Question

Unveiling Operation Condor- The USA's Involvement and Southern Cone Leaders' Contributions to Atrocities

Guide to the Primary Source Paper

The purpose of this paper is to get you started working with the primary sources that your final paper will be based on. Your goal is to write a paper based purely on the primary sources (though you are welcome to put an occasional comment in the footnotes about how your evidence relates to the secondary literature if you think it’s especially relevant).

Why are we doing this?

First, because writing a paper with primary sources is different than doing so with secondary sources. You take the raw materials and shape them into a narrative (more like telling a story) or analytical framework (more like breaking down the evidence and discussing it). There are also some pitfalls that you want to avoid (we will discuss this next Thursday) and this will give you a chance to recognize those. You may not have ever written a paper based primarily on primary sources, so we need to give it a try!

Second, while we generally teach students that a major research project has a certain order of events—i.e. Figure out a topic, then read the historiography and find some hole (lacuna!) to investigate, then formulate a question, then find relevant primary materials to try and answer the question, then analyze those materials, then write your essay—in reality, the research process is a little more of a back and forth. Usually the primary sources will raise new questions in your head that will take you back to the secondary literature (e.g. “Was this event that’s mentioned here in my primary sources even mentioned in the secondary sources? Are these rationales that I now see were being forwarded by policymakers even mentioned by the existing historiography?). Sometimes the questions raised by the primary sources even help us to reshape our original question. So by getting you started digging into the primary sources now, you’re better replicating how we actually do our work in the real world.

Third, this paper will give you a chance to try out citing primary sources for the first time, and it will give you a chance to think about how you are going to take your notes and organize your materials.

Paper Guidelines

1)   This paper should be from 900-1500 words in length (approximately 3-5 pages). It should be double spaced and in 12-point-font.

2)   All of your evidence must be cited Chicago Style format and all of it should come from the primary sources you are working with (again, if you’d like to note in the footnotes how something relates to the secondary literature, that’s fine.).

3)   You must provide some sort of analysis. This can either be explicitly analytical or your analysis can be embedded in a narrative presentation of the evidence (again, we will consider these two approaches on Thursday). However, the purpose is not for you to come to any final conclusions or understand the whole story. This is an exercise. It’s like a test drive of your sources. So just do the best you can with what you’ve got. You are welcome to offer caveats about your analysis in the footnotes.

4)   Please proofread multiple times and clean up any sloppiness before you turn it in.

5)   No bibliography necessary for this paper.

Expert Solution

Operation Condor, the late 20th century Southern Cone countries' clandestine cooperation, is still debated. The security agencies of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, formed Operation Condor to combat subversion and terrorism. According to the released records, the project started as an information-sharing program about subversive organizations with a focus on coordinated intelligence gathering among the involved countries. But as time went on, the objectives changed, and talk turned to the prospect of carrying out assassinations overseas. Declassified documents, intelligence reports, and diplomatic correspondences provide a complex narrative of the United States' active participation in the covert cooperation known as Operation Condor, which involved Southern Cone countries during the late 20th century. The operation's objectives also changed over time, and the narrative of the varied contributions made by Southern Cone leaders to atrocities is revealed.

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