US President Barack Obama is to declassify US military and intelligence records related to Argentina’s “Dirty War,” the White House said on Thursday, aiming to bring closure to questions of US involvement in a notorious chapter in Argentina’s history.
Obama’s visit to Buenos Aires next week coincides with the 40th anniversary of the 1976 military coup that started Argentina’s 1976 to 1983 dictatorship. Little is known about the US role leading up to that period, in which thousands of people were forcibly disappeared and babies systematically stolen from political prisoners.
US National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Obama would use his trip to announce a “comprehensive effort” to declassify more documents, at Argentina’s request. She said Obama would also visit Remembrance Park in Buenos Aires to honor victims of the dictatorship.
“This anniversary and beyond, we’re determined to do our part as Argentina continues to heal and move forward as one nation,” Rice said in a speech ahead of Obama’s trip.
The announcement promised to reverberate across Argentina, where even today the events of the dictatorship are a major topic of national interest and concern.
“This is transcendental. We believe it’s a huge gesture,” Argentine Chief of the Cabinet Marcos Pena told TV station Todo Noticias.
The US has previously released 4,000 US Department of State documents related to that period, but those documents tell only part of the story.
Notes from a 1976 meeting between then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and the Argentine foreign minister, for example, seemed to show Kissinger urging his new counterpart to clamp down on dissidents they referred to as “terrorists.”
“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” Kissinger said, according to a transcript the US declassified more than a decade ago.
In Argentina, human rights advocates have repeatedly called for the US to divulge the rest of the information it has in hopes of exposing any wrongdoing.
As part of the new declassification effort, the US is to search for additional records related to rights abuses committed by the junta, said a senior Obama administration official, who was not authorized to discuss the program by name and requested anonymity.
That search is to for the first time include records from US intelligence agencies, along with the Pentagon, US law enforcement agencies and presidential libraries, the official said.
Argentine Human Rights Secretary Claudio Avruj said opening the archives could shed light on Argentine soldiers trained at the School of the Americas and the so-called Plan Condor, a coordinated effort between South American dictatorships to stamp out dissent through assassinations, torture and repression.
“This is also going to help in the search for grandchildren taken during the dictatorship,” Avruj wrote on Twitter.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency