Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

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ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

The Transnational Artistic Memorialisation of

Operation Condor: Documenting a “Distribution of
the Possible”

Caterina Preda

To cite this article: Caterina Preda (2020): The Transnational Artistic Memorialisation of Operation
Condor: Documenting a “Distribution of the Possible”, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies,
DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2020.1801398

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2020.1801398

Published online: 23 Sep 2020.

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2020.1801398

Caterina Preda

THE TRANSNATIONAL ARTISTIC

MEMORIALISATION OF OPERATION
CONDOR: DOCUMENTING A “DISTRIBUTION
OF THE POSSIBLE”

This article analyses three artistic projects that contribute to a transnational artistic
memorialisation of Operation Condor: Jo~ao Pina’s project Condor (2005–2014), the
documentary film by Pedro Chaskel, De vida y de muerte, testimonios de Operacion
Condor (2000–2015), and Voluspa Jarpa’s En nuestra peque~na region de por aca
(2016/2017). Situated at the crossroads of the study of the role of art in Transitional
Justice processes and cultural memory studies, this article conceptualises the role of art in
forging a transnational memory through the lens of the “art and politics of memory”. Using
Jacques Ranciere’s observation of the role of art in building a new “distribution of the
sensible”, this investigation argues that artistic practices of remembrance employ three
strategies. In the first place, they render visible those who are still absent; secondly, they
document and provide supplementary sources about human rights abuses during
dictatorships, and thus give back human dignity to the victims. Finally, they also criticise
the status quo of official memory. In the absence of a transnational memory of the secret
cooperation that occurred within Operation Condor, artistic practices of remembrance help
build this memory and create a “distribution of the possible”.

Keywords: Operation Condor; artistic memorialisation; transnational

memory; documentary

Introduction

Operation Condor (OC) was a secret plan for transnational cooperation between
the military dictatorships in South America in the 1970s and 1980s organised in
order to eliminate left-wing opponents on the territory of the participating
countries. Although its memorialisation has lagged behind, there are several
artistic projects that contribute to the transnational memorialisation of Operation
Condor. This article proposes to analyse three such projects and their role in the
building of a transnational memory of Operation Condor: the documentary
photographs of Jo~ao Pina in his project Condor (2005–2014), the documentary
film by Pedro Chaskel, De vida y de muerte, testimonios de Operacion Condor
(2000–2015), and the work of Voluspa Jarpa in En nuestra peque~na region de por
aca (2016/2017).
# 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

To understand the significance of these artistic projects, this article first explores
the main features of Operation Condor (Lessa 2015, 2019; Martorell 1999;
Dinges 2004; McSherry 2002) and situates its hesitant memory in relation to the
remembrance of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone (Stern 2010; Winn et al.
2014; Lessa and Druliolle 2011; Drinot 2009; Crenzel 2011). In this sense, I will
analyse how these artistic practices of remembrance engage with the “memory
frameworks” (Stern 2010) that have developed nationally in the Southern Cone
countries, and how they can contribute to the “emblematic memory” (Stern 2010)
of OC as a transnational memory.
In a second step, the investigation explains the different ways in which a trans-
national artistic memory of Operation Condor has crystallised through artistic prac-
tices. The approach used to discuss the three artistic projects is that of the “arts
and politics of memory”, an interdisciplinary exploration that combines the resour-
ces of two main fields, art in Transitional Justice (TJ) studies (Rush and Simic
2014; Atencio and Gates-Madsen 2013; Garnsey 2016), and cultural memory
(Jelin 2007; Erll 2010; Gomez-Barris 2009), with an input from the art and polit-
ics focus (Ranciere 2008; Bal and Hernandez-Navarro 2011; Benjamin 1934;
Baque 2006).
Furthermore, as memory studies have registered a “transnational turn” (Assmann
2014) the conceptualisation of transnational memory has mainly referred to its
relation to space (Rigney 2016; W€ustenberg 2019) and to the multi-scales of
memorialisation (Rothberg 2014; De Cesari and Rigney 2014). In this context, my
understanding of transnational artistic memorialisation takes into account both
coordinates. By transnational artistic memorialisation I mean an artistic project that
is transnational in terms of its production, its ideas and sources, as well as the
memory of a transnational object, in this case Operation Condor.
If art’s role in memory studies (Huyssen 2001) has rather been that of com-
memoration, and the study of art in TJ (Atencio and Gates-Madsen 2013; Rush
and Simic 2014; Garnsey 2016) has included the study of art as therapy, or as a
healing practice (Falcon 2018; Bahun 2015), this article seeks to broaden the
understanding of the role played by artistic memorialisation in post-dictatorial set-
tings (Preda 2013). Thus, it argues that artists can contribute to the production of
a transnational memory of atrocities, such as those exemplified by OC, by employ-
ing three types of artistic strategies.
Artists render visible ideas that can “provoke ruptures in the sensible” (Ranciere
2008, 72), document the past, and critique the status quo, and thus put forward a
“new distribution of the possible” through the implicit potentialities that they illu-
minate. In the first place, Jo~ao Pina renders visible the transnational violence of
OC by exposing archival photographs of the victims and by taking photos of the
sites of terror in the different countries. Pedro Chaskel (2015) in his documentary
film unveils, through the testimonies of the different participants, how the trans-
national character of OC was enacted by the military regimes. Voluspa Jarpa
recomposes the concealed history of the collaboration of the military dictatorships
and the help provided by the US through archival documents that are used as
“images of history”. Secondly, Pina, Chaskel and Jarpa use a documentary reper-
toire, formed of official documents, national or transnational archives, and the
 C. PREDA 3

