Dirty War
Based on Wikipedia: Dirty War
Between 1976 and 1983, somewhere between 22,000 and 30,000 people vanished from Argentina. Not died—vanished. They were taken from their homes, their workplaces, their university classrooms, often in the middle of the night. They were held in secret camps. They were tortured. And then, overwhelmingly, they were killed in ways designed to leave no trace. Their bodies were burned, buried in unmarked graves, or thrown from military aircraft into the South Atlantic Ocean while still alive.
The Argentine military called this the "Dirty War."
It's a curious name for a government to give its own systematic murder of civilians. The term itself was a piece of propaganda, an attempt to frame state terrorism as something resembling legitimate combat—as if torture chambers and death flights were merely unconventional military tactics in an actual war. But as prosecutors would later establish in court, there was no war. The leftist guerrilla groups the military claimed to be fighting were never strong enough to threaten the state. They controlled no territory. They had no foreign backing. They lacked popular support.
What Argentina experienced was not a war at all. It was a campaign of extermination against anyone the ruling junta considered politically inconvenient.
The Roots of Political Violence
To understand how Argentina arrived at this catastrophe, you have to go back to Juan Perón—a figure so influential that the political movement bearing his name, Peronism, has defied easy classification for nearly eighty years. Was Perón a fascist? A populist? A socialist? Scholars still argue about it. His movement attracted everyone from trade unionists to neo-fascists, from Catholic nationalists to Marxist revolutionaries. This ideological incoherence would prove explosive.
Perón first rose to power in 1946 and governed until 1955, when the military overthrew him in a coup called the Revolución Libertadora—the "Liberating Revolution." The new government didn't just remove Perón from power; they tried to erase Peronism itself. A decree made it illegal to even speak Perón's name in public. His political party was banned. His supporters were persecuted.
This backfired spectacularly.
Rather than disappearing, Peronism went underground. Workers and trade unions resisted, determined to protect the economic gains they'd achieved under Perón's rule. Over the following two decades, as weak civilian governments alternated with military regimes, leftist guerrilla groups began to form. They saw themselves as fighting for Perón's return and for a more radical transformation of Argentine society.
Perón himself, exiled in Spain, cultivated these groups from afar. He was a master political manipulator who encouraged followers across the entire political spectrum, playing different factions against each other. When he finally returned to Argentina in June 1973, the contradictions within his movement exploded into the open.
The Ezeiza Massacre
The day of Perón's return should have been triumphant. Instead, it became a bloodbath.
Millions of supporters gathered at Ezeiza Airport outside Buenos Aires to welcome their leader home. Among the crowd were both left-wing Peronists—students, young activists, socialist revolutionaries—and right-wing Peronists aligned with the party's conservative union leadership. Snipers positioned near the airport opened fire on the leftist sections of the crowd. The exact death toll remains disputed, but dozens were killed and hundreds wounded.
This massacre marked the definitive split between Peronism's warring factions. The elderly Perón, returning to a country he barely recognized after eighteen years of exile, sided firmly with the right. He denounced the young leftists who had fought for his return as "beardless idealists" and withdrew his support from the Montoneros, the largest left-wing Peronist guerrilla group.
Within a year, Perón was dead. His third wife, Isabel Perón—a former nightclub dancer with no political experience—became president. Power shifted to the figures around her, particularly José López Rega, her Minister of Social Welfare and the founder of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance.
Triple A: Death Squads Before the Coup
The Argentine Anticommunist Alliance—known as Triple A or the AAA—represented something new and terrifying in Argentine politics. This was a paramilitary death squad operating under government protection, systematically assassinating trade unionists, lawyers, journalists, priests, and anyone else deemed subversive. They killed with impunity.
The numbers tell the story of an escalating horror. In 1973, paramilitary groups killed 19 people. In 1974, they killed 50. In 1975, they killed 359.
Consider who was targeted. Silvio Frondizi, a leftist lawyer and brother of a former president. Carlos Mugica, a priest associated with liberation theology who worked in the slums of Buenos Aires. Atilio López, a union leader and former vice-governor. Rodolfo Ortega Peña, another lawyer. Trade unionists were assassinated at their jobs, their union halls closed, their leaders arrested. In August 1974, the automobile workers' union in Córdoba was shut down and its leaders imprisoned; most would be murdered after the 1976 coup.
