Customer Reviews

The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Condor Years it's a superb piece of work. It often happens to me that the more I know about an issue, the more I am unsatisfied with what I read about it, because I am able to detect mistakes and inaccuracies. With John Dinges' book, right the opposite happened. Precisely because I am familiar with quite a few of the documents that he is using, I could appreciate how sound and well grounded are each and every statement that he makes, and how thoughtful, balanced and insightful is his reading of his sources. John Dinges' book has helped me to fully understand the implications and meanings of documents I was already familiar with. And now I am much more confident about the big picture, than what I used to be before reading the book. Needless to say, it also reads beautifully. To read it was a real intellectual pleasure.

The first thing we have to make clear in these types of books is who the author is and the author of this book is John Dinges. Dinges is a serious journalist who worked as the editorial director for National Public Radio for over ten years (1985 to 1996). He has worked as a foreign correspondent for Time, ABC, and most notably the Washington Post. And he is currently a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

This book is well-researched, documented, and in it Dinges is himself extremely careful about what he states as fact and is not afraid to acknowledge when there simply is not enough documentation to make clear judgments. He frequently cites cables sent between the White House and the U.S. embassy in Santiago and as well as information from his own interviews with major players within Condor and embassy/government officials during the period.

He makes clear how important Operation Condor was in the context of South American politics such as the fact that traditional enemies like Argentina and Chile were co-operating fully for the first time in contemporary history. And, initially at least, the real fear amongst the military dictatorships of guerilla movements united under the "Revolutionary Co-ordinating Junta".

Dinges shows how DINA (the Chilean secret police) was created with U.S. support and turned from a small intelligence department to the hand of Pinochet under the leadership of Manuel Contreras. More interesting is how the book documents how operations were run in Europe headed by American-born DINA operative Michael Townley along with Italian fascists to eliminate the exiled Christian Democratic/Socialist Party opposition. All of this, of course, climaxs with the Letelier assasination in D.C.

This is perhaps the best book you will find on the subject of Operation Condor. Documents obtained by Dinges in making this book are frequently cited by institutions such as the National Security Archive at George Washington University. It deserves all five stars I am giving it.

What's so remarkable about this book is the incredible fairness of its author. The reader will find that as he or she discovers one outrage after another, one violation of human rights after another, it will be almost impossible to remain calm. But Dinges calm tone, incredible evidence, and judicious manner makes the indictment of his book all the more powerful. Anyone worried about the conduct of the United States on the world stage today must read this book.

After all the 'moral values' chatter that erupted after the recent American election, a dose of reality can remind one of just how hypocritical the game is, and this excellent account of the Pinochet years, and the actions of the American government to that sordid history, can serve up the facts of the case, to wit, what Americans are capable of, on the record. Since it takes decades to get the facts, we should be wondering what's going on now in this second round of the 'war on terror' and who the successors to Kissinger are. The need for vigilance is crucial as the surge toward the right provokes all the standard systems of rights abuses, the 'mandate' for torture we won't read too much about, except for goofs like Abu Gharib.
The documented history here is first rate journalism and documents in chilling fashion the state terror set in motion to exterminate the leftists in South America. Espcially sordid is the picture of Kissinger colluding here even as he appears to be promoting rights issues, breathtaking hypocrisy.
Know what your government is capable of and fear it isn't getting worse.

This is a true story of terrorism and international terrorism patronized by the US government, then led by such honest and law-abiding statesmen as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (I guess Gerald Ford was also there, but permanently asleep). In this case the terrorists were not marxist revolutionaries or religious lunatics, but seven or eight South American rogue states - all of them military dictatorships and impeccable US allies. When in September 1976 the Chilean state terrorists choose Embassy Row, Washington DC, as the background for another assassination (in the person of ex-Chilean foreign minister and ex-ambassador to Washington Orlando Letelier), the US government coughed twice to cover its embarrassment, then coughed a third time, then ordered the US diplomats and secret services to cancel their almost manifest collaboration with the state terrorists, who still had plans to eliminate Ed Koch and other dangerous revolutionaries like him in the USA and Europe. These actions were canceled, but Operation Condor (the serial killings' corporate name) continued secretly at least until 1981. Some of the military have been tried and a few are still in jail now, but Operation Condor's top responsible Augusto Pinochet avoided any punishment till this day and Kissinger, though innocent and free at home, is on the run in half planet Earth.
We still don't know everything about this shocking story, but John Dinges' book The Condor Years is a great breakthrough. The only reviewer here who rates this book four stars tries to absolve the South American military dictatorships from their crimes, saying that they were fighting communism. Hitler always said the same.

John Dinges first wrote about the terrorist activities of the Pinochet dictatorship as long ago as 1980 (in Assassination on Embassy Row, written with Saul Landau), but, however much one might have suspected at that time, it was impossible to support it with much documentary evidence. A great deal more is available now, in part because of the case brought by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón in 1998, and in part because the declassification of many US Government files in the years from 1999 onwards. Dinges has therefore returned to his subject, and has written a detailed count of the years of terror in the southern part of South America, in which numerous military dictatorships -- led by Chile, but with enthusiastic participation of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay -- conspired to murder and torture many of their own citizens, transferring them between secret prisons at their convenience.

Despite the emotional and dramatic nature of the events that he describes, and despite his clear commitment to democracy, Dinges has written a balanced book, allowing the facts to speak for themselves and refraining from the sort of exaggeration that can easily convert a good case into an incredible one. Despite the much higher profile that the Chilean dictatorship had in the European and North American press than the even more vicious ones in Argentina and Uruguay had, he recognizes that -- contrary to what most people think -- there were far fewer murders in Chile than in most of the other countries involved, around 3000 in total, compared with around ten times as mant in Argentina. At one point he talks of several orders of magnitude more in Argentina, implying several millions, but that is clearly absurd, and is probably not so much an exaggeration as a careless use of words: certainly, there is nothing in the surrounding text to suggest that this means what it literally says.

Dinges concludes his book with the words "the history of the Condor Years is not one we are condemned to repeat." Let us hope that he is right.

In "The Condor Years", Jonh Dinges does a wonderful job documenting US complicity in overthrowing the democratically elected Popular Unity government in Chile and instituting Operation Condor, a network of right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America's six southernmost countries with the aim of crushing popular movements for economic democracy, social justice and political freedom. As such, it is an essential text for activists and scholars interested in human rights, civil liberties, union organizing, political repression in the Americas, corporate globalization and peace. The book also delves into the role that pro-business, reactionary Cuban exiles played in hunting down Chilean dissidents living in the US. Given current events in Colombia, Iraq and elsewhere, this is an urgent and frightening book!

I picked this up for a bit of a background on Chile, but I learned more about my own country in the process. Very factual, but reads like a novel. Engrossing, enlightening.

I love this book. I actually bought it at the book signing and found John Dinges himself to be an intelligent, modest, interesting man. The book itself goes along the same lines as Assasination on Embassy Row in that it recounts the history but put it into a format that is more like a novel. I read the through the entire thing in one day, and although I thought I had a good working knowledge of Chile during the Pinochet regime, I had not even touched on most of the things recounted in this book.

This is a breathtaking tour de force by one of the very best U.S. journalists who have written long and hard about Latin America, and although it may be not obvious, the book has eye-opening relevence to Washington's pursuit of al Qaeda. The Washington Post, moreover, cited the author's "subtlety and insight of his account of Condor, in which Pinochet's murderous (my word) "tactics made some sense in the face of the legitimate (if inflated) threat that the revolutionary left represented. More often, however, Condor targeted pro-democracy and human rights activists, religious leaders, opposition political leaders and peaceful dissidents -- all in the name of winning a self-anointed 'war on terrorism.'" Foreign Affairs said "But Dinges sees this whole sorry episode as a classic case of 'blowback': the unintended consequences of U.S. policies long kept secret from the U.S.public." Sound familiar? Afghanistan?