Though officially neutral until March 1945, Buenos Aires played a key role during World War II as a base for the South American intelligence operations of the major powers. The Hidden War in Argentina reveals the stories of the spymasters, British, Americans and Germans who plotted against each other throughout the Second World War in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, Johannes Siegfried Becker – codename 'Sargo' – was the man responsible for organizing most of the Nazi intelligence gathering in Latin America and the leader of 'Operation Bolivar', which sought to bring South America into the war on the side of the Axis powers. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the US state department pressured every South American country to join it in declaring war on Germany, and J Edgar Hoover authorized huge investments in South American intelligence operations. Argentina continued to refuse to join the conflict, triggering a US embargo that squeezed the country's economy to breaking point. Buenos Aires continued to be a hub for espionage even as the war in Europe was ending – hundreds of high-ranking Nazi exiles sought refuge there. This book is based on newly declassified files and details of the operations of MI6, the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the FBI, as well as the OSS and the SOE. Most significantly, The Hidden War in Argentina reveals for the first time the coups of Britain's MI6 in South America.

Though officially neutral until March 1945, Buenos Aires played a key role during World War II as a base for the South American intelligence operations of the major powers. The Hidden War in Argentina reveals the stories of the spymasters, British, Americans and Germans who plotted against each other throughout the Second World War in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, Johannes Siegfried Becker – codename 'Sargo' – was the man responsible for organizing most of the Nazi intelligence gathering in Latin America and the leader of 'Operation Bolivar', which sought to bring South America into the war on the side of the Axis powers. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the US state department pressured every South American country to join it in declaring war on Germany, and J Edgar Hoover authorized huge investments in South American intelligence operations. Argentina continued to refuse to join the conflict, triggering a US embargo that squeezed the country's economy to breaking point. Buenos Aires continued to be a hub for espionage even as the war in Europe was ending – hundreds of high-ranking Nazi exiles sought refuge there. This book is based on newly declassified files and details of the operations of MI6, the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the FBI, as well as the OSS and the SOE. Most significantly, The Hidden War in Argentina reveals for the first time the coups of Britain's MI6 in South America.

“[A] quiet, powerful novel” of a young woman caught in the chaos of Argentina in the mid-1970s, when speaking against the government could mean death (Publishers Weekly). March 23, 1976. Berta watches horrified as her lover, a union organizer named Atilio, is thrown from a window to his death by soldiers. The next day, Colonel Jorge Rafael Videla stages a coup d’état and a military dictatorship takes control of Argentina. And even though she was never a part of Atilio’s union efforts, Berta is on a list to be “disappeared.” Fleeing to relatives in the countryside, she becomes part of the family she knows only from old photographs: Aunt Avelina, who blasts music from an old record player; Uncle Nepomuceno, who watches slugs slither in the garden every afternoon; and Uncle Javier, who sits in his tiny grocery store day and night. But soon enough, Berta realizes she must run even further to save her life—and those she has come to love. With a prose that is light yet penetrating, Gloria Lisé has written “a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love, with memorable characters painted in the tender strokes of a watercolor” (Luisa Valenzuela, author of Black Novel with Argentines).

This powerful study makes a compelling case about the key U.S. role in state terrorism in Latin America during the Cold War. Long hidden from public view, Operation Condor was a military network created in the 1970s to eliminate political opponents of Latin American regimes. Its key members were the anticommunist dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru and Ecuador, with covert support from the U.S. government. Drawing on a wealth of testimonies, declassified files, and Latin American primary sources, J. Patrice McSherry examines Operation Condor from numerous vantage points: its secret structures, intelligence networks, covert operations against dissidents, political assassinations worldwide, commanders and operatives, links to the Pentagon and the CIA, and extension to Central America in the 1980s. The author convincingly shows how, using extralegal and terrorist methods, Operation Condor hunted down, seized, and executed political opponents across borders. McSherry argues that Condor functioned within, or parallel to, the structures of the larger inter-American military system led by the United States, and that declassified U.S. documents make clear that U.S. security officers saw Condor as a legitimate and useful 'counterterror' organization. Revealing new details of Condor operations and fresh evidence of links to the U.S. security establishment, this controversial work offers an original analysis of the use of secret, parallel armies in Western counterinsurgency strategies. It will be a clarion call to all readers to consider the long-term consequences of clandestine operations in the name of 'democracy.'

Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds were injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent - particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival research, statistical analysis, multi-sited fieldwork, and taking heed of the perspective of contentious politics, this book provides an analytic description of the origins, course, meanings, and outcomes of the December 2001 wave of lootings in Argentina.

The worker-run factories of Argentina offer an inspirational example of a struggle for social change that has achieved a real victory against corporate globalization. Lavaca is an Argentine editorial and activist collective. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of No Logo.Avi Lewis is an author and filmmaker. Klein and Lewis co-produced The Take, a film about Argentina's occupied factories.

When Heinz Lüning posed as a Jewish refugee to spy for Hitler’s Abwehr espionage agency, he thought he had discovered the perfect solution to his most pressing problem: how to avoid being drafted into Hitler’s army. Lüning was unsympathetic to Fascist ideology, but the Nazis’ tight control over exit visas gave him no chance to escape Germany. He could enter Hitler’s army either as a soldier . . . or a spy. In 1941, he entered the Abwehr academy for spy training and was given the code name “Lumann.” Soon after, Lüning began the service in Cuba that led to his ultimate fate of being the only German spy executed in Latin America during World War II. Lüning was not the only spy operating in Cuba at the time. Various Allied spies labored in Havana; the FBI controlled eighteen Special Intelligence Service operatives, and the British counterintelligence section subchief Graham Greene supervised Secret Intelligence Service agents; and Ernest Hemingway’s private agents supplied inflated and inaccurate information about submarines and spies to the U.S. ambassador, Spruille Braden. Lüning stumbled into this milieu of heightened suspicion and intrigue. Poorly trained and awkward at his work, he gathered little information worth reporting, was unable to build a working radio and improperly mixed the formulas for his secret inks. Lüning eventually was discovered by British postal censors and unwittingly provided the inspiration for Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. In chronicling Lüning’s unlikely trajectory from a troubled life in Germany to a Caribbean firing squad, Thomas D. Schoonover makes brilliant use of untapped documentary sources to reveal the workings of the famed Abwehr and the technical and social aspects of Lüning’s spycraft. Using archival sources from three continents, Schoonover offers a narrative rich in atmospheric details to reveal the political upheavals of the time, not only tracking Lüning’s activities but also explaining the broader trends in the region and in local counterespionage. Schoonover argues that ambitious Cuban and U.S. officials turned Lüning’s capture into a grand victory. For at least five months after Lüning’s arrest, U.S. and Cuban leaders—J. Edgar Hoover, Fulgencio Batista, Nelson Rockefeller, General Manuel Benítez, Ambassador Spruille Braden, and others—treated Lüning as a dangerous, key figure for a Nazi espionage network in the Gulf-Caribbean. They reworked his image from low-level bumbler to master spy, using his capture for their own political gain. In the sixty years since Lüning’s execution, very little has been written about Nazi espionage in Latin America, partly due to the reticence of the U.S. government. Revealing these new historical sources for the first time, Schoonover tells a gripping story of Lüning’s life and capture, suggesting that Lüning was everyone’s man in Havana but his own.