The Dirty War (Spanish: Época del Proceso or Época de los desaparecidos) is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina (Spanish: dictadura cívico-militar de Argentina) for the period of United States-backed state terrorism in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 as a part of Operation Condor, during which military and security forces and right-wing death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA, or Triple A) hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism or the Montoneros movement.
About 30,000 people disappeared, of whom many were impossible to report formally due to the nature of state terrorism. The excuse for the Coup d'Etat was the armed actions of the Montoneros and the ERP, but the actual target of the Operation Condor were students, militants, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists and any citizens suspected to be left-wing activists, including Peronist guerrillas. The "disappeared" (victims kidnapped, tortured and murdered whose bodies were disappeared by the military government) included those thought to be politically or ideologically a threat to the junta even vaguely, or contrary to the neoliberal economic policies dictated by Operation Condor. They were killed in an attempt by the junta to silence the social and political opposition.
Many members of the junta are currently in prison for crimes against humanity and genocide.
About 30,000 people disappeared, of whom many were impossible to report formally due to the nature of state terrorism. The excuse for the Coup d'Etat was the armed actions of the Montoneros and the ERP, but the actual target of the Operation Condor were students, militants, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists and any citizens suspected to be left-wing activists, including Peronist guerrillas. The "disappeared" (victims kidnapped, tortured and murdered whose bodies were disappeared by the military government) included those thought to be politically or ideologically a threat to the junta even vaguely, or contrary to the neoliberal economic policies dictated by Operation Condor. They were killed in an attempt by the junta to silence the social and political opposition.
Many members of the junta are currently in prison for crimes against humanity and genocide.
Overview
In the decades before the 1976 coup, the Argentinian military, supported by the Argentine establishment, opposed Juan Domingo Perón's populist government and attempted a coup in 1951 and two in 1955 before succeeding in 1976. After taking control, the armed forces proscribed Peronism,
a decision that triggered the organization of Peronist resistance in
workplaces and trade unions, as the working classes sought to protect
the economic and social improvements obtained under Perón's rule.
Soon after the coup, Peronist resistance began organizing in workplaces
and trade unions as the working classes sought economic and social
improvements. Over time, as democratic rule was partially restored, but
promises of legalizing the expression and political liberties for
Peronism were not respected, guerrilla groups began to operate in the
1960s, namely Uturuncos and the EGP (People's Guerrilla Army). Both were small and quickly defeated.
As Perón returned from exile in 1973, the Ezeiza massacre marked the end of the alliance between left- and right-wing factions of Peronism. In 1974, Perón withdrew his support for the Montoneros shortly before his death. During the presidency of his widow Isabel, the far-right paramilitary death squad Argentine Anticommunist Alliance
(AAA, or Triple A) emerged. In 1975, Isabel signed a number of decrees
empowering the military and the police to "annihilate" left-wing
activists. In 1976, her government was overthrown as a part of Operation Condor by a military coup led by General Jorge Rafael Videla.
The junta, calling itself the National Reorganization Process,
organized and carried out strong repression of political dissidents (or
perceived as such) through the government's military and security
forces. They were responsible for the arrest, torture, killings and/or
forced disappearances of an estimated 30,000 people. The junta would
dictate Argentina's future. With the help of Washington, the junta was
aided with $50 million in military aid. Another group in the far right
that was responsible for the death of many was, Alianza Anticomunista
Argentina otherwise known as Triple A. Triple A was ruled under Jose
Lopez Rega, the Minister of Social Welfare who used Triple A as a death
squad regime. Both the junta and Triple A targeted young professionals,
high school and college students and trade union members. These groups
of people became main targets because of their involvement in political
organizations that exploited the work of the right-wing group.
Assassination occurred domestically in Argentina via mass shootings and
the throwing of live citizens from airplanes to death in the South
Atlantic. Additionally, 12,000 prisoners, many of whom had not been
convicted through legal processes, were detained in a network of 340
secret concentration camps located throughout Argentina. Triple A
partnered with the army, navy and the air force to terrorize the
population. Navy captains such as Adolfo Scilingo performed massive number of executions. These actions against victims called desaparecidos
because they simply "disappeared" without explanation were confirmed
via Scilingo, who has publicly confessed his participation in the Dirty
War, stating that the Argentinian military "did worse things than the
Nazis".
In 1983, the National commission on Disappeared People forced Scilingo
to testify where he described how "prisoners were drugged, loaded onto
military planes, and thrown, naked and semi-conscious, into the Atlantic
Ocean". A vast majority of those who were killed left with no trace or
record of their disappearance.
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Photographs of victims of the 1976–83 dictatorship
The junta referred to their policy of suppressing opponents as the National Reorganization Process (Proceso de Reorganización Nacional).
Argentine military and security forces also created paramilitary death
squads, operating behind "fronts" as supposedly independent units.
Argentina coordinated actions with other South American dictatorships as
in Operation Condor.
Faced with increasing public opposition and severe economic problems,
the military tried to regain popularity by occupying the disputed Falkland Islands. During the resulting Falklands War,
the military government lost any remaining favour after the Argentina's
defeat by Britain, forcing it to step aside in disgrace and allow for
free elections to be held in late 1983.
Restoration of democracy and trial of the juntas
The democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín was elected to office in 1983. Alfonsín organized the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas,
CONADEP) to investigate crimes committed during the Dirty War, and
heard testimony from hundreds of witnesses and began to develop cases
against offenders. The commission organized a tribunal to conduct a
transparent prosecution of offenders, holding the Trial of the Juntas
in 1985. Among the nearly 300 people prosecuted, many of the leading
officers were charged, convicted and sentenced for their crimes.
The Argentinian armed forces opposed subjecting more of its
personnel to the trials, threatening the civilian leadership with
another coup. In 1986, the military forced the passage of the Ley de Punto Final
(Full Stop Law) in 1986, which "put a line" under previous actions and
ended prosecutions for crimes committed by the National Reorganization
Process. Fearing military uprisings, Argentina's first two presidents
sentenced only the two top Dirty War former commanders. The Punto Final
Law stated that military personnel involved in torture were doing their
"jobs". In 1994, President Carlos Menem praised the military in their "fight against subversion".
Repeal of laws
In
2003, Congress repealed the Pardon Laws, and in 2005 the Argentine
Supreme Court ruled they were unconstitutional. Under the presidency of Nestor Kirchner, the Argentine government re-opened its investigations on crimes against humanity and genocide in 2006 and began the prosecution of military and security officers.
Origin of the term
The
term "Dirty War" was used by the military junta, which claimed that a
war, albeit with "different" methods (including the large-scale
application of torture and rape),
was necessary to maintain social order and eradicate political
subversives. This explanation has been questioned in court by human
rights NGOs, as it suggests that a "civil war" was going on and implies
justification for the killings. During the 1985 Trial of the Juntas,
public prosecutor Julio Strassera suggested that the term "Dirty War"
was a "euphemism to try to conceal gang activities" as though they were
legitimate military activities.
