Argentina | Paul R. Katz

Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, CIA Edition

I learned that former U.S. torture-center supervisor Gina Haspel would become the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency at an impossibly apt moment. I’ve just come back to New York after more than a year and a half abroad, and I spent Monday at the main branch of the New York Public Library to fill a hole in my research. The gap concerned the Movimiento Argentino Antiimperialista de Solidaridad Latinoamericana (MAASLA, the Argentine Anti-Imperialist Movement for Latin American Solidarity), a virtually unstudied Buenos Aires-based group that denounced repression and torture as explicitly transnational phenomena from 1972 to 1976. (They even used the word “transnational” itself; anyone who’s written a history grant recently will understand how exciting this is!)

I knew that in 1974, MAASLA had published a 40-page pamphlet titled “La CIA. ¿Qué es? ¿Qué hace en América Latina?” (“The CIA. What is it? What does it do in Latin America?”), with a skull-faced Statue of Liberty on its cover. Together with the table of contents, this was the only part of the document that I had seen; “La CIA” itself was missing from the Argentine archive where I’d learned of its existence. Fortunately the microform reading room at the main branch is the domain of miracles, and in place of acute curiosity and I now have a digital copy from microfiche.

As you may have begun to suspect, Lady Death was smiling at me from my computer screen as my phone buzzed Tuesday morning with the news that torture enthusiast Mike Pompeo would replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, and that Haspel in turn would lead the CIA. This coincidence was striking not simply because MAASLA’s 1974 pamphlet concerns the CIA, but because it emerged as part of the CIA’s first major scandal, which began to unfold publicly that same year. At a moment when the darkest stretches of the CIA’s gloomy past are showing with unusual clarity through the whitewash of the Obama years, I’d like to remember MAASLA and its efforts to turn up the heat in Latin America as the CIA faced an unprecedentedly broad attack at home.

The CIA had dealt with public-relations challenges before 1974, of course. The botched Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 and the discovery six years later of agency links to dozens of nominally independent groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom are just two among many public revelations that had battered “the Company,” as the CIA likes to call itself.

Yet even by those standards 1974 was an outstandingly rough year for U.S. intelligence operations. With the Company already tarnished by public recognition of its involvement in Nixon’s Watergate burglary, in June of ’74, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks — formerly of the CIA and State Department, respectively — published a book called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In it the two authors accused the Company of abandoning run-of-the-mill intelligence work in favor of complex and often inept covert operations designed to further U.S. imperial designs. Accounts had also begun to circulate concerning an upcoming tell-all book by CIA defector Philip Agee, to be published the following year in London under the title, Inside the Company. Agee had been stationed in Mexico, Ecuador, and Uruguay, and it was understood that he was going to name names (as indeed he would).

In the meantime some of Agee’s more damning anecdotes — among them accounts of CIA efforts to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government in Chile — had already leaked, including in a September 30, 1974 article in Time magazine, adding color to charges of U.S. interference abroad that had been all but confirmed by President Gerald Ford just weeks before. Even more damningly, in December New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh got a hold of parts of a 700-page internal CIA memo baptized “the Family Jewels.” As Hersh explained on the front page of the Times, the memo documented dozens of illegal activities undertaken by the CIA over the previous two decades, including assassination attempts against foreign leaders and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens. (After countless Freedom of Information Act requests, the Family Jewels were finally declassified in 2007, so you can take a look for yourself — it doesn’t get much juicier than this.)

The September 30, 1974 cover of *Time* magazine. MAASLA cited this issue repeatedly in its report on the CIA. *[From Time.com]*

These journalistic revelations fed an increasing Congressional interest in the CIA’s activities, leading to repeated closed-session testimony by CIA Director William Colby in 1974 and the formation of Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities the following year. Mounting awareness of the Company and its methods would play a major role in the growing disillusionment within the U.S. regarding policing and intelligence activities at home and abroad, but decades before the ascent of digital media there was no guarantee that these revelations would reach, let along reverberate in, the countries on the receiving end of the CIA’s destabilization efforts.

That is where MAASLA enters the picture. As the CIA’s “dirty tricks” were starting to leak, Argentina was experiencing a remarkable political moment. The dictatorship that had dominated the country since 1966 had been voted out of power in March 1973, and in its place, democratically elected President Héctor Cámpora had brought the left wing of the movement led by long-exiled former President Juan Perón into power for the very first time. While Cámpora would be made to step down after less than two months in office to clear the way for Perón’s personal return to the presidency in September, for a brief moment in mid-1973, it seemed that the entire Argentine political world had shifted far to the Left, and that revolution was just around the corner. This feeling lingered even as Perón turned decisively to the Right once in office, its permanence aided by the thousands of left-wing refugees from military-led Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil who had poured into the country. Even as Argentine political violence increased precipitously over the course of 1974, Buenos Aires stood out as a bastion of comparative freedom for the Left in a region offering few alternatives.

Amid this transnational churn, MAASLA emerged as an Argentine center for exile activism. While its executive leadership and national board were comprised predominantly of Argentine artists, academics, and politicians from the Left and Center-Left, MAASLA built strong connections with committees of exiles working to denounce political crimes in neighboring countries, and many of its own volunteers were exiles themselves. MAASLA expanded on the work of the coalition of groups that had sought to destabilize Argentina’s own recent dictatorship through the defense of political prisoners and the denunciation of its practices of “repression and torture”. Appeals on behalf of political prisoners were MAASLA’s bread and butter, salted liberally with accusations of systematic counterrevolutionary violence.

A poster for a 1973 MAASLA event on behalf of Paraguayan political prisoners. *[From the archives of the Fondazione Basso.]*

Unlike those earlier “repression and torture”-centered organizations, however, MAASLA framed its denunciations not in Argentine but rather in transnational terms. That so many Latin American countries were now governed by repressive military dictatorships was not “the result of the capriciousness of one dictator or another,” MAASLA’s leaders wrote in November 1972. Instead, these regimes “are guided by a common doctrine and by similar methods,” all of which harkened to the “doctrine of the ‘internal front,’ developed by the Pentagon.” ¹

For MAASLA, the similarities among the repressive methods employed in these different countries underscored their common origin: “the same aberrant criminal techniques are instilled in ‘experts’ in repression at the police schools of [the] Panama [Canal Zone] and Washington,” they wrote. The effectiveness of this counterrevolutionary system was further enhanced by the “million-dollar budgets” of the CIA and related U.S. agencies, which play a “papel principalísimo” — a decidedly principal role — “in the commission of the crimes that we have denounced.”

MAASLA’s interpretation of regional repression would only be reinforced in 1973, as Uruguay and Chile joined Paraguay and Bolivia on the list of southern South American countries governed by military juntas. The Chilean coup in particular led MAASLA to call in September 1973 for the unmasking of “the common enemy that arms the fascists: yankee imperialism and its most direct agent, the fascist government of Brazil.”

This reference to Brazil was hardly a throwaway; indeed, the country held an increasingly privileged place in denunciations of South American repression as a transnational phenomenon. MAASLA documents make frequent reference to Brazil’s “mini-imperialism” in South America, citing Brazilian diplomats and security officials as they criss-crossed the region, facilitating coups and training their executors in the repressive techniques that had turned Brazil’s military government, in power since 1964, into a “model” for counterrevolution.

