Operation Condor was a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state terrorism, involving intelligence operations, CIA-backed coups, as well as assassinations of left-wing sympathizers, liberals and democrats and their families in South America which formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Operation Condor was officially and formally implemented in November 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America.
Jorge Rafael Videla was an Argentine military officer and dictator, Commander in Chief of the Army, member of the Military Junta, the 47th President of Argentina, and the 1st President of the National Reorganization Process from 1976 to 1981. His rule, which was during the time of Operation Condor, was among the most infamous in Latin America during the Cold War due to its high level of human rights abuses and severe economic mismanagement.
Luis Echeverría Álvarez was a Mexican lawyer, academic, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who served as the 57th president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Previously, he was Secretary of the Interior from 1963 to 1969. At the time of his death in 2022, he was his country's oldest living former head of state.
The Dirty War is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina for the period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as a part of Operation Condor, during which military and security forces and death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism, or the Montoneros movement.
Lucio Cabañas Barrientos was a Mexican schoolteacher, union leader, and guerilla leader who founded the social and political movement Party of the Poor in 1967. Under his leadership, the party later became a guerilla organization that was active in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range of Guerrero.
The National Reorganization Process was the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, which received support from the United States until 1982. In Argentina it is often known simply as the última junta militar, última dictadura militar or última dictadura cívico-militar, because there have been several in the country's history and no others since it ended.
The military history of Mexico encompasses armed conflicts within that nation's territory, dating from before the arrival of Europeans in 1519 to the present era. Mexican military history is replete with small-scale revolts, foreign invasions, civil wars, indigenous uprisings, and coups d'état by disgruntled military leaders. Mexico's colonial-era military was not established until the eighteenth century. After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the early sixteenth century, the Spanish crown did not establish on a standing military, but the crown responded to the external threat of a British invasion by creating a standing military for the first time following the Seven Years' War (1756–63). The regular army units and militias had a short history when in the early 19th century, the unstable situation in Spain with the Napoleonic invasion gave rise to an insurgency for independence, propelled by militarily untrained, darker complected men fighting for the independence of Mexico. The Mexican War of Independence (1810–21) saw royalist and insurgent armies battling to a stalemate in 1820. That stalemate ended with the royalist military officer turned insurgent, Agustín de Iturbide persuading the guerrilla leader of the insurgency, Vicente Guerrero, to join in a unified movement for independence, forming the Army of the Three Guarantees. The royalist military had to decide whether to support newly independent Mexico. With the collapse of the Spanish state and the establishment of first a monarchy under Iturbide and then a republic, the state was a weak institution. The Roman Catholic Church and the military weathered independence better. Military men dominated Mexico's nineteenth-century history, most particularly General Antonio López de Santa Anna, under whom the Mexican military were defeated by Texas insurgents for independence in 1836 and then the U.S. invasion of Mexico (1846–48). With the overthrow of Santa Anna in 1855 and the installation of a government of political liberals, Mexico briefly had civilian heads of state. The Liberal Reforms that were instituted by Benito Juárez sought to curtail the power of the military and the church and wrote a new constitution in 1857 enshrining these principles. Conservatives comprised large landowners, the Catholic Church, and most of the regular army revolted against the Liberals, fighting a civil war. The Conservative military lost on the battlefield. But Conservatives sought another solution, supporting the French intervention in Mexico (1862–65). The Mexican army loyal to the liberal republic were unable to stop the French army's invasion, briefly halting it with a victory at Puebla on 5 May 1862. Mexican Conservatives supported the installation of Maximilian Hapsburg as Emperor of Mexico, propped up by the French and Mexican armies. With the military aid of the U.S. flowing to the republican government in exile of Juárez, the French withdrew its military supporting the monarchy and Maximilian was caught and executed. The Mexican army that emerged in the wake of the French Intervention was young and battle tested, not part of the military tradition dating to the colonial and early independence eras.