victims’ testimonies. They provide documentary sources that, although already

public, are ignored and that can constitute a complementary memory resource
about OC and consolidate the knowledge of the wrongdoings it perpetrated.
Finally, because art can act as a form of dissensus (Ranciere 2008), the three proj-
ects of artistic memorialisation criticise the status quo (the lack of a proper memo-
rialisation of OC), and challenge the official history that maintains the erasure of
memory by creating interstices of remembrance.

A “transnational network of terror”: Operation Condor, late

tentative justice, and insufficient memory

Operation Condor, also called Plan Condor or Operative Condor, started at a

meeting in Santiago de Chile at the end of 1975 between the participating coun-
tries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil (joined in 1976), Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay
(joined by Peru and Ecuador in 1978), but its end has not been acknowledged.
In fact, the knowledge on Condor remains “a truth under construction”
(Brodsky 2015, 11). While this topic is under-studied by Transitional Justice stud-
ies, democratisation studies, or memory studies, several books have been published
about its main features (Martorell 1999; Dinges 2004), and other information has
been made available through the accounts of the victims or their close relatives,
“whose aim has been to break decades of silence and to grant even if symbolically
their human dignity” (Brodsky 2015, 11). Further archival documents have been
useful in shedding light on the organisation of this cooperation into repression;
these include the so-called “Archives of terror”, which were discovered by chance
in 1992 in Asuncion, Paraguay, and which contain 700,000 documents. The
involvement of the CIA, and the knowledge the US had of this secret operation,
has been largely discussed by the literature on Condor (McSherry 2005; Zanchetta
2016). Thus, additional evidence has been accessible through the declassified CIA
archives (1998–2000), “The Chile Declassification Project”, which included 24,000
documents, and the more recent (2016–2019) declassification of US documents
about Argentina that comprises 47,000 pages, many of which are about OC
(Osorio and Kornbluh 2019), as well as the information provided during the
recent trials against OC crimes.
We know that Operation Condor was a “transnational terror network”, which
“complemented the repression these dictatorships were unleashing at home” (Lessa
2015, 497). A “secret intelligence and operations system created in the 1970s
through which the South American military states shared intelligence, and seized,
tortured, and executed political opponents in one another’s territory” as well as
outside South America, in Europe and the United States, it functioned as “an anti-
communist transnational war apparatus” (McSherry 2005, 1; Dinges 2004). The
trans-border character of Condor appeared as a result of the fact that “if
‘subversion’ did not respect borders, then neither did its counterpart” (Palummo
et al. 2015, 10). The military shared information in order to pursue their oppo-
nents using the Condor System, which included the Condortel, an encrypted
4 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

system of communication, a “computerized central data bank of suspects,

‘something similar to Interpol, but dedicated to subversion’” (McSherry 2002, 52).
The estimated number of victims of OC varies considerably from a few hun-
dreds (Dinges 2004; Lessa 2016) to 60,000 (Pina 2014). But, as John Dinges
observed, the total number of victims of the dictatorships in the respective mem-
ber countries (17,000) should be separated from those that were explicitly part
of the trans-border activities of the secret police forces (350) (Dinges 2015,
13–17, 16). In fact, the estimated number of victims of Operation Condor
between 1974 and 1981, according to a report issued by UNESCO in 2016, was
377 (including 177 Uruguayans, 72 Argentinians, 64 Chileans, and 25
Paraguayans) (Garzon Real 2016, 260). According to Francesca Lessa’s evaluation
of the victims, as they appear in the trials in South America, their number is
greater. As such, in Argentina alone, the number of victims of Plan Condor
under judicial investigation in 2016 was 457, with victims from Argentina,
Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, but also from Brazil, Germany, and
Spain (Lessa 2016, 6).
The trials connected to OC have shed new light on the secret plan, and most
specifically the trial in Argentina, which started in 2013 and ended in May 2016.
In 2016, there were 23 proceedings concerning Operation Condor at different
stages of the judicial process in South America (13 in Uruguay, 4 in Chile, 6 in
Argentina, of which 11 have been concluded), with 43 sentences and 77 still facing
trial, whereas 247 victims were investigated (and four victims still awaited trial)
(Lessa 2016, 6). The “Plan Condor” trial in Argentina (2013–2016) concerning the
fate of 109 victims from Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile is the first prosecution of
transnational crimes in South America (Lessa 2019). The role of the Plan Condor
trial is paramount in several ways: because it proves the existence of the plan and
its persecution of those exiled across borders, and it helps undermine the impunity
of crimes in Argentina, potentially inspiring other countries in the region to do
the same (Lessa 2015, 505).
Notwithstanding, Operation Condor has received little attention as part of the
memory policies in the participating countries, with few exceptions such as the
“Memorial on the violations of human rights and the victims of Operation Condor
and other episodes of coordination of illegal repression in South America”, inaugu-
rated in 2012 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, by Brazilian and Argentinean representatives.
The practices of regional memory include the activities of the MERCOSUR's
Institute for Public Policy in Human Rights (IPPDH 2009) and published volumes
such as A 40 a~nos del Condor (2015), with studies on the evolution and develop-
ment of Condor in the different member countries.
This delayed, ongoing, and still incomplete reckoning with the past through
scarce memory policies and late justice has been preceded or accompanied by a
form of poetic justice through the use of mainly a documentary form, through
which artists and film directors in the participating countries have tried to docu-
ment and propose an alternative history of Condor. Before turning to the analysis
of the artistic projects that produce new transnational practices of remembrance of
Operation Condor, it’s worth acknowledging which are the different “ontologies of
violence” in the different countries of the region (Drinot 2009, 25) so as to
 C. PREDA 5