This belief in Brazil’s key role in the Right’s violent South American advance led MAASLA to collaborate intimately in the organization of the Second Russell Tribunal (1974-1976), a series of Europe-based hearings patterned on the First Russell Tribunal’s moral condemnation of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. Russell II was originally planned to center only on Brazil, but after the Chilean coup its purview was extended to include the whole of the region. Nearly a year before Allende’s overthrow, MAASLA was urging that the scope of the tribunal be expanded. Much of MAASLA’s correspondence with the tribunal’s organizers concerned its efforts to include more Latin Americans in Russell II and to keep the focus of the hearings squarely on the linkages among South America’s military regimes, all of which pointed due north via Brazil to the United States.

The third and final session of Russell II. *[From Brazil’s Memorial da Anistia.]*

MAASLA’s case for U.S. coordination of the Latin American counterrevolution became much stronger with the CIA leaks of 1974. The group’s CIA pamphlet referenced at the start of this post was printed before Hersh’s seminal December 1974 article about the “family jewels,” but it was nonetheless informed by a thorough reading of the substantial sources then available. Cited prominently throughout the report, these sources include the September 30 Time cover article depicted above, fragments of confidential testimony as well as public declarations by high U.S. officials as reported by the press, and The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. MAASLA also cited information gleaned from a remarkable conference on CIA covert action organized by the Center for National Security Studies and held September 12 and 13, 1974, in a Congressional hearing room on Capitol Hill, which was attended by journalists, academics, and even CIA Director Colby himself.

The central message of the well-sourced pamphlet, directed primarily to Argentine readers, was clear: it could happen here. Page after page documented past CIA incursions in the region, from the overthrow of Guatemalan reformist Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 to the more than decade-long financing of Allende’s Chilean opponents. The CIA was not the only U.S. agency devoted to destabilizing Latin America, the pamphlet contended; indeed, an organizational chart on page 8 includes numerous groups, among them the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Agency for International Development, responsible for the training of foreign police.

In cataloguing the activities of these groups, MAASLA did not shy away from naming names, and the pamphlet included deep dives into the personal histories of important intelligence figures. The last of these individuals to be profiled was then-current U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert C. Hill, who had previously been instrumental in the coup against Arbenz. Argentina had been encircled by repressive military dictatorships, and now its U.S. ambassador was an old hand at regime change. Without constant vigilance and firm political opposition, MAASLA insisted, Argentina would be next to fall.

In broad strokes, MAASLA was not wrong. In the months following the publication of “La CIA,” paramilitary violence against the Argentine Left increased vertiginously, much of it under the banner of a diffuse state-linked organization called the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A — a death squad similar in operation to units previously formed in Brazil and Uruguay. On Christmas Eve 1974, the Triple A attacked MAASLA’s headquarters in downtown Buenos Aires, killing Raúl Feldman, an Uruguayan exile and the only person in the office at the time.

Feldman had been working to transcribe interviews with Uruguayan torture victims from cassette tapes. These tapes were seized in the attack, together with the bulk of the group’s materials, and the office was destroyed. While MAASLA continued to operate out of a new space in 1975, deteriorating political conditions made the group’s work increasingly dangerous. Two months after Argentina’s own 1976 military coup, MAASLA was formally declared illegal and dissolved.

Accept or reject MAASLA’s nearly monolithic focus on the role of the U.S. in the rise of Latin America’s repressive Right, the bottom line remains the same. At a time of mounting interest in the clandestine activities of the U.S., MAASLA helped to ensure that investigations happening there had repercussions that extended beyond the U.S. itself. Its correspondence and publications, moreover, are valuable tools for contemporary historians seeking to reconstruct a moment at which the transnational dimensions of southern South America’s Cold War-era counterrevolution were coming clearly into focus for the first time.

Rodolfo Walsh and the Politics of Violence: Part II

[In the first part of this post, I discussed some of the factors that have made it difficult for scholars of Argentina to address the armed militancy of figures celebrated today as defenders of human rights, taking journalist and Montonero intelligence leader Rodolfo Walsh as a powerful example of the missed opportunities that this reticence implies. This second installment looks at the substance of Walsh’s disagreement with the Montonero leadership, and concludes with a reflection on its implications for understandings of treason and responsibility today.]

Journalist by training, Rodolfo Walsh came to the Montoneros in the early 1970s, just as repression of the armed Peronist group was making it increasingly difficult to organize its once-massive political base. Walsh took on a leadership role within the organization’s intelligence structure, one which extended beyond the writing of news stories to encompass, for instance, the interrogation of the two brothers atop the major Argentine company Bunge & Born, kidnapped by Montoneros in 1974 and released the following year after the payment of what was reportedly the largest ransom in history. Yet it is his post-coup journalism for which Walsh is best known. Three months after the military’s seizure of power in March 1976, Walsh founded ANCLA, the Agencia de Noticias Clandestina, or Clandestine News Agency, circulating remarkably accurate descriptions of the military’s repressive apparatus. (Some representative ANCLA cables, including one from August 1976 naming ESMA, La Perla, and other military facilities as clandestine torture and detention centers, can be found here.)

AN ANCLA communique *[From Infojus Noticias]*

By the time of ANCLA’s founding, the Montoneros were facing a bleak outlook. Despite the organization’s significant base and explicit support from former president Juan Perón in the military-dominated opening years of the 1970s, Perón’s return to the country and then to the presidency in 1973 marked the beginning of the end of the armed group’s broad popularity. On May Day 1974, the aging president broke publicly with the Montoneros, setting the group on a path that would lead to its legal proscription two months after Perón’s death in July of that year. The national leadership’s decision to reorganize clandestinely changed the lives of countless Montoneros. As repression by the state-supported Argentine Anticommunist Alliance deepened, the group grew increasingly militarized, abandoning the political work that had built its base. “Territorial” militants, who had labored, with varying degrees of openness, not as soldiers but as organizers of factories, schools, and slums, were now dangerously exposed. Following the coup and the full implementation of the regime’s semi-secret apparatus of torture and extermination — of which the Montonero leadership had a remarkably thorough understanding from the start, and which they nonetheless welcomed under the revolutionary banner of “the worse, the better” — the organization adopted a strategy built around attacks on the regime’s “center of gravity,” principally the police. Chains of command were streamlined, extinguishing the regional autonomy that had long characterized an organization formed though mergers with several other groups. By the end of 1976, amid unprecedented repression, the Montoneros had largely abandoned political work in favor of military action and had closed all meaningful channels for internal dissent.

Yet strident critiques of this course nonetheless emerged from within the organization, most famously from the Columna Norte, the unit responsible for the populous northern stretches of Greater Buenos Aires. The Columna’s leaders demanded greater autonomy, particularly with respect to the group’s ransom-swollen budget, which they wished to use to finance the protection of the territorial militants being hunted by security forces. These criticisms were echoed to a lesser degree by leaders of other units, and by individual militants; all were rejected by the national leadership.

The Montoneros at the peak of their popular support in 1973 *[From La Voz]*

None of these internal critiques had the resonance of the documents which would soon be baptized Los papeles de Walsh (The Walsh Papers), a series of five related assessments that the journalist directed to the national leadership between late November 1976 and early January 1977. Published in 1979 by a dissident faction of the organization, these documents have been reprinted countless times since. As Eduardo Salas argued in a 2006 essay in the magazine Lucha Armada, “El debate entre Rodolfo Walsh y la Conducción Montonera,” these papers are at their most edifying when juxtaposed with the October 1976 report of the Montoneros’ leadership that inspired them.

This “October Document,” the summation of the conclusions reached at that month’s meeting of the group’s national directorate, was released to militants in parts, accounting for Walsh’s piecemeal response. The document’s very organization, methodically evaluating the Montoneros’ confrontation with security forces in terms of “space,” “time,” and “weapons,” clearly reflects the militarization of the group’s outlook. The regime, the document claimed, sought to defeat its armed opponents in a short war because it had no political resources and a deeply unpopular economic agenda. The Montoneros, in turn, would fight a long war, weathering the harsh blows of the military’s first campaign in order to return even stronger, after the regime had exhausted itself, for their definitive counteroffensive. This strategy would bear success in spite of the heavy losses inflicted on the group, the October Document held, because the support of the people granted the Montoneros a nearly limitless capacity for regeneration.

Despite the report’s generally optimistic outlook, the national leadership recognized the power of what it identified as the key method underlying the military’s campaign of annihilation: a cycle of kidnapping, torture, and delación (roughly, forcing militants to inform on their compañeros), generating the raw data on the basis of which the cycle could begin again. Because kidnapped militants were ultimately to be killed in secret rather than tried, even in military courts, security services could torture them for as long as they liked; indeed, “in kidnapping and torture,” the leadership explained, “the objective is to gain time in order to break the militant.”

By 1976, however, the national leadership’s position on torture was clear: it could always be resisted. As historian Laura Lenci has shown, the group’s 1972 disciplinary code proscribed punishment only for militants who talked during the first 24 hours of their captivity (thus depriving compañeros of the opportunity to learn they had been kidnapped) or who shared “unnecessary information.” The rules that replaced it in 1975, in contrast, made no such allowances, sanctioning militants who provided any information whatsoever, no matter the circumstances. This inflexibility reflected the view, as the headline of an article from the June-July 1975 edition of the leadership’s magazine Evita Montonera declared, that “Torture Is a Battle and It Can Be Won.” Replete with stories of heroic compañeros who had refused to yield the slightest bit of data, the article insisted that torture could always be endured, and as such, that every Montonero carried the obligation to resist it completely.

Evita Montonera No. 5, June-July 1975 [*From Ruinas Digitales]*

Working in this vein, the authors of the October Document thus found the solution to the power of the kidnapping-torture-delación sequence not in a strategic realignment but in the heroic refusal of all militants to concede any true information under torture, while leading the enemy astray through false revelations:

To prevent the enemy from achieving its objective through torture, the offensive counter-tactic consists of generating the conditions that allow [the militant] to escape or to die, and at the same time making the enemy lose time through erroneous information. The defensive counter-tactic consists of not saying anything: torture, even in its most savage form, is bearable. Hundreds of heroic compañeros have shown this to us, in the same way that traitors and informers have shown us that their collaboration with the enemy does not originate fundamentally in torture but in their own ideological weakness.

Secure in the conviction that even boundless torture could be resisted, the national leadership placed the responsibility for the success of the regime’s kidnapping-torture-information sequence not on the torturers themselves, but on those few “ideologically weak” militants unable to resist until escape (a virtual impossibility) or death.

In his five-part critique of the October Document, Walsh rejected this assignment of responsibility, placing the blame for the blows suffered by the group not on tortured militants but on the errors of the national leadership. His views on the topic were not new; torture had long figured prominently in Walsh’s work. One of the more reflective passages of the otherwise-straightforward Operación Masacre ponders “the torturer who becomes an executioner at the slightest provocation,” the “beast lurking among us” who has too long been ignored. The same practice would assume a central role in Walsh’s Open Letter, an indictment of the “kingdom of torture and death” erected by the military regime, which through the practice of enforced disappearance has “freed torture from its temporal limits” and raised it to an “absolute, atemporal, metaphysical” level.

Such an “atemporal” challenge could not be overcome through individual willpower alone. According to a 1994 reflection by Walsh’s former partner Lilia Ferreyra mentioned in Salas’ 2006 essay, the journalist considered the belief in the resistibility of “absolute” torture to be a reflection of the “idealism” that often clouded the Montonero’s judgement, one which in the case of torture “left the compañero alone in an extreme situation.” Walsh believed, Ferreyra explained, that the organization needed to develop better internal procedures, so that “the security of the group would not fall exclusively on the moral or physical strength of the individual.”

Yet Walsh’s critique of the organization’s approach to torture centered not on its capacity to be overcome, but rather on its relationship to the tension between politics and militarization. The leadership’s identification of the kidnapping-torture-delación sequence as the military’s key method was, Walsh argued, incorrect. Instead, “the principal characteristic of enemy intelligence” was “structural analysis”:

The determining factor is knowledge of our structure in its political, ideological, and organizational aspects…. [This] departs from the supposition that, knowing the objectives pursued by one’s adversary, the virtues and weaknesses of their cadres, chain of command, zonal base, functional practices and communications, one knows enough to destroy [the adversary] if one has superiority in arms and mobility.

Within this conception, torture, delación, and the creation of double agents should be characterized as procedures or search techniques, and should not be confused with the principal method. The meeting revealed to the enemy, the safe house that falls, are “logical accidents” that naturally derive from the structural analysis and geometric progression of accumulated intelligence.

Torture was not in fact the regime’s principal method, Walsh contended, but rather a tactic to advance the structural analysis that was the true lynchpin of the military’s campaign of annihilation. This distinction, which may at first seem minor or even petty, is in fact central to Walsh’s critique. Unrestrained torture may have been a powerful weapon, but it alone could not account for the military’s evident success. Meetings were intercepted and safe houses fell not because one militant talked but because the security services had achieved a profound knowledge of the organization and its operations, one which could grow “geometrically” with each new data point and which, coupled with superior arms and territorial control, meant inevitable defeat for the insurgent group. On the military front, in other words, the game was up. And the military front was the only front the Montoneros still had.

It was the Montonero leadership’s earlier decision, in the face of the clear and increasing superiority of the repression, to abandon politics and to transform a broad “territorial” movement into a narrow and isolated military one that most incensed Walsh. The bulk of Argentine society, he contended elsewhere in his critique, did not in fact understand itself to be at war with the military, and would not serve as the Montoneros’ strategic reserve. The choice of the national leadership to pursue alliances with the far Left and to ignore rest of political spectrum was a particularly grave mistake. By late 1976 the Left hardly existed in Argentina — the country’s other major guerrilla group, the People’s Revolutionary Army, had been effectively eradicated — and the remainder of the country’s political parties, even the Communist Party, fell somewhere on the spectrum between passive and active collaboration. The Montoneros had thus cleaved themselves from the Peronist masses and from nearly all other political actors. Responsibility for this mistake did not rest on the heads of militants subjected to horrendous torture, but on the leaders who had charted an incorrect course and stuck to it even in the face of ample evidence that it was leading to military defeat.

For Walsh, however, it was not too late for the organization to change course. Tactical retreat and political regrouping were possible, but only if the leadership could recognize that strategic errors, and not the ideological weakness of torture victims, were the source of its failings:

If talking under torture happened because of ideological weakness, the best course would be to pull down the curtain [and give up], because ideology takes half a century to change. [But people talk under torture] because of their lack of confidence in a project, owing to the grave political errors committed. For this reason, the errors can be corrected and we will not be defeated.

It is impossible to know whether, in the final weeks of his life, Walsh truly believed that the leadership’s “grave political errors” could be remedied. What we do know is that they were not. Subsequent documents from the organization’s national leadership maintained the view that militants’ ideological failings explained the success of the repression. Despite the near-total destruction of the Montoneros’ operative capacity in Argentina, moreover, the group stuck to its plan to follow its “strategic retreat” of 1977 with a counteroffensive launched in 1979, sending hundreds of militants who had earlier managed to escape the country back to Argentina, and to their certain deaths. Gratuitous almost to the point of unintelligibility, the counteroffensive prompted waves of defection from among the group’s leaders, expanding the dissident Montonero networks that would circulate and debate “Los papeles de Walsh.”

