Latin America’s Southern Cone
SOUTH AMERICA
In the 1960s and 1970s, within the geopolitical frame of the Cold War and the support of the U.S. State Department, civil-military dictatorships took power as a result of a series of coups d’état in Latin America’s Southern Cone countries. The new regimes’ repressive organizations coordinated their actions, shared information, technical knowledge and action protocols under what was called Operation Condor. In the cases of Brazil, first, and then Chile and Argentina, the military governments carried out a policy of terror against the population that included the illegal detention of political opponents, the systematic and organized use of torture and the forced disappearance of people. Villa Grimaldi, Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) and the Memorial da Resistência are three emblematic spaces of State violence in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, respectively.
