed only once, through the 2013 Snowden leak, which indicated about $ 14.7 billion.

Ordinary citizens therefore understand almost nothing beyond that single figure, and Congress knows far less than people assume. The complete breakdown appears in a classified annex that only the House and Senate intelligence panels and the defense appropriations subcommittees examine in detail. The remaining members of Congress can technically access it, but only in a secure room, typically without their staff and without taking notes or speaking publicly about what they observed, which in practice, means few do. Covert activities must be authorized by a presidential “finding” and reported to the intelligence committees, but the most sensitive ones can be restricted to just eight leaders, the so-called Gang of Eight, who are also bound to confidentiality. The consequence is that a few dozen lawmakers supervise tens of billions of dollars on behalf of everyone else, and the public mostly learns what was done years later, through leaks, declassified records or inquiries like the Church Committee in the 1970s.

In the 80s, Senator Arlen Specter was pushing a bill to create an independent Inspector General for the CIA. William Webster, then CIA director, opposed it and sent an unclassified letter to each committee member, which annoyed several of them. According to The Washington Post, one member (identity withheld) said Webster’s stance matched that of CIA officials who wanted to treat congressmen “like mushrooms,” which thrive when kept in the dark. The full version of that old saying is “kept in the dark and fed manure.”

Some Latin American military dictatorships during the 60s and 70s

Argentina: (capitalist far-right wing)

Bolivia (capitalist far-right wing)

Brazil (capitalist far-right wing)

Chile (capitalist far-right wing)

Cuba (communist far-left wing)

Haiti (capitalist far-right wing)

Honduras (capitalist far-right wing)

Guatemala (capitalist far-right wing)

El Salvador (capitalist far-right wing)

Ecuador (capitalist far-right wing)

Nicaragua (capitalist far-right wing)

Panamá (socialist center-left, then capitalist far-right wing)

Paraguay (capitalist far-right wing)

Perú (military, left)

Dominican Republic (capitalist far-right wing)

Uruguay (capitalist far-right wing)

Right-wing paramilitarism and Death squads (see Gral. William P. Yarborough) were introduced into those countries with some form of democracy before the 60s left wing guerrilla groups.

Some Dictatorships in the 60s and 70s

Here we don’t include previous dictatorships, usually called banana republics or U.S. protectorates from the 19th century through WWII.

Argentina (1966, 1976-1983). General Juan Carlos Onganía ousted Arturo Illia in 1966. On March 24, 1976, Jorge Videla, Emilio Massera, and Orlando Agosti deposed Isabel Perón, and José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, an industrialist connected to steel and agribusiness, managed the economy. Corporate complicity is judicially established in some cases: in 2018 a court convicted two former Ford Argentina executives for the kidnapping of union delegates held inside the plant, and the Ledesma sugar company is linked to the «Night of the Blackout» raids of 1976. The major papers, Clarín and La Nación, endorsed the coup, and the 1976 acquisition of Papel Prensa from the Graiver family under pressure remains a contested legal case. In October 1976, Henry Kissinger told Foreign Minister César Guzzetti that if things had to be done, they should be done swiftly, according to declassified memos. The Carter administration later condemned abuses and cut military aid in 1978. Result: 8,961 documented disappearances (CONADEP), about 30,000 according to human rights organizations.

Bolivia (1964, 1971, 1980). General René Barrientos ousted Víctor Paz Estenssoro in November 1964. Declassified documents reveal CIA financing for Barrientos, and Gulf Oil acknowledged in 1975 that it had disbursed about $460,000 to his party, including a helicopter. Hugo Banzer seized authority in August 1971 against the left-leaning Juan José Torres, with backing from Brazil, Argentina, and a welcoming Nixon administration. In 1980, Luis García Meza’s «cocaine coup,» assisted by Argentine officers and the Nazi fugitive Klaus Barbie, was rejected by the Carter administration.

Brazil (1964-1985). On March 31, 1964, generals headed by Humberto Castelo Branco ousted João Goulart. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon emboldened the plotters, and Operation Brother Sam stationed a U.S. naval task force on standby. The business institutes IPES and IBAD, bankrolled by Brazilian and foreign companies and, according to later investigations, the CIA, financed the campaign against Goulart. O Globo, O Estado de S. Paulo, and Jornal do Brasil backed the coup; O Globo publicly apologized in 2013. Businessmen funded the torture center OBAN, and Volkswagen do Brasil admitted collaborating with the repression and agreed to compensation in 2020. The National Truth Commission (2014) acknowledged 434 dead or disappeared.

Chile (1973-1990). Augusto Pinochet and the commanders of the navy, air force, and police toppled Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. After Allende’s election in 1970, Nixon instructed the CIA to thwart his inauguration, and General René Schneider, who opposed a coup, was slain in a kidnapping attempt by plotters the CIA had been in contact with. ITT offered $1 million to obstruct Allende, and Kennecott and Anaconda forfeited their copper mines to a unanimous nationalization vote in 1971. The CIA gave about $1.5 million to El Mercurio, whose owner Agustín Edwards had met with Kissinger and Helms in 1970, and financed opposition groups and strikes. The Church Committee found no evidence of direct U.S. participation in the coup itself, but documented years of destabilization. The «Chicago Boys» then ran the economy. More than 3,000 dead or disappeared and about 38,000 tortured (Rettig and Valech commissions).

Cuba (1952-1959; 1959-present). Fulgencio Batista seized authority in a coup on March 10, 1952, and was recognized by Washington. U.S. corporations controlled much of the sugar industry, utilities, and the telephone service (ITT), and the mafia operated the Havana casinos. Washington halted arms sales in March 1958. The revolution succeeded on January 1, 1959, and Fidel Castro’s government expropriated U.S. property in 1960, with claims totaling about $1.8 billion. Washington countered with the Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961), Operation Mongoose, CIA-mafia assassination plots against Castro documented by the Church Committee, and the embargo (1962). The revolutionary government created a one-party state allied with the Soviet Union, executed several hundred people by firing squad in its first years, sent dissidents and gay men to UMAP labor camps (1965-68), and placed the press under state control.

Haiti (1957-1986). The U.S. occupation of 1915 to 1934 was preceded by the removal of Haiti’s gold reserve by National City Bank in 1914. François Duvalier won an army-supervised election in 1957, declared himself president for life in 1964, and ruled through the Tontons Macoutes. Kennedy suspended aid in 1962 and 1963, but Washington tolerated and later supported the Duvaliers as an anticommunist bulwark near Cuba. Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled from 1971 until 1986. Estimated 30,000 to 60,000 killed.

Honduras (1963, 1972, 1980s). Colonel Oswaldo López Arellano deposed Ramón Villeda Morales on October 3, 1963, ten days before elections, after an agrarian reform that impacted the banana corporations. In the 1975 «Bananagate» scandal, United Brands (formerly United Fruit) was determined to have paid a $1.25 million bribe to Honduran authorities to reduce a banana export tax, which resulted to López Arellano overthrew Ramón Villeda Morales on October 3, 1963, ten days before elections, after an agrarian reform that affected the banana companies. In the 1975 «Bananagate» scandal, United Brands (formerly United Fruit) was found to have paid a $1.25 million bribe to Honduran officials to lower a banana export tax, which led to López Arellano’s ouster. In the 1980s, Honduras became the base for the CIA-backed Contras, and Battalion 3-16, trained with U.S. support, disappeared about 184 people.

Guatemala (1954-1996). Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas led the CIA’s Operation PBSUCCESS against Jacobo Árbenz in June 1954. United Fruit was directly linked to the Dulles brothers through Sullivan & Cromwell, and its publicist Edward Bernays organized press tours and a campaign presenting Guatemala as a Soviet beachhead. In 1963 Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia took power with the Kennedy administration’s tacit approval to prevent the return of Juan José Arévalo. Military regimes followed until 1986. The UN-backed truth commission counted about 200,000 dead or disappeared, attributed 93% to the state and its paramilitaries, and found acts of genocide against the Maya. Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013, a verdict later annulled on procedural grounds.

El Salvador (1931-1979; civil war 1980-1992). General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez’s regime suppressed the 1932 rebellion in La Matanza, killing an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 people, predominantly indigenous peasants. Military governments aligned with the coffee oligarchy, the so-called «fourteen families,» dominated for decades. ORDEN functioned as a rural paramilitary network. Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated on March 24, 1980, and the UN Truth Commission identified Roberto D’Aubuisson as having ordered it. In December 1981, the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion annihilated close to 1,000 people at El Mozote; Raymond Bonner of the New York Times, who documented it, was vilified by the Reagan administration and withdrawn from Central America. Washington dispatched about $4 billion to $6 billion in aid during the war. About 75,000 dead.