An early edition of Los papeles de Walsh *[From Ruinas Digitales]*

Yet for all the prominence that Walsh’s critiques have achieved among former Montonero militants, his refusal to place the responsibility for the success of the repression on the backs of torture victims has not been widely shared. The fact that the overwhelming majority of militants captured by the military were killed in secret has led many in Argentina to equate survival with collaboration. Like the reticence to discuss the connections of regime victims to political violence described in Part I of this post, the conflation of survival and delación was firmly established during the dictatorship itself.

The same year that the alliance of relatives of desaparecidos in exile, COSOFAM, asked the Comisión Argentina de Derechos Humanos (CADHU, or Argentine Human Rights Commission) to withhold details of desaparecidos’ political commitments from reports of regime violence, the Argentina-based group, Familiares de Desaparecidos y Detenidos por Razones Políticas (Relatives of Those Disappeared or Detained for Political Reasons), put out a similar statement. CADHU had continued to circulate testimonies of former desaparecidos released from captivity, most of which posited that the vast majority of desaparecidos had in fact been killed. This contention was understandably upsetting to relatives whose organizing centered on the demand that their loved ones be returned to them alive. “We cannot accept testimonies of liberated people,” Familiares declared, “who have been informants and torturers of their own compañeros, who take advantage of these testimonies to talk about kidnapping victims ‘broken’ by torture but who have not named even one among the many, we are sure, who behaved heroically, preferring their holocaust before relinquishing their ideals.”

The broad suspicion of survivors evident in this statement has only grown more entrenched over subsequent years. This sentiment has left its impact on organizations not only of relatives but also of ex-desaparecidos themselves, leading many — as anthropologist Rebekah Park has documented in her book, The Reappeared — to emphasize their own refusal to collaborate, in contrast to traitors in other groups.

The reticence of many scholars and activists to embrace the complexity of political violence and in so doing, to move beyond the binary of heroic resistance and traitorous collaboration, makes these painful issues that much harder to address. And it means, perversely, that the individuals who suffered the impacts of this violence most directly in the 1970s are those who must endure the worst effects of its silencing today. Walsh’s critiques reveal that since the year of the coup itself, we have had the tools to help us reckon more honestly, and more humanely, with its legacies — if we’ll only pick them up.

Rodolfo Walsh and the Politics of Violence: Part I

While out for drinks one night soon after moving to Argentina in 2010, I learned a basic fact that threw me for a loop: Rodolfo Walsh, the Argentine journalist killed in a 1977 shootout the day after he released his famous Open Letter to the Military Junta, had been a Montonero. And not just any Montonero, but second in command of the Peronist insurgent group’s intelligence structure, and thus one of the key figures in the most prominent guerrilla organization of Argentina’s turbulent 1970s. By this point in my life I had probably seen a dozen academic references to Walsh, and not just to his open letter, which I had read several times through. His 1957 book Operación Masacre, recently translated into English, is a gripping account of a mass political killing the year before, and arguably the founding work of modern investigative journalism. (Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood wasn’t published until 1966.) Walsh, in short, was a figure I thought I knew. But the foundational biographical fact of his high-level Montonero militancy — a fact central to understanding the evolution of his thought and the circumstances of his death, one so basic I could have learned it on Wikipedia — had never been mentioned. I was flabbergasted.

Rodolfo Walsh [From izquierdadiario.com]

Seven years and three history degrees later, I now understand that the elision of Walsh’s work with the Montoneros was the product of a heated strategic debate among Argentine human rights organizations that ran the duration of the country’s 1976-1983 dictatorship and continues through to today. The debate owes much to the particularities of the 1976 military coup. In contrast to the widespread condemnation that followed Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 overthrow of democratic socialism in Chile, Argentina’s coup was met not with international censure but with broad relief. The deposed government, led by the violent Peronist Right, had made few friends since President Juan Perón‘s death in 1974. Moreover, by moving away from worker and student organizing and toward increasing militarization at a time of widespread preoccupation with political violence, Argentina’s armed groups had likewise lost much of the public sympathy they had commanded when the country had last been under dictatorship from 1966 to 1973. This unfavorable pre-coup scenario gave the newly installed military regime ample opportunity to claim the mantle of moderation. In the years following the 1976 coup, denunciations of human rights abuses were inevitably — and effectively — met by government claims that such criticisms were simply hypocritical attempts by exiled guerrillas to continue their insurgency by other means. As a result of these maneuvers — and of the steadfast support of a major Argentine trading partner, the Soviet Union (!) — the generals were largely able to avoid the pariah status that had befallen Pinochet.

Human rights groups responded to this adverse situation in distinct ways. Formed through an agreement between Montoneros and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP, or People’s Revolutionary Army) reached shortly before the 1976 coup, the prominent exile-based Comisión Argentina de Derechos Humanos (CADHU, or Argentine Human Rights Commission) made no effort to hide the political militancy of the regime victims whose testimonies it collected and disseminated. This is hardly surprising, given that the radical lawyers who comprised CADHU had been denouncing state violence in service of revolution since the start of the decade, a topic I discuss in the post, Revolutionary Human Rights.

Yet the stigma of subversion was now far greater than it had been just half a decade before. Indeed, as Argentine historian Paula Canelo has demonstrated, the dictatorship succeeded at turning the defeat of the armed Left into a durable source of political legitimacy, one which would remain largely intact until the regime’s spectacular defeat in the 1982 Malvinas/Falkland War. For many human rights and victim advocacy groups, CADHU’s willingness to acknowledge the guerrilla affiliations of regime victims was playing right into the dictatorship’s hands.

This was the argument advanced by COSOFAM, an alliance of relatives of individuals forcibly disappeared by the regime, in a February 1980 letter to CADHU. “We believe, as relatives, that it is incorrect to specify in testimonies the political militancy of the people cited as disappeared,” COSOFAM explained in the letter. “The reason for this is to avoid giving information that could serve the military dictatorship and harm those who are disappeared and their families.” Left unstated was that CADHU’s reports also complicated the attempts of groups like COSOFAM to portray victims in a politically neutral light, already a challenge given the regime’s efforts to cast all of its opponents as dangerous subversives. While CADHU did not change its position in response to the letter, COSOFAM’s approach — shared by other groups at the time — ultimately won out, and in subsequent years advocates and academics working in the human rights vein have rarely referenced, let alone grappled with, the political activities of those imprisoned or killed by the regime.

While an understandable and indeed savvy move in the context of the dictatorship, this elision of militancy has come with significant costs, as I experienced first-hand on my night out in 2010. The Argentines who told me about Walsh’s role in the Montoneros were not simply expanding my knowledge. They were attempting to discredit Walsh and, moreover, to cast doubt on the criminal trials of former repressors that had resumed following Néstor Kirchner’s election to the presidency in 2003. Their arguments hinged not on the fact of Walsh’s militancy but instead on their sense that it had been deliberately obscured. As my interlocutors revealed with unusual concision, attempts to recast the complex and disparate political logics of the past in the moral terms of the present represent a fragile foundation for the contemporary human rights regime. Yet recognizing the radically distinct political values that guided actors on both the Right and the Left in the 1970s need not be a strike against efforts to criminally convict repressors today; to the contrary, it is my firm belief that the two projects must go hand-in-hand.

Selective histories of political violence carry academic costs as well. They make it impossible to understand past conflicts in the terms in which they were lived, and thus to reconstruct the circumstances in which individuals and organizations were forced to negotiate their relationships to the regime and its opponents. As a result, we miss out on valuable contributions to debates about political violence and the nature of rights that are far from resolved today. This is particularly clear in the case of Rodolfo Walsh, a key participant in arguments no less vital now than in the 1970s.

