Kelly (2018) - Sovereign Emergencies, Cap 6

6
The Global Specter of Argentina’s Disappeared
Although bodies were disappeared, buried in the desert, thrown into pits or
into the sea, their memory, guarded by family members, lived on. The
military could not hide the fact that thousands of people whose existence
was recorded in photographs were unaccounted for. These were the ghosts
that could not be laid to rest.1
– Latin American literary scholar Jean Franco
In the second half of the 1970s, human rights activists hit an impasse.
Juan Méndez, an Argentine who was tortured by state authorities before
he became a prominent rights advocate after his exile in 1977, described
in his memoir how “letter-writing and meetings in embassies” following
the 1976 Argentine coup “were less effective when authorities refused to
acknowledge they were holding anyone.”2 This very denial reflected the
world of the desaparecido – the “disappeared” – who began to preoccupy
the global human rights imagination after 1976 by compounding the
concern with the tortured body in Brazil and Chile with the haunting
image of a generation of lost Argentines. The plight of the desaparecidos
is today most remembered by their emblematic champions: the Madres
(Mothers) and Abuelas (Grandmothers) of the Plaza de Mayo who pro-
tested their missing loved ones.3 But as Méndez realized as he pressed for
1
Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 20.
2
Juan Méndez (with Majory Wentworth), Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights
(New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 49. Méndez was the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Torture.
3
Marguerite Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
(New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
Papers, Amsterdam.
208
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The Global Specter of Argentina’s Disappeared 209
 . Hebe de Bonafini, head of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, in

December 1979, courtesy of AP photos.
more attention to human rights while in exile, this new reality called for
activists to “devise new techniques of advocacy and mobilization more
suitable to the characteristics of disappearances.”4
Activists, both in Argentina and across the Western world, labored to
articulate the gravity of the threat posed by the desaparecido, knowledge
they pieced together bit by bit. Victims were abducted, detained, tortured,
and then buried in unmarked graves or drugged and dropped from
helicopters to drown in the Río de la Plata. The Madres responded to
state denials by publishing the names of the disappeared, demanding that
the junta take responsibility for its actions.5 Even after the United Nations
established its own working group on the disappeared in 1980, the depth
and perversity of the crimes in Argentina would not be known in detail
4
Méndez, Taking a Stand, 49. See also Juan Méndez letter, January 5, 1980; Archivo
Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (henceforth CELS), Documentación y Denuncia del
Accionar del Terrorismo de Estado, Caja No. 7; Memoria Abierta, Testimonio de Juan
Méndez, Buenos Aires, 2004; Juan Méndez, interview with author August 2, 2016.
5
See, e.g, “Solo pedimos la verdad,” La prensa (October 5, 1977).
210 Sovereign Emergencies
until the publication of the report by Argentina’s truth commission,

Nunca Más (Never Again).6 By the late 1970s, the battle over the very
existence of the desaparecidos, and the appropriate tactics to call atten-
tion to their ghastly and indefinite state, marked the next stage in the
shifting nature of global human rights politics.
If campaigns against the “sovereign emergencies” in Brazil and Chile
shone a spotlight on the tortured body to galvanize people to action,
the Argentine campaigns elevated the cause of desaparecido to a new
global status. A variety of transnational and local activists denounced the
junta, but even in 1976 and the years after, human rights politics was a
highly unsettled operation. Amnesty International struggled to carry out a
simple fact-finding mission in the face of a defiant junta and fabricated
popular protests that did not take lightly to external intervention. In
these ways, the battle to define the meaning and shape of a politics of
human rights in Argentina was a fierce one. It took place not just between
the junta and the “anti-Argentina campaign” – the junta’s term for those
who opposed it – but even, at times, among the diverse groups of human
rights activists themselves. This chapter examines these conflicts by
looking at three of the most prominent groups that linked local and
transnational activism: the Madres’ politicized performance of their
gender in the interest of identifying their missing children, the depoliti-
cized stance of Amnesty International, and the more politically oriented
exiles and solidarity activists who sought a more radical politics than that
of human rights.
