Note to readers: this is more or less a companion piece, albeit an incidental one, to Curro’s post from yesterday, “‘Islamist Extremism’ Has Been Defeated; a New (Old) Foe Is Needed: ‘Left-Wing Political Terrorism.’” Whereas Curro’s post focuses primary on the interplay between the US’ war on terror and its newly relaunched war on all things nominally left-wing, this post is more concerned with the potential ramifications of a new Operation Condor for Latin America as well as its interplay with the Trump administration’s escalating war against “narco-terrorists”.
In mid-Nov 2024, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies wrote an article outlining eight reasons why Marco Rubio would make a disastrous secretary of state. That article, which we cross-posted here, pointed out, quite presciently, that Rubio, while “the least controversial of Trump’s candidates [among the Washington establishment], is the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy.”
And so it has proven. Since coming to power, not only has Trump 2.0 failed to extricate the US from project Ukraine, as it said it would; it has launched a disastrous war of choice in West Asia, on Israel’s behalf, that is on the verge of cratering the global economy. It has also designated drug traffickers as terrorists, attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its president, carried out missile strikes on dozens of alleged smuggling vessels, and launched a full-scale siege of Cuba.
Granted, Rubio is by no means solely responsible for all of these actions; indeed, he has largely taken a backseat on project Ukraine and the US-Israeli war against Iran. By contrast, he has been very much in the driving seat on all US actions pertaining to the Western hemisphere, particularly Latin America.
As for Medea Benjamin, she and CODE PINK, the anti-war organisation she heads, now find themselves on what journalist Ken Klippenstein describes as a “virtual government blacklist” of prominent US left-wing politicians and groups that the US government has accused of working in cahoots with the Cuban government to subvert democracy.
They are joined on that informal list by 41 other individuals and groups, including:
- Amazon Labor Union
- Antifa
- Bass, Karen, the current mayor of Los Angeles.
- Black Lives Matter
- Cohen, Ben, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s.
- Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a prominent socialist political organisation whose members include prominent congressmen and which has organised official delegations to Cuba.
- Goodman, Amy, the host of Democracy Now!
- Mamdani, Zohran, the current mayor of New York.
- National Lawyers Guild (NLG)
- Omar, Ilhan, a Democratic Congresswoman.
- Smalls, Christian: The founder of the Amazon Labor Union who participated in the 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba.
- Viva Palestina US: The US branch of an international network that, according to the report, has provided convoys and funds to Hamas.
All of these names feature in the report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Capitalism,” published by the US State Department earlier this week. The report tries desperately hard to paint Cuba as “the leading sponsor of radical leftism… in the United States” and, as such, a “unique threat to American homeland security”:
“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa,” reads the Department of State report. “Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”
The logical inconsistencies in the report are truly something to behold. The Trump administration wants everyone to believe that a small island nation of 11 million people with a failed economy — no explanation as to why — and a failed state is responsible for decades of civil rights accomplishments and anti-war movements, not only in the US but across the West.
In the lead-up to the report’s publication, Rubio held a ministerial summit on the supposed international threat posed by “far-left terrorism”. That summit was attended by ministers from 66 national governments, primarily from Europe and Latin America. Representatives of Israel’s Netanyahu government were also in attendance, of course.
From Latin America three countries were conspicuously absent: Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, all three currently governed by left-leaning administrations (though not for much longer in the case of Colombia). Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum said her government turned down the invitation to participate as the summit, she said, did not reflect Mexico’s priorities for bilateral cooperation on security matters.
That said, the US embassy in Mexico, headed by former CIA officer and green beret Ron Johnson, is one of more than 20 US diplomatic missions that have been asked to gather information on alleged “extreme left” groups in their territory, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The summit, which came on the heels of two previous gatherings on the same subject, one held at the US Embassy in the Hague in May, the other at the US Institute of Peace in June, is part of a clear effort by the Trump administration to expand the list of the US’ external and internal enemies. And the political left makes for a nice, soft-bellied target.
There are, of course, many ironies, most of them dark-hued, about all of this. For starters, the Trump administration is declaring war on left-wing political movements, more or less of any kind, at a time when left-wing politics is a shadow of its former self, both in the US and across the West. It is also doing so while taking equity stakes in a growing roster of private companies, which is the sort of thing one might expect a left-wing government to do.
