Resistance to Argentine Dictatorship from the US (1979-80)

Argentina´s bloody dictatorship (read at the International Congress on Human Rights held at the American Civil Liberties Union in St. Louis, Missouri, January 1979, and afterwards published in Minnesota Daily, vol.80, n. 137 y 138, Wednesday March 28, and Thursday March 29, 1979; and in Student Life (St. Louis, Missouri), Friday February 9, 1979, page 7).

by Eduardo Saguier

In the twentieth century history of Argentina, unlike that of Uruguay or Chile, military coup d´etats have been a common fact. All of them obeyed to a higher or lesser degree the goal of resorting the control of their neo-colonial economies to the North American corporations, and the landowning oligarchies, which meant reinstating starvation wages and reactionary social legislation. The sole purpose of this economic policy, despite Carter´s weak human rights policies, serves to increase the rate of capital accumulation which then is transferred to the metropolitan headquarters.

What distinguished today´s Argentine dictatorship from those that preceded it is its fascist and terrorist features. Besides wiping out political parties, labor federations and student associations, intervening universities, firing professors and dissolving scientific careers, forbidding strikes and union activities, the Argentine military Junta has unleased a holocaust unmatched in the twentieth century history of Latin America, dwarfing in scope and cruelty the terror of Batista´s Cuba, Trujillo´s Dominican Republic or Stroessner´s Paraguay. Paradoxically, the mass media of the U.S.Ñ that consumes such amount of energies in finding out Soviet dissidents, hardly mentions Argentina´s drama.

For what a lot of Argentines have heard, among political circles is that Pinochet advised Videla not to commit his own mistakes. Instead of repressing political enemies i8n military uniforms Pinochet told Videla to do it whithout them. Since the military takeover on March 1976, in the name of morality and Western Christian Civilization and with the stated ultimate goal of returning the nation to a stable modern capitalist democracy