For todays hard right mess, you don’t have to look back far to see how this ends up. Let’s look at a real example: Argentina’s Dirty War wasn’t an “excess”, a few bad generals, as our liberal friends might say. It was state terrorism, built deliberately and scaled region-wide through our right-wing #mainstreaming, they called this Operation Condor at the time.
In South America, from the late 1960s into the 1976 coup, repression was already underway with Peronism. After the junta took power, the gloves came off. This wasn’t aimed at only armed groups. It targeted everyone who didn’t fit: trade unionists, students, teachers, artists, journalists, lawyers, priests, activists, exiles. Political disagreement became a death sentence.
Every day people were kidnapped, disappeared into secret camps, tortured, executed, thrown from planes into the sea. Evidence erased. Bodies vanished. Between 22,000–30,000 killed or disappeared. Babies born in captivity were stolen and handed to regime families – identities erased as policy. This wasn’t isolated chaos, it was administration.
And it didn’t stop at borders. Operation Condor wired together the dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil. Shared intelligence. Joint death squads. Cross-border kidnappings and assassinations. Safe exile became a trap. People fled one regime only to be captured by another. This was a transnational system, not national repression.
Automotores Orletti. Death flights. The Caravan of Death. The murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington. This was global – Europe, the US, everywhere dissidents thought they were safe.
Foreign power mattered. The US, France, and others trained, armed, advised. Cold War “anti-communism” gave cover. Declassified documents show our officials knew, and the literal #deatcult machine kept running.
Carter didn’t endorse the horror – he pushed human-rights language harder than anyone before him – but pressure isn’t power. By then the terror system was entrenched, protected by years of US military aid, diplomatic cover, and right-wing internal resistance inside Washington itself. You don’t politely stop an autonomous death machine already at scale.
Inside Argentina the net was wide. Jews – 1% of the population – made up 5–12% of victims. Anti-Semitism baked into “national security.” Children stolen. Families destroyed twice over.
Justice didn’t arrive cleanly or fast. Truth commissions. Trials. Then amnesties to protect the military. Decades of silence enforced by fear. What broke it wasn’t the state – it was the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, refusing to shut up, refusing to forget. Grassroots memory work. Relentless pressure.
From the 2000s, amnesties fell. Trials reopened. Convictions followed. Stolen children recovered their names. Planes used in death flights traced. Archives pried open. Not enough, but something.
This example, Operation Condor, shows what happens when hard right state power + ideology + secrecy + transnational cooperation align. Violence becomes normal. Accountability disappears. “Security” becomes a license to kill. This isn’t history trivia. It’s a warning. Because when terror is framed as “order”, it always comes back.
We are on a path to repeat this mess, please let’s become the change and challenge we need to do something better this time.