evaluate afterwards how the artistic projects that help bring about a transnational
artistic memory of OC engage with the regional memory framework.

National memory frameworks of the dictatorships in the

Southern Cone: a hesitant transnational memory

The cooperation among the dictatorships of the Southern Cone as part of OC high-
lights the transnational approach in regard to human rights abuses as it becomes
evident in the Condor trials. The lack of memory of OC at the regional level is
accompanied by an insufficient analysis of the transnational memory of the dictator-
ships in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay).
The comparison of the dictatorships’ approaches or the analysis of the emergence
of the “transnational nature of dictatorial violence” (Crenzel 2011, 10) has been
limited to the introduction and/or conclusions that accompany a series of national
case-studies (Winn et al. 2014; Lessa and Druliolle 2011; Allier-Monta~no and
Vicente Ovalle 2015b). Another problem related to regional memory is a simul-
taneous unfolding of a national memory of the violence, the memory of Operation
Condor, and a third, regional memory of human rights violations.1
After the initial phase of searching for the truth at the end of the dictatorships,
forgetting and silence dominated the regional panorama (Roniger and Sznaider
1999). However, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in three countries
of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay), important advances were regis-
tered in what concerns the search for truth and justice (Winn 2014b, 329).
Acknowledging the different “times of memory” in the three countries of the
Southern Cone, Winn recalls the commonalities between the three; thus, as, dur-
ing the military regimes, and then, after the transition to democracy, the military
imposed its own narrative according to which its actions saved the nation, also
known as “memory of salvation”, the three countries witnessed a phase of
“deliberate forgetting of the past” (Winn 2014b, 329). The archives of the human
rights organisations played an essential role both during the dictatorships and dur-
ing the transition period for finding out the truth and sending to justice those
guilty (Winn 2014b, 336). For the victims of the dictatorships, the fact of judicial-
ising their testimonies changed their character and conferred on them the value of
an established truth, being officially recognised (Winn 2014b, 335).
The fight between emblematic memories, a struggle between dominant and dis-
sident memories has seen long and intense confrontations that, although similar,
have their national specificities (Stern 2004; Allier-Monta~no and Vicente Ovalle
2015a, 11). Chile witnessed four emblematic memory frameworks: “memory as
salvation, as cruel rupture, as persecution and awakening, as a closed box of dirty
war” (Stern 2010, 10). Similarly, in Argentina, “multidirectional memories of the
violent 1970s changed repeatedly because of new interpretive frameworks and
shifting political opponents” and included “a dirty war, an armed conflict, state
terrorism and genocide” (Robben 2012, 306). After the return to democracy
with the Raul Alfonsın regime in 1983 Argentina witnessed the domination of the
so-called “two demons theory” which emphasised how both the military and
6 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

