New Documents Reveal Kissinger’s Support of 1976 Coup in Argentina

On the thirtieth anniversary of the coup in Argentina that removed Isabel Peron from power, the ever-essential National Security Archives has released a series of fascinating documents detailing the massive atrocities committed by the military junta in the wake of the coup and revealing Henry Kissinger’s intent to immediately support the junta despite warnings of the impending bloodshed. The documents include a formerly secret transcript of the staff meeting in which Kissinger ordered the support; DoD and State Department reports on the junta’s repressive activities; and internal memoranda and cables from Battalion 601, Argentina’s intelligence unit, and from DINA, Chile’s secret police agency that was collaborating with the Argentinian military.

NSA provides an excellent overview of what the documents reveal about the situation in Argentina before and after the coup:

In the year preceding the coup, Argentina descended into a spiral of violence. On one side, death squad operations carried out by the Anti-communist Argentine Alliance (AAA), sponsored by the government, the Federal Police and the Armed Forces, claimed hundreds of victims per month; on the other side the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the Montoneros guerrillas attacked a number of economic installations. Scores of union leaders, popular activists, journalists, scientists, lawyers and intellectuals as well as public servants, military men and business people were targeted. Private companies, many of them U.S. corporations, saw their executives threatened and killed. The U.S. Embassy received numerous threats and attacks; one of its staffers was wounded and another killed in 1975. Political chaos was compounded by economic upheaval. By early 1976, Isabel Peron, who had succeeded her late husband as president, was weak and isolated. The military coup was seen by many in the Argentine polity as an inevitable step to bring stability.

Washington welcomed the military takeover. Initially, reports by the U.S. Embassy branded it as “moderate in character” and the “most civilized coup in Argentine history.” The administration of President Gerald Ford was ready to support the new Junta financially and with security assistance. But, as the U.S. Ambassador put it: “the USG [U.S. government] of course should not become overly identified with the Junta, but so long as the new govt can hew to a moderate line the USG should encourage it by examining sympathetically any requests for assistance.” At the very first State Department staff meeting after the coup, Assistant Secretary William Rogers predicted to Secretary Kissinger that the Argentine military was “going to have to come down very hard not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties,” and recommended that “we ought not at this moment rush out and embrace this new regime.”

Kissinger, however, ordered U.S. support for the new government. “Whatever chance they have,” Kissinger noted, “they will need a little encouragement from us.”

As predicted by the State Department, the military Junta instituted widespread and vicious repression following the coup. Not only Argentines were targeted, but also citizens from Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay who had taken up political exile in Argentina to escape repression in their home nations. As part of Operation Condor–a network of Southern Cone secret police services collaborating to eliminate opponents of their regimes–the Argentine military carried out numerous operations against foreigners trapped in Buenos Aires after the coup.

[snip]

How many people were killed and disappeared during the seven years of dictatorship? “It is our estimate that at least several thousand were killed and we doubt that it will ever be possible to construct a more specific figure,” says the U.S. Ambassador in one cable in early 1978. The National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) was able to document 9,089 persons disappeared at the hands of the regime. Another U.S. declassified State Department memo, titled “Disappearance Numbers,” places that figure at 15,000 by late 1978.

But one internal DINA document, obtained by journalist John Dinges for his book, The Condor Years, recorded secret numbers on the dead and disappeared compiled by Argentine Intelligence Battalion 601 between 1975 and July 1978. The cable, sent by DINA’s attaché to Buenos Aires, Enrique Arancibia Clavel (using the code name Luis Felipe Alemparte Diaz) stated that that he was “sending a list of all the dead” which included the official and unofficial death toll. Between 1975 and mid 1978, Arancibia reported, “they count 22,000 between the dead and the disappeared.”

The documents also reveal that the U.S. had advance knowledge of the impending coup:

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.”

Not everyone in the U.S. government was so convinced. Two days after the coup, William Rogers, Kissinger’s chief deputy on Latin America, told him that “we’ve got to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, before too long.”

As history demonstrates, Kissinger didn’t care.