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U.S./INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. By J. Patrice McSherry. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. Pp. xxx, 284. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $82.50 cloth; $29.95 paper.
Operation Condor was a joint venture coordinating intelligence and repression integrated by the military regimes of Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, and later by Peru and Ecuador. Focusing on its activities in the 1970s, McSherry sketches a veritable globalization of covert operations whose origins she traces to the aftermath of the second World War and the special left-behind forces in Europe. This trajectory then moves into the Americas, particularly the Southern Cone, and expands to Central America in the 1980s. The book is a carefully documented chart of covert wars describing in detail the functioning of what the author defines as parallel state(s) and how the United States participated in their design, structure, implementation, and financing.
Faced with the difficulties of studying covert operations, such as extensively redacted U.S. declassified documents, the author supports her arguments with a variety of sources ranging from scholarly publications to testimonies from former torturers. The result...