Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers, liberals and democrats and their families in South America which formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Augusto Pinochet’s spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to the Army War Academy on La Alameda, Santiago’s central avenue, which comprised the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The United States and, allegedly, France were frequent collaborators and financiers of the covert operations.

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.