President Obama’s arrival in Argentina and his visit with President Mauricio Macri are part of a greater move toward transparency in examining the complicity of the U.S. and the Catholic Church in the country’s Dirty War.
Earlier this year, when President Barack Obama’s first visit to Buenos Aires was announced, human-rights organizations in Argentina threatened to fill the streets in protest when he arrived. The visit was scheduled for March 24th, coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of the country’s last coup d’état and the beginning of a brutal dictatorship. During the junta’s seven-year reign, military hit squads disappeared tens of thousands of people, torturing and killing most of them and abducting hundreds of their children. As with other military interventions throughout South and Central America in the Cold War era, the Argentine coup and its consequent crimes were made partly possible by the support of the United States. For the relatives of the disappeared and sympathizers with their cause, American imperialism is as much to blame for their loss as the military itself.
After further consideration, though, the activists decided that Obama’s visit was not so much an insult as an opportunity. On February 23rd, they met for the first time with Argentina’s new president, , to request an extensive declassification of U.S. intelligence and military records on American involvement with the dictatorship. Macri, a pro-business, right-wing leader, had previously shown little sympathy toward the activists’ cause. In fact, since he took office, in December, there have been rumors that his Administration might attempt to abort the ongoing trials against the military for their crimes under the junta, or even grant some officers a pardon. To Macri, then, Obama’s visit afforded the perfect occasion to prove otherwise, and he immediately forwarded the declassification request to the American government. Last week, on the eve of a historic trip to Cuba, Obama granted the request, in a gesture widely read in the region as a salve for the wounds of the Cold War. As a result, when Obama walks on Thursday into the Parque de la Memoria, a monument to the disappeared on the banks of the Río de la Plata, the river into which thousands were thrown to their deaths from military planes, he will face no mass protests from the groups that originally threatened them.
There is a sense of déjà vu in all of this. Sixteen years ago, another outgoing Democratic President, Bill Clinton, announced the first-ever declassification of diplomatic records relating to the Argentine dictatorship. It was the last in a series of such releases during his Administration. Documents from a wide range of government bodies—the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the State Department—had already revealed shocking levels of complicity between the American government and the military regimes in Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Argentina benefited too late from this declassified diplomacy, and received only a small batch of records. According to Carlos Osorio, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., the documents were ready to be delivered by early September of 2001, but then 9/11 happened. A second attempt was frustrated by the economic and political meltdown in Argentina at the end of that year. Ultimately, only forty-seven hundred State Department documents were handed over, in August of 2002.
Even this limited release, which did not include records from U.S. intelligence or military agencies, proved revealing. “During 1976, the records show the State Department received daily and detailed information from their Buenos Aires embassy about the illegal state-sponsored repression in Argentina,” Daniel Gutman, the author of a book on the documents, told me. “In spite of that, Henry Kissinger and other State Department officers were friendly with the dictatorship. They kept asking the junta how long they planned to use those repressive methods and recommended to get it done quickly, because public opinion in the U.S. was starting to turn against them.” One such conversation, dated two days after the coup, has a member of Kissinger’s staff telling him “to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina.” Kissinger replies with concern for the junta. “Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement,” he says. “Because I do want to encourage them. I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”
The records provided human-rights groups, judges, and prosecutors concrete evidence to mount criminal cases. After the amnesties and pardon laws of the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties were declared unconstitutional, around ten years ago, investigations of violations during the dictatorship were reopened, and thousands of former military and police officers were brought to trial. Ever since then, such groups as the Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, composed of grandmothers looking for their stolen grandchildren, and the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) have unsuccessfully requested the release of records that were left out of the 2002 declassification. Obama’s visit presented them with the chance to make a renewed push. The Argentine government will now work on drafting a detailed list of the files that it wants declassified, though most of the work has already been done by human-rights groups. Osorio told me that the process usually takes “between eight months and a year,” and he believes that the Obama Administration aims to release the files before the next President takes over.
What additional insights the documents might offer is a matter of speculation. According to Osorio, they may “clarify the U.S. intelligence role in the coup and in general what was their stance around the counterinsurgency operations of the Argentine military.” Horacio Verbitsky, the president of CELS, expects to see specific information on coöperation between the United States and the Argentine military before the coup—visits by Argentine generals to Vietnam during the war, for instance, and support from the School of the Americas, a military institute at Fort Benning that provides training to U.S. allies in Latin America. (The school has since been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Coöperation.)
The biggest effect of Obama’s decision, though, may have less to do with specific revelations than with a broader move toward transparency. On Saturday, after a meeting with Pope Francis—himself the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires—Bishop Carlos Malfa, a high-ranking Argentine cleric, announced that the Vatican will release its own classified records on the dictatorship. Historians have established the Catholic Church’s links to and support of the Argentine military during its reign of terror. For decades, Church authorities have refused to acknowledge the role they played in those years; on several occasions, they have hinted at the need for “reconciliation,” a coded reference to amnesty. On Sunday, the Argentine Episcopal Conference released a statement condemning the “state terrorism” of the dictatorship, which it says led to “torture, murder, disappearance, and the kidnapping of children,” and vindicating the path of “truth, repentance, and reparation through justice”—strong language never before used by Catholic high authorities.
“There is a sense of bittersweetness to Obama’s visit,” Verbitsky, who also wrote a book about the complicity between the Church and the dictatorship, told me. On the one hand, he said, the President’s visit coincides with a bad chapter in Argentina’s economic history and a contentious argument over how the country will handle its creditors, the so-called vulture funds. “Obama is coming to Argentina when our Parliament is debating the country’s submission to Wall Street,” Verbitsky said. On the other hand, he added, “We must celebrate Obama’s recognition and homage to the victims of the dictatorship, which prove there is no going back in the fight for historical memory.”
Earlier this year, when President Barack Obama’s first visit to Buenos Aires was announced, human-rights organizations in Argentina threatened to fill the streets in protest when he arrived. The visit was scheduled for March 24th, coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of the country’s last coup d’état and the beginning of a brutal dictatorship. During the junta’s seven-year reign, military hit squads disappeared tens of thousands of people, torturing and killing most of them and abducting hundreds of their children. As with other military interventions throughout South and Central America in the Cold War era, the Argentine coup and its consequent crimes were made partly possible by the support of the United States. For the relatives of the disappeared and sympathizers with their cause, American imperialism is as much to blame for their loss as the military itself.
After further consideration, though, the activists decided that Obama’s visit was not so much an insult as an opportunity. On February 23rd, they met for the first time with Argentina’s new president, , to request an extensive declassification of U.S. intelligence and military records on American involvement with the dictatorship. Macri, a pro-business, right-wing leader, had previously shown little sympathy toward the activists’ cause. In fact, since he took office, in December, there have been rumors that his Administration might attempt to abort the ongoing trials against the military for their crimes under the junta, or even grant some officers a pardon. To Macri, then, Obama’s visit afforded the perfect occasion to prove otherwise, and he immediately forwarded the declassification request to the American government. Last week, on the eve of a historic trip to Cuba, Obama granted the request, in a gesture widely read in the region as a salve for the wounds of the Cold War. As a result, when Obama walks on Thursday into the Parque de la Memoria, a monument to the disappeared on the banks of the Río de la Plata, the river into which thousands were thrown to their deaths from military planes, he will face no mass protests from the groups that originally threatened them.
There is a sense of déjà vu in all of this. Sixteen years ago, another outgoing Democratic President, Bill Clinton, announced the first-ever declassification of diplomatic records relating to the Argentine dictatorship. It was the last in a series of such releases during his Administration. Documents from a wide range of government bodies—the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the State Department—had already revealed shocking levels of complicity between the American government and the military regimes in Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Argentina benefited too late from this declassified diplomacy, and received only a small batch of records. According to Carlos Osorio, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., the documents were ready to be delivered by early September of 2001, but then 9/11 happened. A second attempt was frustrated by the economic and political meltdown in Argentina at the end of that year. Ultimately, only forty-seven hundred State Department documents were handed over, in August of 2002.
Even this limited release, which did not include records from U.S. intelligence or military agencies, proved revealing. “During 1976, the records show the State Department received daily and detailed information from their Buenos Aires embassy about the illegal state-sponsored repression in Argentina,” Daniel Gutman, the author of a book on the documents, told me. “In spite of that, Henry Kissinger and other State Department officers were friendly with the dictatorship. They kept asking the junta how long they planned to use those repressive methods and recommended to get it done quickly, because public opinion in the U.S. was starting to turn against them.” One such conversation, dated two days after the coup, has a member of Kissinger’s staff telling him “to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina.” Kissinger replies with concern for the junta. “Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement,” he says. “Because I do want to encourage them. I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”
The records provided human-rights groups, judges, and prosecutors concrete evidence to mount criminal cases. After the amnesties and pardon laws of the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties were declared unconstitutional, around ten years ago, investigations of violations during the dictatorship were reopened, and thousands of former military and police officers were brought to trial. Ever since then, such groups as the Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, composed of grandmothers looking for their stolen grandchildren, and the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) have unsuccessfully requested the release of records that were left out of the 2002 declassification. Obama’s visit presented them with the chance to make a renewed push. The Argentine government will now work on drafting a detailed list of the files that it wants declassified, though most of the work has already been done by human-rights groups. Osorio told me that the process usually takes “between eight months and a year,” and he believes that the Obama Administration aims to release the files before the next President takes over.
What additional insights the documents might offer is a matter of speculation. According to Osorio, they may “clarify the U.S. intelligence role in the coup and in general what was their stance around the counterinsurgency operations of the Argentine military.” Horacio Verbitsky, the president of CELS, expects to see specific information on coöperation between the United States and the Argentine military before the coup—visits by Argentine generals to Vietnam during the war, for instance, and support from the School of the Americas, a military institute at Fort Benning that provides training to U.S. allies in Latin America. (The school has since been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Coöperation.)
The biggest effect of Obama’s decision, though, may have less to do with specific revelations than with a broader move toward transparency. On Saturday, after a meeting with Pope Francis—himself the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires—Bishop Carlos Malfa, a high-ranking Argentine cleric, announced that the Vatican will release its own classified records on the dictatorship. Historians have established the Catholic Church’s links to and support of the Argentine military during its reign of terror. For decades, Church authorities have refused to acknowledge the role they played in those years; on several occasions, they have hinted at the need for “reconciliation,” a coded reference to amnesty. On Sunday, the Argentine Episcopal Conference released a statement condemning the “state terrorism” of the dictatorship, which it says led to “torture, murder, disappearance, and the kidnapping of children,” and vindicating the path of “truth, repentance, and reparation through justice”—strong language never before used by Catholic high authorities.
“There is a sense of bittersweetness to Obama’s visit,” Verbitsky, who also wrote a book about the complicity between the Church and the dictatorship, told me. On the one hand, he said, the President’s visit coincides with a bad chapter in Argentina’s economic history and a contentious argument over how the country will handle its creditors, the so-called vulture funds. “Obama is coming to Argentina when our Parliament is debating the country’s submission to Wall Street,” Verbitsky said. On the other hand, he added, “We must celebrate Obama’s recognition and homage to the victims of the dictatorship, which prove there is no going back in the fight for historical memory.”