Although the junta said its objective was to eradicate guerrilla
activity because of its threat to the state, it conducted wide-scale
repression of the general population, it worked against all political opposition
and those it considered on the left: trade unionists (half of the
victims), students, intellectuals including journalists and writers,
rights activists and other civilians and their families. Many others
went into exile to survive and many remain in exile today despite the
return of democracy in 1983. During the Trial of the Juntas, the
prosecution established that the guerrillas were never substantial
enough to pose a real threat to the state and could not be considered a belligerent as in a war:
The guerrilla had not taken control of any part of the national territory; they had not obtained recognition of interior or anterior belligerency, they were not massively supported by any foreign power, and they lacked the population's support.
The program of extermination of dissidents was referred to as
genocide by a court of law for the first time during the trial of Miguel
Etchecolatz, a former senior official of the Buenos Aires Provincial
Police.
Crimes committed during this time (genocide of civilian population and other crimes against humanity) are not covered under the laws of war (jus in bello), which shields enlisted personnel from prosecution for acts committed under orders given by a superior officer or the state. Estela de Carlotto, president of the Argentine human rights non-governmental organization Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo states:
[That term] is a way to minimize state terrorism and is a term born outside the country. It is a totally wrong concept; there was no war, dirty nor clean.
Previous events
Return of Peronism
Since former army officer Juan Perón was ousted from the presidency by a coup in 1955 (Revolución Libertadora), military hostility to Peronism and populist politics dominated Argentine politics. The 1963 Aramburu decree prohibited the use of Perón's name and when General Lanusse, who was part of the Argentine Revolution,
called for elections in 1973, he authorized the return of political
parties. However, Perón, who had been invited back from exile, was
barred from seeking office.
In May 1973, Peronist Héctor José Cámpora
was elected as President, but everyone understood that Perón was the
real power behind him. Peronism has been difficult to define according
to traditional political classifications and different periods must be
distinguished. A populist and nationalist movement, it has sometimes been accused of fascist tendencies.
Following nearly two decades of weak civilian governments, economic
decline and military interventionism, Perón returned from exile on 20
June in 1973, as the country was becoming engulfed in financial, social
and political disorder. The months preceding his return were marked by
important social movements as in the rest of South America and in particular of the Southern Cone before the military intervention of the 1970s, thus during Héctor Cámpora's first months of government (May–July 1973) approximately 600 social conflicts, strikes and factory occupations had taken place.
Upon Perón's arrival at Buenos Aires Airport, snipers opened fire
on the crowds of left-wing Peronist sympathizers. Known as the 1973 Ezeiza massacre,
this event marked the split between left-wing and right-wing factions
of Peronism. Perón was re-elected in 1973, backed by a broad coalition
that ranged from trade unionists in the center to fascists on the right
(including members of the neo-fascist Movimiento Nacionalista Tacuara) and socialists like the Montoneros on the left.
Following the Ezeiza massacre and Perón's denouncing of "bearded
immature idealists", Perón sided with the Peronist right, the trade
unionist bureaucracy and Radical Civic Union of Ricardo Balbín, Cámpora's unsuccessful rival at the May 1973 elections. Some leftist Peronist governors were deposed, among them Ricardo Obregón Cano,
governor of Córdoba, who was ousted by a police coup in February 1974.
According to historian Servetto, "the Peronist right... thus stimulated
the intervention of security forces to resolve internal conflicts of
Peronism".
Isabel Perón's government
Perón died on 1 July 1974 and was replaced by his Vice President and third wife, Isabel Perón, who ruled Argentina until overthrown in March 1976 by the military. The 1985 CONADEP human rights commission counted 458 assassinations from 1973 to 1975 in its report Nunca Más (Never Again): 19 in 1973, 50 in 1974 and 359 in 1975, carried out by paramilitary groups, who acted mostly under the José López Rega's Triple A death squad (according to Argenpress, at least 25 trade-unionists were assassinated in 1974).
However, the repression of the social movements had already started
before the attempt on Yrigoyen's life: on 17 July 1973, the CGT section in Salta was closed while the CGT, SMATA and Luz y Fuerza in Córdoba
were victims of armed attacks. Agustín Tosco, Secretary General of Luz y
Fuerza, successfully avoided arrest and went into hiding until his
death on 5 November 1975.
Trade unionists were also targeted by the repression in 1973 as
Carlos Bache was assassinated on 21 August 1973; Enrique Damiano, of the
Taxis Trade Union of Córdoba, on 3 October; Juan Avila, also of
Córdoba, the following day; Pablo Fredes, on 30 October in Buenos Aires;
and Adrián Sánchez, on 8 November 1973 in the Province of Jujuy.
Assassinations of trade unions, lawyers and so on continued and
increased in 1974 and 1975 while the most combative trade unions were
closed and their leaders arrested. In August 1974, Isabel Perón's
government took away the rights of trade unionist representation of the Federación Gráfica Bonaerense, whose Secretary General Raimundo Ongaro was arrested in October 1974.
During the same month of August 1974, the SMATA Córdoba trade-union, in
conflict with the company Ika Renault, was closed by the national
direction of trade unions and the majority of its leaders and activists
arrested. Most of them were assassinated during the 1976–1983
dictatorship. Atilio López, General Secretary of the CGT of Córdoba and
former Vice Governor of the Province, was assassinated in Buenos Aires
on 16 September 1974.
Peronist guerrillas, estimated on 300 to 400 active members (Montoneros) at 1977 (and 2000 at his peak in 1975, though almost half of them related to militia),
committed a number of delicts in this period such as bombings at
Goodyear and Firestone distributors, Riker and Eli pharmaceutical
laboratories, Xerox Corporation, and Pepsi-Cola bottling companies.
Director-general of the Fiat Concord company in Argentina was kidnapped
by ERP guerrillas in Buenos Aires on 21 March 1972 and found murdered on
10 April. On 73' a Ford Motor Company executive was killed in a kidnapping attempt; a Peugeot representative was kidnapped and later released for a reported US$200,000., and FAP guerrillas killed John Swint, the American general manager of a Ford Motor Company. On December, the director of Peugeot in Argentina was kidnapped.
In 1974, FAP guerrillas killed the labour relations manager of
the IKA-Renault Motor Company in Córdoba; In 1975 a manager of an auto
parts factory and a production manager of Mercedes-Benz were kidnapped by Montoneros, and an executive of the US Chrysler Corporation and a manager of the Renault plant in Córdoba were killed.
In 1976, Enrique Aroza Garay of German-owned Borgward automobile
factory and a Chrysler executive were killed. In all, 83 servicemen and
policemen were killed in left-wing guerrilla incidents.
Annihilation decrees
In 1975, the Guevarist People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), inspired by Che Guevara's foco theory, began a small rural insurgency in the province of Tucumán; with a campaign of no more than 100 men and women.
which the Argentine Army defeated; Ítalo Luder, President of the
National Assembly who acted as interim President substituting himself to
Isabel Perón who was ill for a short period, signed in February 1975
the secret presidential decree 261, which ordered the army to illegally
neutralize and/or "annihilate" the insurgency in Tucumán, the smallest province of Argentina. Operativo Independencia
granted power to the armed forces to "execute all military operations
necessary for the effects of neutralizing or annihilating the action of
subversive elements acting in the Province of Tucumán".
Extreme right-wing death squads used their hunt for far-left guerrillas
as a pretext to exterminate any and all ideological opponents on the
left and as a cover for common crimes.
In July, there was a general strike.