The Salvadoran Civil War was a twelve-year period of civil war in El Salvador that was fought between the government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition or "umbrella organization" of left-wing groups backed by the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro as well as the Soviet Union. A coup on 15 October 1979 followed by government killings of anti-coup protesters is widely seen as the start of civil war. The war did not formally end until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when, on 16 January 1992 the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in Mexico City.
Digna Ochoa was a human rights lawyer in Mexico. During her career, Ochoa had represented some of Mexico's poorest constituents against government interests. On October 19, 2001, Ochoa was shot dead by unknown assailants at her office in Mexico City. Mexican state authorities initially declared her death a suicide, however amongst objections from human rights activists the investigation into her death was reopened in 2005. In 2021, Mexico admitted wrongdoing in the investigation of Ochoa's death.
Dirty wars are offensives conducted by regimes against their dissidents, marked by the use of torture and forced disappearance of civilians.
Operation Charly, was allegedly the code-name given to a program during the 1970s and 1980s undertaken by the junta in Argentina with the objective of providing military and counterinsurgency assistance to right-wing dictatorships and insurgents in Central America. According to Noam Chomsky, the operation was either headed by the Argentine military with the agreement of the United States Department of Defense, or was led by the US and used the Argentinians as a proxy.
The Mexican Movement of 1968, also known as the Mexican Student Movement was a social movement composed of a broad coalition of students from Mexico's leading universities that garnered widespread public support for political change in Mexico. A major factor in its emergence publicly was the Mexican government's lavish spending to build Olympic facilities for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The movement demanded greater political freedoms and an end to the authoritarianism of the PRI regime, which had been in power since 1929.
Genaro Vázquez Rojas was a Mexican school teacher, organiser, militant, and guerrilla fighter.
Legislative elections were held in Mexico on 1 July 1979. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won 296 of the 400 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Voter turnout was 49%.
Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro Escápite was a Mexican Army general who was shot dead in an incident in Mexico City. He had been incarcerated in the year 2000 for allegedly having ties with the Mexican criminal group known as the Juárez Cartel; he was later released in 2007 for lack of evidences against him. Acosta was also accused of 143–500 disappearances during Mexico's "Dirty War" in the 1970s.
Guerra sucia may refer to:
Israel Nogueda Otero was a Mexican politician, economist and member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Nogueda served as the Municipal President of Acapulco municipality from 1969 to 1971 and the Governor of Guerrero from 1971 until 1975.
The Party of the Poor was a left-wing political movement and militant group in Mexico operating between 1967 and 1974. Led by the rural schoolteacher Lucio Cabañas, the PdlP – through its armed wing, the Peasants' Justice Brigade – waged guerrilla warfare against the Mexican government in the mountains of Guerrero.
Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School, commonly known as the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, is a men’s normal school, located in the municipality of Tixtla, Guerrero, Mexico. The school is part of the rural teacher's education system that was created as part of an ambitious mass education plan implemented by the state in the 1920s. Moisés Sáenz was the head of the Secretariat of Public Education at the time of the school’s creation. The project for rural teachers' normal schools had a strong component of social transformation, which has made it a hotbed for social movements. In that sense, Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School is where important figures such as Lucio Cabañas Barrientos and Genaro Vázquez Rojas were educated and later on led important guerrilla movements in the state of Guerrero during the 20th century.
During the Dirty War in Argentina from 1976–1983, detention centers caused immense fear for victims throughout the country. After being kidnapped and interrogated, the prisoners would be forced to survive while living in various centers' worst conditions. Once the kidnapped were forced into detention centers, they immediately disappeared. Although all camps had their "unique" ways of torturing, every detention center incorporated a torture room that each victim had to encounter. However, the torture did not end there. They were humiliated and dehumanized by the hands of the leaders, losing their ability to talk, shower, eat, and sleep. The Dirty War and select detention centers were notorious for mass murders to remove all evidence of the torture that had transpired. At the end of the Dirty War and a change in government, prisoners were released on the street, blindfolded. The torturers' identity in all detention centers was kept clandestinely at all times.
