Declassified Memo Suggests Kissinger Green Lighted ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON – A declassified American government document to be released today is fueling charges by some historians that Henry Kissinger, while serving as secretary of state, gave a “green light” in 1976 to Argentina’s military rulers for the launching of their “dirty war” against leftist opponents and other foes of the junta.
The document – a 13-page Memorandum of Conversation detailing a meeting in Santiago on June 10, 1976, between Mr. Kissinger and the Argentine foreign minister, Admiral Augusto Guzzetti – is being greeted by longtime Kissinger critics as proof that Mr. Kissinger played a key role in the “dirty war” by reassuring the Argentine military that they had nothing to fear from Washington.
But Kissinger defenders and one of the participants at the 1976 meeting, William Rogers, who was then an undersecretary of state, dismiss claims that the memo represents a smoking gun, and they maintain critics are intent on reading the memo out of context and ignoring the facts.
According to the memo, Admiral Guzetti described the counterterrorist campaign being conducted and sought assistance from Washington to help the junta with Argentina’s deepening economic crisis. On the repression that was already underway, Mr. Kissinger responded: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.”
Mr. Kissinger added: “We have followed events in Argentina closely… We are aware you are in a difficult period. It is a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist activities tend to merge without any clear separation. We understand you must establish authority.”
Part of a secret archive on U.S.-Argentine diplomacy declassified following a visit by then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Buenos Aires in 2000, the memo is to be published today by the National Security Archive, an independent research group based at George Washington University.
“The Argentine generals got a clear message from the secretary in the sense that they had carte blanche for the dirty war,” said Carlos Osorio, Director of the Southern Cone Documentation Project at the archive. “The Memorandum of Conversation confirms scholars’ and historians’ claims that Kissinger gave the green light to the dirty war of the Argentine military during the June 1976 meeting with Guzzetti in Santiago,” he said.
His assessment is supported by Martin Edwin Andersen, author of “Dossier Secreto: Argentina and the Myth of the Dirty War.” He claims: “This memo closes the case on Kissinger’s involvement in the illegal repression.”
Those views are disputed, though, by Marc Falcoff, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former consultant to the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America that was chaired by Mr. Kissinger. He argues: “The so-called dirty war did not start under the military junta and with the overthrow of Peron. It was already happening and the idea that the generals needed our permission to do what they wanted is ludicrous. The mindset of the Argentine military at the time was that the U.S. was losing the Cold War and in retreat and that they had to step up and do what was needed. It is naive and inaccurate to say they waited for us for a green light.”
Mr. Rogers argues that critics misunderstand the whole context of the meeting and also do not appreciate what the administration knew at the time about human rights violations. “We didn’t know about the violations and in no way was the meeting a matter of tolerating human rights violations or telling the military that they could go out and shoot people, throw them out of planes and garrote them. We learned about that later.”
He says: “The context was that the country was being ripped apart by violence and it was a terrible period with right-wingers and left-wingers slaughtering each other. We were very worried about Argentina and were hoping, as many other governments were, that the military could re-establish order and stabilize the country.”
Mr. Rogers adds: “Critics of Henry forget that we were in Santiago for an assembly of the Organization of American States and at that assembly Henry made a strong speech about the importance of human rights. Also, when we started to understand about human rights violations in Argentina and in neighboring countries, Henry sent out on August 23rd a cable to all our ambassadors in the region instructing them to tell the heads of state that unless they stopped they would suffer for it in the form of U.S. support and aid programs. That was a rare cable, signed by him himself to emphasize its importance.”
Writer Christopher Hitchens, author of “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, a book that accuses Mr. Kissinger of committing war crimes in a number of countries, including Chile, Vietnam, Cyprus and Indonesia, among others, says Mr. Rogers is being disingenuous. “June 1976 is too late to argue that they did not know about human rights violations. I would like to know in what context this means anything other than an encouragement and endorsement of the dirty war. Again we have to be grateful to the declassification system for giving the lie to Kissinger’s falsification.”
Mr. Hitchens and other critics point out that at the time of the Santiago meeting, human rights violations by the Argentine military were starting to prompt a clamor internationally and on Capitol Hill. The week before the meeting, the American ambassador to Argentina, Robert Hill, had delivered a demarche to Admiral Guzzetti protesting both the kidnapping and torture of three American women, among them a Fulbright coordinator for Argentina, Elida Messina, and a wave of attacks on political refugees from neighboring countries.
They criticize Mr. Kissinger for not raising the issue. During the conversation with Admiral Guzzetti, Mr. Kissinger only notes: “In the United States we have strong domestic pressures to do something on human rights… We want you to succeed. We do not want to harass you.”
The so-called dirty war is estimated to have claimed up to 30,000 lives.
Mr. Kissinger, who is traveling, was unavailable for comment.