Silencing yourself and living in the dark
leaves you exposed to the type of people
who wander the dark looking for
victims who won’t scream.
I didn’t have a mother for long enough for her to gently tie society’s blindfold over my eyes and keep it there. I’ve seen everything coming, unblinking, and in the room with it. It’s not a pleasant experience, but someone had to live it.
I entered the world shortly after my pregnant mother jumped (or much more likely – was pushed) off a balcony in Argentina in an attempt to escape officers from a military dictatorship.
We dropped from that height and hit the concrete below in the midst of heavily U.S.-sponsored state terrorism in South America under Operation Condor, a written and signed multinational Intelligence agency agreement that had some of its strongest taloned roots in Paraguay and Argentina. The written intention was to root out and eradicate any potential opposition to willing-puppet dictators in the region.
Image Source: The National Security Archive
Translated text: “The Armed Forces of the Nation (Paraguay) and the Argentine Army, in order to coordinate actions in the fight against subversion and insurrection groups that from clandestinity promote insurrection and/or ideological agitation tending to reduce military, political, economic and /or psychological of both countries, also aiming to oppose public opinion and the population against their governments…”
Image Source: The National Security Archive
In addition to funding, the U.S. gave them the blueprint. The Central Intelligence Agency was already surveilling their own citizens and using much of the same terminology that Operation Condor would come to use, just in a different language.
Image Source: Central Intelligence Agency
“Prior to 1969…program for processing data of U.S. citizens believed to be militants, subversives, terrorists, etc.”
Image Text: Central Intelligence Agency
The struggle has always been (Military) Intelligence against the citizens it claims to protect. It is a government’s self-preserving and brutal response against attempts by the citizens to get a corrupted government back under control and functioning as a stable and balanced mechanism of promoting and maintaining a healthy, sane, noncoercive, non-exploitative, and nonviolent stability of infrastructure within a nation’s borders, in support and protection of its citizens, as all but the most rabid of us prefer governments to be.
This becomes most poignant and clear when it’s finally our personal day for them to knock down our door, enslave our children, and kill our parents for a thinnly veiled lie of it being “for the greater good” that no one in our family, community, and country will collect the benefit of. The only “greater good” in the vocabulary of liars and country-level thieves is in the draining of a nation’s resources directly into the pockets of corrupt politicians in support of arms, human trafficking, hardcore drug trade, and the exploitation and overburdening of its people, and often while government mouthpieces insincerely, underhandedly, and disrespectfully claim to be doing the exact opposite.
The biggest insult is when they claim they are protecting us – from their own crimes.
These types of actions, and they continue through today, have always been to protect the financial and political interests of unhealthy governments from the people they use as an infinite resource to exploit. They are desperate and continuing moves to stay in power when there is no longer effective governance and it is no longer in the best interests of the countries being exploited.
It has nothing to do with our survival as a people of a nation. Ask yourself, would you need to be coerced, manipulated by public policies, and lied to in order to join the military in fighting a just war to protect your own borders and families? No, you would not. There is no realistic reason to manipulate the people “for our best interests.” We are quite capable of making the right choices for our survival when it comes down to it, even if that survival requires increasing the number of bodies within the military. The pervasive mass manipulation we all endure is unnecessary. All it does is make a nation weaker and provide an army of dispirited henchmen for private interests and corrupt politicians – against our own people and survival.
These damaging and manipulative maneuvers are often allowed because people mistakenly see Intelligence as a part of their country. But when something is working that hard in opposition to your basic need to exist and to speak when you are being crushed by the mechanisms of an overburdening government, it is not a part of your country. It has been usurped. Frequently in the case of Intelligence and the corrupt, by agreement and consequences it has become part of a multinational entity and is no longer yours.
Government policies are most often created with mechanisms deceptively written in to allow control and power to be easily usurped. In the early stages of a nation or a party’s control, they are often overlooked because they are seen in a positive light – a taking control of a nation for the people. But when you create a method of control, eventually it won’t be you at the helm, even if the new captain is wearing your flag or your party’s insignia for convenience. Just because we have always known something to function in a particular way does not mean it is the best way. We have been living with snakes for a very long time, and seemingly without creating basic methods to ensure that we can live peaceably with them, without being bitten and then consumed.
Back in Argentina when I was still a small child, unlike what the news would play on television screens, the results of the crisis manufactured by Operation Condor would not stay confined to South America. There’s no way they could have – it was an international operation that would grow to touch multiple continents.
However, the University of Buenos Aires and surrounding areas had become the primary at-gun-point forced recruitment area exploited by the U.S. military and Intelligence during the turmoil of state terrorism. That was ground zero.