The government, presided temporarily by Italo Luder from the Peronist
party, issued three decrees, 2770, 2771 and 2772, that created a Defense
Council headed by the president and including his ministers and the
chiefs of the armed forces.
It was given the command of the national and provincial police and
correctional facilities and its mission was to "annihilate [...]
subversive elements throughout the country".
March 1975 raid in Santa Fe
Isabel
Perón's government ordered a raid on 20 March 1975, which involved
4,000 military and police officers, in Villa Constitución, Santa Fe
in response to various trade-unionist conflicts. Many citizens and 150
activists and trade unionists leaders were arrested while the Unión
Obrera Metalúrgica's subsidiary in Villa Constitución was closed down
with the agreement of the trade unions' national direction, headed by
Lorenzo Miguel. Repression affected trade unionists of large firms such as Ford, Fiat, Renault, Mercedes Benz, Peugeot and Chrysler and was sometimes carried on with support from the firms' executives and from the trade unionist bureaucracies.
Military's rise to power
The sentence of the Trials to the Junta states: "The subversives had
not taken control of any part of the national territory; they had not
obtained recognition of interior or anterior belligerency, they were not
massively supported by any foreign power, and they lacked the
population's support". However, the supposed threat was used for the coup.
In 1975, President Isabel Perón,
under pressure from the military establishment, appointed Jorge Rafael
Videla commander-in-chief of the Argentine Army. "As many people as
necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be
secure",
falsely declared Videla in 1975 in support of the death squads. He was
one of the military heads of the coup that overthrew Isabel Perón on 24
March 1976. In her place, a military junta was installed, which was
headed by Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, who stepped out in September 1978, General Orlando Agosti and Videla himself.
The junta, which dubbed itself National Reorganization Process,
systematized the repression, in particular through the way of "forced
disappearances" (desaparecidos), which made it very difficult as in Augusto Pinochet's Chile
to file legal suits as the bodies were never found. This generalization
of state terror tactics has been explained in part by the information
received by the Argentine militaries in the infamous School of Americas and also by French instructors from the secret services, who taught them "counter-insurgency" tactics first experimented during the Algerian War (1954–1962).
By 1976, Operation Condor,
which had already centralized information from South American
intelligence agencies for years, was at its height. Chilean exiles in
Argentina were threatened again and had to seek refuge in a third
country. Chilean General Carlos Prats had already been assassinated by the Chilean DINA in Buenos Aires in 1974, with the help of former DINA agents Michael Townley and Enrique Arancibia. Cuban diplomats were also assassinated in Buenos Aires in the infamous Automotores Orletti torture center, one of the 300 clandestine prisons of the dictatorship, managed by the Grupo de Tareas 18, headed by Aníbal Gordon, previously convicted for armed robbery and answered directly to the General Commandant of the SIDE, Otto Paladino. Automotores Orletti
was the main base of foreign intelligence services involved in
Operation Condor. One of the survivors, José Luis Bertazzo, who was
detained for two months there, identified Chileans, Uruguayans,
Paraguayans and Bolivians among the prisoners. These captives were
interrogated by agents from their own countries.
According to John Dinges's Los años del Cóndor, Chilean MIR
prisoners in Orletti center told José Luis Bertazzo that they had seen
two Cuban diplomats, Jesús Cejas Arias and Crescencio Galañega, tortured
by Gordon's group and interrogated by a man who came one day from Miami
to interrogate them. The two Cuban diplomats, charged with the
protection of the Cuban ambassador to Argentina Emilio Aragonés, had
been kidnapped on 9 August 1976 by 40 armed SIDE agents who blocked off
all sides of the street with their Ford Falcons, the cars used by the security forces during the dictatorship. According to John Dinges, the FBI as well as the CIA
were informed of their abduction. In his book, Dinges published a cable
sent by Robert Scherrer, an FBI agent in Buenos Aires on 22 September
1976, where he mentions in passing that Michael Townley, later convicted of the assassination on 21 September 1976 of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier
in Washington, D.C., had also taken part to the interrogation of the
two Cubans. Former head of the DINA confirmed to Argentine federal judge
María Servini de Cubría on 22 December 1999, in Santiago de Chile, the presence of Townley and Cuban Guillermo Novo Sampoll
in the Orletti center. The two men traveled from Chile to Argentina on
11 August 1976 and "cooperated in the torture and assassination of the
two Cuban diplomats". According to the "terror archives" discovered in Paraguay in 1992, 50,000 persons were murdered in the frame of Condor, 9,000–30,000 disappeared (desaparecidos) and 400,000 incarcerated.
Neoliberal policies of the juntas
During this period of neoliberal policies the level of the Argentine debt exploded; The economic policy of Martinez de Hoz,
Minister of Economy of the dictatorship, applied from 2 April 1976,
marks the beginning of a process of destruction of the productive
apparatus of Argentina. In Your Money or your Life, historian and political scientist Éric Toussaint writes:
Most of the loans granted to the Argentine dictatorship came from the private banks of the U.S. It should be noted the complete agreement of the authorities of the United States (either the Federal Reserve or the American administration), with this policy of indebtedness. To obtain loans from private banks, the government demanded that Argentine companies borrow from international private banks. The public companies thus became the fundamental lever for the denationalization of the State, and the loss of national sovereignty.
The main Argentine public oil company, YPF
(Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales), was forced to borrow abroad
despite the fact that it had sufficient resources for its own
development. At the time of the military coup of 24 March 1976, YPF's
external debt was 372 million dollars. Seven years later at the end of
the dictatorship, this debt reached 6,000 million dollars. The debt had
multiplied by 16 in seven years.
Because of the illegal character of the economic policies of Latin American dictatorships with banks as the International Monetary Fund, a Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt was formed.
Civil complices
There were also some companies complicit in crimes against humanity. There has been participation of senior executives of Ford, Mercedes Benz, Acindar, Dálmine Siderca, Ingenio Ledesma, and Astarsa
Victoria Basualdo, from Columbia University, investigated the
complicity between large companies and armed forces. She found six
companies in which dozens of union representatives were kidnapped and
tortured, often detained inside the companies and transferred to
clandestine detention centers (CDC) in vehicles provided by the
companies. In the case of Dálmine Siderca, a CDC had been installed next
to the factory, to which it communicated through a door. In the case of
Acindar already during the Peronist government of María Estela Martínez
de Perón in 1975, a detention center and interrogation by the Federal
Police was installed inside the company.
Judge Alicia Vence was in charge of the investigation of acts of
State terrorism committed in facilities and with the participation of
authorities of the companies Ford and Mercedes Benz, the latter led then by the race driver Juan Manuel Fangio,
involved in the acts by the witnesses. In 2015, the investigation was
carried out to carry out the oral trial against the accused.
José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, president of the metallurgical company
Acindar, who was Minister of Economy between 1976 and 1980, was
criminally prosecuted in the case of the kidnapping of the businessmen
Federico and Miguel Gutheim, owners of SADECO cotton company.
The direct participation of Catholic religious in the commission of crimes against humanity is also proven. Christian Von Wernich
is a paradigmatic case. He is a Catholic priest, who served as a
chaplain to the Police of the province of Buenos Aires and used to visit
clandestine detention centers, and was sentenced to life imprisonment
in 2007 for kidnappings, torture, and homicides that were considered
crimes against humanity.
False flag actions by SIDE agents
During a 1981 interview whose contents were revealed by documents declassified by the CIA in 2000, former DINA agent Michael Townley explained that Ignacio Novo Sampol, member of CORU anti-Castro organization, had agreed to commit the Cuban Nationalist Movement in the kidnapping in Buenos Aires of a president of a Dutch bank. The abduction, organized by civilian SIDE
agents, the Argentine intelligence agency, was to obtain a ransom.
Townley said that Novo Sampol had provided $6,000 from the Cuban
Nationalist Movement, forwarded to the civilian SIDE agents to pay for
the preparation expenses of the kidnapping. After returning to the
United States, Novo Sampol sent Townley a stock of paper, used to print
pamphlets in the name of Grupo Rojo (Red Group), an imaginary
Argentine Marxist terrorist organization, which was to claim credit for
the abduction of the Dutch banker. Townley declared that the pamphlets
were distributed in Mendoza and Córdoba in relation with false flag
bombings perpetrated by SIDE agents, which had as aim to accredit the
existence of the fake Grupo Rojo. However, the SIDE agents
procrastinated too much and the kidnapping finally was not carried out.
Human rights violations from 1976 to 1983
The exact chronology of the repression
occurring before the Operation Condor's beginning in March 1976 is
still debated, but some sectors claim the long political conflict
started in 1969 as individual cases of state-sponsored terrorism against Peronism and the left can be traced back to the bombing of Plaza de Mayo and Revolución Libertadora in 1955. The Trelew massacre of 1972, the actions of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance since 1973 and Isabel Martínez de Perón's "annihilation decrees" against left-wing guerrillas during Operativo Independencia (Operation Independence) in 1975 have also been suggested as dates for the beginning of the Dirty War.
The target of the Junta was anyone believed to be associated with
activist groups, including trade union members, students (including
underage students, like in Night of the Pencils, an operation directed by Ramón Camps, General and head of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police from April 1976 to December 1977), people who had uncovered evidence of government corruption and people thought to hold left-wing views (including French nuns Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon, kidnapped by Alfredo Astiz). Ramón Camps told Clarín
in 1984 that he had used torture as a method of interrogation and
orchestrated 5,000 forced disappearances and justified the appropriation
of newborns from their imprisoned mothers "because subversive parents
will raise subversive children". These individuals who suddenly vanished are called los desaparecidos, meaning "the missing ones" or "disappeared".
In December 1976, 22 captured Montoneros responsible for the
death of General Cáceres Monié and the attack on the Argentine Army 29th
Mountain Infantry Regiment were tortured and executed during the massacre of Margarita Belén in the military Chaco Province,
for which Videla would be found guilty of homicide during the 1985
Trial of the Juntas as well as Cristino Nicolaides, junta leader Leopoldo Galtieri and Santa Fe Provincial Police chief Wenceslao Ceniquel. The same year, 50 anonymous persons were illegally executed by a firing-squad in Córdoba.
Victims' relatives uncovered evidence that some children taken from
their mothers soon after birth were being raised as the adopted children
of military men as in the case of Silvia Quintela, a member of the Montoneros guerrillas movement. For three decades, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group founded in 1977, has demanded the return of these kidnapped children, estimated to number as many as 500.
In a declassified memorandum from the U.S. State Department dated
May 1978, it is asserted that "if there has been a net reduction in
reports of torture, this is not because torture has been forsworn but
'derives from fewer operations' because the number of terrorists and
subversives has diminished" and presents that case that disappearances
"include not only suspected terrorists but also encompass a broader
range of people, for example, labor leaders, workers, clergymen, human
rights advocates, scientists, doctors, and political party leaders".
The report describes the torture methods used to intimidate and extract
information, including electric shocks, prolonged immersion in water,
cigarette burns, sexual abuse, rape, the removal of teeth and fingernails, burning with boiling water, oil and acid and castration.
German sociologist Elizabeth Käsemann, murdered in 1977
In late 1979, Amnesty International
accused the Videla military government of being responsible for the
disappearance of 15,000 to 20,000 Argentine citizens since the 1976
coup. The Registro Unificado de Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado (Ruvte) got a record of 662 people listed disappeared under the presidency of Isabel Martinez de Perón and other 6,348 disappeared during the military dictatorship.
In 1980, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel,
a Catholic human rights activist who had organized the Servicio de Paz y
Justicia (Peace and Justice Service) and suffered torture while held
without trial for 14 months in a Buenos Aires concentration camp, was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the defense of human rights.
Declassified documents of the Chilean secret police cite an official estimate by the Batallón de Inteligencia 601 of 22,000 killed or "disappeared"
between 1975 and mid-1978. During this period, it was later revealed
that at least 12,000 "disappeared" were detainees held by PEN (Poder Ejecutivo Nacional, anglicized as National Executive Power) and kept in clandestine detention camps throughout Argentina before eventually being freed under diplomatic pressure. In 2003, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons recorded the forced disappearance of 8,961 persons from 1976 to 1983, although it noted that the actual number is higher.
The members of junta militar currently in prison convicted of crimes
against humanity refused to give to the Argentine justice the lists of
names and numbers of kidnapped, tortured, murdered or disappeared
people, so the exact number of victims remains uncertain.
Under Carlos Menem government Congress passed legislation to provide compensation to victims' families. Some 11,000 Argentines as the next of kin
have applied to the relevant authorities and received up to US$200,000
each as monetary compensation for the loss of loved ones during the
military dictatorship while others as Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
refused to receive any money from a government that they considered to
be following the same neoliberal policies dictated by Operation Condor.
Disappeared held under PEN
Collections of photos from families whose children and grandchildren had disappeared
By the time of the coup on 24 March 1976, the number of disappeared held under Poder Ejecutivo Nacional (PEN) stood at least 5,182.
Some 18,000 disappeared in the form of PEN detainees were imprisoned in
Argentina by the end of 1977 and it is estimated that some 3,000 deaths
occurred in the Navy Engineering School (ESMA) alone.
These disappeared were held incommunicado and reportedly tortured.
Some, like senator Hipolito Solari Yrigoyen and socialist leader
professor Alfredo Bravo, were "detenidos-desaparecidos".
By refusing to acknowledge the existence of what was later
established to be at least 340 concentration camps throughout the
country they also denied the existence of their occupants. The total
number of people who were detained for long periods was 8,625. Among them was future President Carlos Menem, who between 1976 and 1981 had been a political prisoner.
Some 8,600 PEN disappeared were eventually released under
international pressure. Of these, 4,029 were held in illegal detention
centers for less than a year, 2,296 for one to three years, 1,172 for
three to five years, 668 for five to seven years and 431 for seven to
nine years. Of these, 157 were murdered after being released from
detention. In one frank memo, written in 1977, an official at the Foreign Ministry issued the following warning:
Our situation presents certain aspects which are without doubt difficult to defend if they are analyzed from the point of view of international law. These are: the delays incurred before foreign consuls can visit detainees of foreign nationality, (contravening article 34 of the Convention of Vienna.) the fact that those detained under Executive Power (PEN) are denied the right to legal advice or defense, the complete lack of information of persons detained under PEN, the fact that PEN detainees are not processed for long periods of time, the fact that there are no charges against detainees. The kidnapping and disappearance of people.
