Secret archives released by the US State Department directly implicate former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other top American officials in backing the brutal military regime of mass murder, “disappearances” and torture that ruled Argentina for more than seven years, beginning in March 1976.
The 4,677 documents declassified late last month spell out a relationship of close collaboration and support offered by the highest levels of official Washington to a military dictatorship responsible for the deaths of at least 30,000 Argentines, most of them workers and students.
The sheer volume of these documents, consisting largely of telegrams, memos and cables that passed between the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the State Department in Washington, make it clear that the three US administrations that dealt with the junta—those of Ford, Carter and Reagan—were kept fully apprised of the atrocities it carried out. It was well informed largely thanks to US officials’ intimate relations with those who directed the death squads and torture centers.
What emerges most clearly from the paper trail left by the State Department is that the US government was well aware that in the name of a “war on terrorism” the Argentine regime was carrying out a bloodbath. Clearly, Washington saw these actions as a necessary defense of both US interests and those of the native ruling elite.
The documents were released as a result of a pledge that Argentine human rights groups, including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, extracted from then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during her visit to the country in 2000. They do not include the equally large and undoubtedly far more incriminating archives that are held by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. Those documents, which would include cables sent by US military and intelligence officers most intimately involved in the bloody work of the dictatorship, remain classified.
The diplomatic language of the State Department partially masks the extent of the US role in Argentina. The real character of US involvement emerges at times in the form of friction between career diplomats in Buenos Aires attempting to preach human rights to the military dictators and those in the key power positions in Washington, who were urging the military to continue the repression.
Among the most telling documents was an October 1976 cable sent by US Ambassador Richard Hill to the State Department concerning the “euphoric” reaction of Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Admiral César Guzzetti, following a visit to Washington where he held talks with Kissinger, who was then secretary of state, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and other officials.
Hill recounted separate conversations in which both Kissinger and Rockefeller declared that they “understood” the repressive methods being employed by the junta and asked only that the dictatorship “get the terrorist problem under control as quickly as possible.”
Other officials gave friendly advice, warning that the military should avoid repression against the Catholic Church and rein in a substantial neo-Nazi faction in its ranks that engaged in blatant anti-Semitic attacks and hung swastikas and other fascist symbols in prisons and torture chambers.
“Guzzetti went to the US fully expecting to hear some strong, firm, direct warnings on his government’s human rights practices.” However, the ambassador wrote, “Rather than that, he has returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the [US government] over this issue.”
The State Department’s top official on Latin America at the time, Harry Schlaudeman, later described the cable as a “bitter criticism” of Kissinger’s role.
On the eve of Guzzetti’s visit, Ambassador Hill had sent another message to the State Department saying that he had stressed with the Argentine admiral that “murdering priests and dumping 47 bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in context of defeating the terrorists quickly; on the contrary, such acts were probably counterproductive.”
The conversations in Washington echoed the message delivered by Kissinger at a meeting of the Organization of American States in Santiago, Chile four months earlier. At the time, several hundred workers, intellectuals, students and others whom the dictatorship perceived as “subversives” were “disappearing” weekly, picked up by military “task forces” and sent to clandestine concentration camps where they were tortured and murdered. It was Guzzetti who then raised the human rights issue with Kissinger. According to a previously released cable, Kissinger responded by asking how much longer the reign of terror would continue. When Guzzetti promised that the “terrorist problem” would be eliminated within six months, the secretary of state expressed approval.
The declassified files demonstrate that when Kissinger and other top US officials gave the green light to the Argentine junta they were well aware of both the military’s methods and its aims.
Many of the documents include sickening descriptions of the torture employed by the Argentine military against its captives. A 1979 embassy memo cites a report listing “cigarette burns ... sexual abuse, rape ... removing teeth, fingernails and eyes ... burning with boiling water, oil and acid, and even castration” as techniques used by Washington’s ally.
Also forwarded to Washington by the embassy was a 1977 statement smuggled out of a women’s prison detailing the fiendish sadism of the regime. It describes a process involving “days or months submitted to the torture of the electric “picana” [prod], suffocation by immersion, violation by the torturers or by mechanical means, the introduction of rats and spiders into our vaginas, bitten by dogs, watching our relatives or our companions die by torture, losing the children in our wombs.”
Other reports describe pregnant women beaten with rifle butts until they miscarried, mothers forced to watch their children tortured and babies seized at birth from their mothers, who were then executed. This is what Kissinger and Co. sanctioned, as long as the process was completed quickly.
US officials also wrote memos making it clear that under the cover of a battle against “subversion,” the main aim of the junta was to break the back of the Argentine working class. One such document drafted for Kissinger by his aide Shlaudeman in August 1976 compared the “national developmental” aims of the military regime with the ideology of Nazism:
“National developmentalism has obvious and bothersome parallels to National Socialism. Opponents of the military regimes call them fascistic. It is an effective pejorative, the more so because it can be said to be technically accurate ... to recover economically, they must break the power of traditional structures, and especially of the labor movement...”
