Paper presented (with slides) at University of New South Wales (UNSW) 2013

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Final Disposition, the legacy of the Operation Condor
Abstract
This paper analyses the conditions of production and circulation of military discourse to
justify the disappearances of detainees in Argentina during the last military dictatorship
(1976-1983). The military discourse is analysed within the context of ‘Operation Condor’, an
intelligence system that allowed members of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and
Uruguay to seize, torture, and make political opponents disappear in each other’s territory
during the 1970s and 1980s. These partners learned from one another’s experiences, which
helped them to refine the repressive apparatus. The Chilean dictatorship, for instance, opted
for mass executions to get rid of opponents and other people perceived as threats. The
Uruguayan dictatorship, on the other hand relied heavily on the incarceration of political
opponents. In contrast, the Argentinean dictatorship chose to kidnap political opponents,
torture them in clandestine centres, drug them and throw them into the sea. The use of the
so-called ‘death flights’ allowed the Argentinean junta to avoid witnesses, overcrowded
prisons and an immediate international condemnation, making the work of human rights
organisations much more difficult in the aftermath. This paper analyses the discursive
justification-the idea of ‘they deserve it’- behind the executions.
Operation Condor
Many of you may be familiar with the song ‘The Condor passes’; a traditional song from the
Andean region that was originally composed in 1913, and then popularised by Simon &
Garfunkel in 1970. It has the traditional tunes of the Andes and talks about going back to the
land of the Incas. Unfortunately, the topic I would like to talk about today is another type of
Condor, quite different from the majestic bird evoked by the song. Operation Condor was an
intelligence system that allowed members of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay
and Chile to seize, torture, and make political opponents disappear in one another’s territory
during the 1970s and 1980s.

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These six countries were under dictatorial governments and the mastermind of the plan was
General Augusto Pinochet, who started organising it in 1975. Former Paraguayan political
dissident and lawyer Martin Almada recently explained the plan as a two-pace operation ‘in
slow motion in Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil- where left groups were weak- and at maximum
speed in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, where left groups had a stronger presence (Página
12, 2013a). As reference, the following map of South America show the duration of
dictatorships.
Map of the dictatorships
Every dictatorship implemented different techniques to execute political opponents; however,
the Argentinean dictatorship learnt from the mistakes made by Chile and Uruguay. Broadly
speaking it is fair to say that the Chilean dictatorship opted for combining disappearances

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with mass executions1
. In contrast, the Uruguayan dictatorship’s first choice was massive
incarceration2
(Bertoia, 2011). Nevertheless, the Argentinean dictatorship chose to kidnap
political opponents, preferably at night to avoid witnesses, torture them in clandestine
centres, drug them and either throw them into the sea-or dump the bodies in unidentified
graves. These two methods of extermination allowed the Argentinean junta to avoid
witnesses, overcrowded prisons and an immediate international condemnation.
Currently, twenty five people are on trial in Argentina for participating in Operation Condor.
Twenty three out of twenty five face charges of ‘conspiracy’ but no charges for torture or
homicide (Dandan, 2013). The trial started on March 4th
2013. The Federal Oral Tribunal
No. 1 expects to hear the testimony of 450 witnesses and the process could last a minimum of
two years (Dandan, 2013). The trial in Argentina is a milestone for Human Rights
organisations because even though in recent years there have been many lawsuits against
those responsible for massive human rights violations none of those lawsuits had addressed
Operation Condor as an entity (Amnesty International, 2013). Prosecutor Miguel Angel
Osorio defined the Operation Condor as more than a mere legal collaboration between
intelligence agencies of the six countries involved. ‘It was a concrete machine of
extermination, reproducing at international level what was happening at national level of
every country’ (Dandan, 2013).
1
The coup d’état was on September 11th
and between the 12th
and 13th
the National Stadium was transformed
into the major concentration camp
2
Political prisoners reached 6,000 in Uruguay, making it the country with the highest proportion of political
prisoners of the world (Bertoia, 2011)

