Dirty War (Argentina, 1976-83)

The Dirty War in Argentina, from 1976-1983, was a seven-year dictatorship and counterinsurgency campaign waged by the Argentinian military junta against left-wing guerrillas and supporting civilians. Tens of thousands of Argentinian nationals, both guerrillas and sympathizers among the civilian population, were abducted by military task groups and supporting volunteer civilian Triple A military death squads often in the middle of the night. They were taken to secret government detention centers where they were eventually released or killed. These people (including survivors from the detention camps) are known as internationally as "los desaparecidos" or detenidos-desaparecidos ("the disappeared" or "detained disappeared").

Recently discovered documents of the Chilean Secret Police (DINA) cite an official estimate by the Argentinian Army's 601st Intelligence Battalion (Batallón de Inteligencia 601) of 22,000 killed and/or disappeared between 1975 and mid-1978. During this period, it was later established that at least 12,000 "disappeared" were in fact detainees held under National Executive Power (Poder Ejecutivo Nacional or PEN), and kept in detention camps throughout Argentina before eventually being freed under diplomatic pressure.

This unexpected Argentinian military defeat during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 hastened the fall of the unpopular military junta that had lost the propaganda war, turning Argentina into a pariah state, and in mid-1982 Lieutenant-General Reynaldo Bignone (head of the interim government) restored basic civil liberties and retracted its ban on left-wing political parties. The Argentinian military dictatorship ended when Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín's UCR (Unión Cívica Radical or Radical Civic Union) civilian government took control of the country on December 10, 1983.

Many people, 7,158-13,000, both Peronist and Marxist guerrillas as well as civilian opponents of the Argentinian military regime were "disappeared". By the end of 1978, 22,000 thousand Argentinians (according to an often-quoted Chilean military intelligence report) had been taken to secret government detention centers where they were killed or eventually freed under international diplomatic pressure.

The leftist guerrillas caused at least 5,000 casualties among the military and police forces, according to a recent article by Spanish journalist Carmen Muñoz from Periódico ABC in 2011.

Origins

The origins of the Dirty War have long been debated, with Professor Patricia Marchak in God's Assassins: State Terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s and Professor Carlos Marcelo Shäferstein in Cien años de subversión en Argentina and historians Alejandro García and Antonius C. G. M. Robben arguing the political violence started with the anarchist bombing campaigns and armed uprisings in Buenos Aires and the Patagonia in the 1910s and 1920s. During the Patagonia uprisings in the Santa Cruz province in 1921 and 1922, some 300 anarchist were killed in action or executed by the Argentinian Army. During the Buenos Aires uprisings in 1919, some 140 anarchists were killed and several buildings in the capital were burnt down.

Prior to the armed uprisings, several efforts were made to interrupt the celebrations marking 100 years of Argentinian independence on 25 May 1910, with an anarchists handing over a hand-held bomb to a child to take inside a cathedral in Buenos Aires, but the bomb exploded prematurely killing the minor and mutilating another boy.

On 28 June 1910, another anarchist bomb exploded inside the Teatro Colón (in the Argentinian capital) and 20 theatregoers were gravely wounded, and the Argentinian senate approved soon after the death penalty for those anarchists responsible for deaths. On 9 July 1916, an anarchist armed with a hand-gun tried to kill the Argentinian president, Victorino de la Plaza. The attempted assassination took place while the president attended a military parade in Buenos Aires, during the centennial celebrations marking Argentinian independence from Spain.

On 9 February 1918, violent strikes took place in the main Argentinian cities and army units were rushed to the affected areas after anarchists sabotaged train lines and burnt carriages transporting wheat to Buenos Aires for exportation. Argentinian left-wing activists at the time printed and widely distributed, even among conscripts, a newspaper promoting a Communist Revolution in Argentina.

The left-wing violence continued throughout the 1920s. On 24 December 1927 two powerful anarchist bombs went off in two US-owned banks in downtown Buenos Aires, killing two employees. On 23 May 1923, the anarchists detonate another bomb inside the Italian consulate in the Argentinian capital, killing 9 and wounding 41, the majority of them innocent civilians. On 24 December, Argentinian president Hipólito Yrigoyen narrowly survived an attempt on his life. The would-be murderer, 44 year-old Italian anarchist Gualterio Marinelli is killed by return fire from the protecting police detachment.

President Juan Perón

A military coup overthrew president Juan Domingo Perón and restored the Argentinian political right to power in 1955. During the subsequent 18 years of exile, Perón used the Argentinian political left and Montoneros guerrillas as a primary means of breaking down law and order. He also used them to unite the left-wing trade unions in favour of Peronism in order to return to Argentinian presidency.

Guerrillas

Argentina experienced three failed attempts at rural guerrilla warfare between 1959 and 1969. At that point, the insurgents decided in favor of urban guerilla warfare. It seemed obvious that they would be safer and more relevant in crowded cities than in isolated rural areas.

Between the ousting of president Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 and his return from exile in 1973, a number of urban left-wing guerrilla organizations emerged. Six major groups - two Marxist-Maoist- Guevarrist-oriented, and four populist-socialist Peronist-oriented - eventually disbanded or joined the Marxist ERP or the Peronist Montoneros. The Montoneros became the largest and most active of the two revolutionary movements, but fought alongside the ERP in Tucumán province.

Rural guerrilla warfare

A determined effort on the part of the Argentinian left was made at creating a guerrilla front in Tucumán province. In 1974, Marxist admirers of Che Guevarra, (the People’s Revolutionary Army [ERP]) took control of the remote province of Tucumán and declared it an independent state. In 1975 the Argentinian Army 5th Mountain Infantry Brigae under Brigadier-General Edgar Vilas was ordered to Tucumán to eradicate the insurgents and restore the province to the Argentinian state, and did so swiftly and ruthlessly.

Urban guerilla warfare

The Montonero insurgent leadership made a conscious decision to “militarize” the struggle and attack directly the Argentinian police and military forces in the main cities. The political objectives that originally motivated the escalation were sacrificed to military considerations. The groups that were supposed to bring national and social liberation to the country developed into mirror images of the Argentinian armed forces, and legitimizing political-psychological efforts were considered unproductive niceties.

During the month of August 1975, the Argentine city of Córdoba witnessed a number of armed actions on the part of the left-wing guerrillas that resulted in the death of at least five policemen and units of the elite 4th Airborne Infantry Brigade were obliged to be called in to stand guard at strategic points around the city after the bombing of police headquarters and the police radio communications centre.

On 13 January 1976, left-wing militants fire to a Buenos Aires commuter train after forcing passengers to descend at gunpoint. On 2 February 1976 about fifty Montoneros attacked the Juan Vucetich Police Academy in Buenos Aires in an attempt to capture the helicopter-gunships there, but were repelled in heavy fighting. In the week preceding the military coup, the Montoneros killed 13 policemen as part of its Third National Military Campaign. On 15 March, a powerful guerrilla bomb exploded next to the Argentine Army Headquarters, smashing windows in the nearby Casa Rosada and wounding 15 military personnel and 6 civilians as well as killing a civilian passerby. During 1976, Videla himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in which a time bomb planted in the reviewing stand at the vast Campo de Mayo barracks blew out a meter-wide hole at the exact spot where he had been standing.

On 29 September 1976 fierce fighting took place in the Floresta suburb of Buenos Aires, where one-hundred soldiers and policemen were forced to use bazookas and armored cars against heavily armed guerrillas. On 2 October, Lieutenant-General Jorge Videla narrowly escaped death when a bomb packed in metal tubing supporting a reviewing stand at the Campo de Mayo army barracks exploded only moments after he left. On 17 October a bomb blast in an Army Club Cinema in downtown Buenos Aires killed 11 and wounded about 50 officers and their families. On 15 December, another bomb planted in a Defense Ministry movie hall killed at least 14 and injured 30 officers and their families. By the first anniversary of the coup that ousted President Isabel Perón, 124 soldiers and police had been killed in incidents involving left wing guerrillas in what the military referred to as, "the Dirty War".

Power vaccum

After the death of the controversial President Juan Perón in 1974, his wife, Isabel Perón, assumed power. However, she was not very strong politically and a military junta led a coup against her and removed her from office. This military junta maintained its grip on power by cracking down on anybody whom they believed was associated with the guerrillas. The new regime under General Jorge Rafaél Videla attempted to apply a monetarist solution to economic problems and launched what it called the war against subversion, which came to be widely known to others as the "Dirty War", in an attempt to defeat definitively left-wing guerrilla activity that was out of control by early 1976.

National Reorganization Process

With the initial support of the majority of the Argentinian population, the military regime undertook widespread kidnappings, torture, and murder — not only of the violent guerrillas of the left but also the unarmed leftist political activists, guerrilla sympathizers, and their lawyers and families. The war against subversion was viewed within the military's National Security Doctrine as the beginning of "World War III," which it defined as a struggle against the efforts of communism for world supremacy. In seven years as many as 30,000 Argentines were either killed or imprisoned.

