What do you know about Argentina?
Perhaps its food: wine, meat, dulce de leche.
Or its culture: the tango, Borges, the city of Buenos Aires.
But there’s a part of Argentina that you probably know very little about.
From 1976 to 1983, Argentina was ruled by one of the most BRUTAL dictatorships in the
history of Latin America.
It was a regime, supported and funded by the United States, that engaged in one of the
most violent and ruthless campaigns of extermination in the entire twentieth century.
Argentina had been marked by political instability since 1955, when the military overthrew President
Juan Perón and banned his party from taking part in national elections.
In the meantime, left-wing guerrillas emerged.
Perón returned to the country in 1973, and was reelected president.
When he died the next year, his wife, Isabel, took power.
Amidst an economic crisis, the government supported right-wing paramilitary groups in
order to fight the guerrilla movement.
Political violence became a top concern.
Right after midnight on March 24th, 1976, the Argentine military arrested Isabel Perón,
occupied radio and TV stations, and released their first statement: the country was now
under military rule.
They promised to restore the country to order and end the violence.
They even called the new government “the National Reorganization Process.”
Some believed in that promise.
The American ambassador called it “the best executed and most civilized coup in Argentine
history.”
To the American ambassador, the coup’s leader—a general named JORGE RAFAEL VIDELA—was a
“moderate” who could “defeat the left-wing terrorists.”
After all, the generals who executed the coup were trained by the U.S. military at the School
of the Americas.
But they had something bigger in mind.
Beecause, in the end, they had come to do way more than fight the guerrillas, whom they
crushed within a few months.
For them, “terrorism” meant anything that went against their vision of a pure society.
Many of them harbored fascist sympathies.
Videla himself declared: “a terrorist is not only someone with a weapon or a bomb,
but anyone who spreads ideas which are contrary to our Western and Christian civilization.”
So the generals sought to “disappear”—kidnap, imprison, torture, kill—everyone they saw
as a threat.
That meant not only those involved in resistance activities, but also trade unionists, Jews,
writers, homosexuals, even priests and nuns who worked among Argentina’s poor.
This was their opportunity to “PURIFY” Argentine society—by force.
The military called this repression La Guerra Sucia: “the Dirty War,” a war against
a “hidden” enemy in which ANY means were justified.
Argentina became a theater in a regional terror campaign called “OPERATION CONDOR.”
Right-wing dictatorships across Latin America—not just Argentina but also Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay,
and Brazil—pursued a RELENTLESS CAMPAIGN of torturing and murdering leftists.
These regimes murdered tens of thousands of dissidents in the most brutal fashions imaginable.
And it was all backed, even funded, by the United States.
In fact, in 1976, American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with the new regime’s
foreign minister.
The Argentine minister thought that Kissinger would lecture him about the military’s violence.
But Kissinger did not raise the subject.
When the minister asked, Kissinger responded that they should simply “clean up the problem.”
According to the State Department, the Argentines saw Kissinger’s words as a “green light”
to do whatever they pleased.
After the meeting with Kissinger, the repression accelerated.
The Argentine military built clandestine detention camps across the entire country to house political
prisoners.
There, prisoners were tortured to obtain information about other political activists.
The torture techniques employed by the military were brutal: rapes, electric prods, beatings.
After torture, prisoners were killed, and their bodies were burned or buried in mass
graves.
The Argentine military soon became famous for their so-called “death flights,” where
prisoners were boarded on a plane, stripped naked, and dropped over the ocean, with their
bodies sometimes washing up on the beaches around Buenos Aires.
Even pregnant women were tortured.
In many cases, the military executed them after giving birth, stole their children,
and gave them to military families.
At the same time, the Argentine military government implemented a harsh system of “economic
reform.”
The program was received with praise from Wall Street: the president of Chase Bank,
David Rockefeller, called it “brilliant, solid and absolutely realistic.”
Rockefeller was a personal friend of the regime’s Minister of Economy, Martínez de Hoz.
Argentina abolished price controls, froze wages, liberalized the financial markets,
and ended industrial protectionist measures.
It was a rapid neoliberal transformation of the economy.
And the consequences of that reform were disastrous.
In one year, the real wages of Argentine workers fell 30 percent.
Argentine industry went into a deep crisis, and living standards plummeted.
One famous journalist, Rodolfo Walsh, wrote of the effect of these policies on the Argentine
people in an “Open Letter” to the military regime.
During this first year of government, consumption of food has decreased by 40 percent, consumption
of clothing by more than 50 percent, and the consumption of medicine is practically at
zero among the lower class.
“The results” of the policies, he wrote, “have been devastating.”
The day after he wrote those words, Walsh was gunned down in the street by the government’s
soldiers.
They never returned the body.
And in both its violent repression and its economic “reform,” the Argentine government
had the firm support of the United States and the International Monetary Fund.
In 1976, the U.S. gave Argentina $50 million in “security assistance,” while the IMF
extended a new loan.
In 1977, the U.S. provided about $700,000 to train hundreds of Argentine military officers.
And in 1978, the U.S. sold $120 million in military parts to Argentina.
It was only in the middle of President Jimmy Carter’s term that the United States began
to question its role in funding the Argentine dictatorship.
An American diplomat, Patricia Darien, wrote a report detailing the extent of the Argentine
government’s brutality.
She said:
The electric picana, something like a supercharged cattle prod, is still apparently a favorite
tool [of torture], as is the ‘submarine’ treatment (immersion of the head in a tub
of water, urine, excrement, blood, or a combination of these).
But others in the U.S. did not care.
A California politician named RONALD REAGAN responded that Darien should “walk a mile
in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.
Reagan said that “the incarceration of a few innocents…is NO REASON to open the jails
and let the terrorists run free.”
Kissinger went to Argentina as General Videla’s personal guest, and praised his so-called
“efforts in combating terrorism.”
In response to the revelations of torture and murder, the Carter administration cut
aid to Argentina—from $30 million to $15 million.
But after 1979 the U.S. government CONTINUED to back the Argentines as the leaders of anti-communist
repression in the Americas, even looking the other way as they trafficked money through
the United States to fund death squads in Central America.
And when Reagan became president in 1981, American support became more explicit.
A leading general, Leopoldo Galtieri, was invited to Washington, and Reagan sought to
resume arm sales and loans to Argentina.
An official in the Reagan Administration named ELLIOT ABRAMS later admitted that he knew
that the Argentine government was stealing babies from prisoners and giving them to military
officers, but did nothing.
But in 1982, amid a failing economy and growing protests, the military government decided
to salvage their popularity by invading the Malvinas Islands, a territory occupied by
Britain.
But they made a big mistake.
The U.S. was forced to side with Britain, and Argentina was left isolated.
The war went terribly, and the Argentines were quickly defeated.
With the economic crisis, the brutal repression, and the failure of the Malvinas War, criticism
of the military became more open.
By the end of 1983, the military government fell, and a new, democratic government was
elected.
The new government put the military on trial.
The JUICIO A LAS JUNTAS—“the trial of the juntas”—was unique in the region.
But after the trial ended, right-wing violence forced the president to set HUNDREDS of torturers
free, imprisoning only the generals.
And in the 1990s, President Carlos Menem—a neoliberal tied closely to the United States—even
pardoned the generals.
It was only when leftist governments were elected in the 2000s that many of the generals
were imprisoned again.
In 2010, Videla died in a prison cell in Buenos Aires.
Still, the trauma remains fresh.
The survivors of the prison camps, the families of the tens of thousands killed, the children
of the disappeared are alive and with us.
In Argentina, it remains an open wound—very alive, and very painful.
But the story was different in the United States.
No one who supported the tortures and murders in Argentina—from Henry Kissinger to Ronald
Reagan—was punished.
Elliot Abrams served in the U.S. government as recently as 2021.
EVERYONE got away with it.
Those wounds, too, remain fresh.
I’m Pablo Pryluka, PhD student at Princeton University, for the Gravel Institute.