Michael Parenti had an alternative explanation for what is actually happening…
It seems that more and more people are beginning to cotton on to this unfolding trend. After all, it’s not exactly subtle…
Besides Rubio, other senior Trump officials present at the ministerial summit on left-wing “terrorism” included Stephen Miller, the chief architect and enforcer behind the Trump administration’s hardline immigration and domestic policies, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and FBI Director Kash Patel.
To kick off proceedings, Rubio declared that under “President Trump, the United States, for the first time, is building the infrastructure, the partnerships and the strategies to defeat the scourge of far-left terrorism.”
The parallels with 1950s McCarthyism are both plain and chilling. Indeed, as Ken Klipperstein notes in his substack, the State Department’s report on Cuba “explicitly mentions the ‘blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions’ of the 1950s” as positive accomplishments that helped defeat communism in the US:
The Cuba report follows last week’s Rubio-led international summit on “political terrorism.” That summit, as I reported, introduced the new term “Far-Left Terrorism” (abbreviated “FLT”), a term it never really defined.
A White House press release summarizing the event said that “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
Speaking at the summit, Rubio vowed that further new terrorist designations for left-wing groups would be coming “soon.”
A Supersized Reboot of Operation Condor
There is something almost cartoonish about the Trump administration’s resurrection of McCarthyism. When Stephen Miller talks about Democrats wanting to seize private industry and hand it to the government, even as the Trump administration holds equity stakes in over a dozen companies, it feels like we could be watching some kind of Mel Brooks parody.
And to hear Trump officials decry the evils of communism, socialism, anarchism and all other left-wing movements while facilitating genocides in Gaza and Lebanon and waging an aggressive war of choice that threatens to cause a global food crisis, as Ruben Bauer Naveira warned in his excellent, sobering post yesterday, is downright surreal.
But this, unfortunately, is very real, just as the 25-year war on Islamist terrorism and Trump’s recently declared war on narco-terrorism are very real. The arguments for those wars may rest on the flimsiest, even most farcical, of foundations but that hasn’t stopped them from causing the deaths of millions of people and the destruction of entire economies.
The Trump administration’s calls for a global alliance of countries to fight the scourge of left-wing extremist is reminiscent of one of the darkest episodes of 20th century history: Operation Condor.
Hatched in a meeting in Santiago de Chile between senior military intelligence officers from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in November 1975, with backing from the US, Condor was a coordinated campaign of state-sponsored terror conducted by right-wing military dictatorships in South America during the 1970s and early 80s.
During that period tens of thousands of suspected political opponents were kidnapped, tortured and killed. Many disappeared without trace. The guiding mission behind Operation Condor was to make sure there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide for left-wing activists, students and members of revolutionary armed groups in South America’s southern cone, even if they managed to escape the country they were living in.
As Francesca Lessa explains in a recent article published in The Conversation, Condor was built on three main operational pillars.
First, all intelligence information about perceived subversive activities across the region was centralised in a database in Santiago. Second, an encrypted communications channel let state agents communicate secretly and efficiently. And third, the so-called office for coordination and advanced command oversaw joint operational activities.
Argentina, Chile and Uruguay also set up the Teseo unit to target exiles from those three countries who were living in Europe. And while Operation Condor ended in late 1978, bilateral operations which mainly saw Argentina collaborate with Brazil, Paraguay and Chile continued until early 1981.
Operation Condor 1.0 had Henry Kissinger’s fingerprints all over it, as Christopher Hitchens documents in his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. That said, Kissinger was able to keep enough distance between him and Condor’s covert plotters to maintain plausible deniability — until his later years.
Declassified documents obtained and posted by the National Security Archive in 2010 revealed that in September 1976 Kissinger rescinded instructions to US ambassadors in the Southern Cone to warn military leaders there against orchestrating “a series of international murders” — just five days before a car bomb rocked downtown Washington DC, killing former Chilean diplomat and Pinochet opponent Orlando Letelier.
Rubio’s State Department is now seeking to build something similar to Operation Condor but on a more ambitious level, involving dozens of countries spanning multiple continents — at a time when information and communication technologies make it much easier for governments to share information as well as track people’s movements and actions. This is why Operation Condor 2.0 could be even more dangerous than the original…
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Nick Corbishley 