The coronavirus pandemic has been utilised by Latin American governments — prominent examples being Brazil and Chile — to militarise societies, criminalise resistance and normalise violence. Last year’s protests in Chile, in which the nation mobilised against the dictatorship constitution, provided an insight into repressive tactics which Chileans said were reminiscent of the terror unleashed by Augusto Pinochet’s National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).
In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has not been averse to using the pandemic to allow incursions into the Amazon; the aim being to legalise land grab and industrialisation of the Amazon. The early days of the pandemic were marked by the killing of environmental activists and Indigenous leaders in the Amazon — another sign that violence has not abated in the country, under the rule of a president who has openly glorified dictatorships.
A report coinciding with the International Day of the Disappeared on August 30 shows Latin America as the region with the highest number of disappeared persons, many of which pertain to the dictatorships era. Operation Condor — a US-backed intelligence plan that sought to exterminate all socialist influence in Latin America and in eight countries ruled by dictatorships — is estimated to have killed and disappeared tens of thousands of people. Buried in mass graves, exhumed and transferred to other undisclosed locations, or thrown off helicopters into the ocean, the disappeared victims in Latin America are an integral part of each country’s struggle for justice and collective memory.
Operation Condor sought to establish state terror through surveillance and killings. Besides the victims of this region-wide operation that also sought to neutralise opponents globally, countries in Latin America have had to reckon with their separate, historical past. Argentina’s disappeared number 30,000. Between 1958 and 2018, 80,514 Colombians were disappeared. Guatemala counts 45,000 disappeared people, while Mexico’s is currently at 73,308 — an increase of over 30,000 victims since 2018.
In the absence of a justice system that is not politically influenced, Latin America is risking an increase in state violence. While disappearances are now mostly linked to the drug wars in Mexico, for example, governments in the region have not been averse to continue implementing the same neoliberal policies ushered in the 1970s , which in turn necessitate normalising various forms of state violence. What Operation Condor did in the past to prevent a left-wing resurgence, states are now implementing within their own borders to safeguard