♞ Stage 1: Recruitment
I didn’t have a mother for long enough for her to gently tie society's blindfold on for me 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 balcony in the midst of heavily U.S.-sponsored state terrorism in South America under Operation Condor, a written and signed multinational Intelligence agency agreement. The written intention was to root out and eradicate the potential political opposition of their willing-puppet dictators in the region.
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.
For the most recent version, GO HERE
Image Source: The National Security Archive (1)
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, just in a different language.
Image Source: Central Intelligence Agency (2)
“Prior to 1969…program for processing data of U.S. citizens believed to be militants, subversives, terrorists, etc.”
Text Source: Central Intelligence Agency
Unlike what the news would play on television screens, the results of that manufactured crisis 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. They were ground zero.
With the welcome invitation of Argentina, 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. They 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. How no one ever realized they always targeted the 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 their pockets, their government offices, and their military research labs.
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 they do to imprisoned drug addicts to turn them into informants, but with a heavier hand.
Image Source: Central Intelligence Agency (3)
“...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.
There are several years left on the classified documents 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.
On a personal level, if there is anything worse than being jolted into this world by military thugs, it’s having that record sealed by those same military thugs, so you are forced to contend with a public kept intentionally blind to what you have gone through.
If there is something worse than that, it’s being forced to stand next to more of those thugs, holding their instruments for them, as they methodically work on killing your 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 the people you are trying to warn would rather blindly trust an authority with money, secrecy, and war as priorities, rather than trust the word of a child witness whose sole need is a civilization safe enough to grow up in.
So, they leave you to grow up in the cold hands of the government, in pain, to watch the slow grinding carnage of the preparation for their own demise.
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’s been documented that they were doing it 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 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. My dad was in medical school. My mother was a history major.
While our socio-economic status is not the important part here, the fact they lied about it, and absolutely everything else, is.
We were comfortable. We weren’t clawing from the bottom, fighting some neo-political socio-economic war between the haves and the have-nots. The strategists behind Operation Condor smashed me to the bottom, said I’d always been there, put on the crown of a rescuing savior of the poor and indigent, claimed me for themselves, and never 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 (4)
Image 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 (5)
“In Villa Devoto in Buenos Aires….the most dangerous prison in South America.”
Image Text: The Guardian
In internal disputes, when a political party dehumanizes the enemy enough and paints them as unrealistically grotesque and grungy caricatures, they start thinking that’s a good place to keep their manufactured enemy’s women, infants, and children. They 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 them 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.
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 problem is that we’re 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.