The document provided entails of the United States intelligence community actively monitoring countless number of countries that used a Swiss made, but secretly CIA owned encryption device produced by Crypto AG that many governments in Latin America used throughout the Cold War. Unbeknownst to all the governments purchasing the encryption devices, the US along with West Germany had rigged many of the company’s devices in order to break encrypted codes from one country to another, much easier. Countries such as Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil are just a few of the many countries throughout much of the 20th century that the US was actively spying on. According to the NSA archives, some topics include “the 1973 military coup in Chile; the 1976 military coup in Argentina; the car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington D.C. in September 1976; the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados in October 1976; the Sandinista revolution and the contra war in Nicaragua which the Argentine security forces covertly supported; and 1982 Falklands war between Argentina and Great Britain, among many others.”(1)
Based on our readings and the sheer amount of topics that are declassified in the document provided above, the main takeaway from it would be just how much more information the US had about the countries and dictators it backed in Latin America during the Cold War such as Augusto Pinochet for example. Pinochet, along with leaders from Argentina and Uruguay, collaborated under “Operation Condor” to preserve their power through the means of state terror and political repression. While many of these leaders had notorious human rights violations, the US had supported them all for the means of communism not to spread throughout the region with weapons, money, advisors, and occasionally troops for anti-revolutionary purposes.(2) The US had largely succeeded in its quest to have control of geo-politics in Latin America during the Cold War with the exception of Cuba which remained a thorn in the flesh for the US.
2: Wood, J. A., & Alexander, A. R. (2019). Chapter X. In Problems in modern Latin American history: Sources and interpretations (p. 238). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
3:https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/