By Hugo Alconada October 5, 2023.
the Argentinean people never forget the disappeared, photo: Bill Hackwell
Thirty years after the military coup, new declassified documents show that the military estimated that it had killed or made disappear some 22,000 people between 1975 and mid-1978, five years before the return of democracy.
The calculation, provided by Argentine military and agents who operated from the 601st Intelligence Battalion to their Chilean counterpart Enrique Arancibia Clavel, appears among the documents that the National Security Archive of Georgetown University managed to bring to light, and to whose copies LA NACION had access.
Signed under the alias “Luis Felipe Alemparte Díaz”, Arancibia Clavel was the agent of the Chilean Intelligence Directorate (DINA) in Buenos Aires, in charge of informing Santiago what was happening in Argentina and coordinating kidnappings with Argentines, Uruguayans, Paraguayans and Brazilians, among others, in what was called Plan Condor.
In July 1978, Arancibia Clavel sent a cable to his DINA superiors, with the names of dozens of victims in the country and specifying that his contacts in Battalion 601 had “counted 22,000 between the dead and the disappeared”, from 1975 to “the present day”, shortly after the end of the World Cup.
The debate on how many died or disappeared during the dictatorship has been unresolved for years and arouses a fierce controversy, with estimates ranging from 8,000 to 30,000, depending on who is doing the counting.
Human rights organizations have maintained for decades that the Armed Forces had drawn up lists with names and details of all those kidnapped, those killed and the operations authorized.
It is assumed that these lists were destroyed before Raul Alfonsin became president, although some suspect that they could be intact and hidden, as happened with the archives of the police of the province of Buenos Aires.
Arancibia Clavel, who in 2004 was sentenced by the Argentine justice system to life imprisonment for the murder in Buenos Aires of Chilean General Carlos Prats and his partner, even drew up his own list of “officialist” and “non-officialist” dead. That is to say, those supposedly killed in “confrontations” with the security forces and the clandestine ones.
“Enclosed is a list of all those killed during 1975. The list is only classified by month,” explained Arancibia Clavel to his bosses. This work was obtained from Intelligence Battalion 601.”
The agent even explained that “these lists correspond to annexes” 74,888 and 74,789 of 1975 and stated that “those who appear as NN are those bodies impossible to identify”, which “almost 100% correspond to extremist elements eliminated “by the left” by the security forces”.
Among those murdered “for political reasons” was the Uruguayan leader Zelmar Michelini, among dozens of men and women, some also Uruguayan asylum seekers in Argentina and captured under the Condor Plan. In a now declassified U.S. Department of Defense document, two U.S. military officers compiled data on Plan Condor, which they defined as “joint counterinsurgency operations in several South American countries”.
By October 1, 1976, the two Americans reported to the Pentagon: “More and more is being heard about Plan Condor in the Southern Cone. Military officers who hitherto were silent on the subject have begun to speak openly. One of the favorite phrases is: one of your colleagues is out of the country because he is flying like a condor”. It meant that he was in an operation to kidnap a “suspect”.
A global plan
In the same cable, US intelligence informed that a delegation of Argentine generals, in civilian clothes, had traveled to Montevideo to coordinate operations, and anticipated that in a following phase the plan could be extended to Europe.
How many were killed or disappeared? “It is our estimate that at least several thousand were killed and we doubt that it will ever be possible to establish a more specific figure,” the then Ambassador to Buenos Aires, Robert Hill, warned his superiors in 1978.
Also in 1978, another State Department document already estimated 15,000 disappeared, thanks to the contribution of an embassy official, Tex Harris, whose work would be recognized by the Argentine State only in 2004.