In the second part of this post, I explain why, honing in on key aspects of a debate between Walsh and the Montonero leadership in the months before his death that speak directly to controversies regarding the uses of political violence and the nature of loyalty and treason that remain live wires in Argentine scholarship and politics today.

Revolutionary Human Rights

The modern Argentine human rights movement was born, it has been firmly established, in 1975. In December of that year, just three months before the coup that would inaugurate the most violent dictatorship in Argentine history, a small group of religious and secular activists gathered in a Buenos Aires church to found the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos (APDH, or Permanent Assembly for Human Rights). The APDH was joined in early 1977 by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a courageous group of babushka-clad mothers who faced down the threat of violent repression as they demanded the return of their kidnapped children during weekly marches through Buenos Aires’ most iconic civic space. In so doing, scholars from Elizabeth Jelin to Kathryn Sikkink have argued, these organizations and their allies planted the seed that would give life to one of the most important social movements of the past half-century.

The Madres march, October 1982. *[Photo by Eduardo Longoni]*

Nothing about the preceding paragraph is wrong — except the sentence that opens it. While it is true that the Argentine human rights groups that were to achieve the greatest international prominence all took shape in the years surrounding the country’s 1976 coup, they did not sprout from barren soil. Indeed, in 1975 Argentina was just two years out of its penultimate period of military rule, a series of three consecutive governments that together constituted the self-proclaimed “Argentine Revolution” (1966-1973). Particularly in its later years, this dictatorship unleashed a wave of surveillance, torture, and disappearance that prefigured the extraordinary violence soon to be loosed on an even wider scale. This repression generated both armed resistance and a vigorous nonviolent response from laborers, lawyers, journalists, and students. Drawing on deep-seated traditions of resistance, these individuals built a dynamic and multifaceted movement to denounce state violence and to aid its victims.

Guided by a chapter of Ariel Eidelman’s excellent 2010 doctoral dissertation on repression during the “Argentine Revolution,” I have spent much of the past month in Buenos Aires tracking down whatever I can about the hardly-studied groups that opposed it. Organizations including the Foro de Buenos Aires por la Vigencia de los Derechos Humanos (Buenos Aires Forum for the Enforcement of Human Rights, founded 1971); the Trotskyist Comisión de Familiares de Presos Políticos, Estudiantiles y Gremiales (Commission of Relatives of Political, Union, and Student Prisoners, founded 1971); and the long-standing, Communist Party-linked Liga Argentina por los Derechos del Hombre (Argentine League for the Rights of Man, founded 1937) all produced detailed reports available in various archives across the city.

These reports share many of the elements that would later be cited as hallmarks of a supposedly depoliticized human rights discourse: an emphasis on testimony, a tendency to foreground victims’ suffering rather than their political commitments, and an insistence on the systematic illegality of dictatorial repression, to name just a few. Yet the documents I have been reading are indisputably not apolitical: they present state repression as the servant of imperialism, and they find its solution in the end of exploitation and the transformation of society, at home and across the world. They offer a vision, in other words, not of minimalist but of revolutionary human rights.

A close look at any of the organizations named above could readily substantiate this point, but none could do so as compellingly as the Movimiento Nacional contra la Represión y la Tortura, the National Movement Against Repression and Torture. Founded in June 1971 and active at least through 1973, the Movimiento’s trajectory can be traced through the personal papers of one of its leaders, the leftist lawyer and presidential brother, Silvio Frondizi. From the early 1940s until his murder at the hands of a state-linked death squad in September 1974, Frondizi led an array of significant leftist groups and publications, earning fame as one of the most prominent thinker-practitioners of the Argentine left. His papers, housed at the National Library and recently opened to public consultation, represent a picture window onto midcentury left-wing politics in general, and resistance to the “Argentine Revolution” in particular.

Frondizi and fellow left-wing lawyers on the cover of the magazine he directed, Nuevo Hombre (New Man). *[From Changüí Revista]*

Never kind to its opponents, the 1966-1973 dictatorship turned toward increasingly violent repression following the May 1969 outbreak of worker- and student-led uprisings across major Argentine cities. This state violence demonstrated the characteristics that would come to dominate the decade: an increasing role for the military in internal security; the kidnapping, rather than the arrest, of key opponents; frequent extrajudicial executions; enforced disappearance; and electric torture, sometimes in clandestine facilities, carried out by specialists and often supervised by doctors.

The Movimiento Nacional contra la Represión y la Tortura set about documenting and denouncing the ever-broadening use of these repressive tactics. It drew up lists of political prisoners, organized by province and detention facility, both to warn the government that these detainees had not escaped public notice, and also to paint a national picture of the scope and scale of repression. Testimonies of torture victims, quoted in press releases and disseminated at press conferences, presented first-person accounts sure to arouse horror and sympathy, and to allow the Movimiento to chart patterns of repression. A pair of press conferences held in Buenos Aires on April 12, 1972 is representative. The sessions addressed the experiences of five victims, four of whom had been tortured with the picana, or adapted electric cattle prod. One of the victims had also been drugged. Another, four months pregnant at the time of her detention, had lost her child. These cases, the Movimiento insisted, showed that torture had not only become systematic, but that, supervised by doctors and involving the use of drugs, it was also becoming medicalized. At a time when the national government had declared its commitment to “institutionalizing” the regime in advance of promised March 1973 presidential elections, the Movimiento argued that this increasingly structured repression led away from the “true path to institutionalize the country,” a goal that could only be accomplished by “respecting the principles of our constitution and ensuring genuine democracy.”

A picana eléctrica. [From Paraguay’s Museo Electrónico MEVES]

Intensifying state torture was not the only deviation from the path of “institutionalization” that concerned the Movimiento. Most of the political prisoners on whose behalf the Movimiento advocated were arrested by uniformed security agents and, perhaps after a lag of hours or days, acknowledged by the state. These “legal” detainees could still be tortured without consequence, as they were ultimately to be tried not in ordinary courts but in a newly created, military-dominated forum called the Cámara Federal en lo Penal (Federal Penal Chamber). Some high-value targets, however, were never to be tried at all. Instead, they were kidnapped by plainclothed agents and never seen again — a tactic that would come to be identified as “enforced disappearance” following the 1976 coup. Beginning with the December 1970 kidnapping of Néstor Martins, prominent lawyers began to join guerrilla fighters on the list of such victims, inspiring a new round of self-organization by the country’s left-wing law professionals.

The Movimiento joined other human rights groups in denouncing this terrifying practice. The most striking example of these efforts was a full-page advertisement placed in the magazine, América Latina, in July 1971. Titled, “Avoid a Kidnapping,” the ad advised anyone confronted by a group of armed, non-uniformed agents to resist detention by “every means possible,” and to try to draw attention to the event by screaming their own name. It also asked witnesses to immediately denounce kidnappings, and included the telephone numbers of newspapers and radio and TV stations to this end. The Movimiento understood that enforced disappearance relied on anonymity, and that the most effective means to help its victims was to publicly denounce their kidnapping from the first moment — a practice that would come to stand at the center of human rights advocacy following the 1976 coup.

The Movimiento was active far beyond Buenos Aires, denouncing state violence and participating in actions in cities including Rosario, Santa Fe, and Tucumán. Like the groups that would arise later in the decade, the organization also built channels of collaboration across civil society, including with the major proponent of liberation theology in Argentina, the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (Movement of Priests for the Third World). These “third-world priests” advocated revolutionary change as they challenged the government’s claim to defend “Western, Christian civilization” — a trope that predated 1976.