Most exiles sympathized with some variant of Peronism, a longstand-
ing populist workers’ movement in Argentina that triangulated a third
way beyond capitalism and communism. But Peronism divided the left
into many factions, which were reproduced in acrimonious debates
among exiles abroad.7 Human rights began to appeal to some in this
moment of distress: previous methods to enact social change, whether
through armed or unarmed violence, had ceased to be viable by the end
6
See Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, established by UN’s
Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 20 (XXXVI), February 29, 1980; Comisión
Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP), Nunca Más: Informe de la
Comisión Nacional Sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1984).
7
Pablo Yankelevich, “Exiles and the Argentina Diaspora: Issues and Problems,” in Luis
Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich, eds., Exile and the Politics of Exclu-
sion in the Americas (Brighton: Sussex, 2012), 204; on the endurance of Peronism, see
Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class,
1946–1976 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
of the decade. Initially dismissed by some on the left as a “petty bourgeois

pastime,”8 the defense of human rights, at least in the beginning and while
in the desperation of defeat, offered the possibility of papering over old
party antagonisms.
At the same time, the turn to human rights by many Argentine leftists
was facilitated by the growing sense of inter-American solidarity among
victims of state violence in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Indeed, the com-
bined influence of earlier 1970s activism from their Southern Cone neigh-
bors enlivened a debate in the Americas about the possibilities and
drawbacks of a social activism in the name of human rights.9 Exiles faced
similar issues as Brazilians or Chileans in their reclamation of human
rights language and practice, but the major difference was that they
already had advocacy templates from which to draw.
Yet, it was an uphill battle. Even though an increasing number of
NGOs and ad hoc action groups were turning to human rights to name
and shame South American authoritarianism, anti-junta forces in Argen-
tina contended with a far less compelling narrative than their Chilean
counterparts. In Argentina there was no sinister analogue to Pinochet,
with his dark glasses and flowing capes. All the more, many in Europe
interpreted Peronism as a variant of fascism, making them less inclined to
accept Argentines as they did Chileans with open arms.10 Still, advocates
built on extant solidarity and human rights structures, both ideologically
and programmatically. But the nature of the junta’s crimes, too, and
especially the disappearance of thousands of its citizens, posed a signifi-
cant challenge. How do you protest a crime whose victims and tangible
evidence have all but disappeared?
***
Argentina was on the verge of collapse for years. In contrast to Chile’s
long history of democratic rule, Argentina was marred by military inter-
ventions throughout the twentieth century. Juan Perón’s death in 1974,
which brought his wife Isabel to power, provided an opening for the
8
Envar El Kadri and Jorge Rulli, Diálogos en el exilio (Buenos Aires: Editorial Foro Sur,
1984), 111.
9
See, for example, Néstor Scipioni’s 1983 memoir Las dos caras del terrorismo (Mexico
City: Círculo de Estudios Latinoamericanos, 1983), in which he tells how he went from
being inspired by the Cuban Revolution, to joining a leftist Peronist group in 1973, to
working for human rights in Belgium; see also Silvina Jensen, “Identidad, Derrotero y
Debates del Exilio Peronista en Cataluña,” Hispania Nova, no. 5 (2005), 70–93.
10
Yankelevich, “Exiles and the Argentina Diaspora,” 209.
anti-Peronist military to ascend. With the country suffering from rising

inflation, the political climate grew increasingly fraught as paramilitary
groups from across the political spectrum engaged in pitched battles.
This allowed the military to portray “Isabelita” – the gendered, diminu-
tive form of her name – as a weak and “incompetent” female leader.11
With Peronist guerrillas waging “revolutionary war” against her, few
supported Isabel when she was overthrown.
Given the array of voices calling for change, even Amnesty Inter-
national acknowledged the coup at first “seemed hopeful.”12 Might the
junta bring a sense of normalcy to a chaotic Argentina? The ostensibly
peaceful transition led the most famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis
Borges to claim: “Now we are governed by gentlemen.”13 In contrast to
Chile, where the orgy of violence resulted in the martyrdom of Salvador
Allende, many thought the coup would mark the end of a long period of
violence in Argentina, not the dawn of a new era. In the eyes of human
rights advocates, the Argentine story was never a simple black and white
morality tale like its Chilean precursor. And the Argentine junta had
learned some important lessons from watching the campaigns against its
Chilean, Brazilian, and Uruguayan fellow authoritarian neighbors.
Perhaps the most critical informed the surreptitious logic of the junta’s
new “Dirty War” against its enemies, carried out under the Orwellian
Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Pro-
cess), colloquially known as the Proceso.14 Pinochet had created large
11
Quoted in Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in
Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 54.
12
Amnesty International, Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina, 6–15
November 1976 (London, UK: Amnesty International Publications, 1977), 5; Emilio
Mignone, Derechos humanos y sociedad: el caso argentino (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del
Pensamiento Nacional, 1991). In a vast historiography on the Dirty War, see Marcos
Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La dictadura militar (1976–1983): del golpe de estado a la
restauracíon democrática (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003); Gabriela Aguila, Dictadura,
represión y sociedad en Rosario, 1976/1983: Un estudio sobre la represión y los com-
portamientos y actitudes sociales en dictadura (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2008);
Hugo Quiroga and César Tcach, eds., Argentina: 1976–2006: Entre la sombra de la
dictadura y el futuro de la democracia (Rosario: Homo Sapiens, 2006).
13
To be sure, Borges was later said to have regretted the statement. Quoted in Rita Arditti,
Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared
Children of Argentina (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 8.
14
On the transition from fascism to dictatorship, see Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological
Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century
Argentina (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014). On the Dirty War itself, see
James Brennan’s important revisionist history, Argentina’s Missing Bones: Revisiting the
History of the Dirty War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018).
concentration camps whose images implanted in the embryonic global

human rights consciousness; few could forget the pictures of Chilean
detainees strewn about the National Stadium encircled with barbed
wire.15 In contrast, the Argentine junta pushed the violence behind closed
doors. Detention facilities became clandestine centers; the police dressed
in plain clothes and drove unmarked cars to create the sensation that they
were at once “everyone and no one.”16 And while the state practice of
forced disappearances was in practice in Guatemala in the 1960s (and to a
lesser extent in Brazil and Chile before 1976), the Argentine military made
it the signature of its campaign of state terror. As performance studies
scholar Diana Taylor has written, the Dirty War “served fundamentally
to reconstitute the Argentina population and turn it into a docile, con-
trollable, feminine ‘social’ body.”17
The intentions of the military leaders are now clear, for they have since
admitted so in no uncertain terms. In an interview before his 2013 death,
ex-junta leader Rafael Videla said, “in order to not provoke protests
inside and outside the country . . . the decision was arrived at that those
people would disappear.” The junta hoped “society did not realize” what
was going on. “There was no other solution . . . it was the price to win
the war against subversion.”18 Although the extent of these crimes were
not known at the time, estimates now suggest that the number of disap-
peared range from 20–25,000; some 340 detention centers were scattered
throughout Argentina. The vast majority of desaparecidos were first
tortured and then killed after the interrogation.19
Even before the coup, as political order was unraveling in Argentina,
a self-declared non-partisan group of lawyers and clerics formed two
human rights organizations: the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights
15
Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 96, 393; Mary Helen Spooner, Soldiers in a
Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1999), 61–2.
16
Bernard-Henri Lévy, “Argentina Today, II,” The New Republic (June 17, 1978), 18.
17
Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 151.
18
“Videla admitió el asesinato de más de 700 desaparecidos,” La Nación (April 14, 2012);
for Videla’s account, see his interview in Ceferino Reato, Disposición final (Buenos Aires:
Random House Mondadori, 2012).
19
On the 20–25,000 estimate, see John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His
Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York, NY: The New Press, 2004),
140. Of course, precise numbers are impossible to determine. Human rights activists long
used the figure of 30,000 to signal the magnitude of the disappeared. See also Alison
Brysk, “The Politics of Measurement: The Contested Count of the Disappeared in
Argentina,” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4 (November, 1994), 676–92.
(Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos; APDH) and the

Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights (Movimiento Ecuménico por
los Derechos Humanos; MEDH). The latter group was an exception,
however, in that the Argentine churches supported the military to a
degree unmatched in Chile and Brazil.20 Such groups helped to launch a
domestic human rights movement in a country characterized by what one
Argentine historian calls a relative “absence of a social conscience of
human rights.”21
The APDH and the MEDH experimented with different techniques
that helped to build that social conscience. In seeking to “promot[e] the
validity of human rights enunciated in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights,” the APDH addressed letters to junta leader Videla in
the most deferential and respectful terms, calling him “His Excellency
Mr. President.”22 In shunning the use of violence associated with aspects
of the Marxist left, the APDH focused on the legal defense of victims
by collecting testimonies and legal claims, filing writs of habeas corpus
(which largely failed), and seeking the right to publish the names of the
desaparecidos. The APDH attracted members for all political persuasions
and was the most far-reaching of all domestic Argentina human rights
groups, establishing chapters in cities across the country.23
Most significantly in their quest for non-partisanship, the APDH and
the MEDH denounced the “terrorism” and “fascism” of the left and the
right in equal parts. In so doing, they laid the foundation for what would
20
On the MEDH, see Arturo Blatezky, Documentos fundamentales y declaraciones púb-
licas del Movimiento Ecuménico por los Derechos Humanos, 1976–2002 (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones del MEDH, 2002), 13, 15–16. Horacio Verbitsky, Doble juego: la Argentina
católica y militar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2006); Emilio F. Mignone,
Iglesia y dictadura: El papel de la Iglesia a la luz de sus relaciones con el régimen militar
(Buenos Aires: Colihue, 2006). As counterpoint, see Jennifer Adair, “In Search of the
‘Lost Decade’: The Politics of Rights and Welfare During the Argentine Transition to
Democracy, 1982–1990” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2013).
21
Sebastián Carassai, “Antes de que anocheza: Derechos humanos, y clases medias en
Argentine antes y en los inicios del golpe de estado de 1976,” América Latina Hoy,
vol. 54 (2010), 69–96. See also his The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes,
Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014) and David M. K. Sheinin, Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the
Dirty War (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 2012).
22
“Protocolo Notarial,” file 198, B7. Archivo de la Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos
Humanos (hereafter cited as: APDH).
23
APDH to President Videla, file 1.33, C1, APDH; Enzo Giustozzi, “Qué es la Asamblea,”
Derechos Humanos, vol.2, no. 8 (February 1987). When the junta refused to publish the
names, a coalition of families of the disappeared released a partial list of 1,129 names of
the detenidos-desaparecidos (detained–disappeared) in La Nación in late 1977.
later concretize in Argentina’s 1984 truth and reconciliation report,

Nunca Más (Never Again), as a “doctrine of the two devils” that inexor-
ably led to rampant societal violence. This false equivalency conflicted
with later historical analysis that attributed far more blame to the right’s
counter-revolutionary forces.24
Although these were some of the first groups in Argentina to self-
consciously trumpet human rights as a means to protest escalating state
and non-state violence, their more cautious approach would lead to a
schism with Emilio Mignone, a lawyer and member of the APDH whose
daughter Monica was swept away and disappeared a few months after
the junta took over. (Mignone would form his own group, CELS, whose
work is considered in Chapter 7). Indeed, unlike in Brazil, Chile, and
Uruguay, a wide array of domestic NGOs sprouted up in Argentina after
the 1976 coup, each articulating its own unique perspective on human
rights.25 The most significant and symbolic for the development of global
human rights politics was the Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
***
Every Thursday at 3:30 in the afternoon, in the Plaza de Mayo, the square
directly in front of the government’s neoclassical presidential palace, the
Casa Rosada, a group of three to four hundred women donned white
headscarves. They marched as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, carry-
ing photos of their missing children, “keep[ing] the dead and brutalized
bodies forever ‘alive’” – the white headscarves symbolizing babies’
diapers.26 At these weekly ritual vigils the Mothers “performed” an
essentialized idea of motherhood, dressing in white and wearing slippers
24
On the “theory of the two devils” in Argentina and the role of domestic human rights
organizations, see Carassai, “Antes de que anochezca,” 71, 80; Greg Grandin, “The
Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State
Formation in Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala,” American Historical Review, vol. 110,
no. 1 (February, 2005), 53.
25
These domestic organizations are treated more thoroughly in Alyson Brysk, The Politics
of Human Rights in Argentina: Protest, Change, and Democratization (Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1994); Adair, “In Search of the Lost Decade”; Lynsay B. Skiba,
“Between National Law and International Norms: The Political Transformation of
Human Rights in Argentina, 1955–83” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, 2015). See also Hector Leis, El movimiento por los derechos humanos y la
política argentina (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1989), 17–19.
26
See Taylor, Disappearing Acts, quote on 191; see also 142, 193–6; Barbara Sutton,
“Poner el Cuerpo: Women’s Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina,” Latin
American Politics and Society, vol. 49, no. 3 (Fall 2007), 140.
to symbolise both the Virgin Mary and Evita Perón (who used white
hankerchiefs), for which the military dubbed them las locas (the mad-
women). As emblems of the sanctity of the religious Argentine family and
the purity of womanhood, they called into question the very ethos of
masculinist salvation offered by the junta’s Proceso, even as they “left a
restrictive patriarchal system basically unchallenged.” Their gendered
status as seemingly apolitical, innocent, and grieving mothers provided
them an opening to innovate a new kind of human rights practice.27
Their influence was extraordinary, both in Argentina and across the
globe. In the conservative and most widely read Argentine newspaper
in the country – and only after all other publishers turned them down –
the Mothers took out a half-page ad regarding the fate of the
desaparecidos. “We only ask for the truth,” they supplicated in a letter
to the junta. The letter ran on December 10, 1977, a year before the
fortieth anniversary of the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, in spite of the fact that the junta disappeared a number of Mothers
two days before in an attempt to dissuade them from publishing it.28
Despite these efforts, broad swathes of the Argentine populace believed
the disappeared were the Mothers’ own creation, not state policy.
As a result, the Mothers looked beyond the borders of Argentina.
They gathered on weekends in the home of their first president, Azucena
Villaflor De Vicenti, and spent whole nights drinking coffee and writing
letters to share information with Argentine exiles, foreign embassies,
journalists, activists, diplomats, and politicians in Europe and the Amer-
icas; they invented a figurative language of poetry, referring to themselves
as las palomas (the doves), to evade censors. “If it hadn’t been for inter-
national support,” one Mother reflected, “we wouldn’t be here talking to
you today.”29
Toward the end of 1978, as their global stature grew, they began to
tour Europe and the United States, meeting with Senator Kennedy and
27
Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, 72–3. On photos as devices to help relatives remem-
ber and grieve their missing family in the absence of bodies, see Ludmila da Silva Catela,
No Habrá Flores en la Tumba del Pasado: La Experiencia de Reconstrucción del Mundo
de los Familiares de Desaparecidos (La Plata: Ediciones Al Margen, 2001).
28
See “Sólo pedimos la verdad,” La Prensa (December 10, 1977); “10 de diciembre de
1977: Solicitada ‘Sólo pedimos la verdad’”: Memoria Abierta Online Archive: www
.memoriaabierta.org.ar/materiales/solicitada1977.php; Estela Schindel, La desaparición
a diario: sociedad prensa y dictadura, 1975–1978 (Villa María: Eduvim, 2012), 261–2.
29
Maguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 68; Jo Fisher, Mothers
of the Disappeared (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999), quote on 71, 75.
other concerned parties in the US Congress, the Department of State, and

the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC,
and they traveled to New York to speak with the United Nations officials;
in Europe, they provided testimony to the UN’s Commission on Human
Rights, collaborating with Dutch lawyer Theo Van Boven, who became
head of the UN Human Rights Division in 1977, and traveling to Rome in
an ill-fated attempt to gain an audience with the Pope. The most promin-
ent of the Mothers, Hebe de Bonafini, who became president in 1979,
“thrust pictures of [her] children” into the Pope’s hands, “crying out,
‘Please help the disappeared!’” But the pictures passed through his hands
and the Pope continued walking.30
In the beginning, the Mothers were neophytes who “did not speak of
human rights and did not think in those terms.”31 “Just imagine,” Hebe
de Bonafini later recalled, “none of us had ever been abroad before, we’d
never spoken to people in such positions of power and we didn’t speak
English.”32 But they gradually grew more comfortable with the language
of human rights, promoting a version of human rights practice that
centered on what they saw as little more than the “truth,” avoiding
thorny questions of politics and shunning the more radical anti-
imperialist language of South American leftists.33
As a result, the seemingly “innocent” Mothers found little trouble in
enlisting foreign allies. Indeed, virtually all domestic Argentine activists
had some degree of connection to groups on the outside. Even the most
insular, the APDH, received significant funding from the Swedish govern-
ment and the World Council of Churches.34 These transnational links
were the natural result of increased density and diversity of global human
rights politics by the late 1970s. But in the immediate wake of the coup,
international actors, led by Amnesty International, were the first to gather
and compile information about human rights abuses in Argentina. As in
other Southern Cone countries, Amnesty provided a template and praxis
of human rights that helped carve out a space for the growth of domestic
rights groups in Argentina. Local activists, in turn, “vernacularized” the
30
Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, quote 87, 98.
31
See, e.g., Carassai’s interview with Hilda De Velazco, as cited in “Antes que anocheza,”
77–8.
32
Quoted in Fisher, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 77.
33
Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (London, UK: South End Press, 1989), 72, 76–7;
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo (Lanham: SR Books, 1994), 68, 83; Carassai, “Antes que anochezca.”
34
Mignone, Derechos humanos y sociedad, 102.
politics of human rights as they looked to international groups to legitim-

ize their claims in the formation of what was a symbiotic relationship.35
***
“We didn’t think that people had necessarily disappeared forever,”
Amnesty International investigator Patricia Feeney explained about
Amnesty’s on-site investigation. “We were assuming that the disappeared
would turn up in preventive detention in some place and not that . . . they
had been dropped out of planes.” It was not until the delegation set foot
in Argentina that the “full horror of what was going on” became clear.36
Propelled by the flood of information about state abuses from exiles and
victims, Amnesty was the first organization to conduct an investigation in
Argentina; it took place in November 1976, a mere six months after the
coup, following the organization’s first country-specific campaign on
Uruguay in 1976.37 Although Amnesty’s Argentina report would later
be surpassed by the exhaustive report from the Inter-American Commis-
sion on Human Rights (IACHR) in 1979, Amnesty initially set the terms
of the global debate on human rights in Argentina, especially through its
focus on the magnitude of desaparecidos.38
Although growing in membership and diversifying its tactics, Amnesty’s
work in 1976 was highly improvisational. Amnesty faced off against
a defiant Argentine junta over the truth of events in Argentina. Indeed,
the junta went to great lengths to obfuscate Amnesty’s fact-finding.39
35
Carassai, “Antes que anochezca,” 79. On vernacularization, see Peggy Levitt and Sally
Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women’s Rights in Peru,
China, India and the United States,” Global Networks, vol. 9, no. 4 (2009), 441–61.
36
Patricia Feeney, interview with author, June 29, 2012, London, UK.
37
For example, Juan Méndez had studied abroad in the United States in the 1960s, and his
“American” and Argentine families shared information with Feeney, leading to his
adoption as a prisoner of conscience. Méndez, interview with author. Amnesty was
alerted to violence in Argentina before the 1976 coup. See AI to national sctions/CAT
coordinators and Argentina coordination groups, “Re: Action on Argentinian Cases,”
February 4, 1975 and AI News Release, “Amnesty International Calls for Argentine
Probe into Murder of Uruguayan Exiles,” November 6, 1974, Series II.5, Box 2, AMR
13- Americas-Argentina, 1972–5, in the Archives of Amnesty International-USA (here-
after cited as: AI-USA).
38
Amnesty would not return in a formal capacity until its 1984 mission led by José
Zalaquett; see A Report on an Amnesty International Visit to Argentina, 23 April–2
May 1984 (London, UK: Amnesty International Publications, 1984.)
39
See Iain Guest’s chapter, “Amnesty’s Fraught Visit,” for a blow-by-blow account of the
visit in his Behind the Disappearances, 76–86. For a brief discussion, see William Michael
Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy
toward Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 77–8.
