Martin Edwin Andersen covered the 1985 mini-Nuremberg trials of the "dirty war" generals in Buenos Aires for Newsweek and the Washington Post and is the author of "Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the 'Dirty War'" (Westview Press, 1993).
Story highlights
- Before
Argentina trip Obama pledged to declassify docs related to country's
"dirty war," says Martin Andersen
- Andersen:
It was an important gesture, but must be followed by substantive action,
not window dressing
- It is estimated more than
20,000 Argentines were killed during the "dirty war" between
1976 and 1983.
Leading up to President Barack
Obama's historic trip to Argentina this week, his administration dropped a
mini-bombshell: The U.S. government would begin declassifying documents related
to Argentina's "dirty war," the period between 1976 and 1983 when more than 20,000 citizens—known as "the
missing" ("desaparecidos" in Spanish)—were secretly detained and
tortured and murdered, their bodies never recovered.
Visiting Argentina on the 40th
anniversary of the March 24, 1976, military coup that marked the beginning of
that period was a political gamble—much less perhaps than his journey to the
Castros' Havana—but a gamble nonetheless.
It was a watershed moment in a
relationship that has been fraught for decades, in part because of adisturbing narrative of collusion between U.S. intelligence
agencies and the Argentine military establishment which carried out the
killings. Whether the narrative is true or not is almost incidental to its
overwhelming power in Argentine society.
As so often happens in diplomacy,
Obama was forced to strike a delicate balance on this trip.
For example, accusations of the involvement of former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger loom large in the dirty-war narrative, though
Kissinger has denied them.
And yet, in public speeches Obama
steered clear ofmentioning Kissinger or addressing his alleged role. His
silence on the subject was deafening.
But Obama also extolled certain
Americans who took huge risks to expose the atrocities of the dirty war. Obama
praised Patt Derian, the assistant secretary of state for human rights under
President Jimmy Carter -- who raised the alarm inside the State Department --
and Tex Harris, the courageous U.S. Embassy officer who documented human rights
abuses and identified the missing. The President should be commended for
recognizing these heroes.
As a whole, the trip was exactly
what Obama does best: From dancing the tango and drinking mate tea to giving a
moving tribute to the victims of the dirty war, Obama basked in applause from
an Argentine public often critical of American policy, and a new pro-free
market, pro-U.S. government.
And yet the success of the trip
was tied inextricably to Obama's "declassified diplomacy." In the
face of lingering questions not just about the dirty war, but also about U.S.
engagement with Argentina's tragically corrupt governments since then, doubts
remain about just exactly what it is that the Obama administration has promised
to declassify.
What the President said -- and didn't say -- in Buenos Aires
has only put those doubts into overdrive.
U.S. National Security Adviser
Susan Rice vowed that Obama would "announce a comprehensive effort to
declassify additional documents, including for the first time military and
intelligence records ... to underscore our shared commitment to human
rights."
This is fine rhetoric, but whether
the U.S. plans to declassify truly meaningful information that will hold the
guilty accountable remains to be seen. A public relations milk run revealing a
stack of essentially meaningless classified documents will only serve to
antagonize those who suffered during the dirty war. There must be substantive
action.
At a minimum, declassification
should include all information from the files relating to senior Argentine
officials who were directly, or indirectly associated with dirty war
atrocities. Files related to prominent "anti-government" figures who were
double agents working for Argentina's military establishment -- and American
officials who turned a blind eye -- also should be released.
Corroborating documents surely lie
in the still-padlocked files of the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department.
Shadowboxing with history remains
a fundamental challenge not just for the Argentines, but for the United States
as well, as world attention fixes on effectively protecting ourselves against
terrorist organizations.
When they initiated their largely
clandestine slaughter in Argentina, members of the military junta loudly
proclaimed that their fight was the "opening battle of World War III"
against terrorist guerrillas. However, as the late FBI legal attache Robert W.
Scherrer (another U.S. hero in the fight against the dirty war) noted not long
after he left Buenos Aires:
"Terrorism was a convenient
vehicle for irresponsible elements of the military and their civilian
counterparts to seek retaliation against real or imagined wrongs. ... The true
reason for the coup was the disastrous state of the Argentine economy and the
gross corruption of the Peronist government. At no time did terrorism ever
represent a threat to the stability of the government."
In that sense, the U.S.-Argentina
relationship offers a critical lesson for the United States as it seeks
effective ways to fight ISIS and al Qaeda -- among other organizations --
without selling out completely to corrupt and oppressive regimes across the
Middle East.
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