On 30th anniversary of Argentine coup: new declassified details

[struggle4progress]

Washington, D.C., March 23, 2006 - On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina, the National Security Archive posted a series of declassified U.S. documents and, for the first time, secret documents from Southern Cone intelligence agencies recording detailed evidence of massive atrocities committed by the military junta in Argentina. The documents include a formerly secret transcript of Henry Kissinger's staff meeting during which he ordered immediate U.S. support for the new military regime, and Defense and State Department reports on the ensuing repression. The Archive has also obtained internal memoranda and cables from the infamous Argentina intelligence unit, Battalion 601, as well as the Chilean secret police agency, known as DINA, which was secretly collaborating with the military in Buenos Aires.

The documents record Washington's initial reaction to the military takeover. "I do want to encourage them. I don't want to give the sense that they're harassed by the United States," Secretary of State Kissinger ordered his staff after his assistants warned him that the junta would initiate a bloodbath following the coup. According to the transcript, Kissinger's top deputy on Latin America, William Rogers, told him two days after the coup that "we've got to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long."

State Department cables, including some obtained previously by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, show that U.S. officials had prior knowledge of coup plotting. More than a week before the coup, Ambassador Robert Hill sent Assistant Secretary Rogers a secret cable reporting that the commander of the Navy, Admiral Emilio Massera, had requested that the U.S. embassy "indicate to him one or two reputable public relations firms in the U.S. which might handle the problem for a future military government." Massera, according to the cable, promised that the Argentine military would "not follow the lines of the Pinochet takeover in Chile," and would "try to proceed within the law and with full respect for human rights."

But although the military repression in Argentina drew less international attention than the Pinochet regime's in Chile, it far exceeded it in terms of human rights violations. By mid 1978, according to a secret cable from the DINA station in Buenos Aires, posted here publicly for the first time, the secret police battalion 601 had "counted 22,000 between dead and disappeared, from 1975 to the present date ." Thousands of additional victims were killed between 1978 and 1983 when the military was forced from power. <snip>

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB185/index.htm

[peacetalksforall]

1. And military rule is where we're heading under this regime? Does

anyone know if the military camps are still sitting empty and waiting? Do you think they will declare martial law rather than turn over Congress? How would a Supreme Court vote go under a military or would there be a Court? In other words, are we living under a pretense?

Reading this dark news makes a person think dark. Same regime as then.

[struggle4progress]

2. They'll play "iron fist in velvet glove," try to intimidate people without

stirring up vigorous opposition, talk out of both sides of their mouths, and prepare. If they really want a dictatorship, they'll try to get all their ducks in a row first, then engineer a provocation (say, an amateur counter-attack of the McVeigh sort) to use as justification for more draconian measures ...

Are we living under a pretense? Well, yes, of course, but it can get much worse if we allow them to consolidate their power further ...

[Judi Lynn]

3. I could swear the info. in this letter from Political Officer

F. Allen "Tex" Harris sounds so familiar. Where and when on earth could I have heard of any country keeping political prisoners in a secret place no one knew about, without access to anyone on the outside. Hmmmmmm.:

April 26, 1978 -
Source: U.S. Department of State Argentina Declassification Project, 2002. Copy collected by Carlos Osorio in 2006.

Reporting on several human rights issues to his colleagues at the Department of State, U.S. Embassy Human Rights officer, Tex Harris writes that in addition to the PEN prisoners, "One of the jargon breakthroughs we have made recently concerns the DAMs - Personas bajo disposicion autoridad militar. This is the argot for the disappeared but alive non recognized prisoners…." Harris identifies a new prison and suggests that intelligence reports estimate that it could hold up to 1000 "non recognized" prisoners. The problem, he writes, "is that very few people are released from the detention centers which are "outside the law."
(snip/...)

~~~~ link ~~~~

(From the new (to the outside world) material posted here by struggle4progress.

Thank you very much for the chance to read these documents.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Kick!

:kick: :kick: :kick: