This hefty book is a tribute to the victims of Operation Condor, a secret military plan established in 1975 by six Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) governed by extreme right military dictators in order to eliminate all political opposition. Revealed in 1979 by the Washington Post, this operation was the cause of tens of thousands of deaths over ten years. Over the course of almost a decade, João Pina worked in depth on memory, traveling to South America to meet some of the victims as well as their loved ones to give them a voice to document what is left of the era of Operation Condor.
The United States played an important role in the operation. Military from the entire region went to be trained, in a counterinsurgent manner, at the School of Americas in Panama, supervised by American advisors. Nazis, coming to find refuge in South America, became consultants of military regimes and trainers of torture and espionage techniques. Less notoriously, French military, having participated in the Algerian War, went to Argentina to pass on their torture experience, summary execution (which they named “corvée de bois” [“firewood duty”] and their experience in making bodies disappear at sea from planes and helicopters.
For João Pina, who describes his approach at the end of the book, photographing the absence, the emptiness left by the women and men abducted by the military, tortured, drugged, and dropped from a plane into the Atlantic Ocean or the Río de la Plata means, above all else, giving back an identify and a face to the victims. The first pages of the book illustrate facsimiles of documents found in Paraguay by human rights militants. “Like good bureaucrats, political officers of the regime of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) archived everything very carefully. That’s how three tons of documents were found.” [João Pina]. A journalistic text by American journalist Jon Lee Anderson retraces the history of Operation Condor. The former examining magistrate Baltasar Garzón Real (who made himself known on an international level by issuing an arrest warrant for the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet and by his investigations on terrorism, corruption, and crimes committed in Argentina and Chile by dictatorships) contributes a section on victims rights. A page on tracing paper tracks the context of each of the testimonies, and a small black notebook inside the book gives a detailed caption of each of the photos.
Born in Lisbon in 1980, João Pina has been working as a photographer since he was eighteen. He dedicated these last ten years to Latin America, and his work has been published in the New Yorker, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Globo, and El País. His first book “For Your Free Thought” (2007) tells the story of twenty-five former political prisoners from the Portuguese dictatorship. The accounts touch him personally. A member of a very political family, he draws inspiration from his personal story. “My grandparents were political prisoners. My grandfather spent nineteen years in prison and my grandmother seven years because they were communists.”
Irène Attinger
Irène Attinger is in charge of the library and bookstore of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris.
João Pina, Condor : le plan secret des dictatures sud-américaines
Published by Éditions du Sous-Sol
49€