This violence didn't emerge from nowhere. In February 1975, President Isabel Perón signed decrees authorizing the military and police to "annihilate" left-wing "subversive elements." The word "annihilate" was not chosen carelessly. It was a license to kill.
The Coup and the Proceso
On March 24, 1976, the military removed Isabel Perón from power and installed a junta—a ruling council of military commanders representing the army, navy, and air force. They called their regime the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, the "National Reorganization Process." The bureaucratic name masked a simple reality: this was a military dictatorship committed to reshaping Argentine society through terror.
The scale of the repression exploded. The junta established at least 340 secret detention centers across the country—clandestine prisons where an estimated 12,000 people were held at various times. These weren't ordinary jails. They were torture facilities. Prisoners were subjected to electric shocks, beatings, rape, mock executions, and psychological torment designed to break them completely.
The purpose of torture was ostensibly to extract information about guerrilla networks. But the reality was more sinister. Torture served to terrorize the population, to demonstrate that the state could do anything to anyone without consequence. It also served no investigative purpose in most cases—the junta's targets were overwhelmingly not guerrillas at all.
Who were the disappeared?
Half were trade unionists. Others were students, intellectuals, journalists, writers, artists, human rights activists. Some were targeted for their political activities. Others were denounced by neighbors settling personal grudges. Some were simply related to someone the military wanted. A remarkable number were very young—high school students, university undergraduates, young professionals in their twenties.
Jewish Argentines were targeted with particular ferocity. Although Jews comprised only about one percent of Argentina's population, they represented between five and twelve percent of the disappeared. Antisemitic imagery and torture methods were common in the detention centers.
Death Flights
The junta's most macabre innovation was the death flight.
Prisoners were told they were being transferred to another facility. They were loaded onto military aircraft. Once over the South Atlantic Ocean, they were thrown from the planes—sometimes drugged, sometimes fully conscious. Their bodies were never recovered. Their families were never notified. They simply ceased to exist.
This method served multiple purposes. It eliminated evidence. It created uncertainty—families could never be certain their loved ones were dead, which complicated mourning and resistance. And it sent a message: opposition to the regime meant not just death, but complete erasure.
The Spanish word for the victims entered the international vocabulary: los desaparecidos, the disappeared. Not the dead, not the murdered—the disappeared. People who were there and then were not. People whose fate remained officially unknown for years or decades. People whose bodies, in many cases, have never been found.
Operation Condor
Argentina did not act alone. Throughout the 1970s, military dictatorships across South America coordinated their repression through an intelligence-sharing network called Operation Condor. Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia all participated. They shared information about dissidents, tracked refugees who had fled across borders, and sometimes conducted joint assassination operations.
The United States supported this network. Washington provided $50 million in military aid to the Argentine junta. American officials were informed about the scale of the killings and chose to continue their support. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger personally encouraged the Argentine military's campaign against the left, telling Foreign Minister César Augusto Guzzetti in 1976 that "we want you to succeed" and advising him to complete the crackdown quickly, "before the situation is frozen."
This Cold War context helps explain—though certainly doesn't justify—how the junta understood its actions. In their minds, they were fighting World War Three against international communism. The leftist guerrillas, however small, were proxies for the Soviet Union. Normal rules didn't apply. Any means were justified.
The delusion was remarkable. As courts would later establish, the guerrillas were never a serious military threat. By 1977, the Montoneros had been reduced to perhaps 300 active members. They controlled nothing, threatened nothing, and posed no genuine danger to the state. The junta's "war" was against phantoms—and against ordinary Argentines who happened to believe in labor rights or social justice.
The Mothers and Grandmothers
In the midst of this terror, something extraordinary happened. A small group of women began gathering every Thursday afternoon in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in Buenos Aires facing the presidential palace. They wore white headscarves embroidered with the names of their disappeared children. They walked in a slow circle, demanding answers.
