Eight Latin American governments led by Chile and Argentina formed a military alliance known as “Operation Condor” in the seventies. Their goal? Cross borders to carry out kidnappings, murders, torture and other crimes in countries of the Southern Cone, North America and Europe. This early form of “war on terror,” in which the CIA and the US government itself were complicit, was soon a counterproductive decision: one of the international assassinations took place on the streets of Washington D.C.
Acclaimed by the major international media both for its contribution to historical memory and for its unsurpassed investigative journalism, The Years of the Condor reveals, with rigor and detail, the characters and gears of Latin America’s unprecedented systems of cross-border repression. Its author, the award-winning and renowned journalist John Dinges, who was also kidnapped and interrogated in Villa Grimaldi, interviewed the protagonists of this story, in addition to examining thousands of recently declassified documents.
The latest trials of the military officers responsible and the documents released by the United States in 2019 have allowed the author to delve into military operations and recount the tragic and unknown human stories of the victims, whose names are presented here for the first time in full. A hard-hitting and at the same time intimate book about that dark era.
“Rigorous and insurmountable research that portrays perpetrators, victims, and provides definitive background on that dark time of horror that we lived in the southern cone during the seventies and eighties,” says Maria Olivia Monckeberg.
“John Dinges has written a masterful book on state terrorism deployed from South America to the world. Those of us who were close to the victims can only be moved by the relentless memory that this work gives those who can remember, but especially those who do not remember that the loss of democracy generates monsters, “adds Juan Gabriel Valdés.
“John Dinges has identified the perpetrators and thus embarrassed all those who were complicit and inconvenienced all those who remained neutral,” says Christopher Hitchens.
The media also does not resist and The Washinton Post published: “Dinges assembles a thorough, well-documented and indignant allegation, more captivating the more judicious and content.” So did The Miami Herald, titled “The ‘Shocking and Compelling Account’ of a Brutal Campaign of Repression in Latin America, Based on Previously Classified Interviews and Documents.”
John Dinges (born 1941 in Spencer, Iowa) is one of the most prestigious investigative journalists today. Between 1972 and 1978 he worked as a correspondent for The Washington Post, Time and ABC Radio in Chile. He later covered the conflicts in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. In Chile he was one of the founders of APSI. Between 1985 and 1996 he was international editor and editorial director of National Public Radio. Between 1996 and 2016 he was the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University. He is co-founder of the Center for Research and Journalistic Information (Ciper) and together with Pascale Bonnefoy and Maria Olivia Monckeberg founded the research center ArchivosChile.
He is co-author, with Saul Landau, of Murder in Washington. El caso Letelier (1980) and author of, among other books, Nuestro hombre en Panamá (1990) and Operación Condor (2003). Dinges has also been awarded the Maria Coors Cabot Prize for Excellence in Latin American reporting, the Latin American Media Award and the Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Award. In 2017, President Michelle Bachelet awarded him the Bernardo O’Higgins order in the rank of commander for his personal contributions, throughout his professional career, to the struggle for the restoration of democracy in Chile.
