Between 1976 and 1978, an extrajudicial campaign of violent repression was waged by South American dictatorships against political dissidents and exiles who spoke out against domestic repression and military rule.
Operation Condor, as this campaign was known, has since inspired multiple novels, plays and exhibitions, not to mention a forthcoming HBO series. The latter, based on The Ashes of the Condor, the 2014 novel by Uruguayan writer Fernando Butazzoni, tells the story of a young man whose parents fled Uruguay during the military dictatorship.
In 1992, a cache of about 700,000 documents were discovered in a police station in Asunción, Paraguay. Dubbed the Archives of Terror, these papers comprehensively recorded the activities of the Paraguayan secret police since the 1970s.
