MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
US hands Argentina thousands of declassified documents from the military dictatorship
The United States handed thousands of documents on Friday to Argentina on disappearances by the military dictatorship (1976/1983), completing Washington's biggest-ever transfer of documents to another government. Read full article
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Disclaimer & comment rulesSome of the newly declassified documents show in excruciating detail the extent to which the US knew about the methods used by the Argentine military dictatorships to eliminate suspected opponents.
Apr 14th, 2019 - 06:58 pm - Link - Report abuse -1In addition, some declassified reports created by US intelligence refer in great detail to the Plan Condor by which the dictatorships of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and “to some extent” Bolivia and Brazil worked together to eliminate opponents in any of those countries.
“Selection of targets: Each representative will put forth his choice of target in the form of a proposal,” reads in English one of the US intelligence reports now declassified. “The final selection of a target will be by vote and on the basis of simple majority.”
These and other documents show in chilly detail the extent to which the US knew about the extent and planning with which human rights abuses were perpetrated in most of Latin America, particularly in countries of the southern South American cone.
At the time, the military described any appearance of murdered civil individuals as “excesses of war,” which they considered normal in an armed conflict. In reality, each kidnapping, each interrogation, each torture case and each summary execution was planned and approved by the military, and as it becomes now official, in full knowledge of the central countries and especially the US.
At the time, however, denunciations of relatives of those kidnapped were ignored, or at the most, the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs of the countries named was invoked.
Such principle, however, was conveniently dropped in cases such as the Grenada island in 1983, Panama in 1989, Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004. The non-intervention principle appears forgotten now in relation to Venezuela.
Poor Latin America: so far from God -- so close to the US.
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