Children of the disappeared
At the time when the CONADEP report was prepared, the Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo or Abuelas),
had records of 172 children who disappeared together with their parents
or were born at the numerous concentration camps and had not been
returned to their families.
The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo now believe up to 500
grandchildren were stolen and 102 are believed to have been located.
On 13 April 2000, the grandmothers received a tip off that the birth
certificate of Rosa Roisinblit's infant grandson, born in detention, had
been falsified and the child given to an Air Force civil agent and his
wife. Following the anonymous phone call, he was located and agreed to a
DNA blood test, confirming his true identity. Rodolfo Fernando,
grandson of Roisinblit, is the first known newborn of missing children
returned to his family through the work of the grandmothers. On 6 October 1978, Roisinblit's daughter, 25-year-old Patricia Julia Roisinblit de Perez, who was active in the Montoneros, was kidnapped along with her husband, 24-year-old José Martínas Pérez Rojo.
The case of Maria Eugenia Sampallo (born some time in 1978) also
received considerable attention as Sampallo sued the couple who adopted
her illegally as a baby after her parents disappeared, both Montoneros.
Her grandmother spent 24 years looking for her. The case was filed in
2001 after DNA tests indicated that Osvaldo Rivas and Maria Cristina
Gomez were not her biological parents. Along with army Captain Enrique
Berthier, who furnished the couple with the baby, they were sentenced
respectively to 8, 7 and 10 years in prison for kidnapping.
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentine mothers whose children were "disappeared" during the Dirty War
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is the best-known Argentine human
rights organization. For over thirty years, the Mothers have campaigned
to find out about the fate of their lost relatives. The Mothers first
held their vigil at Plaza de Mayo in 1977, where they continue to gather
there every Thursday afternoon. An article of the Madres of the Plaza
de Mayo monthly publication caused quite a stir in the mid-1980s, when
the Human Rights Group Familiares were quoted as saying: "Familiares
assumes the causes of their children's fight as their own, vindicates
all the disappeared as fighters of the people, [...] [and when occurs]
the defeat of imperialism and the sovereignty of the people, we will
have achieved our objectives".
In 1986, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo split into two groups:
Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Linea Fundadora (Founding Line) remains
focused in recovering the remains of the missing and bringing former
police and military commanders to justice. On the other hand, the
Asociacion de Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
Association) is opposed to the search for and identification of the
missing and have also rejected monetary compensation. In April 2004, the former head of the Mothers of Plaza Hebe de Bonafini declared her admiration for her missing children Jorge Omar and Raúl Alfredo for taking up arms as left-wing guerrillas.
Coordination on international criminal operations
In 1980, the Argentine military helped Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Stefano Delle Chiaie and major drug lords mount the bloody Cocaine Coup of Luis García Meza Tejada in neighboring Bolivia. They hired 70 foreign agents for this task, which was managed in particular by the 601st Intelligence Battalion headed by General Guillermo Suárez Mason.
After having been trained by the French military, in the frame of
Operation Charly the Argentine Armed Forces would train their
counterparts not only in Nicaragua, but also El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. From 1977 to 1984, after the Falklands War the Argentine Armed Forces exported counter-insurgency tactics, including the systemic use of torture, death squads and disappearances. Special force units, such as Batallón de Inteligencia 601, headed in 1979 by Colonel Jorge Alberto Muzzio, trained the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, in particular in Lepaterique base.
Following the release of classified documents and an interview with Duane Clarridge, former CIA responsible for operations with the Contras, the Clarín showed that with the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1977 the CIA was blocked from engaging in the special warfare
it had previously been engaged in. In conformity with the National
Security Doctrine, the Argentine military supported U.S. goals in Latin America
while they pressured the United States to be more active in
counter-revolutionary activities. In 1981, following the election of Ronald Reagan the CIA took over training of the Contras from Batallón 601.
Many Chilean and Uruguayan exiles in Argentina were murdered by
Argentine security forces (including high-profile figures such as
General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974, Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini in Buenos Aires in 1976). Others, such as Wilson Ferreira Aldunate escaped death.
United States involvement with the junta
The Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Buenos Aires, 24 March 2016
Although at least six U.S. citizens had been "disappeared" by the
Argentine military by 1976, high-ranking state department officials
including then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had secretly backed up Argentina's new military rulers.
During his years as U.S. Secretary of State, Kissinger had
congratulated Argentina's military junta for combating the left, stating
that in his opinion "the government of Argentina had done an
outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces". The importance of his role was not known about until The Nation published in October 1987 an exposé written by Martin Edwin Andersen, a Washington Post and Newsweek special correspondent, Kissinger had secretly given the junta a "green light" for their state terrorist policies, being the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), founded in 1946 assigned the specific goal of teaching "anti-communist counterinsurgency training", the place where several Latin American dictators, generations of their military where educated in state terrorism tactics, including the uses of torture in its curriculum. In 2000/2001, the institute was renamed to WHINSEC. According to a Command and General Foundation News
issue, the current curriculum at WHINSEC is compatible with curriculum
taught at U.S. military academies. WHINSEC faculty members travel to Fort Leavenworth
in Kansas throughout the year in order to remain up to date on
curriculum changes. However, the school remains controversial due to its
influence over affairs in Latin America and its education of Latin
American state actors on crimes against humanity within the military and law enforcement.
In Buenos Aires, Robert C. Hill, a five-time conservative Republican
ambassadorial appointee, worked behind the scenes to keep the Argentina
military junta from engaging in massive human rights violations. Upon
finding out that Kissinger had given the Argentine generals a "green
light" for the state terrorism
of the junta in June 1976 while at an Organization of American States
meeting in Santiago (at the Hotel Carrera, later made famous as the
Hotel Cabrera in the film Missing),
Hill quietly scrambled to try to roll back the Kissinger decision. Hill
did this although Kissinger aides told him that if he continued,
Kissinger would likely have him fired. During that meeting with
Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally.
Argentine junta leader Jorge Rafael Videla meeting U.S. President Jimmy Carter in September 1977
In October 1987, The Nation noted: "'Hill was shaken, he
became very disturbed, by the case of the son of a thirty-year embassy
employee, a student who was arrested, never to be seen again,' recalled
former New York Times reporter Juan de Onis. 'Hill took a
personal interest.' He went to the Interior Minister, an army general
with whom he had worked on drug cases, saying, 'Hey, what about this?
We're interested in this case.' He buttonholed (Foreign Minister Cesar)
Guzzetti and, finally, President Jorge R. Videla himself. 'All he got
was stonewalling; he got nowhere.' de Onis said. 'His last year was
marked by increasing disillusionment and dismay, and he backed his staff
on human rights right to the hilt." "It sickened me," said Patricia
Derian, the Mississippi civil rights crusader who became President Jimmy
Carter's State Department point person on human rights, after Hill
reported to her Kissinger's real role, "that with an imperial wave of
his hand, an American could sentence people to death on the basis of a
cheap whim. As time went on I saw Kissinger's footprints in a lot of
countries. It was the repression of a democratic ideal".
