Ending U.S. Complicity in Argentina's Dirty War

On March 24, 1976, the Argentinian military detained President Martínez de Perón and seized control of the government. Two days later, at Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s weekly staff meeting, Assistant Secretary for Latin America William Rogers argued that the U.S. government should keep its distance from the military regime. “[W]e've got to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood,” he said. But Kissinger rejected his counsel, and the United States quietly supported the junta’s “Dirty War,” a brutal campaign of arbitrary detention, torture, and assassination against students, trade unionists, and other opponents of the government. Thousands of people — perhaps as many as 30,000 — were killed or disappeared by the regime, which ruled until 1983. And “los desaparecidos” entered the human rights lexicon.