What was underway in Argentina was an effort to eradicate the intellectual base on which this small handful of active terrorists existed, and it got out of control. And they spent hours trying to convince me, the ambassador, and major policy figures from Washington, D.C., that their battle was really in the interest of saving western civilization and that they should have been applauded and rewarded and not distanced and not penalized for their actions. But Harris and in Washington, Assistant Secretary of State Patricia Derian refused to go along. Derian met with the Argentine Junta three times and made Argentina a principal target of the Carter administration's then revolutionary policy of concern for human rights. Nobody likes to hear the truth.
Nobody expects to be called on it.
It's sort of like wife beating in the old days. There's a kind of gentleman's agreement that went on forever where it didn't matter what you did to your own citizens. So when they're confronted not only with the statement, the cruel statement of what they're doing, but also the facts of it, they're astonished. I mean, you have to say that. Argentines credit pressure from the Carter administration for decreasing the number of disappearances, but it was Argentina's defeat in the Falklands in 1982 that finally brought an end to military rule.