In 1978, former Secretary Kissinger was feted by the "dirty war"
generals as a much touted guest of honor at the World Cup soccer matches
held in Argentina. In a letter to The Nation editor Victor Navasky,
protesting publication of the 1987 article, Kissinger claimed: "At any
rate, the notion of Hill as a passionate human rights advocate is news
to all his former associates". Ironically, Kissinger's posthumous
lampooning of Hill (who had died in 1978) as human rights advocate was
later shown to be false by none other than once and future Kissinger
aide Henry Shlaudeman, later ambassador to Buenos Aires, who told William E. Knight, an oral historian working for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) Foreign Affairs Oral History Project:
It really came to a head when I was Assistant Secretary, or it began to come to a head, in the case of Argentina where the dirty war was in full flower. Bob Hill, who was Ambassador then in Buenos Aires, a very conservative Republican politician – by no means liberal or anything of the kind, began to report quite effectively about what was going on, this slaughter of innocent civilians.
He, at one time in fact, sent me a back-channel telegram saying that the Foreign Minister, who had just come for a visit to Washington and had returned to Buenos Aires, had gloated to him that Kissinger had said nothing to him about human rights. I don't know – I wasn't present at the interview.
7
August 1979 United States embassy in Argentina memorandum of the
conversation with Jorge Contreras, director of Task Force 7 of the
Reunion Central section of the 601 Army Intelligence Unit,
which gathered members from all parts of the Argentine Armed Forces
(subject: "Nuts and Bolts of the Government's Repression of
Terrorism-Subversion")
State Department documents obtained in 2003 during the George W. Bush administration by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act
show that in October 1976 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and
high-ranking U.S. officials gave their full support to the Argentine
military junta and urged them to hurry up and finish their actions
before the Congress cut military aid. On 5 October 1976, Kissinger met with Argentina's Foreign Minister and stated:
Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better. [...] The human rights problem is a growing one. Your Ambassador can apprise you. We want a stable situation. We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.
The United States was also a key provider of economic and military
assistance to the Videla regime during the earliest and most intense
phase of the repression. In early April 1976, the Congress approved a
request by the Ford administration, written and supported by Henry Kissinger, to grant $50,000,000 in security assistance to the junta.
At the end of 1976, Congress granted an additional $30,000,000 in
military aid and recommendations by the Ford administration to increase
military aid to $63,500,000 the following year were also considered by
Congress. U.S. assistance, training and military sales to the Videla regime continued under the successive Carter administration
up until at least 30 September 1978 when military aid was officially
called to a stop within section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act.
In 1977 and 1978, the United States sold more than $120,000,000
in military spare parts to Argentina and in 1977 the Department of
Defense was granted $700,000 to train 217 Argentine military officers. By the time the International Military Education and Training
(IMET) program was suspended to Argentina in 1978, total U.S. training
costs for Argentine military personnel since 1976 totalled $1,115,000.
The Reagan administration,
whose first term began in 1981, asserted that the previous Carter
administration had weakened U.S. diplomatic relationships with Cold War
allies in Argentina and reversed the previous administration's official
condemnation of the junta's human rights practices. The
re-establishment of diplomatic ties allowed for CIA collaboration with the Argentine intelligence service in training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista government. The 601 Intelligence Battalion, for example, trained Contras at Lepaterique base in Honduras.
French connection
Investigating French military influence in Argentina, French journalist Marie-Monique Robin
found in 2003 the original document proving that a 1959 agreement
between Paris and Buenos Aires initiated a "permanent French military
mission" in Argentina and reported on it (she found the document in the
archives of the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs). The mission was formed of veterans who had fought in the Algerian War and it was assigned to the offices of the chief of staff of the Argentine Armed Forces. It was continued until 1981, date of the election of socialist François Mitterrand.
After release of her documentary film Escadrons de la mort, l'école française in 2003 which explored the French connection with South American nations, Robin said in an interview with L'Humanité
newspaper: "French have systematized a military technique in urban
environment which would be copied and pasted to Latin American
dictatorships". She noted that the French military had systematized the methods they used to suppress the insurgency during the 1957 Battle of Algiers and exported them to the War School in Buenos Aires. Roger Trinquier's famous book on counter-insurgency had a very strong influence in South America. In addition, Robin said she was shocked to learn that the DST
French intelligence agency gave DINA the names of refugees who returned
to Chile (Operation Retorno) from France during their
counterinsurgency. All of these Chileans have been killed: "Of course,
this puts in cause [sic – this makes responsible] the French government, and Giscard d'Estaing,
then President of the Republic. I was very shocked by the duplicity of
the French diplomatic position which, on one hand, received with open
arms the political refugees, and, on the other hand, collaborated with
the dictatorships".
On 10 September 2003, Green members of parliament Noël Mamère, Martine Billard and Yves Cochet
filed a request to form a Parliamentary Commission to examine the "role
of France in the support of military regimes in Latin America from 1973
to 1984" before the Foreign Affairs Commission of the National
Assembly, presided by Edouard Balladur (UMP). Apart from Le Monde, French newspapers did not report this request. UMP deputy Roland Blum,
in charge of the Commission, refused to let Marie-Monique Robin testify
on this topic. The Commission in December 2003 published a 12-page
report claiming that the French had never signed a military agreement
with Argentina.
When Minister of Foreign Affairs Dominique de Villepin travelled to Chile in February 2003, he claimed that no co-operation between France and the military regimes had occurred.
People in Argentina were outraged when they saw the 2003 film, which
included three generals defending their actions during the Dirty War.
Due to public pressure, President Néstor Kirchner ordered the military to bring charges against the three for justifying the crimes of the dictatorship. They were Albano Hargindeguy, Reynaldo Bignone and Ramón Genaro Díaz Bessone.
The next year, Robin published her book under the same title Escadrons de la mort: l'école française (Death Squads: The French School, 2004), revealing more material. She showed how Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's government secretly collaborated with Videla's junta in Argentina and with Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile. Alcides Lopez Aufranc was among the first Argentine officers to go in 1957 to Paris to study for two years at the Ecole de Guerre military school, two years before the Cuban Revolution and when no Argentine guerrillas existed:
In practice, declared Robin to Página/12, the arrival of the French in Argentina led to a massive extension of intelligence services and of the use of torture as the primary weapon of the anti-subversive war in the concept of modern warfare.
The annihilation decrees signed by Isabel Perón
had been inspired by French texts. During the Battle of Algiers, the
police forces were put under the authority of the Army. 30,000 persons
were "disappeared". In Algeria. Reynaldo Bignone,
named President of the Argentine junta in July 1982, said in Robin's
film: "The March 1976 order of battle is a copy of the Algerian battle". The same statements were made by Generals Albano Harguindeguy, Videla's Interior Minister; and Diaz Bessone, former Minister of Planification and ideologue of the junta.
The French military would transmit to their Argentine counterparts the
notion of an "internal enemy" and the use of torture, death squads and quadrillages (grids).
Marie-Monique Robin also demonstrated that since the 1930s, there
had been ties between the French far-right and Argentina, in particular
through the Catholic fundamentalist organisation Cité catholique, created by Jean Ousset, a former secretary of Charles Maurras, the founder of the royalist Action Française movement. La Cité edited a review, Le Verbe, which influenced militaries during the Algerian War, notably by justifying the use of torture. At the end of the 1950s, the Cité catholique founded groups in Argentina and organised cells in the Army. It greatly expanded during the government of General Juan Carlos Onganía, in particular in 1969. The key figure of the Cité catholique in Argentina was priest Georges Grasset, who became Videla's personal confessor. He had been the spiritual guide of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), the pro-French Algeria terrorist movement founded in Franquist Spain.
