RENDITION IN THE SOUTHERN CONE: Operation Condor Documents Revealed from the Paraguayan 'ARCHIVE OF TERROR'

Washington D.C., December 21, 2007 - On the fifteenth anniversary of the discovery of the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, the National Security Archive posted Spanish-language documents that reveal new details of how the Southern Cone military regimes collaborated in hunting down, interrogating, and disappearing hundreds of Latin Americans during the 1970s and 1980s.

The collaboration, which became officially known as "Operation Condor," drew on cross-border kidnapping, secret detention centers, torture, and disappearance of prisoners—rendition, interrogation and detention techniques that some human rights advocates are comparing to those used today in the Bush administration's counter terrorism campaign.

"These documents provide a historic passkey into the horror chambers of the Southern Cone military regimes," said Carlos Osorio, who directs the Southern Cone Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. "The atrocities they record from the past remain relevant to the debate over the conduct of counter terrorism operations today, and in the future."

The National Security Archive also posted a series of other records from the Paraguayan archive to inaugurate a new website of 60,000 records of repression [ http://test.aladin.wrlc.org/gsdl/collect/terror/terror_e.shtml]. The website, created in collaboration with the Paraguayan Supreme Court, and the George Washington University, is believed to be the largest internet site of Spanish-language military and secret police records relating to abuses that took place during the military regime in Paraguay and elsewhere in the Southern Cone. It is designed to facilitate research and international legal efforts to prosecute human rights violators.

http://www.nsarchive.org