the guerrilla were responsible for the escalating violence (Robben 2012, 308).
A comparable understanding of the Uruguayan dictatorship (1973–1985) was seen
dominating, “the two demons: the military and the guerrillas that held the country
hostage” and the salvation memory of the military regime (Allier-Monta~no and
Vicente Ovalle 2015b, 50). Finally, Ignacio Telesca (2003) defined Paraguay as
“the country of I don’t remember” because of the social amnesia that has allowed
impunity to exist for so long.
Despite the similarities and contrasts between these memory frameworks of the
different countries in the Southern Cone, these are essentially national frames of
understanding. While some authors, such as Emilio Crenzel (2011, 3), stressed the
role played by transnational human rights networks in supporting those exiled for
political reasons and the relatives of the victims and in imposing a culture of
human rights in the region, for others, such as Greg Grandin, “truth commissions
serve as modern-day instruments in the creation of nationalism” (Grandin 2005,
48). Instead of looking at the deeper roots of the establishment of the military
regimes, which employed unseen levels of violence against their own citizens, truth
commissions in Latin America focussed on the need to establish national unity
(Grandin 2005, 63).
In the absence of a transnational memory of the dictatorships of the Southern
Cone, the transnational memory of Operation Condor, as it is put forward by the
artistic projects analysed in the next section, can be conceptualised as an emblematic
memory also as a result of the conflation between the different types of memory.
The memory struggles for the definition of an “emblematic memory” of Operation
Condor recapture Stern’s observation of how loose memories become collective
memories through these alternative artistic forms of memorialisation, and produce a
memory knot that organises, filters, and reformulates the individual memories
(Winn 2014a, 15). This is exemplified in how visual artists use individual stories of
the victims of Operation Condor and promote them as emblematic memories of the
suffering imposed by the military dictatorships, fostering thus a hegemonic discourse
on the violence perpetrated. The transnational artistic memorialisation of Operation
Condor can be regarded as a “memory knot” because it is an example of a powerful
event that has the potential to “galvanize struggles to shape and project into the pub-
lic cultural domain ways of remembering that capture an essential truth” (Stern
2010, 10) of the shared suffering. Thus, the artistic projects analysed challenge the
national framing of the transnational violence experienced during the Southern Cone
dictatorships, through the lens of the transnational memory of Operation Condor.

“Ruptures in the sensible”: the documentary crystallisation of a

transnational artistic memorialisation of Operation Condor

Artistic remembrance projects of Operation Condor recount specific examples or

cases, such as Operation Colombo, and artists privilege different aspects: the vic-
tims, and their absence, their loved ones ones that still live with pain, and sorrow,
the sites of memory, former secret detention centres, the involvement of the US
in the cooperation of the military dictatorships, or the lack of justice. Many of the
 C. PREDA 7

artistic evocations of Operation Condor, using either film, photography, contem-

porary art, or theatre, employ a documentary form that makes use of archival
sources or oral history (testimonials).
In the countries participating in Operation Condor, besides the national “archives
of repression” (military and police, secret services, special tribunals, etc.) that are
for the most part inaccessible, there are also archives of “pain and resistance”
(human rights organisations and truth commissions), and the archives of the polit-
ical and social movements (Gruppo 2016, 39). The “power over the documentary
record, and by extension over the collective memory” and the representation and
“integration into the metanarratives of history” (Schwartz and Cook 2002, 17) by
the official memory are disrupted by visual artists who make use of transnational
archives, such as those provided by the CIA, and who also create their own sub-
jective archive through the photographs they take of the sites of terror and of
the survivors.
In fact, “documentary art” (Baque 2006) has been used extensively by artists in
relation to TJ processes, in which art’s role as a testimony serves to acknowledge
people’s agency, and to show experience from their point of view; it can serve as
an alternative history through artistic representations (Garnsey 2016; Rueda 2014).
Artists employ a documentary form to stress the realism of the works and to
underline the critical power they hold, to provide a new reading of a phenom-
enon, which is otherwise missing or is rather sporadic. At the same time, there
are limitations to the documentary character of artistic representations, as photog-
raphy for example can be manipulated and misplaced (Gonzalez Cueva and Librizzi
2014). Cynthia Milton believes art can bear witness, but warns about the problems
this poses as “art may inscribe and promote multiple memories and meanings and
implicitly counters the homogenizing tendencies of institutional memories” (Milton
2014, 17, 18). The official national memory is usually marked by a certain degree
of homogenisation of the traumatic experience by creating a depersonalised evoca-
tion of the victim, leaving aside the nuances of personal suffering that artistic dis-
courses can illuminate.
In what follows, the analysis will discuss three artistic projects that focus on the
transnational character of this secret cooperation, and contribute to a transnational
memory of the violence used by the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone
through Operation Condor. These artistic projects represent histories of trans-
national violence that engage with the memory of the dictatorships as it was
expressed by the NGOs representing victims, which supported the idea of “state
terrorism”. They also support the idea of the absence of justice for the crimes of
the military dictatorship and are constructed as a form of testimony for his-
tory’s sake.

Rendering visible the transnational violence in Condor by Jo~ao Pina

Jo~ao Pina’s project about Operation Condor called Condor (2005–2014), which
was exhibited in the Memory Park in Buenos Aires (2016) as part of the exhibition
“The Shadow of the Condor”, consists of 110 photos taken by the author between
8 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

2005 and 2014 in the six organising countries of Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina,
Uruguay, and Paraguay (with additional photos in Cuba and the USA), or found in
different archival resources in the same countries. The book Condor (Pina 2014)
which accompanies the project includes photographs from archives from public
protests and the police archives (Direccion de Inteligencia de la Policia de la
Provincia de Buenos Aires, Archivos del Terror Asuncion), recent photos with sur-
vivors whose story Pina also describes in a short presentation, images with some
of the torture centres, funerals, cells from these former torture centres, and also
portraits of some of the members of the military accused of crimes against human-
ity in Argentina.
The artist presents his project as the result of an operation that produced more
than 60,000 victims and whose responsible perpetrators remain largely unpun-
ished.2 In fact, as I mentioned earlier, there is some confusion regarding the
regional memory of violence in South America and Latin America and the shared
memory of Operation Condor. Thus, the number used by Pina of 60,000 victims
is rather a reflection of the conflation between the regional memory of violence
with the specific memory of Operation Condor. This type of conflation stems
from the absence of an emblematic memory of Operation Condor, and thus the
specific collaboration that was part of Operation Condor tends to be equated with
the similar techniques used by the military regimes in Latin America throughout
the second half of the twentieth century. Pina further consolidates this mispercep-
tion by including images from Cuba and the USA, which are meant to show the
impact of Operation Condor on those exiled.
As part of his project, Pina photographed former centres of torture such as
Automotores Orletti, one of the secret prisons used by Condor in Argentina, or La
Escuelita in Bahia Blanca Argentina, of which nothing remained and all we can see is
an enormous tree; the prison of Punta de Rieles in Uruguay; the torture room of
the clandestine detention centre in Olimpo, Argentina; ESMA in Argentina;
Londres 38 and the National Stadium in Chile; a clandestine centre in La Paz inside
the ministry of interior; the Emboscada concentration camp in Paraguay, and the
former police headquarters in Asuncion. Thus, Pina recreates the geography of the
terror organised as part of Operation Condor. The viewer is confronted with the
cartography of repression as the victims experienced it, and these sites of memory
of the repression constitute affective topologies (Garnsey 2016) of the suffering that
allow viewers to have access to this experience of the victims.
He also photographed the few survivors of Condor such as Lilian Celiberti of
Uruguay, the Chilean Veronica de Negri, the Argentinian Adriana Calvo, or the
members of the families of those disappeared such as Victoria Montenegro, who
was identified with the help of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo as a new-born kid-
napped by the military in Argentina. Pina’s images depict a common representation
of Condor which erases borders and gathers together sites of torture from distinct
places, and that become part of the same story, linked by their account of suffering
and violence. Those he portrays share the same story of abuses against human
rights, and seeing their faces helps bring about a more thorough understanding of
what this secret plan of cooperation between the military dictatorships meant for
the citizens of the countries in South America.
 C. PREDA 9

~o Pina, Condor (2005–2014) #Joa

Figure 1. Joa ~ o Pina. Anahit Aharonian, looking from the
window of her former cell in the Punta de Rieles prison in Montevideo, Uruguay. Ms.
Aharonian is a descendant of survivors of the Armenian genocide and was born in Uruguay.
She became involved with politics in her teenage years and joined the Tupamaros
movement. She was arrested by the military during the early days of the Uruguayan
dictatorship and then spent 12 years in jail. Montevideo, Uruguay, February 2012.

Pina’s photos are all black and white and share a poetic aesthetic (See Figure 1).
According to the artist, all of the archival photos were printed using a warm grey
and his own photographs were printed using a cool grey. The formal portraits are
staged, other shots are taken in court or are more informal portraits, such as that
of the members of the families of the victims photographed in the desert or in the
cemetery. Through his artistic documentation, Pina renders visible the victims (De
Greiff 2014; Garnsey 2016; Shefik 2018), which can “raise awareness of the depth,
breadth, and effects of rights violations” (De Greiff 2014, 18). The use of personal
stories helps the artist provoke a questioning and, through this artistic encounter,
bring forward the different and subjective interpretations of TJ processes (Garnsey
2016, 11, 16).
Pina’s project, although using individual portraits of victims and presenting spe-
cific details of the practices used by Operation Condor through the cartography of
the detention centres, portrays the transnational memory of Operation Condor as
10 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

part of a regional memory of transnational violence. Compared to the memory

frameworks that exist in the Southern Cone, it can be seen as an artistic project
that focuses on the transnational violence operating during the dictatorships with-
out detailing the specificities of each participating country, as the memory frame-
works, which are nation-specific, do. On the contrary, Pina shows us the
similarities between the different countries during the military regimes through
their collaboration, which had a similar impact on the victims in the participating
countries. He participates thus in the establishment of the memory of Operation
Condor that is missing and helps forge an emblematic transnational memory.

