The War on Subversives to the War on Terror

For scholar McSherry, following the 2001 September 11[i] attacks and the ‘War on Terror’ the U.S instituted the same tactics as Condor. As she put it:

“We witnessed the use by US counterterrorist forces of disappearances, cross-border renditions, torture, secret ‘black sites’ located in other countries, and so on, approved by civilian authorities… all of these methods characterized Operation Condor.”[ii]

Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy (11 January 2002). Camp X-Ray detainees [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons.

For many scholars, the U.S shifted legal and moral norms and what is acceptable in the international domain. More concretely the U.S War on Terror greatly expanded intelligence agencies power and reach. We are still grappling with these powers today, whether through indiscriminate mass surveillance (see Chapter 5), the expanded power of the executive branch in the U.S and the erosion of norms, as Dr. Johannes Thimms a German professor on politics explains, many countries now label any struggle against political opponents as ‘fighting terrorism’, Russia, China and Turkey have all used this rhetoric when attacking minorities and nationalities. [iii] 

Domestically for the U.S the ‘War on Terror’ has led to the militarization of police, a push which comes directly from the Department of Homeland Security which provided money and military hardware with little oversight. [iv]This militarization has led to increased violent confrontations resulting in deaths and injuries from police interactions for example one study noted in the 1980s there were roughly 3,000 SWAT raids per year, this jumped to 45,000 in 2005.[v] 

More shockingly, in a 2015 expose The Guardian revealed a police force ‘black site’ was operational in Chicago, accounts from those detained there include: being held without legal counsel for 12 hours to people as young as 15, keeping arrestees off official booking databases and shackling for long periods. Discussing the site, Tracy Siska a civil-rights activist noted:

“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects… That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”[vi]

More recently, since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 political discourse has heated up around the world and the tactics of the Dirty War are now celebrated by members of the far-right. U.S groups such as the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers have been spotted sporting shirts and signs with slogans such as ‘Free Helicopter Rides’ or ‘Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong’. In the 2023 Allen, Texas mass shootings the perpetrator who killed 8 people wore a patch with the initials ‘RWDS’ which stands for ‘Right Wing Death Squad’, t-shirts with graphics of bound figures being thrown from helicopters are still sold on Amazon despite controversy. [vii]

I found one website that sells anti-communist crypto fascist anime girl t-shirts and apparel. You can’t make this shit up. John Zek, Screenshot, 09/01/2025.

The increasingly unhinged and violent rhetoric of not only Trump but the U.S Republican party must bring a chill of déjà vu to Condor survivors, in February 2024 congressman Mike Collins of Georgia replied to a tweet about a migrant man falsely accused of assaulting police writing that 

“..we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back”[viii].

Then former President Trump has made remarks that could have come from the mouth of Pinochet or Videla, in 2023 at one rally he proclaimed:

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. . .. We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”[ix]

An alternate history

As more documents become declassified, we unlock a clearer picture of the truly ‘hot’ actions of the Cold War.  These revelations challenge the accepted narrative that the Cold War was relatively bloodless and instead demonstrates that the U.S and various governments around the world fought a terrifying campaign of terrorism in order not only to repress grassroots communist movements but any liberal or progressive government that did not fall in line with their hegemonic vision.

For journalist and author Victor Bevins who has researched anti-communist mass killings around the world, the anticommunism crusade led by Washington and the West resulted not only the Third World undergoing mass murder and the deaths of untold hundreds of thousands if not millions but

“destroyed a number of alternative possibilities for world development”. [x]

We can’t say for certain whether these alternative possibilities would have worked amidst the authoritarian communist regimes and the ‘free’ market West, but we will never know now.

Condor showcases not only the frailty of democracy and civil society but the power of the human spirit. The speed and ferocity of violence by the military against its own citizens, of the chaotic return to democracy and struggle for justice show that powerful civil societies are required to keep power in check. The stories of individuals who faced Condor, of the families who faced intense persecution even death trying to find answers, of those tortured physically and psychologically, of women working together in solidarity; these stories show the triumph of the human spirit when faced with adversity. The memory and retelling of these events are needed now more than ever in a world once again facing the looming shadow of fascism.

Nunca Más Never Again

[i] Which coincidentally is the same day as the coup d’etat in Chile.

[ii] Branko Marcetic. The CIA’s Secret Global War Against the Left. Jacobin Magazine, November 30, 2020. https://jacobin.com/2020/11/operation-condor-cia-latin-america-repression-torture

[iii] Johannes Thimm.. From Exception to Normalcy: The United States and the War on Terrorism. German Institute for International and Security Affairs 2018.

[iv] American Civil Liberties Union, War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, June 2014, https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/jus14-warcomeshome-report-web-rel1.pdf. P. 30

[v] Ed Pilkington. US Police Departments Are Increasingly Militarised, Finds Report. The Guardian, September 20, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/jun/24/military-us-police-swat-teams-raids-aclu

[vi] Spencer Ackerman. The Disappeared: Chicago Police Detain Americans at Abuse-laden ‘black-site.’ The Guardian, March 26, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site

[vii] Jason Leopold, "Amazon Pulls ‘Chile Dictatorship Death Flights’ T-Shirts After Outcry," The Guardian, December 5, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/05/amazon-pulls-chile-dictatorship-death-flights-t-shirts-after-outcry. .

[viii] Moustafa Bayoumi.  Republican Congressmen Are Now Talking about Throwing Migrants from Helicopters. The Guardian, February 5, 2024.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/05/republicans-far-right-extremists-augusto-pinochet-helicopters.

[ix]Marianne LeVine. Trump Calls Political Enemies ‘Vermin,’ Echoing Dictators Hitler, Mussolini. Washington Post, November 13, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/.

[x] Vincent Bevins. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. Hachette UK, 2020. P. 255