Ecuador (1963-1966; 1972-1979). A military junta deposed Carlos Julio Arosemena on July 11, 1963. Former CIA operative Philip Agee, stationed in Quito, detailed in his 1975 book Inside the Company how the CIA infiltrated parties, unions, and the press to pressure the country to break with Cuba and destabilize civilian administrations. In 1972, General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara seized power with a nationalist agenda and renegotiated oil terms with the Texaco-Gulf consortium; a more conservative triumvirate supplanted him in 1976 and transferred power to civilians in 1979.

Nicaragua (1936-1979). The U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 and established the National Guard. Its commander, Anastasio Somoza García, ordered Augusto César Sandino killed in February 1934 and seized power in 1936. (The phrase «he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,» attributed to Franklin Roosevelt, is probably apocryphal.) The Somozas built a family business empire and misappropriated much of the international aid after the 1972 Managua earthquake. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, was assassinated in January 1978. Carter reduced aid in 1979, and the Sandinistas assumed power in July. Washington then financed the Contras and mined Nicaraguan harbors, and in 1986 the International Court of Justice ruled against the United States.

Panama (1968-1989). Panama’s independence in 1903 was orchestrated with U.S. backing to secure the canal. In October 1968, National Guard officers toppled Arnulfo Arias eleven days into his term, and Omar Torrijos emerged as leader of a nationalist, populist administration that secured the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties returning the canal. After Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981, Manuel Noriega seized control of the Guard; he was a longtime paid CIA operative, more a narco-military strongman than an ideological right-winger. After he fell out with Washington, the U.S. invaded on December 20, 1989. Civilian deaths are disputed: about 200 according to the Pentagon, from several hundred to a few thousand according to other estimates.

Paraguay (1954-1989). Paraguay (1954-1989). General Alfredo Stroessner seized authority in 1954 and governed for 35 years with the Colorado Party, U.S. military assistance, and the anticommunist endorsement of successive administrations. Paraguay harbored Nazi fugitives, including Josef Mengele, and played a pivotal role in Operation Condor; the «Archives of Terror» discovered in 1992 document it. The newspaper ABC Color was shuttered in 1984. The 2008 truth commission recorded around 20,000 people detained and nearly 19,000 tortured, plus hundreds executed or disappeared.

Peru (1968-1980). General Juan Velasco Alvarado ousted Fernando Belaúnde on October 3, 1968, after a scandal over an agreement with the International Petroleum Company, a Standard Oil affiliate. Six days later Velasco nationalized IPC, then implemented a sweeping agrarian reform and expropriated the major newspapers in 1974. Washington reacted with aid reductions and credit pressure until a compensation settlement in 1974. In 1975 General Francisco Morales Bermúdez displaced Velasco and shifted the regime to the right, and Peru later collaborated with Operation Condor.

Dominican Republic (1930-1961; 1965-1978). Rafael Trujillo ascended through the constabulary established during the U.S. occupation of 1916 to 1924 and ruled from 1930 to 1961, directing the 1937 massacre of Haitians. When he became a liability, the CIA provided some weapons to the conspirators who killed him on May 30, 1961, according to the Church Committee. Juan Bosch, elected in December 1962, was deposed in September 1963. When his supporters rose up in April 1965, Lyndon Johnson dispatched more than 20,000 U.S. troops. Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo’s former aide, administered from 1966 to 1978 amid political killings, while Gulf+Western emerged a dominant force in the sugar industry.

Uruguay (1973-1985). President Juan María Bordaberry abolished Parliament with the military on June 27, 1973. The persecution had begun earlier: Dan Mitrione, a U.S. police consultant through USAID’s public safety program, was abducted and killed by the Tupamaros in 1970, and a former Cuban intelligence agent’s allegations that he taught torture are disputed. Uruguay had the world’s greatest rate of political prisoners per capita in the 1970s, and about 200 people were disappeared, many in Argentina through Operation Condor.

Two labels to double-check against the record: Peru (1968-75) and Ecuador (1972-76) had nationalist military governments that clashed with U.S. oil companies, so they don’t fit «far-right,» and Noriega’s Panama was defined more by drug trafficking and CIA ties than by ideology.

Operation Condor: The Consortium of Repression (1975-1983)

On November 25, 1975, while General Pinochet celebrated his 60th birthday, Colonel Manuel Contreras, head of Chile’s secret police (DINA), received a gift worthy of the occasion. In Santiago, the intelligence chiefs of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay signed the founding act of a new kind of regional integration. Not of markets, not of universities, but of torture chambers. They called it Condor. Brazil joined in 1976, Ecuador and Peru in 1978. The same regimes that preached sovereignty erased their borders, not to let people through but to make sure no one escaped.