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Front page of Argentinean newspaper Página 12 on March 4th
2013; the headline reads ‘The Condor does not
pass’ contrasting with the traditional Andean song entitled ‘The Condor passes’.
The confession of General Jorge Rafael Videla
One of the accused was General Jorge Rafael Videla, who died two months into the trial, on
May 2013 (Clarin, 2013). Despite his death, prosecutors decided to continue the cases in
which Videla was involved (44 out of the 106 victims had Videla as the sole accused)
because those testimonies could contribute to prove the ‘conspiracy’ charges against
Operation Condor’s executors (Página 12, 2013b). Videla had admitted his participation in
the execution of civilians two years before the trial, during a set of interviews conducted by
writer Ceferino Reato, who later wrote a book called ‘Final Disposition’.

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The title of the book is a reference to a military term used when a military garment needs to
be destroyed, the garment passes to ‘final disposition’ (Reato, 2012b). Videla confessed to
Reato that the disappearances were the only solution for the junta to avoid a public outcry. He
specified that ‘that was the price to pay to win the war’. It was imperative to eliminate a great
number of people who could not be trialled or executed and the subtle solution of
disappearances created a feeling of ambiguity among people: they were neither alive nor
dead, they were disappeared 3
(La Nación, 2012; Reato, 2012b). Videla argued that ‘it was a
fair war’ (Reato, 2012a).
Discourse analysis
The ‘final disposition’ of Videla’s confession was certainly not ‘final’, it was just the
beginning; it developed an articulated set of ideas that later grew and flourished within the
‘iron fist’ or mano dura discourse to justify the execution of civilians. My thesis research
analysed the military discourse of the Argentinean junta of the 1970s as the condition of
production of the ‘iron fist’ discourse of the 1990s and how the ‘war against subversion’ was
transformed twenty years later in the ‘war against crime4
’(Bilder, 2011).
During the 1976 dictatorship, military commanders restructured the police force in Buenos
Aires, merging it with military task groups; the police became part of the repressive military
apparatus and therefore managed several detention camps where political prisoners were
3
Original in Spanish: No había otra solución; estábamos de acuerdo en que era el precio a pagar para ganar la
guerra y necesitábamos que no fuera evidente para que la sociedad no se diera cuenta. Había que eliminar a un
conjunto grande de personas que no podían ser llevadas a la Justicia ni tampoco fusilarlas. El dilema era cómo
hacerlo para que a la sociedad le pasara desapercibido. La solución fue sutil -la desaparición de personas-,
que creaba una sensación ambigua en la gente: no estaban, no se sabía qué había pasado con ellos; yo los
definí alguna vez como una entelequia
4
Crime is understand as a generic term in that sentence, in Spanish ‘la Guerra contra la delincuencia’

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tortured (Isla & Miguez, 2011). Although the repressive military tactics were not new to the
police, the concentration of absolute discretionary power allowed the practice to be extreme,
with unprecedented levels of violence. The security forces became perpetrators, not only
master-minding but also controlling and promoting most types of criminal activity.
Progressively, task groups would appropriate their victims ‘assets as “war bounty” to finance
further repressive operations. Therefore, the repressive operations progressively turned into
economic operations with the main purpose of enlarging the personal fortunes of the
participating police and military officials (Isla & Miguez, 2011).
I argue that the conditions of production and circulation of military discourse resulted in a
particular framework that was transmitted to the police, a particular view on crime and on
crime policies, beneficial to police abuse ‘in the act of duties’ that still continues in
contemporary Argentina. The execution of civilians was justified by a discourse whose main
argument was ‘we are at war’. I am particularly interested in how the press collaborated to
develop such discourse and to communicate the idea that some civilians in particular
deserved to be executed by the junta (and currently by the police); the argument of ‘they
deserve it’ or in Spanish se lo merecen. In my analysis, I used the theoretical framework
developed by Eliseo Veron on social discourses as a social semiotics between conditions of
production, circulation and recognition of any given discourse (Verón, 1996).