Registering transnational testimonies of violence in Pedro Chaskel’s De

vida y de muerte, testimonios de Operacion Condor

The second example of how artistic remembrance establishes a transnational mem-

ory of Operation Condor is the documentary film by Pedro Chaskel, De vida y de
muerte, testimonios de Operacion Condor (Of life and death, testimonies of Operation
Condor) (2000–2015). According to the website of the project, the film offers an
overview of the Condor Plan, which it describes at the beginning as an operation
in which Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay participated, with the help
of the United States of America, and which began in 1975. The film starts with a
declaration by Martin Almada, the Paraguayan lawyer who in December 1992 dis-
covered (says the film) the undestroyed archives of Condor, which became known
as the “Archives of terror” and allowed for “the opening of the door of history”.
The film documents through the presentation of interviews with victims, former
military men, and families of those still disappeared filmed over a period of
15 years, between 2000 and 2015, the known but forgotten history of
Operation Condor.
The movie is divided into ten parts: I The archives, II The documents, III
Military, IV Legality, V Prison, VI The children, VII Military (b), VIII The inva-
sion, IX “The comrade”, and X About life (De vida). Each chapter presents an
important aspect related to the organisation of the collaboration between the dicta-
torships (chapters one, two, and three), the shared task of torturing and assassinat-
ing their enemies (five, six), and the responsibility of the military (seven), the
framed aggression they supervised, arguing it was an internal war (eight), and
finally hope, which is identified in the solidarity encountered by prisoners in the
detention centres such as Villa Grimaldi. The film includes testimonies by survi-
vors, such as the Uruguayans Sara Mendez and Enrique Rodriguez Larreta who
recount their torture and their release after being framed as invaders in Argentina
(part of the so-called “Invasion” scheme imagined by the military so as to justify
their arrest and then imprisonment). Several of these testimonies presented by
Chaskel prove the inter-regional character of the operation, and the detention and
torture of the prisoners in one of the neighbouring countries, thus proving the
transnational character of Condor (See Figure 2).
The film begins with the presentation of the foundation of Condor through the
invitation letter sent by Manuel Contreras, head of the Chilean DINA to the chief
 C. PREDA 11

 n Condor, 2015.
Figure 2. Pedro Chaskel (2015), De vida y de muerte, testimonios de Operacio
# Pedro Chaskel.

police of Asuncion inviting him to a meeting in Santiago, which was held between
25 November and 1 December 1975. We follow the development of this secret
operation through the example of the infamous Operation Colombo, in which 119
Chileans were killed and their bodies discovered in Argentina. The documentary
film also evokes through the testimonies of Sara Mendez, the Argentinian writer
Juan Gelman, and Mara Lamadrid the fate of the babies born in captivity and kid-
napped by the military or those close to them so as to be raised as their own.
Finally, in the last two chapters, the testimony of Leila Perez evokes being a pris-
oner in Villa Grimaldi in Chile and the solidarity that appeared there in spite of
having survived hell with all the screams, pain, and torture. Building his explor-
ation of Operation Condor on the documents of the Archives in Paraguay, Chaskel
brings forward the testimonies of the few survivors as a manifest of life despite the
death alliance formed by the military dictatorships.
Chaskel’s portrayal of Operation Condor focussing on the testimonies of the vic-
tims of the different countries, and on several topics (the detention in neighbour-
ing countries, the collaboration of the security forces), helps demystify one of the
memory frameworks that dominated the dictatorial period and the post-dictatorial
decades, the “internal war” thesis (“salvation memory”) in which the military
argued they were fighting against a similar and comparable enemy. By showing us
how solidarity helped the victims survive, the film enables us to understand reality
from the other’s perspective (Falcon 2018). The documentary film then acts as a
form of witnessing, and helps make accessible the realities of mass violence, aiding
in visualising “what may be indescribable”, it brings forth hidden stories, and assists
in “the creation of a historical record” (Blum 2014, 479). The film narrates the
12 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

story of transnational violence Operation Condor put into place, and I argue that
by placing together the testimonies of victims of different countries, it helps create
a transnational memory of the violence of Operation Condor supplementing the
work done by the NGOs representing victims and the testimonies given by victims
or their families in the trials of Operation Condor.

The role of transnational “archives as images of history” in Voluspa

Jarpa’s “In our little region over here”: documenting, erasing or rewriting
the past?

The Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa (1971) presents the transnational character of
repression in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s from the perspective of the
archives organised by the CIA. The artist uses the CIA documents declassified
between 1998 and 2000 to discuss several important issues regarding the construc-
tion of the region's history. Using these secret documents, Jarpa shows how the
United States intervened in the national affairs of the states in the region, but these
foreign archives are also our only tools to discover the activities of the military dicta-
torships in the region, as national archives were destroyed, or remain unavailable. In
fact, Jarpa started with the desire to work with those documents that dealt with the
Chilean case but slowly discovered they were linked to, and similar to, what was
happening in the neighbouring countries, also as part of Operation Condor, and then
at the regional level, including Central America. So, this correspondence between
the national (Chilean) memory, the memory of Operation Condor, and the regional
memory of violence can be seen even more clearly in Jarpa's case.
Voluspa Jarpa has incorporated archival materials in her artistic work on the
recent events in Chile and South America since 1998. In her work Biblioteca de la
No-Historia [The Library of the No-History] (2010–2016), the artist printed and
edited volumes, which included declassified CIA documents about Chile covering
the period 1968 to 1991. From the 22,000 declassified documents (24,000 accord-
ing to Calandra 2015, 208) (with more than 200,000 pages) Voluspa Jarpa chose
to use 4,000 of them and underline the way in which they were released, marked
by the black erasures of censorship. The documents were printed according to
three periods: 1968 to 1974, 1975 to 1981, and 1982 to 1989. The artist recog-
nises she was shocked to declassified archives contained more deletions than infor-
mation and thus was confronted with ideas related to obscuring, erasing,
concealing. In the web presentation of the exhibition in the Buenos Aires-based
MALBA, the artist wonders about the degree of manipulation used to change his-
tory in Latin America. In the 2011 Biennial hosted by the MERCOSUR in Porto
Alegre, Brazil (under the theme “Ensayos de Geopoetica”), Jarpa presented La no-
historia (The non-history). This artwork consisted in a library of volumes which
included documents of the CIA archive about the Southern Cone (Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay) and their collaboration as part of Operation
Condor. As the artist observed, “I thought that the organization MERCOSUR had
antecedents in Plan Condor – when these countries agreed in secret to organise
repression in the region despite national sovereignty and national borders” (Jarpa
2018, 31).
 C. PREDA 13