With the welcome invitation of Argentina’s military dictatorship, U.S. and foreign forces walked right in via Operation Condor. They selected the best people from the academic and scientific communities in Argentina and then framed them as the political opposition in order to force them into what was very much a coerced “come work for us or die here” scenario. Quite a few countries were in a post-World War II phase and wanted as many people as they could get to create bigger and better weapons and strategies for the next wars. In the West, the U.S. was taking the lead. How no one ever realized that they always targeted universities is beyond my comprehension.
Operation Condor opened up one of the largest government-sponsored international human trafficking funnels of that time, and it was emptying right into government pockets, offices, and military research labs across more than two continents.
The reality is that it was a resource grab, as all wars are, and was blanketed in divisive excuses, as wars tend to be. It was the military reaping machine against a field of people, and they never even saw it for what it was, thanks to the distraction and haze of well-rehearsed media and political rhetoric.
The U.S. was also doing the same thing domestically, with more subtlety and less obvious bloodshed. They would entrap their own university-educated citizens, make them political prisoners, and then coerce them while they were being held in indefinite detention. The methodology was nearly identical to what the U.S. still does to imprisoned drug addicts to turn them into informants, but with a heavier hand for the military and Intelligence.
Image Source: Central Intelligence Agency
“…because of the likelihood that public exposure of the Agency’s intent in the problem of student dissidence would result in considerable notoriety…We believe that the basic text should be edited for the purpose of eliminating even the most casual reference to the domestic scene – lest someone infer from such a chance reference that the original paper had contained a section on American students…
This document was produced in two versions – one with the chapter on radical students in America… was sent to the President, Walt Rostow, and Cy Vance (former Secretary of Defense).”
Text Source: Central Intelligence Agency
In Argentina, they had full reign to forcibly recruit however they wanted, so they didn’t hide it. They did it in the open and with a combat boot.
Every person on this planet is living in the aftermath of what would go down over the next several decades as a result of those manipulative recruitment practices. The television newscasters simply haven’t been honest about it yet. It’s doubtful that they ever will be.
There’s at least a decade left on the classified documents from my early years before they can drag it out into the public view and do their customary song and dance of, “See, we made inhumane mistakes, but we were less ethical back then. Thankfully, we’re more modern, evolved, and saintlike now,” all while hiding their current atrocities under yet another 50+ year blanket of secrecy. Rinse and repeat until someone in the endgame labs finally gets it right, and we all have more than the unshakeable sniffles, as if that wasn’t already enough of a nuisance.
On a personal level, if there was anything worse than being jolted into this world by military thugs, it was in having my records sealed by those same military thugs, so I would be forced to spend a lifetime feeling as if I were standing alone to contend with a public, a multitude of people, kept intentionally blind to where I have been or what I would go through, thus hindering any real chance of unentangling myself and finding safety.
Image Source: The Guardian
“Argentina’s military set about crushing any potential opposition and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, almost all of them civilians. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their parents while in captivity and given to military couples to raise as their own.”
Text Source: The Guardian
If there was something worse than that, it was in being forced to stand next to more of those military thugs, holding their instruments for them, as they methodically worked on killing both my people and theirs – all under yet another layer of sealed documents, a seal that for some reason everyone’s more terrified of than the actual looming threat of death hiding beneath it.
And the one thing worse than that? When many of those I tried to warn preferred to blindly trust in and prostrate themselves to an authority with money, secrecy, and war as priorities; rather than believe the gravity of the words of a child witness whose sole need was a civilization safe enough to grow up in.
So, they abandoned us children, living evidence of a war against the people, and forced us to grow up within the cold hands of foreign enemies, in pain; to watch in horror the slow grinding carnage of the preparation for the demise of the people of multiple nations, including the nations that abandoned us and the ones into which we were illicitly adopted after being moved by military caravans, some of which were manned by people from our own nations.
That eats at a person.
The recruitment during state terrorism in Argentina wasn’t the first time the U.S. had used coercive wartime methods to forcibly hire weapons research specialists, scientists, scholars, and war strategists overseas. It has been documented that they were doing it in other locations only one decade prior (right before the 50-year classification secrecy cover comes down on us all). But I’ll get to those prior recruitments in a bit, with references.
The door for foreign involvement was opened wide by the military needs of Argentina, a country where most of the carnage would occur. Some of the country’s soldiers found that rounding up and killing their own people was unsettling, especially when their victims were primarily in the same age group they were. This was made obvious by their bizarre methodologies of murder, such as drugging students and then shoving them out of planes without a parachute. To the uninitiated, that type of behavior seems incredibly sadistic and evil.
Ironically, the reality is behavior like that is often a sign that no one had the stomach to shoot their own people at point-blank range. They had to devise a way to do it that was more removed. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone with a soul who has ever had to kill a chicken how that first kill went for them. Nine times out of ten, it’s not quick and clean. They’ll have a story about awkward attempts, feathers flying everywhere, and the bird escaping at least twice. There’s a hurdle in the human mind that needs to be overcome first. Now, imagine it’s their neighbor’s son and not a chicken.
To manage the mass incarceration, murder, and trafficking of their own citizens in exchange for a war bounty, Argentina’s government needed help from foreign military and Intelligence on the ground. The nations and authorities behind Operation Condor were ready to respond to the expected request. They killed the Argentine citizens they saw no monetary value in and trafficked the ones, like my injured mother, who they thought they might be able to use elsewhere. While I know my mother’s fate, I honestly don’t know what happened to my father after the dictatorship dragged him away.
Before my heavily pregnant mother jumped from that balcony, my parents weren’t grungy hand-rolled-cigarette smoking guerrillas in dingy back rooms reading CIA-made communist propaganda and crafting makeshift bombs, as the dictatorship’s foreign-Intelligence-run media arm would bizarrely claim all their victims were. According to the limited public records that exist, my dad was in medical school. My mother was a history major who volunteered at a local children’s hospital.
While their vocations and socio-economic status are not the important parts here, the fact the government and media lied about it, and absolutely everything else, is.
We were comfortable enough and Argentina still had a thriving economy at that time. We weren’t clawing from the bottom, fighting some neo-political socio-economic war between the haves and the have-nots.
And yet, the strategists behind Operation Condor smashed me to the bottom and said I’d always been there. Then they put on their false crown of a rescuing savior of the poor and indigent, and would claim me for themselves, never to let go again.
As for my mother, they would keep her for nineteen excruciating years in total, squeezing every bit of value they could from her before finally taking her life.
They took those university students and graduates because they had monetary and military value. It was never about rhetoric, philosophies, or political bickering. It has always been about resources and for the war machine.
And to help dispel the myth of the United States as the wealthy white knight, here are the “low-income degenerate communist mud huts they liberated us from.” This was the neighborhood of Buenos Aires my parents called home:
Image: La Plata, Buenos Aires, Source: Turismo
Sometimes, I wonder if where my parents grew up is why I always seek a city near the sea: to be a little closer to the family I lost. I’ve often situated their photo frames in my home with the water seen behind them, so I can still share it with them.
As for why they were taken from me:
My mother’s crimes: knowing history and my father.
My father’s crime: not wanting to coerce, corral, or experiment on and kill his own people for the military.
My crime: being their child and thus “the next wave of the enemy.”
I would become a child political prisoner in one of the most dangerous prisons on the planet (most dangerous according to a Guardian journalist). I grew to call it home.
Image Source: The Guardian
“In Villa Devoto in Buenos Aires….the most dangerous prison in South America.”
Image Text: The Guardian
In internal disputes, when politicians dehumanize their political enemies enough and paint them as unrealistically grotesque and grungy caricatures, they convince the public to think that’s a good place to keep their manufactured enemy’s women, infants, and children. They exsanguinate the mothers and roll the infants in prison yard dirt while praying it sticks so those babies can appear to match the stories told about them.
And why? Because the media arm of government and military promises that those grotesque caricatures of neighbors want to take away the diminishing rights that government still allows. And on a different television channel, the opposing political party has told their own followers the same exact thing about them. We’re all the enemy of the government. They’ve simply delegated the effort of anger and dehumanizing. They delegated the tasks to the masses after conveniently separating them into opposing teams. The fact that so many people so easily go along and sacrifice their own neighbors and family makes me question if there is anything within human nature to salvage.
Internal politics can destroy a nation’s humanity until it begins to consume itself. But you might be figuring that out by now.
That playbook was written long before any of us. It genuinely does not matter which country or party uses it. The results are the same – some of us lose our humanity and some of us lose our lives. The modern complexity of the age-old problem is that we’re now getting to a stage at which we may all become the latter.
I know, you’re thinking, “But you were one kid in Argentina who obviously went through some trauma. What does it have to do with me or the current state of where I am?” Patience. I didn’t remain a child and this isn’t a “Dear Diary.”
However, you need to become aware of the human element and how it affects the larger picture, and I will walk you through that experience while pointing out the government and military maneuvers and catastrophes along the way. Think of me as your endgame warfare and secrecy backstage tour guide, the one you never knew you needed but absolutely did.
Next: Tip of the Spike