Operación Condor
Operation Condor was a transnational project that targeted political dissidence and Communist “subversion” in Latin America through a system of terror. The operation was active in the latter half of the 1970s, following the successful coups d’état by military groups in Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. Operation Condor functioned through secret intelligence agencies and the kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and assassination of political dissidents from the left. This page seeks to explore the experience of Jews under the military regimes which held power in Argentina and Brazil, which have the largest Jewish populations in Latin America.
Brief History
Operation Condor was conceived in the context of the Cold War, which produced a desire to suppress political activity on the left and anti- Communist and Marxist sentiments grew in the US and globally. In the 1960s and 1970s populist, nationalist, and socialist movements developed across countries in Latin America. Cold War doctrines, such as the Monroe Doctrine, gave the U.S. nominal authority to interfere in foreign affairs and eliminate political “subversion.” The US collaborated with the military powers of Latin American countries in this countersubversion campaign by coordinating arrests and secret intelligence as well as training Latin American powers in torture practices.
Legacy
Operation Condor was effectively a war on communism and was executed through a series of military led coups d’état in the aforementioned countries, and subsequent implementation of military dictatorships. These dictatorships were defined by violence, and citizens were subject to the enforcement of a system of torture which took countless lives and separated tens of thousands of families. Political activists, educators, intellectuals, leftists and students tended to be the most prominent target for this violence. Amongst the victims of these regimes, the Jewish population was disproportionately affected. The number of Jewish desaparecidos does not accurately reflect the minority group’s presence in the country. This page seeks to educate the public on the loss suffered by the Latin American Jewish community because of Operation Condor and the resulting dictatorships. Through education of these tragedies, we intend to pay homage to those lost and separated and highlight the role of anti-Semitism in the reign of these dictatorships.
Dictatorship in Brazil
On April 1, 1964, Armed Forces led a coup d’état against the administration of President João Goulartand instituted a military regime in Brazil. Commanders of the Brazilian Army were responsible for planning of the coup d’état, but its execution was also supported by the Catholic Church and anti-communist movements as well as the United States State Department. This support for military rule was compounded by Brazil’s business elites, who along with military elites feared the left’s growing influence in national politics. The regime restricted civil and political liberties through a system of torture and political maneuvers. In 1967 the military government enacted the Sixth Constitution which eliminated direct elections in over 500 cities, required pre authorization and supervision of political meetings, and produced militarized police patrol on the streets. Effectively, the regime disbanded previous political parties and eliminated political opposition. These political maneuvers were supplemented with the execution of an elaborate system of torture which targeted political dissidents from the left.
Brazil was the first Latin American democracy to fall victim to a surge of military rule in the 1960s and 1970s, and its employment of a system of torture to punish political dissidents served as a framework for subsequent military regimes in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere. Because of its colossal human loss under military rule, the term desaparecidos is often associated with Argentina. Although Argentina lost significantly more citizens to political violence than neighboring Brazil, such comparison does a disservice to the suffering endured by Brazilians under the Fifth Brazilian Republic.
Over the two decades following the military coup of 1964, until March of 1985, Brazilian citizens suffered under a military regime that sought to eliminate political opposition from the left through a system of torture. Thousands of Brazilians were tortured and exiled under military rule and hundreds became desaparecidos as a result of forced disappearances. Guerilla groups who resisted the oppressive regime from its beginning were prominent targets for these tortures, exiles, and murders. As a result of their efforts and massive demonstrations by the public, Brazil held its first free election in twenty years in 1982.
The 1979 Amnesty Law has prevented anybody from being punished for the human rights violations that occurred under military rule in the 1960s and 1970s. The government’s intentional misreporting of executions and exiles resulted in hundreds of desaparecidos, many of whom continued to be searched for by their family for decades after the regime’s end.
Dictatorship in Argentina
On March 24th, 1976, a military pilot flew President Isabel Perón of Argentina to an Air Force base in the Jorge Newbery International airport rather than the presidential residence where she expected to go. Once at the base, military powers formally deposed and arrested her. Just three days later, a three-man military junta (a military group who took the presidency by force) granted the presidency to Jorge Rafaél Videla, a senior commander in the Argentine army, who would remain in the presidential position for the next five years. Immediately upon his appointment to office, Videla closed the national Congress, imposed censorship upon the Argentine people, outlawed trade unions, and instructed the military to seize control over both state and municipal governments. From the nascence of his presidency, Videla also initiated an operation against dissidents by establishing hundreds of secret detention camps in which the military kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured suspected political opponents, resulting in the unexplained disappearances of tens of thousands of leftist subversives, many of them never to see their families ever again. Not only did they kidnap, torture and kill adults, however, they also took the babies of their political prisoners and gave them to childless military families.
At first, this new presidential regime did not spark widespread public backlash due to the long-standing presence of leftist guerilla resistance during Perón’s tenure and resulting widespread understanding that Argentina was engaged in a Civil War, however once the public began to recognize the severity of the junta’s actions, the Argentine people began to orchestrate resistance movements such as Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of May Plaza). In response to the rising disapproval of the masses, Videla tightened censorship practices, implemented strict curfews and resorted to fearmongering tactics such as the constant panoptic threat of the “secret police.”
In March of 1981, Videla willfully passed his presidential power to Gen. Roberto Viola, who struggled to maintain his military allies due to the political unrest the military had created in Argentina. As a result of Viola’s lack of success in the Presidential position, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri assumed the role for under a year before facing his own removal as a result of his failed invasion of the Malvinas Islands. His replacement, Gen. Reynaldo Bignone, allowed opposing political parties to resume their operations, and announced that the junta would be holding general elections for the presidency. In anticipation of backlash for their violations of human rights, the military worked to hide the atrocities of the Guerra (War).
In the election of 1983, Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Civic Union, a center-left political party, won the presidency, reinstating democracy in Argentina. Upon his inauguration, Alfonsín declared that he would be prosecuting members of the junta for their many crimes. He repealed a law that gave amnesty to those accused of human rights violations during the Guerra, which led to the prosecution of hundreds of military personnel. In 1985, five former members of the junta, including Videla and Viola, were convicted of various crimes, and three officers, including Galtieri, were convicted of incompetency in the Falkland Islands war. In response to pressure from the military, however, Alfonsín introduced two new legislations which slowed the progress towards justice for the victims of the junta, the Full Stop Law and the Due Obedience Law in 1986 and 1987, respectively. The Full Stop Law instated a deadline for introducing new prosecutions against military officers, and the Due Obedience law granted immunity for hundreds of military officers below the rank of Colonel on the grounds that they were merely following orders, except in cases of rape and the abduction of babies. In mid-1989, Alfonsín resigned from the presidency. His successor, Carlos Menem, allied himself with the military and pardoned several of the top officers who were members of the junta during the dirty war. In 1998, however, Videla received charges for kidnapping babies and was placed under house arrest until 2008, when he went to prison. In 2005, the Supreme Court of Argentina overturned the amnesty laws that Alfonsín had ratified, trying hundreds and sentencing many of the members of the junta who had previously gone unpunished. Though Violi and Galtieri had already died, Videla, Bignone, and seven other people were convicted of human rights violations and kidnapping babies, Videla receiving a 50-year sentence and Bignone receiving 15 years.
Jews in Argentina
The initial wave of immigration that fueled the concentration of Jewish people in Argentina occurred between 1850 and 1900 in response to pogroms and economic troubles in Russia and its surrounding countries. Despite the government’s close alignment with the Catholic Church, the need to fill large new geographical spaces outweighed the discomfort and disdain for religious views and cultures outside of Catholicism. These European immigrants mostly settled in agricultural communities with one another (see Agricultural Colonies page for more), however the Argentinean people wished to integrate the Jews into their society, both physically and ideologically, creating conflicting political and religious influences between the two groups. After World War I and prior to World War II, the Jewish population continued to grow in Argentina in spite of the pressure that Argentinian society was placing upon Jewish groups to adopt the dominant practices. In 1935, the Jewish community started an organization called the DAIA, or the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations. This organization created a social and political center for Jewish people in Argentina and would eventually serve as a legal support organization in response to the disappearance and detention of Jews during the Dirty War.
In general, the Jewish community contributed significantly to Argentine society politically, economically and socially. Regardless, the Christian-centric ideological environment in Argentina confronted the Jewish population with anti-Semitic attitudes both from Church personnel as well as conservative members of society. The Church attempted to restrict Jewish immigration into Argentina and far-right groups like the Tacuara Nationalist Movement engaged in violent anti-Semitic acts such as assaults and bombings. As President, Perón did not enact any official resistance against the Jewish presence in Argentina, but she did not deter the Church from resisting Jewish immigration, nor did she prosecute the perpetrators of the violence Jews faced. Thus, Perón positioned Argentina so that the general disorder and right-leaning ideology perpetuated by the junta led naturally to an uptick in this anti-Jewish activity.
Jews and the Dirty War
Although the Jewish population was less than one percent of the national total in Argentina, they represented between 10 and 15 percent of the junta’s victims. One aspect of the unspeakable violence the dictatorship uniquely imposed on Jews was the reinscription of the fascist ideologies enacted by Hitler and the Nazis during the Holocaust. In Argentine historian, Federico Finchelstein’s article, “From Holocaust Trauma to the Dirty War,” he states that “transcontextual memories of violence, remembered and performed by Argentine perpetrators, explicitly elicited the repetition of trauma for the victims: the traumatic memories of the Holocaust were vehicles for the enactment of a new violent present.” Examples of this repetition of trauma included forcing Jews to kneel before images of Hitler and Mussolini, painting their faces with mustaches resembling Hitler’s, spray-painting swastikas on their backs, threatening to send them to gas chambers and turn them into soap. As Finchelstein states, these “jokes” were “funny only to perpetrators, as it presented the bodies of Jewish victims as physical manifestations of the ideological wish to exterminate them.” Overall, then, not only did the Jewish victims of the junta experience this violence at a disproportionate rate, their experiences as political prisoners were uniquely molded by the historical interaction of Judaism and fascist violence, “conflat[ing] the past with the present creating new gruesome realities.”
Profiles of Resistance and Responses to Dictatorships
Gustavo Germano
Gustavo Germano is the brother of Eduardo Raúl Germano, political activist who spoke out against the military during their rule in Argentina and was detained and “disappeared” on December 17th, 1976 in Rosario. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team identified Eduardo’s remains in 2014. Gustavo began working as a photojournalist in 1990 and moved to Barcelona in 2001, where he currently works on “photographic projects of social and civic memory.”
Gustavo’s primary artistic focus is on the “development and production of different photographic projects of social and civic memory.” Gustavo’s latest project is a “documentary and photographic project Contradesapariciones (Counter-disappearances), about the long process of recovery of the remains of his brother, Eduardo; and advances in his construction of a ‘map’ of enforced disappearance in Latin America.” His 2007 exhibition, “Ausencias Argentina,” or “Absences Argentina” in English, highlights individual cases of disappearances in Argentina during the Dirty War and their effects on the families of the victims by placing photographs from before the junta in conjunction with recreations of these same photographs after the war, highlighting the absences of the disappeared persons from the photographs and the lives of those in them.
Juan Gelman
Juan Gelman was a Jewish man born on May 3rd, 1930 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the military dictatorship in Argentina, Gelman was a member of the Montoneros, a leftist group in support of Perón, who attempted to take the power back from the military government using violence.
He also wrote pieces of activism in the Argentine magazines, Panorama and Crisis. As a result of his resistance to the junta, he was exiled to Italy in 1975.
Gelman is famous for his political poetry, which he started publishing in 1956 and continued to do for fifty years afterwards. His poems centered thematically around his experiences as a victim of the military dictatorship in Argentina, his resulting experiences in Italy, and his Jewish culture and lineage.
During the military dictatorship, his grandchild and his daughter-in-law were among the disappeared persons who were victim to the violence of the regime. He faced the public eye in the latter half of the 1990s as he tried to locate his disappeared family members. In 2000, Jorge Batlle, the president of Uruguay, told Gelman that his daughter-in-law was residing in Uruguay and had given birth to his granddaughter, whom he was able to meet once he discovered this information.
Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo
On April 30th, 1977, 14 women whose children had been abducted by the military junta in Argentina gathered in the Plaza de Mayo (May Plaza) across from the presidential palace to protest the human rights violations the government was committing. They wore white headscarves with the names of their disappeared children so that they could acknowledge their existence—an existence which the government denied. Given the violent and abrupt actions the military would take against political resistors, this was a brave and dangerous undertaking for these women. In order to avoid arrest, they would march in groups of two so that they would not violate the military’s restrictions on public gatherings.
After protesting every Thursday at 3:30pm for decades, many of the mothers eventually procured forensic evidence that their children were assassinated by the military junta, however many of them never learned the fates of their offspring.
Another group which formed as a result of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo was Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (The Grandmothers of May Plaza), a group of women whose pregnant daughters were among the desaparecidos, and many of them were able to achieve contact with their grandchildren.
29 years later, on January 26th, 2006, the mothers and grandmothers held their final meeting at the Plaza, feeling accomplished in the awareness they had raised for the desaparecidos and acknowledging the progress the Full Stop Law had made towards incriminating the military actors who inflicted violence on dissidents. During their period of activity, they won a number of awards, listed below:
- Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, 1992
- Geuzenpenning (Netherlands), 1997
- United Nations Prize for Peace Education, 1999
- La Presidente de las Abuelas (President of the Grandmothers), Estela Barnes de Carlotto: United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights, 2003
Carlos Lamarca
Carlos Lamarca is remembered as one of the most significant guerrilla fighters against Brazil’s military government. A military man from a young age, Lamarca became a captain in the Brazilian Army just a few years after the coup that brought the Fifth Brazilian Republic to power.
During the two years Lamarca spent in the Brazilian Army, he was involved in the organization that would later become the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (VPR). In 1969, he deserted his post, taking a group of soldiers and dozens of weapons from the 4th Infantry Regiment, and officially joined the armed resistance against the dictatorship.
Lamarca became the number one enemy of the state. To keep his family safe, he sent his wife and two children to live in exile in Cuba. Lamarca rose to be one of the resistance’s most prominent leaders, leading the movement alongside Carlos Marighella. His acts of resistance included bank robberies to finance the revolution and, notably, the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador Giovanni Bucher, an act that freed 70 political prisoners in 1970. He also participated in a guerrilla warfare camp in the extreme south of Saõ Paulo.
During his time in the VPR, Lamarca became romantically involved with Iara Yavelberg, a Jewish Brazilian guerrilla fighter. The two became involved in the Movimiento Revolucionário 8 de Octubro (MR-8), and moved to Bahia to develop a foundation for the organization. On September 17, 1971, two days after the death of Yavelberg, Lamarca was found and killed by members of the Brazilian Army at age 34. The assassination was the result of Operação Pajuçara (Operation Pajuçara), which had begun in August 1971 to exterminate Lamarca. Lamarca was publicly tortured and murdered, and the campaign and subsequent assassination is remembered as one of the dictatorship’s most violent actions.
Lamarca’s family was granted 300,000 reais and an allowance equivalent to a general’s wage in compensation for the brutal death and the family’s time in exile. The indemnification was obtained from the Amnesty Commission of the Ministry of Justice in 2007, after several years of fighting and public outrage. Three years later, however, the decision was suspended. Lamarca is remembered by the Praça Capitão Carlos Lamarca (Captain Carlos Lamarca Public Square) at the site of his death in Ipupiara.
Iara Yavelberg
Iara Yavelberg was a Jewish activist who actively fought as a guerrilla fighter in the armed resistance of the Brazilian dictatorship. The daughter of a Jewish family from São Paulo, and originally a psychologist and teacher, Yavelberg became one of the Brazilian Army’s most prominent enemies and targets under military rule along with her partner, Carlos Lamarca.
The couple’s photos were posted across the country as the military government sought their execution. Yavelberg was murdered in 1971, two days before the government’s assassination of Lamarca.
Yavelberg is remembered in the academic center of the Faculdade de Psicologia da Universidade de São Paulo (Faculty of Psychology at the University of São Paulo), where Yavelberg first began her political career and which now bears her name. Yavelberg was involved in the Marxist Political Workers’ Revolutionary Organization, the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard, and the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Octubro (MR-8), which she joined with Lamarca, who was the movement’s leader. The MR-8 was composed of Brazilian Communist Party members who disagreed with the party’s decision to not partake in the armed resistance of the dictatorship. The group self identified as “Marxist-Leninist” and adopted the name of a former resistance movement which had been suppressed by police powers. The organization sent the couple from Rio de Janeiro to Bahia, where the two were separated and Iara was stationed in the capital. On August 20, 1971 police discovered Iara, surrounding the apartment where she was living underground. The official police report stated that Iara committed suicide upon being surrounded, and she was buried in the cemetery’s’ designated area for suicides following Jewish tradition. Iara died at age 23.
In 2003, Iara’s family successfully initiated an investigation into the true cause of Iara’s death. Upon autopsy of Iara’s body, suicide was ruled the false cause of death, and her body was reburied in 2004 in the proper place in the Israeli cemetery. The reburial ceremony was carried out by Rabbi Henry Sobel, who was a staunch critique of the military regime. Iara’s assassination is covered in the documentary, Looking for Lara. The documentary investigates her niece, Mariana Pampiona, to explore the conditions of Yavelberg’s death and dismantle the official suicide version espoused by the government. Yavelberg is remembered as a prominent Jewish activist against Brazil’s military regime, and one of its most sought after enemies.
Vladimir Herzog
Vladimir Herzog was a Jewish Brazilian journalist who was arrested for alleged communist ties and tortured and killed by military police in 1975. The military announced the journalist’s death as a suicide, following his death on the first day of his imprisonment, and circulated a photo of Herzog hanging by a belt in his jail cell.
The photo announcement was met with public outrage and resulted in a 30,000 person strike that lasted for a week. The strike was initiated by university students and professors in rejection of the government’s suicide label and in protest of the military government’s torture of thousands. The promulgated suicide was further rejected by Rabbi Henry Sobel, who refused to bury Herzog’s body in the cemetery’s designated area for suicides, which Jewish tradition would have demanded. In act of defiance to the military regime, Sobel decided that Herzog’s body would be buried in the center of the synagogue’s cemetery, demonstrating that he did not believe the government’s claim of death by suicide. Herzog’s service was attended by more than 8,000 people and the public protests resulting from his arrest and murder are considered by man to have been a turning point in Brazil’s re-democraticization process.
Vladimir worked as a professor and a filmmaker in addition to his career as a journalist. Born in Croatia, Herzog lived in Italy and then emigrated to Brazil with his parents in 1942 at the age of five. He had two children with his wife, Clarice Herzog. He was 38 years old when he was assassinated by the military regime.
Rabbi Henry Sobel
Rabbi Henry Sobel led Latin America’s largest liberal Jewish congregation and became a well-known human rights activist when he defied Brazil’s dictatorship following the death of Vladimir Herzog in 1975. Sobel was born in Lisbon in 1944, to parents who had fled Nazism during World War II.
Sobel lived and received his education in New York before moving to Brazil in 1970, where he took control of Congregacao Israelita Paulista Synagogue. During his tenure at the Synagogue, it became the largest Jewish congregation in Latin America, serving over 2,000 families. Sobel was known for his acceptance of the Jewish and non-Jewish community and a desire to build relations between different denominations.
Rabbi Sobel rose to national and global prominence in 1975, when his burial of Vladimir Herzog in the center of the synagogue’s cemetery signified a clear defiance to the country’s dictatorship. The burial in the cemetery’s center was a disavowal of the regime’s promulgation of Herzog’s death as suicide, which would have relegated the body to the designated portion of the cemetery for dishonorable suicides. The service he held for Herzog was a rare public display of protest to military dictatorship. Sobel passed away from lung cancer in November of 2019. His death was mourned globally by Jews and non-Jews alike.
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