They called themselves the Madres de Plaza de Mayo—the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
The military didn't know what to do with them. These weren't young radicals who could be easily demonized. They were middle-aged mothers looking for their children. The junta dismissed them as "las locas"—the crazy women. But they kept coming back, every Thursday, week after week, year after year.
A related group, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo—the Grandmothers—formed to search specifically for children who had been stolen from disappeared parents. Pregnant women in the detention centers were often kept alive until they gave birth; their babies were then taken and given to military families or their allies. The grandmothers worked to identify these stolen children and reunite them with their biological families, a task that continues to this day.
Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers, has spent decades rejecting the term "Dirty War" itself. "That is a way to minimize state terrorism," she has said. "It is a totally wrong concept; there was no war, dirty nor clean."
The Falklands and the Fall
By the early 1980s, the junta was in trouble. The economy had collapsed. Inflation was rampant. Public discontent was growing despite the repression. The military needed something to restore their legitimacy.
They decided to invade the Falkland Islands.
The Falklands—called the Malvinas in Spanish—are a remote archipelago in the South Atlantic that had been under British control since 1833. Argentina had long claimed sovereignty over the islands, and the junta calculated that seizing them would unite the country in nationalist fervor. They also calculated that Britain, led by Margaret Thatcher, would not fight to recover such distant and seemingly insignificant territory.
They were catastrophically wrong.
Britain sent a naval task force across the Atlantic and, in a brief but intense conflict, defeated the Argentine military and recaptured the islands. The war lasted just over two months. Around 650 Argentine soldiers died, along with 255 British personnel. The junta was humiliated.
The defeat destroyed what remained of the military's credibility. Within a year, they were forced to allow free elections. Raúl Alfonsín, leader of the Radical Civic Union, won the presidency in October 1983. When he took office on December 10, 1983—International Human Rights Day—the Dirty War formally ended.
Justice Delayed
Alfonsín immediately created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, known by its Spanish acronym CONADEP. Led by the novelist Ernesto Sabato, the commission heard testimony from hundreds of witnesses and documented the systematic nature of the repression. Its report, titled "Nunca Más" (Never Again), became a foundational document of Argentina's reckoning with its past.
In 1985, the government put the leaders of the junta on trial—an unprecedented action. This was the first time a Latin American country had prosecuted its own former military rulers for human rights abuses. The prosecutor, Julio Strassera, famously concluded his closing argument by saying "Nunca más"—never again. Five of the nine junta members were convicted, including Jorge Rafael Videla, who received a life sentence.
But justice proved fragile.
The military still had power, and they resented the trials. Facing pressure from officers who feared they too might be prosecuted, Alfonsín's government passed the Ley de Punto Final—the "Full Stop Law"—in 1986. This law set a sixty-day deadline for filing new human rights charges, effectively ending most prosecutions. The following year, under continued military pressure, the government passed the Ley de Obediencia Debida—the "Due Obedience Law"—which granted immunity to lower-ranking officers who were following orders.
When Carlos Menem became president in 1989, he went further, pardoning the convicted junta leaders. Videla walked free. In 1994, Menem praised the military for their "fight against subversion."
For over a decade, impunity reigned.
The Return of Justice
The story didn't end there. The mothers and grandmothers kept marching. Human rights organizations kept documenting. International courts, particularly in Spain, began pursuing cases against Argentine perpetrators. Public opinion shifted as the democratic generation came of age.
In 2003, under President Néstor Kirchner, Congress annulled the amnesty laws. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. The prosecutions resumed.
Since then, hundreds of former military and police officers have been convicted for crimes against humanity. In 2006, a court for the first time officially classified the repression as genocide—not during the trial of a major figure, but in the case of Miguel Etchecolatz, a former senior police official in Buenos Aires Province. The ruling established that the campaign had targeted specific groups for extermination.
Videla was returned to prison, where he died in 2013. Other perpetrators have been found living quietly in Argentina or abroad, sometimes decades after their crimes. The identification of stolen children continues—more than 130 have been located, some learning in middle age that the people who raised them were complicit in their parents' murder.
The Stolen Children
Perhaps nothing captures the horror of the Dirty War more than the fate of pregnant prisoners.