The method had three phases, as any well-run corporation would. First, a shared database of «subversives.» Second, cross-border operations: kidnapped in Buenos Aires, tortured in Montevideo, disappeared in Asunción. Third, exporting the product abroad.

The export had begun even before the founding act. On September 30, 1974, a DINA bomb killed General Carlos Prats, the constitutionalist who had refused to betray Allende, and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, in Buenos Aires. On October 6, 1975, gunmen linked to Italian neofascist Stefano Delle Chiaie shot Bernardo Leighton and his wife, Anita Fresno, in Rome. They survived, crippled. In May 1976, Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz appeared murdered in Buenos Aires. In June, the former Bolivian president Juan José Torres. The condor did not need passports.

Nor did it need to conceal in Washington. On September 21, 1976, a bomb planted by DINA operative Michael Townley, born in Iowa, with the assistance of anti-Castro Cuban émigrés from the Cuban Nationalist Movement, detonated Orlando Letelier’s car on Sheridan Circle, a few blocks from the White House. Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, perished along with Ronni Moffitt, an American woman of 25. It was the worst act of foreign terrorism in the U.S. capital until then. And Washington knew. A State Department warning to the dictators, drafted in August, was never delivered. On September 20, the order was to take no further action. The next day, the bomb took action on its own. A week later, an FBI cable described Condor in detail. Its communications, declassified documents show, ran through a U.S. network in the Panama Canal Zone. Terrorism is a matter of who signs the check.

The reality was buried, as customary, in paper. On December 22, 1992, Martín Almada, a Paraguayan educator who had survived torture, discovered the «Archives of Terror» in a police station in Lambaré: hundreds of thousands of pages of bureaucratic atrocity. The most cited statistics from those files: about 50,000 killed, 30,000 disappeared and 400,000 incarcerated across the Condor nations.

Justice, as always, arrived on foot. Argentina convicted 15 defendants in 2016, including the last dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, for 105 victims. Italy confirmed 14 life sentences in 2021. Contreras died in prison in 2015, owing more than 500 years. The condor crossed borders in hours. Justice took half a century, and it still has not finished the trip.

(New York Times)

Pepsi demands a US coup

(The Guardian)

The School of Americas: https://soaw.org/notorious-soa-graduates

Also see: The School of the Americas

US Veterans For Peace: (sumary) veteransforpeace.org/

Some US interventions in Latin America during this period:

1/1959 * Dictator Fulgencio Batista, supported by the US until 1958, flees Castro’s revolution in Cuba.

11/1957 * US high school students in the Panama Canal Zone burn a Panamanian flag, sparking riots that kill and injure more than 100 people.

1960- * CIA plots to depose or assassinate Fidel Castro in what is eventually named «Operation Mongoose.»

4/1961 * Failed Bag of Pigs invasion of Cuba

1961 * US-supported dictator Rafael Trujillo assassinated in the Dominican Republic.

10/1962 * Missile Crisis with Cuba and USSR

1964 * Brazilian President Joao Goulart overthrown by the military, with covert US support.

1965 * US forces takeover, occupy Dominican Republic.

1970-73 * US and multinational corporations work covertly to overthrew socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. He dies in the September 1973 military coup.

1977-80 * President Jimmy Carter makes human rights a major goal in his Latin American policy.

1980 * Mariel boatlift brings 125,000 Cubans to the US.

1981-86 * Reagan administration officials secretly direct counter-revolutionary (contra) forces against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. More than a dozen Reagan administrator officials are convicted of a variety of crimes in the «Iran-Contra Scandal.»

1981-88 * Reagan administration strongly supports the Salvadoran military in their fight against the FMLN guerrillas.

4/1982 * Argentina invades the Falklands/Malvinas Islands, held since 1833 by Great Britain. Reagan administration officials debate for two weeks before siding with Great Britain.

1983 * Reagan orders US forces to invade the island of Grenada to halt Cuban work on an airstrip.

12/1989 * George Bush orders «Operation Just Cause,» the invasion of Panama to capture CIA collaborator and dictator Manuel Noriega.

1991 * Collapse of the Soviet Union creates problems in Cuba and introduces a «Special Period.»

1992 * NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement * 500th anniversary of Columbus’s Caribbean landing gives rise to widespread meetings and protests against imperialism, rejuvenation of indigenous rights movements. Guatemalan Rigoberto Menchu Tum wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

more here: https://faculty.chass.ncsu.edu/slatta/hi216/hi453time.htm

FARC, Shining Path, and Guerrillas in Latin America: https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-218?d=%2F10.1093%2Facrefore%2F9780199366439.001.0001%2Facrefore-9780199366439-e-218&p=emailAuKqCDMHlkvbg

Audiovisuals

Documents

the CIA’s internal history of PBSUCCESS (Nick Cullather, declassified 1997); the Church Committee report Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (1975); the National Security Archive’s collections on Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Operation Condor; the Guatemalan CEH report Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio (1999); the El Salvador Truth Commission report De la locura a la esperanza (1993); Colombia’s Truth Commission final report (2022); and Argentina’s CONADEP report Nunca Más (1984).

Sources

Agee, Philip. Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Penguin Books, 1975.

Azcona, José Manuel, and Miguel Madueño Álvarez. “ETA y MLN-Tupamaros. Del barretín al zulo.” Comillas Journal of International Relations, no. 26, 2023, pp. 18–29. ↗

Becker, Marc. “FARC, Shining Path, and Guerrillas in Latin America.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, Oxford UP, 15 Jan. 2015. ↗

Bernstein, Carl. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, 20 Oct. 1977. ↗

Bonner, Raymond. “Massacre of Hundreds Reported in Salvador Village.” The New York Times, 27 Jan. 1982. ↗

Braden, Thomas W. “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral.’” The Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967.

Broder, John M. “Clinton Offers His Apologies to Guatemala.” The New York Times, 11 Mar. 1999. ↗

Central Intelligence Agency. “Family Jewels.” 1973. CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, declassified 2007. ↗

Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. ¡Basta ya! Colombia: Memorias de guerra y dignidad. Imprenta Nacional, 2013. ↗

Check, Ryan M., and A. John Radsan. “One Lantern in the Darkest Night: The CIA’s Inspector General.” Journal of National Security Law & Policy, vol. 4, no. 2, 2010, pp. 247–94. ↗

Comisión de la Verdad para El Salvador. De la locura a la esperanza: La guerra de 12 años en El Salvador. United Nations, 1993.

Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. Informe final. Lima, 2003. ↗

Comisión de Verdad y Justicia. Anive haguã oiko: Informe final. Asunción, 2008.

Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación. Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación [Informe Rettig]. Santiago de Chile, 1991.

Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP). Nunca más. EUDEBA, 1984. ↗

Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura [Informe Valech]. Santiago de Chile, 2004.

Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición. Hay futuro si hay verdad: Informe final. Bogotá, 2022. ↗

Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Guatemala: Memoria del silencio. UNOPS, 1999.

Comissão Nacional da Verdade. Relatório. Brasília, 2014. ↗

Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954. 2nd ed., Stanford UP, 2006.

Davis, Deborah. Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

“Exposing the Legacy of Operation Condor.” Lens, The New York Times, 24 Jan. 2014. ↗

Gellman, Barton, and Greg Miller. “‘Black Budget’ Summary Details U.S. Spy Network’s Successes, Failures and Objectives.” The Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2013.

Hinckle, Warren, Robert Scheer, and Sol Stern. “The University on the Make.” Ramparts, Apr. 1966.

Iber, Patrick. Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. Harvard UP, 2015.

International Court of Justice. Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America). Judgment, 27 June 1986. ↗

McClintock, Michael. Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940–1990. Pantheon Books, 1992.

National Security Archive. Collections on Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Operation Condor. George Washington University. ↗

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “DNI Releases Appropriated Budget Figure for 2025 National Intelligence Program.” News Release No. 39-25, 31 Oct. 2025. ↗

–. “DNI Releases FY 2026 Budget Request Figure for the National Intelligence Program.” News Release No. 12-25, 4 June 2025. ↗

“Pepsi Demands a US Coup.” The Observer, 8 Nov. 1998. ↗

Priest, Dana. “U.S. Instructed Latin Americans on Executions, Torture.” The Washington Post, 21 Sept. 1996.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Granta Books, 1999.

Slatta, Richard W. Timeline of US–Latin American relations. North Carolina State University. ➗

SOA Watch. “Notorious SOA Graduates.” SOA Watch. ↗

Stern, Sol. “A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, etc.” Ramparts, Mar. 1967.

United States, Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. Interim report, S. Rept. 94-465, Government Printing Office, 1975. ↗

—. Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973. Staff report, Government Printing Office, 1975. ↗

—. Final Report, Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence. S. Rept. 94-755, Government Printing Office, 1976. ↗

Veterans For Peace. US Acts of Aggression in Latin America: Timeline. ↗

Wilford, Hugh. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Harvard UP, 2008.

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