Source: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/argentina/argen1201-11.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 18:07:29+00:00

Document:
Until the 1976 coup, and for months afterwards, the United States relied to a large extent on the armed forces as its main interlocutors in Argentina's turbulent politics. Unlike in Chile and Uruguay, where the U.S had backed reformist parties (at least until the emergence of a serious left-wing challenge in the early 1970s), it was consistently hostile to the most popular political movement in Argentina, Peronism. In the face of Peron's populist rhetoric, economic nationalism, and fascist sympathies, the military seemed to provide a moderate alternative, favorable to American investment, and just as staunchly anti-communist. Not only did it seem to offer the best hope of ending the country's chaotic violence: the military promised, as it had in Chile, to deal effectively with marxist subversion. Itself a cauldron of political violence during the mid-1970s, Argentina was home to hundreds of leftists exiled by the military coups in Chile and Uruguay.
The declassification of thousands of secret U.S. government documents on the Pinochet regime during the Clinton Administration has shed some light on Washington's relations with the Argentine juntas in the 1970s, as has additional information released earlier. Relatives of victims, Argentine human rights groups, European and Argentine judges, and members of the U.S. Congress have called on the U.S. government to authorize the declassification of more documents. In August, 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met representatives of the Abuelas and CELS during a visit to Buenos Aires, and in November she promised to declassify State Department documents on "disappearances," stolen children, and Operation Condor. At this writing (November 2001), the release of some 5,000 documents was shortly expected, unfortunately not including material from CIA or Department of Defense archives.
The U.S. did not explicitly denounce the systematic nature of the abuses until the beginning of the Carter Administration in January 1977. Thanks largely to two officials, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Patricia Derian, and a political officer at the embassy in Buenos Aires, Franklin "Tex" Harris, Washington's policy changed from one of tacit support for the junta to a far more critical stance. Derian and Harris maintained closecontact with people directly affected by the repression, including relatives of the victims. Not only did the administration's information notably improve, but the contact with U.S. officials was a lifeline to human rights groups at constant risk of government reprisal. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance announced plans to cut in half military aid to Argentina (from U.S. $32 million recommended by the Ford Administration to $15.7 million), explicitly due to Argentina's human rights record.
Unfortunately, this policy ended with the Carter Administration. In the late 1970's the security concerns of the United States shifted to the Central American arena following the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979, and the feared export of the Sandinista revolution to El Salvador. The incoming government of President Ronald Reagan was quick to mend fences with the Argentine junta. In February 1981, it ordered its representatives before international financial institutions to stop opposing loans on human rights grounds to Argentina and other Southern Cone countries. It began a long certification battle in Congress to resume military sales, loans, and training programs to Argentina, arguing that human rights conditions had dramatically improved. It was true that "disappearances" had declined, but more than a thousand political prisoners were still being held without charges, and temporary "disappearances," arbitrary arrests, and torture continued.
In the U.S. courts, the story was quite different. Horror at the atrocities of Argentina's "dirty war" helped shape the evolution of U.S. jurisprudence on torture as a universal crime and the limits of sovereignty.
The landmark Filartiga v. Pena-Irala ruling of 1980 made history by awarding the first criminal damages against a torturer (a Paraguayan police agent) found to be in the United States.131 The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit established that, under the 1789 Aliens Tort Claims Act, U.S. courts have jurisdiction over claims for torture brought by aliens against torturers found to be in the United States. In 1992, Congress codified these legal advances in the Torture Victims Protection Act, which holds liable for damages any "individual who, under actual or apparent authority, or color of law, of any foreign nation . . . subjects an individual to torture." During the decade between these important events, U.S. jurisprudence was largely shaped by Argentine cases.
Suárez Mason had left Argentina in early 1984 after a federal judge ordered his arrest for the "disappearance"of a young scientist in late 1978. For the next three years he lived in secrecy in the United States, where he spent periods in Miami, New York, and San Francisco. He was finally captured in Foster City, California, in January 1987, and extradited after eighteen months in prison to Argentina, to stand trial on thirty-nine counts of murder and one count of forgery. The United States complied with its obligation to extradite Suárez or try him in the United States. Yet justice was denied when President Menem pardoned Suárez Mason before his trial was completed.
The program was coordinated by an Extra-Territorial Task Force (Grupo de Tareas Exteriores, GTE) attached to Army Intelligence Battalion 601, in Buenos Aires. It was headed by José Osvaldo Ribeiro, a Battalion 601 member who had previously helped organize a clandestine detention center at the Campo de Mayo military base outside Buenos Aires, and had been an army intelligence chief in Mendoza and Bahía Blanca provinces. Some of its officers were former members of the AAA, such as Raúl Antonio Guglielminetti, who had operated in clandestine detention centers in Buenos Aires and Neuquen. Another Battalion 601 intelligence agent, Leandro Sánchez Reisse, accused in a kidnapping case in Argentina, testified in the U.S. Congress in 1987 that the group operated from Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, under the cover of front businesses, and with the authorization of the CIA.135 Both Guglielminetti and Sánchez Reisse were reported to have received intelligence training in the U.S. in 1976.136 These covert CIA activities began during the Carter Administration, ostensibly without the approval of the White House or Congress.
The declassification of U.S. State and Defense Department and CIA documents ordered by President Clinton in response to requests from Valladares, beginning in 1993, also threw little light on the Argentine connection. The bulk of the information provided concerned specific "disappearance" cases raised by Valladares. The heavily exciseddocuments contained almost no information on the CIA's involvement in training the Hondurans and the contras, or on the role of the Argentines. The declassified CIA Inspector General's report, published on August 27, 1997, admitted for the first time that the CIA had known about the systematic human rights abuses committed by 3-16 Battalion, but had failed to report on them.140 How the United States allowed Argentine officers with a known track record of appalling human rights abuse to have taken the lead in training their Honduran counterparts, is a question that remains to be answered.
The staff includes Kenneth Roth, executive director; Michele Alexander, development director; Reed Brody, advocacy director; Carroll Bogert, communications director; John Green, operations director; Barbara Guglielmo, finance director; Lotte Leicht, Brussels office director; Michael McClintock, deputy program director; Patrick Minges, publications director; Maria Pignataro Nielsen, human resources director; Jemera Rone, counsel; Malcolm Smart, program director; Wilder Tayler, general counsel; and Joanna Weschler, United Nations representative. Jonathan Fanton is the chair of the board. Robert L. Bernstein is the founding chair.
Its Americas division was established in 1981 to monitor human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. José Miguel Vivanco is executive director; Joanne Mariner is deputy director; Sebastian Brett, Robin Kirk and Carol Pier are researchers; Daniel Wilkinson is the Orville Schell Fellow; Jonathan Balcom and Marijke Conklin are associates. Stephen L. Kass is chair of the advisory committee; Marina Pinto Kaufman and David E. Nachman are vice chairs.
120 The cables cited below are from a collection of declassified State Department documents published jointly by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based freeedom of information advocacy group, and CELS, in October 2001: "El Estado Terrorista Desenmascarado: Documentos Desclasificados sobre Argentina del Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos -1976" (available at www.cels.org.ar).
121 Telegram to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, March 29, 1976. Declassified on June 24, 1997.
122 Telegram to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, April 6, 1976. Declassified on June 24, 1997.
123 The Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, AAA) was an extreme-right wing terrorist group that carried out bomb attacks, kidnappings, and political assassinations in the early 1970s. Its main targets were left-wing guerrilla groups, in particular the Peronist Montoneros and the People's Revolutionary Army (Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo, ERP).
124 Telegram to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger CHK, July 23, 1976. Declassified on June 24, 1997.
125 DCJE 405/76, cited in Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: El Mito de la Guerra Sucia en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2000), pp. 230-31.
126 Telegram from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to U.S. ambassadors in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, La Paz, Santiago, Asuncion and Brasilia, August 16, 1976.
127 Cynthia Brown (ed.), With Friends Like These: The Americas Watch Report on Human Rights and U.S. Policy in Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 99-100.
129 Americas Watch-CELS, The State Department Misinforms: A Study of Acccounting for the "Disappeared" in Argentina (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1983).
130 With Friends Like These, pp. 106-08.
131 Amerada Hess Shipping Corp. v. Argentine Republic, 830 F. 2d 421 (2d Cir. 1987); Forti v. Suárez Mason, 672 F. Supp. 1531 (N.D. Cal. 1987); Martinez Baca v. Suárez Mason, No. C-87-2057-SC (N.D. Cal. Apr. 22, 1988); Quiros de Rapaport v. Suárez Mason, No. C-87-2266-JPV (N.D. Cal. Apr. 11, 1989); Siderman de Blake v. Republic of Argentina, 965 F.2d 699 (9th Cir. 1992).
132 Americas Watch (as the Americas division of Human Rights Watch was then known) the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Southern California chapter of the American Council for Civil Liberties, and the San Francisco-based law firm of Morrison & Foester, litigated three civil suits for damages against Suarez Mason on behalf of the victims under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The information gathered for the lawsuits assisted in securing Suárez Mason's later extradition to Argentina.
133 E-mail communication from Joshua Sondheimer, director of civil litigation at the Center for Justice and Accountability, San Francisco, August 15, 2001.
134 In May 1983, Héctor Francés García, a former agent of Argentine army intelligence's 601 Battalion, testified in a video shown to journalists in Mexico City that, beginning in 1980, he and other intelligence officers from the battalion travelled to Honduras and worked alongside the Honduran army and police, and the CIA. Miguel Bonasso, "El arrepentido del 601," 3 Puntos, June 28, 2001; Norberto Bermúdez y Juan Gasparini, El Testigo Secreto (Buenos Aires: Verlap, S.A., 1999), pp. 40-42.
135 United States Senate, transcript of hearings before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, July 23, 1987, pp. 13-20.
136 Ariel C. Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America 1977-1984 (Ohio University Press, 1997), p. 150.
137 See Americas Watch, Human Rights in Honduras: Signs of the "Argentine Method," December 1982; Human Rights in Honduras: Central America's "Sideshow," May, 1987; Amnesty International, Honduras: Civilian Authority: Military Power (AMR 37/02/88).
138 Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and Human Rights Watch/Americas, The Facts Speak for Themselves: The Preliminary Report on Disappearances of the National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights in Honduras (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), p. 208-211.
139 Leo Valladares Lanza and Susan C. Peacock: In Search of Hidden Truths, An Interim Report on Declassification by the National Commissioner for Human Rights (Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 1998), chapter II.
140 CIA Inspectorate General "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980's (96-0125-IG),"August 27, 1997 (available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/latin_america/honduras/cia_ig_report/). See also National Security Archive, "Secret CIA report admits: `Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses'and `inaccurate' reporting to Congress," Washington, D.C., October 1998 (available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/19981023.htm.

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