Argentina’s main human rights groups have announced they will boycott Barack Obama’s visit to the country, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of a military coup that led to the deaths of thousands of people.
Martial law was imposed on 24 March 1976, ushering in seven years of military rule during which Argentina’s generals made their victims disappear by throwing them alive from helicopters into the freezing waters of the Atlantic.
On Wednesday, Obama repeated a pledge to declassify US military and intelligence documents about America’s role in the military dictatorship. The new documents will be the first to be released since 2000, when Bill Clinton ordered the declassification of around 4,000 documents – some of which have been used in ongoing trials against former military officers.
“I hope this gesture helps rebuild trust that may have been lost between our two countries,” said Obama.
On Thursday morning, he and Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri will commemorate the anniversary at a ceremony in the Parque de la Memoria, a memorial park for victims of the dictatorship built alongside the coast of the River Plate.
The event will take place on the morning of 24 March, before Obama travels to the southern tourist resort of Bariloche. The setting for the ceremony – safely removed from the center of Buenos Aires – was chosen after the US president’s schedule was reorganized to avoid potential clashes with marches in the city center.
But both the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who continue to search for missing victims and babies born to their imprisoned daughters, have announced they will not be present at the ceremony.
“It’s a provocation, it’s our date,” said Nora Cortiñas of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who feels Obama’s presence will encroach on a day of painful remembrance for many Argentinians.
The two groups, together with other human rights groups, are instead organizing
what they expect to be massive marches in Buenos Aires and across the country for Thursday afternoon.
“More people and especially more young people are turning out to march every year,” says 89-year-old Sara Rus, another Mother of Plaza de Mayo.
Rus, originally from Łódź in Poland, survived Auschwitz and moved to South America after the second world war, only to have her Argentinian-born son, Daniel, kidnapped by the dictatorship in 1977. “I never saw him or heard from him again,” she said.
The date is especially painful for the aging mothers and grandmothers. “It’s been 40 years of searching for our sons and daughters,” says 86-year-old Cortiñas.
“Making people disappear is something that cannot be forgiven, it is the crime of all crimes.”
Her own son, Carlos Gustavo Cortiñas, was kidnapped by the military on April 15, 1977. His fate remains a mystery.
Human rights group believe that some 30,000 people were “disappeared” during the dictatorship which lasted until 1983. It is a scar that has not healed, despite close to 600 convictions of former military officers during human rights trial here.
US support for military regimes in Argentina and neighboring Chile remains a source of bitterness across Latin America.
The US is alleged to have provided covert support for the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. A CIA report released in 2000 said that the agency “actively supported the military Junta” after the Chilean coup and that some of that country’s worst human rights offenders became paid assets of the agency.
The US was less directly involved in Argentina’s coup three years later, but the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo find it hard to forget that Argentina’s generals modeled their regime on the US-backed Chilean dictatorship.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger gave thinly veiled approval to Argentina’s military for the use of violence against leftwing activists. At a 1976 meeting with Argentina’s Admiral César Guzzetti, Kissinger advised the regime that “the quicker you succeed, the better” – words which the junta took as a green light for a campaign of state terrorism.
Forty years later, families of the victims are still demanding justice.
Members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo reacted bitterly when asked if they would be willing to stand alongside Obama and Macri on Thursday morning.
“How can we, with everything the US represents for us? We’ve already decided against it,” said 85-year-old Taty Almeida, another member of the group, whose 20-year-old son Alejandro Almeida disappeared in 1975, when rightwing death squads had already started targeted leftwing activists.
During his visit, Obama will also stress the positive role of former US president Jimmy Carter who made human rights the cornerstone of his foreign policy during his term in office, slapping an arms embargo on Argentina and demanding an end to “disappearances”.
Among those invited by the White House to Thursday’s commemoration will be Robert Cox, the British former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, the only newspaper in Argentina that reported on the crimes of the military while they were still being carried out.
Also present will be F Allen “Tex” Harris, the American diplomat stationed in Buenos Aires at the time who compiled lists of the missing and met secretly with the relatives of victims to provide assistance. Cox and Harris worked closely together trying to save lives during Argentina’s darkest years.
Cox is more optimistic about the effect of Obama’s presence in Argentina. “It will help to get the record straight,” he said. “The United States under Jimmy Carter defended human rights in Argentina, by reporting and documenting disappearances, thus saving saving countless lives.”
Cox had to abandon Argentina for the US because of threats against his family in 1979 and is now a dual British-American citizen. He is hopeful that the release of classified documents from the Pentagon, CIA and FBI will help to establish a more accurate record of US involvement in Argentina.
But the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo are not convinced. “I don’t believe there will be anything in those documents – they always black out the names and the important parts,” said Cortiñas.
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