Suharto's Indonesia, Marcos's Philippines, the Thai military juntas, South Vietnam before it lost to the North, and even somewhat "milder" authoritarian states like Singapore that relied more on legalistic rather than outright militaristic repression (eg. suing opponents, compliant courts, press censorship, outlawing mass assemblies etc.)…
It seems Cold War Southeast Asia was full of rightwing authoritarian states (predictably backed by the US to varying degrees), and yet unlike in South America, there doesn't seem to be much record of the various Southeast Asian regimes banding together and creating their own version of Operation Condor, the interstate Right-wing state-terrorist campaign to imprison, torture, kill, disappear or otherwise crush and destroy the collective South American Left and resistance. This despite that Condor itself was also inspired largely by Indonesia's lead in massacring its Communists (real or imagined) after Suharto's coup in 1965.
I know Condor's creation of course is as much due to US support as it is to cooperation among the South American states themselves: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, etc., but was either enough US support or enough interstate collaboration absent in the SEA region? Maybe the US's hands were tied in the Vietnam War in a way/to a degree they weren't in Latin America?
Or maybe because there wasn't much movement of a transnational Left within Southeast Asia, in part because unlike the Spanish-speaking vast majority in South America (and Brazilian Portuguese for almost the entire remainder), the SEA states were split among many more languages more evenly, and so it would be harder to move across countries or communicate anyway on a region-wide basis, both for the Left/progressive resistance and for the Right-leaning governments pursuing them? Even English and Chinese I don't think had the same level of penetration in SEA as a whole that Spanish had in South America, so maybe?
Disclaimer: I am NOT saying that Southeast Asia should've created its own Condor equivalent. I'm just curious why one wasn't made given at least some of the circumstances conducive to one were there.
Hey there,
Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.
If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!
Well, because Southeast Asia is the epicenter of the blueprint made for Operation Condor. I guess it is the petri dish for the disasters given and backed by the anti-communist and Mccarthyist idea of the US government.
Suharto's New Order started the "coup/dictator formula" to oust the left-leaning leaders around the world.
The book, Jakarta Method, explained it very well.