Military victory was achieved after three years of limited open fighting and a stream of kidnappings, disappearances and imprisonments that brought a total breakdown of due process for those suspected of being connected with the guerrillas. By June 1978 the guerrillas were all but eliminated, and the military junta declared victory. By 1980 the last vestiges of the terrorist groups had died out, and the disappearances had stopped.

In the view of the National Reorganization Process (Proceso de Reorganización Nacional or Proceso), the eradication of subversion meant not only the guerrillas' activities, but also any form of left-wing activism whether found in the universities, the church, the press, the factory, or even the arts or culture. Building a new national framework required eradicating the Peronists, the left-wing trade unions, parliamentary radicals and leftists. To build the economy required eliminating an industrial sector populated by a blue-collar worker class sympathetic to the guerrillas.

Victims

Everyone was viewed with suspicion and tens of thousands were detained at one point: union leaders who agitated for wage increases and militancy in the US and European-owned car plants in Argentina, students who were members of the Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios (Union of High School Students or UES), journalists like Rodolfo Jorge Walsh that were not fearful of the dictatorship, human-rights lawyers who were part of suspect professions, young communists, socialists, nuns and priests that had ties with the Third World Priest Movement. And family members or friends of any of them; people that financially supported them or hid them from the military.

Children of the Disappeared

With the return of democracy, human rights groups in Argentina started searching for the grandchildren stolen from detained female guerrillas and civilians and adopted in military circle. At the time, the Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo or Abuelas), had records of 172 children who disappeared together with their parents or were born at the numerous detention camps and had not been returned to their families.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo now claim up to 500 grandchildren were adopted by military families. 121 were admittedly located and reunited with their biological families by late 2016 with the announcement that Gustavo Menna, son of Domingo Mingo Menna, and Ana María La Aní Lanzillotto (both ERP militants) had been discovered. On 13 April 2000, the grandmothers received a tip off that the birth certificate of Rosa Roisinblit's infant grandson, born in detention, had been falsified and the child given to an Air Force civil employee and his wife. Following the anonymous phone call, he was located and agreed to a DNA blood test, confirming his true identity. Rodolfo Fernando, grandson of Roisinblit, is the first known newborn of missing children returned to his family through the work of the grandmothers. Roisinblit's daughter, 25-year-old Patricia Julia Roisinblit de Perez, who was a Montoneros member, was kidnapped along with her husband, 24-year-old José Martínas Pérez Rojo, on 6 October 1978.

The case of Maria Eugenia Sampallo (born some time in 1978) also received considerable attention. Sampallo sued the couple who adopted her illegally as a baby after her parents disappeared, both admittedly Montoneros. Her grandmother spent 24 years looking for her. The case was filed in 2001, after DNA tests indicated that Osvaldo Rivas and Maria Cristina Gomez were not her biological parents. They, along with Army Captain Enrique Berthier, who furnished the couple with the baby, were sentenced respectively to 8, 7 and 10 years in prison for kidnapping during the Kirchner government.

Military downfall

Although the military junta carried out its successful war against suspected subversives throughout its entire existence, it was ironically a foreign foe allied with the Chilean military government of General Augusto Pinochet which brought the Argentinian regime to an end. In the early 1980s, it became clear to both the world and the Argentinian people that the military junta was behind the brutal disappearances and imprisonment of tens of thousands of kidnappings. The junta, facing increasing opposition over its human rights record, as well as mounting allegations of corruption, sought to allay domestic criticism by launching a successful campaign to regain Las Islas Malvinas (the Falkland Islands).

British military historian Martin Middlebrook argues that the military junta occupied the Falklands/Malvinas in order to suppress its opposition, principally the exiled Peronists, because the cost - measured in terms of legitimacy - of suppressing their supporters was relatively low at the beginning of the junta's rule. But the cost of suppression increased over time because of the military regime's ruthless suppression of anyone who supported the guerrillas, its failed economic policies, and its defeat in the Falkland Islands/Malvinas War, and thus it had to tolerate its opposition and eventually return power to civilian authority.

The Falklands/Malvinas Islands had been a thorn in the relations between Argentina and Britain, which reoccupied them in 1833, and Argentina, which claimed them since independence. The junta had thought that it could occupy these islands without a British military response, regaining its popularity and control over its people in the process. However, the government was wrong in its conclusions when 72 days after the initial Argentinian military operations, British army and marine units won the ground war, having captured over 11,000 Argentinians in the process.

External links

• Encyclopædia Britannica article