~ a regio
Figure 3. Voluspa Jarpa, En nuestra pequen  n de por aca
 (Santiago de Chile, 2017).
Photo by Rodrigo Merino. # Voluspa Jarpa.

Moreover, in her exhibition En nuestra peque~na region de por aca (In our little region
over here) (shown at MALBA, Buenos Aires, 2016 and at Matucana 100, Santiago,
2017) she included 12 works (paintings, installations, videos, sound pieces, and arch-
ival documents) organised across seven spaces (See Figure 3). On one side, the art-
work foregrounds the declassified CIA documents about the period 1948 to 1994 in
14 countries of Latin America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Mexico, Dominican
Republic, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Operation Condor countries of
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay). In an interview she granted
me in January of 2018 in Santiago Voluspa Jarpa acknowledged that these events are
linked to what the artist considered was the dominant artistic style of the period,
Minimalism, and used Frank Stella’s phrase “What you see is what it is” (1964), that
is, the artist has no opinion. On the other side, the exhibition evokes 47 Latin
American leaders (presidents, military chiefs, archbishops, senators) who died in
mysterious conditions during the Cold War. The bronze portraits of the disappeared
leaders were shown on a collective mural as a funeral, presented with the accompa-
nying phrase of Salvador Allende, “Mi carne es bronce para la historia” (My flesh is
bronze for history). The 47 portraits do not include the individuals’ names because
they were more than themselves, in the opinion of the artist, they represented their
people; we can read instead the name of the country and the year when they disap-
peared (Civale 2016).
Jarpa’s intention is to show a geopolitical common horizon of Latin America
during the Cold War, to produce a general image of the continent despite national
and local details (Sato 2016). According to her, art has the power to condense and
synthesise an image of society that other disciplines do not possess; in this work
14 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

she wants to build an image of the history of Latin America through the archives,
which are seen as an image of that history. Jarpa’s proposal is characterised by the
politics of the interstice and the use of the empty space, as cuts and discontinuity,
erased words, make the information fragmentary, the truth provisional, and this con-
stitutes a counter-archive that valorises the image (Taccetta 2017, 244–245, 249). In
fact, Jarpa is “declassifying the declassified documents” twice as a political gesture
meant to show how art posits challenges to history (Taccetta 2017, 244–245, 249).
Her use of archival documents to create a shared memory of transnational vio-
lence sees Operation Condor as only a part of a regional approach. She engages
with its memory to prove her thesis about how the United States was involved in
altering the course of history in Latin America and how it used similar modes of
intervention in the different countries. Jarpa’s aesthetic intervention is a deliberate
gesture to open up new possibilities for thinking about recent history by inserting
in the collective discussion archival documents, which, although they became avail-
able, have remained unseen or hidden. Thus, in her case, the artworks serve not
only to document the past, to provide a testimony, they can also help “to open up
spaces for new political thinking, possibilities and actions in this narrative” as they
negotiate “the in-between spaces, the imaginative and affective spaces, in order to
convey different feelings of justice” (Garnsey 2016, 20, 17). So, contrary to the
national frameworks of memory Grandin analysed, Jarpa’s artistic projects propose
a regional framework of understanding transnational violence, of which Operation
Condor is one of the best illustrations.

Conclusion: a new distribution of the possible

Forty-five years after the first meeting which was held in Santiago de Chile and
marked the beginning of the coordination of the Operation Condor activities,
artists in several countries in Latin America help build a more comprehensive
understanding of this regional alliance through a transnational narrative about state-
sponsored repression. This article puts forward an understanding of three artistic
projects of remembrance from the interdisciplinary perspective of the art and polit-
ics of memory, combining references from cultural memory studies and the study
of art in Transitional Justice processes, and using the lens of Jacques Ranciere’s
understanding of art’s role to produce a new “distribution of the sensible”. Thus,
it is argued here, artists provide sources to document the past, to render visible
the absence, and give back human dignity to the forgotten victims. Contemporary
artists aid the establishment of a transnational memory of Operation Condor as a
complementary resource to the few initiatives that exist at the regional level and
are coordinated by governments or agencies.
Pina’s project helps reconstruct the cartography of repression as the victims in
several countries of South America experienced it and thus highlights how the
coordination was established in practice. The testimonies of the victims bring their
experiences closer to those viewing the images. Pedro Chaskel’s film is based on
the Archives of terror of Asuncion, as well as on the testimonies of the few surviv-
ing victims. The film director presents his movie as meant to both provide
 C. PREDA 15

information about a largely ignored case of repression Exercised through the alli-
ance of the military dictatorships, and also offer hope through the testimony of the
victims. Voluspa Jarpa’s artistic projects puts forward a conceptualisation of history
through the use of CIA archives about the Cold War in Latin America, which have
been declassified but are often left out of accounts of the past. Jarpa postulates
that archives can produce an image of history because art generates representations
of historical events that encapsulate an understanding of the traumatic past.
While two of the projects (Pina and Chaskel) discuss the transnational character
of Condor through the use of archives but most importantly emphasise the testi-
monies of the victims, the third project (Jarpa) highlights the archival sources pro-
vided by the CIA, which are marked by cuts and erasures and thus provide only a
partial outlook on the truth of what happened. Thus, art can help us in seeing a
“distribution of the possible” in relation to past crimes.
If Pina and Chaskel emphasise the victims’ fragmentary experience, Jarpa places
her interpretation of the collaboration of the military dictatorships at the sub-
regional (Condor) and regional (Latin America) level, answering in a way Greg
Grandin’s observation about the national framing of truth commissions’ reports.
Thus, Jarpa investigates further than the strategy of legitimation proposed by the
reports of the national truth commissions, but her answer finds a single guilty
actor, the United States. This is interesting to consider in relation to recent
research on the Cold War and on the Chilean case, which shows how the KGB,
and the Cubans helped the Popular Unity (UP) government “with funds that
almost matched the CIA’s support for the UP’s right-wing opponents” (Yordanov
2019, 58). So Jarpa’s project opens up new possibilities that were not pursued by
the truth reports in the different countries of the region, but at the same time
takes into consideration only one part of the whole picture of the Cold War.
The artistic transnational memory of Operation Condor can thus be an additional
resource in the establishment of the memory of the dictatorships in the Southern
Cone of South America. Because they use testimonies of the victims, these projects
constitute a supplementary source that testifies about the crimes, which were simi-
lar in the countries participating in Condor. By reinserting into the public domain
documentary resources about Operation Condor and the military regimes’ collab-
oration they contribute to the consolidation of the truth regarding their practices.
Through their implicit critique of the lack of justice and absence of the memory of
Operation Condor they constitute new memorialisation practices that are comple-
mentary to the official history.
As the memory of Operation Condor is largely missing at the regional and sub-
regional level, several artists have contributed to the consolidation of a trans-
national memory of the violence perpetrated by the military regimes in the 1970s
and 1980s because they were sensitive to the actions of the NGOs representing
victims in the different countries (Chaskel, Pina), or they became interested in
explaining the similarities they observed between the different countries of the
region (Jarpa). So, artistic memorialisation works politically (Shefik 2018) to open
up new possibilities for thinking about the past and shows how state and private
actors could act to ensure its memorialisation.
16 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

In this specific case of the artistic memorialisation of Operation Condor, the art-
istic remembrance projects provide alternative memorialisation strategies of the
traumatic past that clash with the official memory of the military by inserting in
the public domain the memories of the victims and their testimonies. These sup-
plementary proofs of the transnational repression further contradict the “two
demons theory” and complicate the military’s claim of representing “the nation”.
Moreover, Jarpa’s project links the transnational collaboration of the military dicta-
torships to what she sees as one of its consequences, that is, the collaboration of
the new democratic regimes in terms of regional integration plans such
as Mercosur.
This example of the artistic transnational memory of Operation Condor is an
important illustration to keep in mind when analysing the case of transnational
memories, which could prove useful to broaden our understanding of how TJ
processes articulate in time. Transnational memories of dictatorships exist also in
Eastern Europe, where the memory of communism is approached artistically, and
help build a shared understanding of the past; through the use of the representa-
tions of socialist monuments, and of the archives of the secret services, contempor-
ary artists in Eastern Europe also produce a transnational memorialisation of the
communist regimes which is complementary, or sometimes contradicts the official
memory of communism.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. I thank one of the two peer-reviewers for pointing this out in the initial stage
of evaluation.
2. In an email to the author (13 July 2020), Pina recognizes that the number 60,000 was
wrong and in later editions of the project he chose to use “dozens of thousands”, the first
number referring to the victims of the Dirty War in the Southern Cone.

Acknowledgement
I thank the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful comments helped improve and clarify
this manuscript.

Funding
This work was supported by a grant of Ministry of Research and Innovation, Unitatea Executiva pentru
Finantarea Invatamantului Superior, a Cercetarii, Dezvoltarii si Inovarii (CNCS – UEFISCDI), project
number PN-III-P1-1.1 – TE 2016 – 0346, within PNCDI III.
 C. PREDA 17

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Caterina Preda is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science (FSP),

University of Bucharest. She holds a PhD in political science and is interested in
comparative politics and in the relation between art and politics in dictatorships (both
cultural policies and artistic artefacts), as well as in post-dictatorial contexts (art of
memorialisation), with a focus on the Romanian and Chilean cases. Her most recent
book is Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships – A Comparison of Chile and
Romania (Palgrave, 2017).