KISSINGER TO ARGENTINES ON DIRTY WAR: "THE QUICKER YOU SUCCEED THE BETTER"
Newly declassified documents show Secretary of State gave green light to junta, Contradict official line that Argentines "heard only what [they] wanted to hear."
While military dictatorship committed massive human rights abuses in 1976, Kissinger advised "If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better."
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB104/index.htm
Washington, D.C., 3 December 2003 – Newly declassified State Department documents obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act show that in October 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and high ranking U.S. officials gave their full support to the Argentine military junta and urged them to hurry up and finish the "dirty war" before the U.S. Congress cut military aid.
Posted on the Web today at www.nsarchive.org, the new documents are two memoranda of conversations (memcons) with the visiting Argentine foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti – one with Kissinger himself on October 7, 1976. At the time, the U.S. Congress was about to approve sanctions against the Argentine regime because of widespread reports of human rights abuses by the junta. A post-junta truth commission found that the Argentine military had "disappeared" at least 10,000 Argentines in the so-called "dirty war" against "subversion" and "terrorists" between 1976 and 1983; human rights groups in Argentina put the number at closer to 30,000.
According to the verbatim memcon, Secretary of State Kissinger told Guzzetti: "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better… The human rights problem is a growing one. Your Ambassador can apprise you. We want a stable situation. We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help."
The memcons contradict the official line given by Assistant Secretary of State Harry Shlaudeman in response to complaints from the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires that Guzzetti had come back "euphoric" and "convinced that there is no real problem with the USG" over human rights. Shlaudeman cabled, "Guz;etti [sic] heard only what he wanted to hear."
The two new memcons were not among the 4700 documents released in August 2002 by the Argentina Declassification Project of the U.S. Department of State. Much to the credit of Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor, Madeleine Albright, who began the project, that release made front page news in Argentina, contributed dramatically to civilian control of the military, provided documentation on military decision making now being used in court cases related to the "dirty war," and for some of the families of the "disappeared," gave the first available evidence of what had actually happened to their loved ones.
The State Department project, however, did not include documents from the often-vigorous internal U.S. policy debates over Argentina; and neither the CIA nor the Pentagon participated in the declassification effort. Carlos Osorio and Kathleen Costar of the National Security Archive obtained the new memcons in November 2003 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the Department of State in November 2002, seeking to fill in the missing pieces from the larger release.
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB104/index.htm
-- Michael Pugliese American imperialism has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic. Harold Innis, 1948 http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm