Terror Beyond Borders: Introducing the Database on South America’s Transnational Human Rights Violations

Abstract This article introduces the Database on South America’s Transnational Human Rights Violations. We describe this dataset, which provides rich descriptive statistics on 805 victims of transnational repression between 1969 and 1981. We show how it complements the existing literature on transnational repression by focusing on a historical instance of collaboration among South America’s dictatorships that jointly silenced hundreds of dissidents living in exile abroad during their reigns of terror. This new data generates novel conclusions that help better understand the complex dynamics of transnational repression and Operation Condor in the region while also providing useful insights for contemporary instances of transnational repression. The most original empirical takeaways from our dataset include the following: (1) Uruguayans are the largest victim group by nationality; (2) political activists constitute the majority of the victims by affiliation; and (3) clandestine renditions of the victims occurred in a quarter of the recorded cases.