Capone and Eliot Ness" at the time of Prohibition in the United States. Similarly, drug-related "mob hits" in Moscow during the 1990s were euphemistically described as "targeted killings" by the Cox News Service and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Central and South America The U.S.-backed Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression and state terror in Latin American right-wing dictatorships involving assassination of political opponents and dissidents. The National Security Archive reported, "Prominent victims of Condor include two former Uruguayan legislators and a former Bolivian president, Juan José Torres, murdered in Buenos Aires, a former Chilean Minister of the Interior, Bernardo Leighton, as well as former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 26-year-old American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, assassinated by a car bomb in downtown Washington D.C." In 1986, the human rights group Americas Watch released a report stating that death squads and armed forces under President José Napoleón Duarte in El Salvador had carried out 240 targeted killings throughout 1985. The report relied upon figures provided by the Roman Catholic Church and included allegations of torture and summary executions. Americas Watch and other rights groups reported "targeted killing" of civilians by the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in the following year during its campaign against the Contras. Politically motivated targeted killings of trade unionists and activists were also recorded in Haiti and Colombia during the late 1980s and 1990s. Targeted killings linked to the drug trade and paramilitary organizations including FARC and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) resulted in large numbers of deaths among human rights and political activists, and women and children, throughout the 1990s. North America Use by United States government An early example of American targeted killing is Operation Vengeance during World War II. This counterattack shot down the plane of Isoroku Yamamoto, the senior planner of the attack on Pearl Harbor. During the Vietnam War, the Phoenix Program targeted political leadership of the Viet Cong for assassination. During the period 1976–2001, there was an American norm against targeted killing. The United States has made targeted killing—the deliberate assassination of a known terrorist outside the country's territory, usually by airstrike—an essential part of its counter-terrorism strategy. Hence, the United States has justified the killing of terrorists under a war paradigm. "Using the war paradigm for counter-terrorism enabled government lawyers to distinguish lethal attacks on terrorists from prohibited assassinations and justify them as lawful battlefield operations against enemy combatants, much