Dirty War

"Dirty War" is the name, used by Argentina's military rulers themselves, for the campaign of state terror waged against suspected leftists and other opponents in Argentina from the mid-1970s until the return of democracy in December 1983. Security forces and allied death squads abducted, tortured and killed thousands of people, most of whom vanished without trace and became known as the desaparecidos, the disappeared. Estimates of the dead and disappeared range from about 13,000 to 30,000, and later trials made Argentina a leading example of prosecuting such crimes in national courts.

After the army overthrew Juan Perón in 1955 and banned Peronism, opposition grew among workers and unions, and leftist guerrilla groups appeared in the 1960s. Perón came back to Argentina in 1973 but broke with the left-wing Montoneros shortly before his death in 1974. Under his widow and successor, Isabel Perón, the far-right Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A, organised by the welfare minister José López Rega, murdered hundreds of people. In 1975 government decrees ordered the armed forces to "annihilate" subversion, and Jorge Rafael Videla became army commander.

In March 1976 the military deposed Isabel Perón. The junta, which called its programme the National Reorganisation Process, extended repression far beyond the armed guerrillas, whom prosecutors later argued had never controlled territory or posed a real threat to the state. Trade unionists, students, journalists, writers, artists and activists were seized and taken to a network of some 340 secret detention centres. Many were killed in mass shootings or drugged and thrown from aircraft into the River Plate or the Atlantic in so-called death flights. Argentina also coordinated the hunting of exiles with neighbouring dictatorships under Operation Condor, and received some $50 million in military aid from the United States.

Some children disappeared with their parents, and babies born in the camps were in documented cases handed to couples linked to the security forces under false identities. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo believe that up to 500 children were taken, and 102 had been located by 2010, often confirmed through DNA testing. From 1977 the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo gathered every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to demand news of their missing children.

Economic crisis and growing opposition weakened the junta, which in 1982 sought popular support by seizing the Falkland Islands. Defeat in the Falklands War discredited the military, and Raúl Alfonsín took office as elected president on 10 December 1983.

Alfonsín set up the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), chaired by the writer Ernesto Sábato. Its report, Nunca Más ("Never Again"), documented nearly 9,000 people disappeared by name and stressed that the true figure was higher. In the 1985 Trial of the Juntas, Videla and other commanders were convicted, Videla receiving a life sentence. Under military pressure, the Full Stop law of 1986 cut short further prosecutions; after a series of army revolts in 1987 and 1988, President Carlos Menem pardoned those convicted in 1989–90.

In 2003 Congress repealed the amnesty laws, and in 2005 the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. Trials resumed in 2006, when the former Buenos Aires police official Miguel Etchecolatz received a life sentence in a case in which the court for the first time described the repression as genocide. By October 2011, 259 people had been convicted of crimes against humanity. Since 2006, 24 March, the anniversary of the coup, has been a public holiday of remembrance.

Our 1985 map shows Argentina two years after the return to civilian rule.