The Movimiento’s alliance-building saw its seminal expression in the Mesa Coordinadora contra la Represión y Tortura (Coordinating Board Against Repression and Torture), a collection of ten groups including the above-mentioned Foro de Buenos Aires, several political-prisoner advocacy organizations, and professional associations for psychiatrists, social workers, and journalists. Citing testimonies and forensic reports documenting torture, a May 1972 Mesa report linked deepening repression to an indictment of exploitation more generally. The regime’s campaign of “institutionalization,” the groups contended, was not about political liberalization but in fact the “institutionalization of repression against all those who seek to actively confront the policies of the dominant sectors of society.”

The Movimiento went even further in an undated document from late 1972 or early 1973. Titled, “Ellos son torturados y están presos por nosotros – Qué hacemos nosotros por ellos?” (“They are tortured and imprisoned for us – What do we do for them?”), the three-page text documents the “specialization” of the military to fight “subversion” by way of dedicated “tactial antiguerrilla commandos” operating in semi-clandestinity. Although this analysis anticipates the sort of human-rights reporting soon to reach global prominence, the very title of the document suggests an understanding of torture worlds apart from what is typically taken to represent “human rights discourse” — a promise on which the contents of the report deliver.

Repression, the Movimiento argues in “Ellos son torturados,” is not a security problem to be reformed away, but rather the inevitable expression of a capitalist system in freefall, in Argentina and around the world. “History demonstrates,” the report explains, “that no system gives up without a fight, and that facing its crisis and its foreseeable, definitive defeat, it will become ferocious and inhuman.” With the US losing in Vietnam and socialism ascendent in Chile, dominant elites staring down the “already visible collapse of the capitalist system” would “cast aside all ethical principles and transform them into various forms of Nazism-fascism.” The process already seen in “Germany, Italy, and Spain” earlier in the century was “now in progress in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, etc.,” where it was further amplified by “underdevelopment” and “imperialism.”

In this context of capitalist crisis, the Argentine government had called elections for March 1973. These elections were to take place under conditions of military rule and to exclude the most popular political figure in the country, once and future president Juan Domingo Perón. Paradoxically, they also enabled the regime to characterize a broad swath of the population as dangerous and therefore a legitimate target of state violence. “From this moment anyone who questions the electoral plan is called a subversive and for this can be tortured with the picana, quartered, and killed without the least inconvenience,” the report states. These subversives included not only armed guerrilla fighters, but also union activists, lawyers, teachers, and journalists. “From all of this,” the author says in closing, “we can reach only one conclusion: the people as a whole have been accused of subversion. And if being a subversive means opposing the current system, there is only one thing to say: LONG LIVE SUBVERSION. LONG LIVE THE WORKERS IN THE STREET. LONG LIVE PRISONERS AND TORTURE VICTIMS. DEATH TO TORTURERS AND THE POLICIES THAT SUSTAIN THEM.”

The Movimiento’s full-throated indictment is a powerful demonstration of a point that has largely fallen out of recent discussions of the transnational human rights movement: there is no reason that a defense of the victim qua victim need be an act of depoliticization. Some of the people subjected to torture and disappearance may have been guerrilleros, the Movimiento contended, but what united them all was their designation as “subversives,” a label that applied as readily to teachers and social workers as to armed revolutionaries. The abuses they suffered, the Movimiento claimed at a February 1972 press conference, constitute “an outrage against the most elemental human rights and a violation of all standing legislation.” The victims themselves were usually presented along these universalizing lines. Those cited in testimonies were almost never identified with a particular political current, and only occasionally were they linked to armed attacks against the dictatorship. But in the Movimiento’s rendition, these torturados were nonetheless fundamentally political agents, opponents of the regime — some of them justifiably violent — to whom society as a whole had incurred a massive debt. They have been tortured for us, the Movimiento implored. What do we do for them?

I do not mean, in calling attention to the work of the Movimiento and other members of the Mesa Coordinadora contra la Represión y Tortura, to suggest that there are not important contrasts between the strategies of these early-1970s groups and those that arose around the dictatorship of 1976. Such a claim would surely have seemed absurd to advocates from both periods. After all, to take just two examples, early-70s revolutionaries knew Emilio Mignone not as the future founder of the pioneering human rights group, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Center for Legal and Social Studies), but as a “technocrat of the Argentine Revolution,” given his service as Vice-Minister of Education from 1966 to 1970. Likewise, Jacobo Timerman, perhaps the most widely known victim of the 1976 dictatorship and later one of its loudest critics, appeared in a 1972 report about the persecution of reporters by the Buenos Aires Journalists’ Association not as a defender of human rights but rather as an object of censure when, as editor of the daily La Opinión, he provided the police with the home address of journalist Zito Lema. Timerman, Mignone, and Frondizi came from very different political traditions, and they spoke in distinct registers — a fact surely not lost on allies and opponents alike.

Timerman (second from right) receiving the Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia, 1981. *[From tea&deportea]*

If my goal is not to equate the opposition figures of the early and late 1970s, then why present the former as a challenge to the truism that the Argentine human rights movement was born in 1975? I can see at least three benefits to framing the Movimiento and its allies as an important if partial precedent for subsequent human rights activism.

First, this approach allows us to cultivate a broader conception of what “human rights” have meant, and thus to avoid oversimplified explanations of complex sociopolitical phenomena. Of course, diverse groups and individuals have long emphasized different sorts of rights; socialists may choose to focus on “second generation” economic and social rights, while liberals may look to “first generation” civil and political ones. This is hardly news. Yet the distance between the discourse of the Movimiento and the most prominent human rights groups of today demonstrates that the very same rights — in this case, the right to basic physical integrity, to not being tortured — can be understood in radically distinct manners. If torture is the product of a crisis of capitalist imperialism, then there is no incompatibility between human rights advocacy and calls for revolution, and the rise of the former cannot easily be called to account for the decline of the latter. (I find the vicious repression of revolutionaries a decent place to start the search for a better explanation.) Likewise, if denouncing torture can serve the ends of revolutionary socialism as well as incremental reformism, then the decline of the first at the expense of the second does not seem to be a compelling explanation for the explosion in talk of torture in the 1970s. (The torture of an enormous number of people with social capital strikes me as a more plausible point of departure.) This more expansive approach also casts the conflation by the region’s dictatorships of armed opposition and human rights in a fresh light — one which I look forward to exploring in a future post.

Second, turning to the early 1970s allows us to call up a broader cast of characters than has populated most recent histories of human rights — and to recognize that rather than crossing it sequentially, they shared the stage. At the same time that groups like Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists were forging the foundations of liberal cross-border advocacy, the Russell Tribunal and later the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples were building a parallel infrastructure for the left. This was also true in Argentina, where for the first year after the 1976 coup, the only source of reliable information on state repression was the Comisión Argentina de Derechos Humanos (CADHU, or the Argentine Human Rights Commission), which brought together many of the lawyers who had formed the backbone of the 1966-1973 opposition. Decidedly leftist in orientation, CADHU worked in exile to denounce regime violence and played a leading role in the creation of two important UN instruments, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (formed in 1980) and the 1984 Convention Against Torture. Keeping sight of this diverse spectrum can also help us see what many have characterized as the Madres’ anti-imperialist “radicalization” of the 1990s less as a break with the mainstream human rights movement than as an embrace of one of the strains that has long comprised it.