Robin believes that this Catholic fundamentalist current in the
Argentine Army contributed to the importance and length of the
French-Argentine co-operation. In Buenos Aires, Georges Grasset
maintained links with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of Society of St. Pius X
in 1970, who was excommunicated in 1988. The Society of Pius-X has four
monasteries in Argentina, the largest one in La Reja. A French priest
from there said to Marie-Monique Robin: "To save the soul of a Communist
priest, one must kill him." Luis Roldan, former Secretary of Cult under
Carlos Menem,
President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999, was presented by Dominique
Lagneau, the priest in charge of the monastery, to Robin as "Mr. Cité
catholique in Argentina". Bruno Genta and Juan Carlos Goyeneche represent this ideology.
Antonio Caggiano, archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1959 to 1975, wrote a prologue to Jean Ousset's 1961 Spanish version of Le Marxisme-léninisme.
Caggiano said that "Marxism is the negation of Christ and his Church"
and referred to a Marxist conspiracy to take over the world, for which
it was necessary to "prepare for the decisive battle". Together with President Arturo Frondizi (Radical Civic Union, UCR), Caggiano inaugurated the first course on counter-revolutionary warfare in the Higher Military College. (Frondizi was eventually overthrown for being "tolerant of Communism").
By 1963, cadets at the Navy Mechanics School started receiving counter-insurgency classes. They were shown the film The Battle of Algiers,
which showed the methods used by the French Army in Algeria. Caggiano,
the military chaplain at the time, introduced the film and added a
religiously oriented commentary to it. On 2 July 1966, four days after
President Arturo Umberto Illia was removed from office and replaced by the dictator Juan Carlos Onganía,
Caggiano declared: "We are at a sort of dawn, in which, thanks to God,
we all sense that the country is again headed for greatness".
Argentine Admiral Luis María Mendía,
who had started the practice of "death flights", testified in January
2007 before Argentine judges, that a French intelligence agent, Bertrand
de Perseval, had participated in the abduction of the two French nuns, Léonie Duquet
and Alice Domont. Perseval, who lives today in Thailand, denied any
links with the abduction. He has admitted being a former member of the OAS and having escaped from Algeria after the March 1962 Évian Accords put an end to the Algerian War (1954–1962).
During the 2007 hearings, Luis María Mendía referred to material presented in Robin's documentary, titled The Death Squads – the French School (2003). He asked the Argentine Court to call numerous French officials to testify to their actions: former French President, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, former French Premier Pierre Messmer,
former French embassador to Buenos Aires Françoise de la Gosse and all
officials in place in the French embassy in Buenos Aires between 1976
and 1983. Besides this "French connection", María Mendía also charged former head of state Isabel Perón and former ministers Carlos Ruckauf and Antonio Cafiero, who had signed the "anti-subversion decrees" before Videla's 1976 coup. According to Graciela Dalo, a survivor of the ESMA interrogations, Mendía was trying to establish that these crimes were legitimate, as the 1987 Obediencia Debida
Act claimed them to be and further that the ESMA actions had been
committed under Isabel Perón's "anti-subversion decrees" (which would
give them a formal appearance of legality, although torture is forbidden
by the Argentine Constitution). Alfredo Astiz also referred to the "French connexion" when testifying in court.
Truth commission and decrees revoked
The junta relinquished power in 1983. After democratic elections, President elect Raúl Alfonsín created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) in December 1983, led by writer Ernesto Sábato,
to collect evidence about the Dirty War crimes. The gruesome details,
including documentation of the disappearance of nearly 9,000 people,
shocked the world. Jorge Rafael Videla, head of the junta, was among the
generals convicted of human rights crimes, including forced
disappearances, torture, murders and kidnappings. President Alfonsín
ordered that the nine members of the military junta be judicially
charged during the 1985 Trial of the Juntas. As of 2010,
most of the military officials are in trial or jail. In 1985, Videla
was sentenced to life imprisonment at the military prison of Magdalena.
Several senior officers also received jail terms. In the Prologue to the
Nunca Más report ("Never Again"), Ernesto Sábato wrote:
From the moment of their abduction, the victims lost all rights. Deprived of all communication with the outside world, held in unknown places, subjected to barbaric tortures, kept ignorant of their immediate or ultimate fate, they risked being either thrown into a river or the sea, weighted down with blocks of cement, or burned to ashes. They were not mere objects, however, and still possessed all the human attributes: they could feel pain, could remember a mother, child or spouse, could feel infinite shame at being raped in public.
Reacting to the human rights trials, hardliners in the Argentine army
staged a series of uprisings against the Alfonsín government. They
barricaded themselves in several military barracks demanding an end of
the trials. During Holy Week (Semana Santa) of April 1987, Lieutenant Colonel Aldo Rico
(commander of the 18th Infantry Regiment in Misiones province) and
several junior army officers, barricaded themselves in the Campo de Mayo
army barracks. The military rebels, who were called the carapintadas, called for an end to the trials and the resignation of army chief of staff General Héctor Ríos Ereñú.
Rico believed that the Alfonsin government would be unwilling or unable
to put down the uprising. He was correct as the Second Army Corps
commander's orders to surround the barracks were ignored by his
subordinates. Alfonsin called on the people to come to the Plaza de Mayo
to defend democracy and hundreds of thousands responded.
After a helicopter visit by Alfonsin to Campo de Mayo, the rebels
finally surrendered. There were denials of a deal, but several generals
were forced into early retirement and General Jose Dante Caridi was
soon replaced Erenu as commander of the army. In January 1988, a second
military rebellion took place when Rico refused to accept the detention
orders issued by a military court for having led the previous uprising.
This time he set up base in the 4th Infantry Regiment in Monte Caseros
and repudiated Caridi's calls to hand himself in. Rico again demanded an
end to the human rights trials saying the promises of Alfonsin to the
rebels had not been fulfilled. Caridi ordered several army units to
suppress the rebellion. Their advance to the Monte Caseros barracks was
slowed down by the rains and the news that rebel soldiers had laid mines
that had wounded three loyal officers. Nevertheless, Rico's forces were
defeated after a three-hour battle. They surrendered on 17 January 1988
and 300 rebels were arrested, and sentenced to jail.
A third uprising took place in December 1988. This time the
uprising was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammed Alí Seineldín and was
supported by 1,000 rebel troops. This uprising proved successful.
Several of the demands of Seineldin and his followers were met. Caridi
was forced into retirement and replaced by General Francisco Gassino,
who had served in the Falklands War and was held in high esteem by the carapintadas. On 5 October 1989, as part of a sweeping reform the newly elected President Carlos Menem pardoned those convicted in the human right trials and the rebel leaders imprisoned for taking part in the military uprisings.
These amnesty laws were long unpopular first with surviving victims of
the Dirty War and their families, later on between most of the
population.
In 2005, under Nestor Kirchner presidency, the trials were opened again. Most of the Junta's members are currently in prison by charges of crimes against humanity and genocide.
-24MAR07-Autor_Mart%C3%ADn_Gait%C3%A1n(4).jpg)
Commemoration in Argentina
Foreign governments whose citizens were victims of the Dirty War (which included citizens of Czechoslovakia, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Paraguay, Bolivia, Spain, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and several other nations) are pressing individual cases against the
former military regime. France has sought the extradition of Captain Alfredo Astiz for the kidnapping and murder of its nationals, among them nuns Léonie Duquet and Alice Domon.