Continued . . .
The 4,677 documents declassified late last month spell out a relationship of close collaboration and support offered by the highest levels of official Washington to a military dictatorship responsible for the deaths of at least 30,000 Argentines, most of them workers and students.
The sheer volume of these documents, consisting largely of telegrams, memos and cables that passed between the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the State Department in Washington, make it clear that the three US administrations that dealt with the junta—those of Ford, Carter and Reagan—were kept fully apprised of the atrocities it carried out. It was well informed largely thanks to US officials’ intimate relations with those who directed the death squads and torture centers.
What emerges most clearly from the paper trail left by the State Department is that the US government was well aware that in the name of a “war on terrorism” the Argentine regime was carrying out a bloodbath. Clearly, Washington saw these actions as a necessary defense of both US interests and those of the native ruling elite.
The documents were released as a result of a pledge that Argentine human rights groups, including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, extracted from then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during her visit to the country in 2000. They do not include the equally large and undoubtedly far more incriminating archives that are held by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. Those documents, which would include cables sent by US military and intelligence officers most intimately involved in the bloody work of the dictatorship, remain classified.
The diplomatic language of the State Department partially masks the extent of the US role in Argentina. The real character of US involvement emerges at times in the form of friction between career diplomats in Buenos Aires attempting to preach human rights to the military dictators and those in the key power positions in Washington, who were urging the military to continue the repression.
Among the most telling documents was an October 1976 cable sent by US Ambassador Richard Hill to the State Department concerning the “euphoric” reaction of Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Admiral César Guzzetti, following a visit to Washington where he held talks with Kissinger, who was then secretary of state, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and other officials.
Hill recounted separate conversations in which both Kissinger and Rockefeller declared that they “understood” the repressive methods being employed by the junta and asked only that the dictatorship “get the terrorist problem under control as quickly as possible.”
Other officials gave friendly advice, warning that the military should avoid repression against the Catholic Church and rein in a substantial neo-Nazi faction in its ranks that engaged in blatant anti-Semitic attacks and hung swastikas and other fascist symbols in prisons and torture chambers.
“Guzzetti went to the US fully expecting to hear some strong, firm, direct warnings on his government’s human rights practices.” However, the ambassador wrote, “Rather than that, he has returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the [US government] over this issue.”
The State Department’s top official on Latin America at the time, Harry Schlaudeman, later described the cable as a “bitter criticism” of Kissinger’s role.
On the eve of Guzzetti’s visit, Ambassador Hill had sent another message to the State Department saying that he had stressed with the Argentine admiral that “murdering priests and dumping 47 bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in context of defeating the terrorists quickly; on the contrary, such acts were probably counterproductive.”
The conversations in Washington echoed the message delivered by Kissinger at a meeting of the Organization of American States in Santiago, Chile four months earlier. At the time, several hundred workers, intellectuals, students and others whom the dictatorship perceived as “subversives” were “disappearing” weekly, picked up by military “task forces” and sent to clandestine concentration camps where they were tortured and murdered. It was Guzzetti who then raised the human rights issue with Kissinger. According to a previously released cable, Kissinger responded by asking how much longer the reign of terror would continue. When Guzzetti promised that the “terrorist problem” would be eliminated within six months, the secretary of state expressed approval.
The declassified files demonstrate that when Kissinger and other top US officials gave the green light to the Argentine junta they were well aware of both the military’s methods and its aims.
Many of the documents include sickening descriptions of the torture employed by the Argentine military against its captives. A 1979 embassy memo cites a report listing “cigarette burns ... sexual abuse, rape ... removing teeth, fingernails and eyes ... burning with boiling water, oil and acid, and even castration” as techniques used by Washington’s ally.
Also forwarded to Washington by the embassy was a 1977 statement smuggled out of a women’s prison detailing the fiendish sadism of the regime. It describes a process involving “days or months submitted to the torture of the electric “picana” [prod], suffocation by immersion, violation by the torturers or by mechanical means, the introduction of rats and spiders into our vaginas, bitten by dogs, watching our relatives or our companions die by torture, losing the children in our wombs.”
Other reports describe pregnant women beaten with rifle butts until they miscarried, mothers forced to watch their children tortured and babies seized at birth from their mothers, who were then executed. This is what Kissinger and Co. sanctioned, as long as the process was completed quickly.
US officials also wrote memos making it clear that under the cover of a battle against “subversion,” the main aim of the junta was to break the back of the Argentine working class. One such document drafted for Kissinger by his aide Shlaudeman in August 1976 compared the “national developmental” aims of the military regime with the ideology of Nazism:
“National developmentalism has obvious and bothersome parallels to National Socialism. Opponents of the military regimes call them fascistic. It is an effective pejorative, the more so because it can be said to be technically accurate ... to recover economically, they must break the power of traditional structures, and especially of the labor movement...”
Continued . . .