Finally, bringing 1966-1973 back into the picture affords the opportunity to think transnationally about repression in the Southern Cone. This is true not only because opposition to the “Revolución Argentina” was itself transnational, though indeed it was — the Foro de Buenos Aires, for instance, emerged from a meeting of Latin American scope held at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1971, and Frondizi opposed a 1972 Argentine crackdown on refugees from Bolivia’s 1971 coup as a self-destructive “competition with Brazil” to play a sub-imperial role in the region. The longer timeframe also enables us to see parallels between militant responses to Brazilian and Argentine repression in the early 1970s and to thereby locate the two countries, not at sequential points along a timeline of repression and response, but rather in a single, understudied regional system.

Each of these points demands much more elaboration. Long as this post has been, any one could be at the center of its own dissertation. I share these thoughts here in raw form, to help myself work through an illuminating set of documents from an under-discussed chapter in the all-too-relevant history of state repression and the brave people who oppose it.

1976

One of the main reasons I am excited to think transnationally about torture and intelligence acquisition in southern South America from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, is the opportunity it affords to move beyond the common (if commonly unstated) assumption that coups and democratic transitions are the most important drivers of political change in the region. The gap between dictatorship and democracy matters, of course, but I believe that it is not wide enough, on its own, to accommodate the new counterinsurgent ideologies and repressive techniques that so deeply marked the late twentieth-century Southern Cone.

This may seem like a strange way to introduce a blog post titled “1976.” It was in March of that year, after all, that the Argentine military seized political power in a long-anticipated coup, vastly accelerating a campaign of quasi-secret kidnapping, torture, and disappearance that was to claim more lives than any other in the region. What could a focus on this already-seminal year contribute to a transnational reevaluation of typical dictatorship-bounded periodizations?

Quite a bit, I believe. I have spent the past week examining the records of Uruguay’s 1985-86 parliamentary investigation into the killings of two prominent former legislators, Zelmar Michelini and Hector Gutiérrez Ruiz, in Buenos Aires in May 1976. The two lawmakers had fled Uruguay after the country’s 1973 coup, following a well-beaten path of exile to the Argentine capital. Amid a rising wave of political violence in Argentina, the two worked to denounce the increasingly open repression of their home country. Michelini in particular established close ties to international human rights groups while also becoming a fixture of the “Tortoni circle” that turned an iconic Buenos Aires café into the de facto capitol of free Uruguay.

On May 18, 1976, however, the two were kidnapped by an Uruguayan commando team with extensive Argentine support. Three days later, their bodies were discovered, along with those of Tupamaro militants Rosario del Carmen Barredo and William Whitelaw, abandoned in the trunk of a car in an industrial stretch of Buenos Aires. All four had been shot in the head.

Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz represent a tiny subset of those killed by repressive Southern Cone states in 1976. Yet two documents from among the thousands of pages compiled by the 1985-86 parliamentary inquiry help us understand the implications of their murders. The first is a transcription of the testimony that Wilson Ferreira Aldunate gave before the investigative commission in June 1985. A member of Uruguay’s traditionally conservative National Party, Ferreira fled in 1973 to Buenos Aires, where he established himself as one of the harshest critics of Uruguayan military rule. While Michelini had been a senator of the opposing Colorado Party, he and Ferreira grew close through their shared criticisms of the dictatorship.

Michelini’s killing, Ferreira explained to the commission in 1985, came as a terrifying shock. It had long been clear that Michelini was in significant danger; since 1972 Michelini’s daughter Elisa had been in the custody of the Uruguayan authorities, and his own passport had been cancelled in late 1975.¹ Michelini himself had even begun to speak publicly about what he feared the Uruguayan military might do to silence his criticisms.

Nonetheless, when they first learned that Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz had been kidnapped, the reaction of Ferreira and fellow members of the Tortoni circle was one of

…protest at the discourtesy, because we supposed that they would be liberated that night. So it seemed outrageous, this lack of respect for two illustrious citizens to whom Argentina had granted refuge. Nobody imagined that they could be killed. It was so monstrous that it didn’t cross anybody’s mind…. When Zelmar said that if he turned up in Montevideo we should know it wasn’t his choice, it was because he – unlike the rest of us – understood that he could be so monstrously killed.

Ferreira’s testimony reveals something that Michelini, alone among the Tortoni circle, had come to understand: the rules of engagement were changing in the Southern Cone. Before May 1976, Ferreira had presumed that only those linked to armed insurgency were at risk of death, and that exile in one country of the region meant a degree of protection from repression by another. But Michelini, though his collaboration with the region’s emerging human rights network, understood that these rules no longer applied. Just a few months before, in late November 1975, representatives of the region’s security services had gathered in Santiago, Chile to constitute the transnational Condor system, which used shared intelligence and joint death-squad operations to take out regime opponents across and beyond South America. The architects of Condor made clear that their targets included not only armed insurgents but also the critics who used emerging transnational human rights networks to draw attention to regime crimes. Nonviolent opponents of the national security state were learning to use the growing international prominence of individual human rights to their advantage, for instance by making South American abuses a key focus of a young Amnesty International’s first issue-specific campaign, which targeted torture worldwide. Indeed, as the Condor founders were meeting in late 1975, Amnesty was drawing on information provided by Michelini and other dissidents to launch a year-long attack on torture in Uruguay, the first country-specific effort of such focused intensity in the group’s history.

These international denunciations were clearly on the minds of the Uruguayan operatives who took out Gutiérrez Ruiz and Michelini. How do we know this? Because in addition to the four victims whose bodies were discovered in Buenos Aires on May 21, 1976, two others were kidnapped in linked operations the day before: banker José Luis Azarola Saint and his brother Juan Ignacio. José Luis, who lived in Montevideo, was a friend of Michelini’s; Juan Ignacio was not, but he, like Michelini, was living in Buenos Aires. The two brothers had the misfortune of appearing in Michelini’s address book – enough to mark them for simultaneous kidnapping, on opposite sides of the River Plate.

In testimony before the parliamentary commission of 1985, José Luis Azarola Saint explained that when a heavily armed commando unit burst into his Montevideo home, tearing it apart in a frantic search for incriminating items, they sought two things above all others: guns and “Amnesty International documents.” As his subsequent interrogation unfolded, it became clear that Azarola’s supposed ties to human rights groups were his tormentors’ central preoccupation. “They asked me if I knew anything about torture, about the submarine [asphyxiation, often in wastewater] or picanas [electric cattle prods], if I knew they were applied in Libertad [a prominent Uruguayan prison] or anywhere else.” Both he and his brother managed to convince their captors that they did not. After 48 hours of beatings, stress positions, and long interrogations, the two were threatened with death should they tell anyone what had happened to them, and released.

Azarola’s testimony suggests that the crime for which Michelini and Gutiérrez Ruiz were responsible was not a manufactured link to armed “subversion”; it was a willingness to denounce the systematic tortures that the Uruguayan dictatorship was employing against its adversaries of all sorts. By 1976, the repressive regimes of Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay had achieved near total military success against their guerrilla opponents; now it was the nonviolent critics of their tactics who would come into the crosshairs. Born at this moment of counterinsurgent advance and mounting anti-torture criticism, the Argentine regime would take its violence even further than its neighbors. With testimonio in global ascendance, Argentina’s generals forewent execution and imprisonment in favor of a strategy that would leave far fewer witnesses, one of a piece with Condor’s transnational death squads: extermination.

* * *

The CIA Channels its Inner Authoritarian

On Monday, the US Director of National Intelligence delivered the second of at least three tranches of newly declassified government documents concerning Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship. This latest batch seemed to hold greater promise than the first, as its contents are drawn largely from the briefings, memos, and reports prepared for three presidents (and one unusually powerful vice president) by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organs. Despite scattered sensationalistic claims in the press, the documents do not appear to include any true bombshells. Indeed, the closest that they come to shocking is their confirmation, reported by the National Security Archive yesterday, that the CIA knew of attempts by agents of the six-country Operation Condor network to assassinate targets in Europe, possibly including human rights activists. (Scholars and journalists have already documented these efforts, though we have never seen such clear proof that the CIA itself knew about them.)

What these documents lack in explosive power, however, they make up for in granularity, illuminating in remarkable detail one aspect of the “intelligence community” (IC) that has received far too little attention: its relationship to the presidency. Then as now, the briefing materials that the CIA and other agencies prepare for the president are key shapers of (sadly still just) his worldview. This dynamic is particularly salient at present, with the incoming president refusing to receive Presidential Daily Briefs and the CIA using charges of Russian election interference to all but openly declare its opposition to Trump. So let’s dig in and take a close look at one particularly interesting document from the tranche: a November 1978 CIA assessment of Southern Cone perceptions of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy in the region, which in this case includes Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay — five countries led at the time by extraordinarily repressive right-wing authoritarian regimes.

First, though, some background. When it comes to relationships with the IC, Carter is to my mind the most interesting of recent presidents. He came into office having decided, at the tail end of his presidential campaign, to overhaul the United States’ relationship to the world — and its own Vietnam War-bruised self-image — by making human rights the center of US foreign policy. This proved to be a tremendous challenge. While a slice of the State Department, led by Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Patricia Derian, worked to execute Carter’s promised turn, they met fierce resistance from a foreign relations and security establishment willing to brook little deviance from the “pragmatic” Kissingerian approach of the past. And future, of course — the establishment largely won in the end. Nonetheless, for a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Derian and a band of sympathetic Congressional Democrats did manage to make human rights an issue central to the US’ relationship with the Southern Cone — and, in turn, to the president’s relationship with the IC.

It was within this context that the CIA presented Carter with its November 1978 analysis of Southern Cone reactions to the US emphasis on human rights. Readable in its entirety at the bottom of this post, the memo reveals the subtlety of CIA manipulation at work. Take, for example, the summary that opens the document:

The Southern Cone governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay have a somewhat cynical view of US policies toward Latin America. The perspective is shaped by the conviction that Washington’s preoccupation since the mid 1960s with other parts of the world has left the US out of touch with Latin American realities. They view US policy toward their region as inconsistent, incoherent, and unreasonably punitive. There is a strong feeling that in the broader arena the US has been outmaneuvered by the Soviets and is losing its ability to lead the West.

By tying US economic and especially military aid to improvements in civil liberties and detainee treatment, Carter and his allies have fallen “out of touch” with the “realities” of the region — in other words, with the view, long championed by the CIA and by the security establishment at large, that Latin America was at risk of falling into Soviet hands, a risk that only strong (and bloody) leadership could mitigate. The risks are so great that in the next two sentences the report’s authors go right for the jugular, labeling Carter’s policies not only “inconsistent” and “incoherent,” but indicative of a broader failure of the US to keep the USSR in line and effectively “lead the West.”

But wait, you might object, isn’t the CIA simply relaying the perceptions of others? Indeed — and therein lies the very brilliance of the report. By channeling the voices of their stated subjects (the title promises an approximation of “Southern Cone perceptions,” after all), the memo’s authors can deliver a damning critique of U.S. foreign policy without appearing insubordinate, and thereby maximize their chances of countering opponents like Derian.

Nonetheless, the authors’ voice slips through at times – though they can be hard to spot, given how little they depart from the regimes’ own perspectives. For instance, in discussing an upcoming UN vote concerning Chile, the memo’s authors explain that “the Chileans will be interested in the US vote on the UN Human Rights Committee’s attempt to provide funds to ‘victims’ of Chilean human rights violations.” The word “victims” surrounded by quotation marks stands out as an inadvertent revelation, suggesting the authors’ skepticism as to the status of these individuals, then denounced as terrorists by regime sympathizers.

The authors then turn to broader Chilean frustrations with the US, noting that Chile’s leaders

…believe that there is a small coterie in Washington that is actively working to undermine the Pinochet regime. They find it incomprehensible that the US does not realize that the stringent government controls in Chile were a necessary course of action after the overthrow of the Marxist Allende regime.

By “stringent government controls,” the authors mean, of course, the extrajudicial execution of some 3,000 and the torture of many thousands more.

Such abuses, however, are never enumerated in the report. Instead, the authors include list after eulogistic list of the many human rights improvements made by these regimes in recent years. These improvements are the only exception to the otherwise unfailingly negative tone of the memo. Indeed, while Southern Cone states are clearly upset about Carter’s approach to diplomacy,

This does not mean that US human rights policy has had a completely negative impact on the area. On the contrary, police and military officials in these countries are now sensitized to human rights considerations. Every chief of state in the area claims to have made clear to his subordinates that torture and arbitrary arrest will no longer be tolerated. All of these countries have shown general improvement during the past year in their treatment of prisoners.

The CIA has eyes and ears across the continent; while it can report honesty that every regional leader now “claims” to have told police and military officials to stop torturing, it cannot possibly have believed that these statements carried the weight of truth. Yet rather than question these purported advances, the authors find an altogether distinct concern to raise. Southern Cone governments feel, they explain, that “these improvements go unacknowledged by Washington, and moreover, the torrent of criticism, adversary treatment, and antagonistic US legislation has continued.” The implication is clear; Congressional Democrats and the White House need to reward “these improvements” by loosening human rights-based restrictions and drawing valuable allies closer to the US.

The worldview undergirding this implication comes most clearly into focus in the report’s most fascinating section, “Public Views of US Policies.” While conceding the difficulty of getting an accurate view of public sentiment in the Southern Cone, the authors nonetheless claim that “most citizens seem to support the military governments; the rest are either unconcerned with politics or belong to a declared opposition.”“Judging from newspaper commentary and personal conversations,” moreover, “US human rights policy has had little impact on the general populace.”

This characterization of public sentiments may indeed by correct; what little research has been done on the question suggests that the region’s dictatorships did indeed enjoy substantial popular backing, especially from the middle and upper classes. Yet the CIA memo includes no discussion of the factors that could have contributed to such sentiments, questions of great relevance to US policymaking. Southern Cone dictatorships worked hard to exaggerate the threat posed by armed insurgents already decimated by repression, limit access to information concerning abuses, and terrify those who might think to step out of line and publicly criticize the regime. Those who dared to do so nonetheless receive no credit in the CIA’s discussion of “public views”; instead, they are cast uniformly — and suspiciously — as members of the “declared opposition.” Indeed, the authors continue, “some political groups that have long opposed the various governments and other groups representing civil and human rights causes have used the policy to air their own specific grievances. Liberal clergy have also cited the policy as being similar to their own programs.” If you’re familiar with the CIA of the 1970s, you’ll know that dissent is only celebrated east of the Iron Curtain, and “liberal clergy” is a phrase never uttered admiringly. The implicit criticism of these characterizations is echoed later in the report, in the authors’ contention that Chile’s longstanding opposition political parties “view US human rights policy as made to order for their own campaign against the government.”

“Their own campaign,” “declared opposition” — these are phrases designed to emphasize that by failing to appreciate the complex political realities of the Southern Cone, Carter is playing the stooge, allowing the US to serve the interests of those who aren’t likely to put Washington’s needs front and center. Reading this sustained but ingeniously packages assault on the coherence and effectiveness of Carter’s human rights policy, I can’t help but wonder: when its authors note, toward the middle of the report, a “growing opinion in Brazil that the US has lost or is losing its resolve and even some of its capacity as a world power,” might they really have meant to say, in the CIA?

Southern Cone Perceptions