When the military detained pregnant women, they were typically kept alive until they gave birth. Then they were killed. Their babies—perhaps 500 in total—were given to military families, police officers, or allies of the regime. These children were raised with false identities, often by people directly involved in their parents' deaths.
The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo began searching for these children almost immediately. They developed innovative forensic techniques, including the "grandpaternity index" for DNA testing, which allows identification even when parents are unavailable. They created genetic databases. They publicized their search relentlessly.
Over four decades, they have identified more than 130 stolen grandchildren. Each identification is a complicated triumph—an adult learning that their entire identity is a lie, that their "parents" may have participated in murdering their biological parents, that they have a family who has been searching for them for decades.
Some stolen children have embraced their biological families. Others have struggled with the revelation. A few have rejected it entirely, choosing to maintain relationships with their adoptive families despite everything. Each case represents an individual human being grappling with an impossible situation created by state terrorism.
Memory and Meaning
What does it mean to remember something like this?
Argentina has grappled with that question more seriously than most countries. The former detention centers have been converted into memory sites. March 24, the anniversary of the coup, is a national holiday—the Day of Memory for Truth and Justice. The trials continue. The Mothers and Grandmothers, now elderly, still march.
But memory is contested. There are still Argentines who defend the military's actions, who believe the "subversives" deserved what they got, who think the country should move on. Under some governments, the memory sites have been neglected and the rhetoric of reconciliation has edged toward forgetting.
The term "Dirty War" itself remains controversial. Human rights organizations reject it as military propaganda. They prefer "state terrorism" or simply "the dictatorship." The word "war" implies two sides fighting, when in reality there was a state apparatus crushing largely defenseless civilians. The word "dirty" implies that a "clean" version of this campaign might have been acceptable.
Julio Strassera, the prosecutor who convicted the junta leaders, called the term a "euphemism to try to conceal gang activities"—to make kidnapping, torture, and murder sound like military operations.
What Elena Knows
Claudia Piñeiro's novel "Elena Knows" is set in post-dictatorship Argentina, where the memories and consequences of those years permeate everything. The country Piñeiro describes is one where thousands of families never learned what happened to their loved ones, where justice came late and incompletely, where the trauma passed down through generations.
This is the Argentina that emerged from the Dirty War—not a country that simply "moved on," but one permanently marked by what happened. Every family knows someone who was touched by the repression. Every neighborhood has its stories. The white headscarves of the Mothers have become a national symbol.
To understand contemporary Argentina is to understand that this happened within living memory. Many of the perpetrators are still alive. So are many of the survivors and the relatives of the disappeared. The stolen children are now middle-aged adults, some still discovering who they really are.
The Dirty War was not ancient history. It was yesterday.
Lessons and Legacies
What can the Dirty War teach us?
First, that "it can't happen here" is always wrong. Argentina in the 1970s was one of the most educated, prosperous, and culturally sophisticated countries in Latin America. It had strong universities, a vibrant press, a politically engaged citizenry. None of that prevented a military dictatorship from murdering tens of thousands of people.
Second, that the descent can be gradual. The killing didn't start with the 1976 coup. It started with the death squads of 1974 and 1975, operating with government protection. It started with the decree authorizing the military to "annihilate" subversives. Each step made the next one possible.
Third, that complicity spreads. The military couldn't have operated without civilian support—judges who ignored habeas corpus petitions, doctors who attended to prisoners only to prepare them for more torture, businessmen who benefited from the elimination of union leaders, journalists who repeated regime propaganda. An atrocity of this scale requires a society-wide failure.
Fourth, that justice is possible, even if delayed. The Argentine trials, interrupted and resumed, imperfect and ongoing, demonstrate that perpetrators can eventually be held accountable. The amnesty laws that once seemed permanent were ultimately overturned. The march of time, which favors forgetting, can also bring new generations who demand answers.
Finally, that memory matters. The Mothers and Grandmothers, walking in their circles every Thursday for nearly fifty years, kept the disappeared from being forgotten. Their persistence made the trials possible, the identifications possible, the reckoning possible. Remembering is itself a form of resistance.
The white headscarves still appear in the Plaza de Mayo. The names of the disappeared are still spoken aloud. And somewhere, perhaps, another stolen grandchild is about to learn the truth about who they really are.