*Here are a couple paragraphs about what was going on in Argentina in the ’70s:*
Anyone suspected of favoring these groups (revolutionaries against the gov) or their ideas was subject to arbitrary arrest. All cultural life was now subjected to strict censorship. The government took control of all labor unions. People were kidnapped on the streets and never seen again. The prisons overflowed with political prisoners and torture was common. There were no trials or pretense of legal process. An estimated 11,000 Argentines disappeared between 1976 and 1982, called *los desaparecidos* or “the disappeared.” More than 30,000 people died during this period, many in Argentine concentration camps modeled after the Nazi camps. At the height of the horror, only the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared had the courage to stand up to the government. Every Thursday, they began assembling in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Presidential Palace, demanding information on their missing children. Conditions in the prisons were unfathomable. Prisoners were not allowed to lie down on their cots during the day, and the strain of this sometimes caused paralysis or atrophy of the legs. They were allowed no contact with family or friends, and most prisoners were afraid to write to loved ones, for fear they too would be targeted. Almost all letters were seized by the censors. The prisons would play sad songs by Julio Iglesias to deepen prisoners’ depression (no kidding). Prison guards would stage fake escapes and executions with mannequins to scare the prisoners. When a prisoner was moved out of his cell, he had to keep his eyes straight ahead; one glance over his shoulder meant loss of all privileges and possible torture. Newspapers and radios were banned insider the prison. Only books written before the French Revolution were in prison libraries.
Prisoners were experimented on with tranquilizer darts, were tortured with cattle prods, had the soles of their feet beaten with batons, had metal buckets placed on their heads and then the buckets hammered, had electrical wires applied to breasts, vaginas, anuses, penises, tongues, and other body parts. In some cases, prisoners’ bellies were slit open and they were dropped in a river as “fish food.” Some were thrown out of airplanes fully conscious. The length of sentences was completely arbitrary and had nothing to do with the “crime” committed, and at the end of the prison term, the prisoner or his family had to pay the state back for the cost of his imprisonment or he would not be released.
*And here is what was declassified in 2003 about America’s opinions of what the Argentine Gov was doing:* In 2003, the *Miami Herald* published proof that America and the Ford administration had approved of this brutal military regime. According to a recently declassified U.S. government document, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Argentine foreign minister in 1976, at the height of the Dirty War, that America supported the Argentine government. The transcript of the meeting between Kissinger and Argentine Navy Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti in New York is the first documentary evidence that the Ford administration approved of the junta’s harsh tactics. “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed,” Kissinger reassured Guzzetti in the seven-page transcript, marked *SECRET*. “I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed, the better.” The Argentine military regime was delighted.
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