Pirámide de Mayo covered with photos of the desaparecidos by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 2004
Continuing controversies
On 23 January 1989, an armed group of around 40 guerrillas, a faction of the Movimiento Todos por la Patria
(MTP or All for the Fatherland Movement), attacked the La Tablada army
barracks on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to "prevent" a military coup.
The attack resulted in 28 of the guerrillas killed, five "disappeared"
and 13 imprisoned. Eleven police and military died, and 53 were wounded
in the fighting. The guerrillas claimed to have acted to prevent a
military coup.
Among the dead at La Tablada was Jorge Baños, a human rights lawyer who
had joined the guerrillas. The MTP attack to prevent a military coup
has been suspected to be led by infiltrated Intelligence military
service.
In 2002, Máxima, daughter of Jorge Zorreguieta, a civilian cabinet minister of Argentina during the early phase of the Dictatorship, married Willem-Alexander,
crown prince of the Netherlands. All of the Netherlands had wrestled in
controversy over her suitability, but ultimately the marriage took
place without the presence of her parents. Máxima thus became Queen when
her husband ascended to the throne in 2013. In August 2016, Argentine
President Mauricio Macri
was widely condemned by human rights group for calling into question
the number of 30,000 disappeared and for referring to the period as a
"Dirty War".
During the Argentine Bicentennial Independence Celebrations (on 9 July 2016), former Colonel Carlos Carrizo Salvadores
drew criticism from the left for leading the march of Falklands War
veterans and Veterans of Operation Independence, the counterinsurgency
campaign in Northern Argentina. Carrizo Salvadores had been sentenced to
life imprisonment in 2013 for his part as a paratrooper captain in the
so-called Rosario Chapel massacre in Catamarca Province, but was
acquitted under the new government of Mauricio Macri.
Repeal of Pardon Laws and renewal of prosecutions
Under Néstor Kirchner's
term as President in 2003, the Argentine Congress revoked the
longstanding amnesty laws, also called the Pardon Laws. In 2005, the
Argentine Supreme Court ruled these laws were unconstitutional. The government re-opened prosecution of war crimes. From then through October 2011, 259 persons were convicted for crimes against humanity and genocide and sentenced in Argentine courts, including Alfredo Astiz, a notorious torturer, that month.
In 2006, 24 March was designated as a public holiday in Argentina, the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice.
That year on the 30th anniversary of the coup, a huge crowd filled the
streets to remember what happened during the military government and
ensure it did not happen again.
In 2006, the government began its first trials of military and security officers since the repeal of the "Pardon Laws". Miguel Etchecolatz,
the police commissioner of the province of Buenos Aires in the 1970s,
faced trial on charges of illegal detention, torture and homicide. He
was found guilty of six counts of murder, six counts of unlawful
imprisonment and seven counts of torture and sentenced in September 2006
to life imprisonment.
In February 2006, some former Ford
Argentine workers sued the U.S.-based company, alleging that local
managers worked with the security forces to detain union members on the
premises and torture them. The civil suit against Ford Motor Company and
Ford Argentina called for four former company executives and a retired
military officer to be questioned.
According to Pedro Norberto Troiani, one of the plaintiffs, 25
employees were detained in the plant, located 40 miles (60 km) from
Buenos Aires. Allegations have surfaced since 1998 that Ford officials
were involved in state repression, but the company has denied the
claims. Army personnel were reported to have arrived at the plant on the
day of the military coup on 24 March 1976 and "disappearances"
immediately started.
In 2007, President Cristina Kirchner continued prosecution of military and security officers responsible for the "disappearances".
On 14 December 2007, some 200 men who were at military service
during the dictatorship demanded an audience with the governor of
Tucumán Province, claiming they too were victims of the Junta as they
had no choice and suffered hunger, abandonment, physical and
psychological injuries, demanding a military pension.
In February 2010, a German court issued an international arrest warrant for former dictator Jorge Videla in connection with the death of 20-year-old Rolf Stawowiok
in Argentina. He was a German citizen born in Argentina while his
father was doing development work there. Rolf Stawowiok disappeared on
21 February 1978. In earlier cases, France, Italy and Spain had requested extradition of the Navy captain Alfredo Astiz for war crimes related to his work with ESMA, but were never successful.
Flag with images of those who disappeared during a demonstration in Buenos Aires to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1976 coup in Argentina
In 1977, General Albano Harguindeguy, Interior Minister, admitted
that 5,618 people disappeared in the form of PEN detenidos-desaparecidos
were being held in detention camps throughout Argentina. According to a secret cable from DINA
(Chilean secret police) in Buenos Aires, an estimate by the Argentine
601st Intelligence Battalion in mid-July 1978, which started counting
victims in 1975, gave the figure of 22,000 persons – this document was
first published by John Dinges in 2004.
Participation of members of the Catholic Church
On 15 April 2005, a human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis), accusing him of conspiring with the junta in 1976 to kidnap two Jesuit
priests. So far, no hard evidence has been presented linking the
cardinal to this crime. It is known that the cardinal headed the Society
of Jesus of Argentina in 1976 and had asked the two priests to leave
their pastoral work following conflict within the Society over how to
respond to the new military dictatorship, with some priests advocating a
violent overthrow. The cardinal's spokesman flatly denied the
allegations.
A priest, Christian von Wernich, was chaplain of the Buenos Aires Province Police while it was under the command of General Ramón Camps
during the dictatorship, with the rank of inspector. On 9 October 2007,
he was found guilty of complicity in 7 homicides, 42 kidnappings and 32
instances of torture and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Some Catholic priests sympathised with and helped the Montoneros.
Radical priests, including Father Alberto Carbone, who was eventually
indicted in the murder of Aramburu, preached Marxism and presented the
early Church fathers as model revolutionaries in an attempt to
legitimise the violence.
A Catholic youth leader, Juan Ignacio Isla Casares, with the help of
the Montoneros commander Eduardo Pereira Rossi (nom de guerre "El
Carlón") was the mastermind behind the ambush and killing of five
policemen near San Isidro Cathedral on 26 October 1975.
Mario Firmenich,
who later became the leader of the Montoneros, was the ex president of
the Catholic Action Youth Group and a former seminarian himself. The Montoneros had ties with the Movement of Priests for the Third World and a Jesuit priest, Carlos Mugica.
The United States Declassification Project on Argentina
According to its front page The United States Declassification Project on Argentina
"represents a historic effort by United States government departments
and agencies to identify, review, and provide public access to records
that shed light on human rights abuses in Argentina between 1975 and
1984". The project was announced by President Barack Obama in 2016 after a request from Argentine President Mauricio Macri and human
rights groups on the 40th anniversary of the 1976 military coup in
Argentina. The documents were released in three tranches in August 2016,
December 2016 and April 2019. Gastón Chillier, of the Cels human rights
group said "There are documents from six or seven different US
intelligence agencies. We're hopeful there may be information there that
could help in the continuing trials against human rights offenders from
the period". Contained within the documents are descriptions of the
methods used by the Argentinian dictatorship to kill its victims and
dispose of their bodies.