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All the discourses have ‘traces’ of previous discourses and people’s ability to recognise those
traces make them meaningful to them, explaining the production and re-production of social
meaning in a particular society. In this case, I was interested to know how the social meaning
of ‘they deserve it’ was built through the print-media discourse. Therefore, I took samples of
the two top-selling newspapers of that period, Clarin and La Nación. One example of ‘they
deserve it’ is the statement of General Harguindeguy-Minister of Interior during the last
dictatorship (1976-1983) and main collaborator of General Videla- justifying the repressive
methods of the military junta ‘The disastrous ideas from the Marxist left are an attack
against our families, our flag, our country and our liberty. We need to know how to defend
them’5
(La Nación, 1976). On the one hand, military figures represented the order, the
common good, the country’s ideal and liberty; on the other hand, subversives or dissidents
represented the disorder, the threat, and the enemies.
5
Original in Spanish: Las ideas nefastas de la izquierda marxista atentan contra nuestras familias, nuestra
bandera, nuestra patria y nuestra libertad. Sepamos defenderlas.

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Clarin and La Nación newspapers used a great deal of biological metaphors to position the
armed forces as ‘doctors’ with the mission to cure the country. The subversion or Marxism
were critical diseases and therefore there was a need for qualified ‘doctors’ to solve the
problem. One of the potential dysfunctions of biological metaphors occurs ‘when they are
transferred from a scientific context to non-scientific contexts; this transference is
problematic because it also transfers the authority of science carried out by the metaphor,
which becomes an 'eternal natural law' almost impossible to question’ (Weingart, 2002,
p.128). Therefore, the use of biological metaphors is suitable to an authoritarian government,
as the metaphors are impossible to question. To use the image of the armed forces as
‘doctors’ made them entitled to ‘operate and cure’ the Republic from the enemy of the social
body, the ‘pathogen agents’ (Bilder, 2011, p.4) embodied by the subversive civilians. Clarin
and La Nación communicated the need for a drastic intervention, an intervention that could
only achieve success by the elimination of the invading agent. Not surprisingly, biological
metaphors were also used in the Argentinean military coups of 1930, 1943, 1955 and 1966
(Vitale, 2009).
These biological justifications continued well into the 1990s. In 1995, the Armed Forces
made a public self-criticism through their then chief in command, Lieutenant Martin Balza.
To justify the role of the Armed Forces in the coup d’état, he also used a biological metaphor.
A translation of what he said follows ‘The armed forces, among them the Army, for whom I
have the responsibility to speak, mistakenly believed that the social body hadn’t had the
necessary antibodies to face the plague, and with the consent of many, took power. The Army,
educated and trained for war, did not know how to face the insane terrorism with the law’
(Página 12, 1995). The authoritarian trace of the military discourse was vividly observed in
1995, Balza denied the existence of a list of disappeared and diluted the guilt in the society as

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a whole, as the front page of Página 12 on April 25th
1995 reproduced above shows (Clarín,
1995).
Página 12, April 25th
1995
The analogy between military figures and ‘doctors’ to cure the social disease was reproduced
twenty years later, in the mid-1990s in the image of police officers as the only agents capable
of deterring crime. More recently, the image of soldiers as a ‘remedy’ to violent crime is
continuing with the latest security plan launched by the Kichner administration, who is
currently deploying soldiers to certain hot spot neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires province to
support police patrols. Last month, the governor of Buenos Aires province Daniel Scioli
appointed a new minister of Security, Alejandro Granados. Granados has a special
philosophy when it comes to criminals. He was a victim of a robbery in his house in 1999 and
confronted the criminals with a gun but could not kill them because he missed the target.
Later he said he regretted not having a better practice in shooting targets, adding ‘We are at
war and we have to win this war. This is to kill or to die’6
(La Nación, 2013).
6
Original in Spanish: Estamos en guerra con ellos y la guerra hay que librarla. Es a matar o morir.

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I would like to conclude here showing you some of the parallelism I found in terms of
discourse structure between the military discourse of the 1970s and the police discourse of
the 1990s.
1970s 1990s

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