Unburied Corpse Part II: The Franchise of Terror
From Operation Condor to the Phoenix Program
My last article The Unburied Corpse traced the transatlantic pipeline that funnelled the personnel and ideology of defeated European fascism directly into the security architecture of the American empire and how Japanese fascism was used as bulwark against Mao’s rising China. We saw how SS generals, Nazi spymasters, and death-camp scientists were not prosecuted, but patronized. How Japan’s genocidal, colonial overlords were rehabilitated to help build an anti-Communist Asian front. This was not a series of isolated moral compromises, but a cold, calculated strategy of recycling counter-revolution.
But this strategy did not end in the corridors of Langley, the bunkers of NATO or the Diet of Japan. The empire, having integrated fascism into its core, began to franchise it. The final and most brutal expression of this system was not in Europe, but in the global South, where the recycled terror of the past was deployed in new laboratories of counter-insurgency to wage a joint war of extermination against the working class and the left. This is the story of that franchise, told through its two most devastating programs: Operation Condor in Latin America and the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.
Operation Condor: The Transatlantic Terror Consortium
Operation Condor was more than a U.S. Cold War policy; it was the perfection of the recycling process. It represented the culmination of the transatlantic pipeline, creating an international terror consortium to wage a joint war of extermination.
The Fascist Foundry: Ratlines and the Nazi Curriculum
The foundations of Condor were laid not in the 1970s, but in the immediate post-war period through the very ratlines detailed in our previous report. These escape routes, run by Western intelligence and Vatican elements, did not merely smuggle war criminals to hide them. It smuggled them to employ them.
Figures like Klaus Barbie (the “Butcher of Lyon”), Walter Rauff (developer of the mobile gas vans), and Alois Brunner were imported as assets. Their expertise in counter-intelligence, torture, and running clandestine networks became the foundational curriculum for the nascent security services of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Bolivia. The doctrine they brought was a continuity of ideology: the Nazi concept of the Untermensch was seamlessly translated into the Condor jargon of “subversives”—ideological contaminants to be eradicated for the purity of the nation.
The Imperial Architect: Synthesizing Terror at the School of the Americas
These scattered European fascists were a resource, but they required an architecht to organize them into a cohesive, international force. The United States, through the CIA and the U.S. military, played this role.
The School of the Americas (SOA) became the synthesis point. It did not replace the Nazi curriculum; it hybridized it with modern U.S. counter-insurgency theory. Latin American officers were taught by U.S. instructors, but the underlying philosophy was a fusion: the same existential, anti-communist crusade that had driven the Nazis, was now repackaged for the Cold War. The CIA provided the indispensable glue—funding, secure communications, and diplomatic cover—actively managing the merger of its own imperial project with the surviving tools of European fascism.
The Class War: Annihilating the Socialist Alternative
Supercharged by this transatlantic fusion, Operation Condor became the capitalist class’s most brutal weapon in a hemispheric class war. Its targets were clear: socialists, trade unionists, students, and reformers.
The strategy was decapitation: by “disappearing,” torturing, and assassinating the most committed leaders, the regime aimed to destroy the very possibility of an organized socialist alternative. This political terror was the necessary precondition for the economic shock therapy to come. The “Chicago Boys” could most effectively dismantle public services and crush unions in a society where the political opposition had been physically liquidated. The violence of Condor guaranteed the “stability” required for unfettered capital accumulation.
The Phoenix Program: Fascism as a Subcontracting Service
The same bloody logic of recycling was applied in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War’s Phoenix Program was the clinical, bureaucratic expression of a strategy designed to annihilate the social base of the Vietnamese revolution. Its target, the so-called Viet Cong Infrastructure, was a euphemism for the entire political and social organism of the national liberation movement.
But the U.S. did not invent these tactics from scratch. It drew upon a ready-made reservoir of expertise: the South Korean military.
These were not neutral allies. The Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) divisions sent to Vietnam were the hardened veterans of Syngman Rhee’s U.S.-installed fascist regime, a political project that had already massacred its own leftist population in the Jeju Uprising and the Bodo League Massacres. The U.S. was not just hiring mercenaries; it was importing a pre-vetted, ideologically reliable fascist paramilitary force.
This recycling served a triple function for the empire:
1. Ideological Synergy: The Rhee regime and U.S. doctrine shared a core tenet: any challenge to the capitalist order was an existential communist threat justifying extermination. No persuasion was needed; the brutality was pre-normalized.
2. Plausible Deniability and Brutal Efficiency: By utilizing Korean troops to carry out the most savage “pacification” campaigns, the U.S. could maintain a veneer of “advise and assist” while outsourcing the hands-on work of terror. This was fascism as a subcontracting service.
3. The Economics of Counter-Revolution: For the Park Chung-hee—Rhee’s successor—dictatorship, sending troops to Vietnam was a lucrative enterprise. Billions of U.S. dollars flooded into South Korea, markets opened and U.S. military procurement was guaranteed, helping to fuel its “economic miracle.” This transaction reveals the cold capitalist logic beneath the rhetoric of “free world” solidarity: the U.S. empire funded the industrialization of one neofascist ally as a bulwark against it’s Communist neighbor with the wages of a genocidal war waged against another people fighting for socialism and national liberation.
Conclusion: The Endless Loop of Extraction and Terror
Operation Condor and the Phoenix Program are not disconnected historical episodes. They are two manifestations of the same imperial system functioning as a central processor for global counter-revolution.
In Condor, we see the fascist, defeated in Europe, recycled as the anti-communist crusader in Latin America. In Phoenix, we see the fascist shock troops from a previous U.S. client state in Korea repurposed to strangle a new liberation movement in Vietnam effectively binding two brutally reactionary clients in blood—ROK and RVN.
This is the endless war of capitalist extraction: a continuous, bloody loop where the profits from one intervention fund the next, the ideologies and personnel of terror are deployable assets and anyone that objects is collateral damage. The corpse of fascism is never buried but perpetually reanimated; limbs stitched onto new bodies to serve the empire’s next war. To understand this cycle is to understand that the fight against fascism and the fight against imperialism is one and the same—a struggle against a system that views human life itself as a raw material to be consumed in its endless, bloody quest for profit and control.