The junta vacillated between occasionally providing information and

withholding access to other vital detention facilities and important per-
sonnel. Through its control of the media, it manipulated the national
reception of Amnesty’s visit and alternately portrayed their visitors as
buffoons and communist thugs. Artificial public protests confronted the
Amnesty delegation wherever it went, under the guise that they were
spontaneous and organic, in an attempt to intimidate Amnesty. The junta
also harassed, and on a few occasions disappeared, those who talked to
Amnesty’s investigators.40
Amnesty sent a triad of investigators: Lord Avebury, a member of the
British House of Lords; Robert Drinan, the first Jesuit priest to be elected
to the US House of Representatives; and Patricia Feeney, an Amnesty
researcher on Latin America.41 The atmosphere was filled with threats
and uncertainty, reflecting how the junta did not take lightly to Amnesty’s
arrival. In fact, the visit almost did not happen at all, in large part because
the junta stonewalled and refused to officially recognize Amnesty’s pres-
ence. It was only after an intervention by the American embassy, on
behalf of Congressman Drinan, that the delegation was granted access.
Once they entered, the delegation interviewed members of the UN Refu-
gee Agency and prisoners at the federal penitentiary of Villa Devoto.42
Leaders of the emerging domestic human rights community, such as
Emilio Mignone, assisted them by coordinating and sharing information
about the disappearances of their family members.43 They met with an
assortment of junta officials, including the Ministers of the Interior and
Justice – but not with junta leader Videla, who was away visiting Pinochet
– all while American diplomats sat in on the meetings as observers.44
Diplomatic cables offer a revealing behind-the-scenes window into
what must have been an astonishing confrontation between Amnesty
and the leaders of the Argentine junta. Drinan was an especially active
40
“Los muertos sin derechos humanos,” La Opinión (November 4, 1976).
41
The effects of this early human rights work on these Amnesty investigators was note-
worthy. Drinan, for one, would later reinterpret his lifework through the lens of human
rights; see his The Mobilization of Shame: A World View of Human Rights (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
42
“Amnesty International: los derechos humanos en la Argentina,” La Opinión (November
21, 1976).
43
Robert Drinan, “Repression in Argentina,” Commonweal (February 18, 1977), 103.
44
DoS Cable, BA 07326, US Embassy in BA to Secretary of State (November 8, 1976),
Subject: Congressman Drinan’s Visit to Argentina, Wikileaks Public Library of US
Diplomacy (hereafter cited as: Wiki).
presence, going far beyond his role as an Amnesty representative and

operating as an independent Congressional investigator; he wildly sug-
gested he had the power to impose sanctions on Argentina. He assumed
what embassy staff called a “very forceful stance” and “emphasized
points several times by pounding [his] first on [the] table.” American
officers wryly commented that “smiles and words of welcome were
[exchanged] literally through gritted teeth” and they noted they “heard
sotto voce ‘what arrogance’ in Spanish” after one of Drinan’s “spirited
statements.”45 At another diplomatic meeting, one Argentine officer read
aloud Amnesty’s definition of a prisoner of conscience and shockingly
stated that, since all Argentine prisoners were violent subversives, the
government had no such political prisoners.46 Despite the tensions
of an awkward diplomatic song-and-dance, Amnesty made some pro-
gress: in their discussions they brought up well-known, high-profile
cases of Argentine prisoners, including Juan Méndez, to substantiate
their claims and push for releases. Méndez was soon thereafter freed in
early 1977.47
The junta’s notional cooperation belied a more pernicious plan.
The Amnesty delegation found itself early on confronted by a posse of
“20 plainclothes policemen, ostensibly assigned to protect the delegates.”
When it explained that it never asked for such protection, a photographer
took a picture of Drinan, who then angrily demanded he be given the
film in what embassy reports called a “scuffle.”48 The real purpose of
the “police,” it soon became clear, was to badger the investigators and
obstruct the mission’s “freedom of inquiry.”49
In these ways, the junta ensured that security forces, who refused to
present any identification, were ever-present to intimidate the Amnesty
investigators. “It was an incredibly frightening mission,” recalled Amnesty’s
45
DoS Cable, BA 07348, US Embassy in BA to Secretary of State, November 9, 1976,
Subject: Congressman Drinan’s Visit to Argentina, Wiki.
46
Subject: Congressman Drinan’s Visit to Argentina – Meeting with GOA, Wiki.
47
Juan Méndez interview in Ana Baron, ed., Por qué se fueron: testimonios de argentinos en
el exterior (Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, 1995), 315.
48
Quoted in DoS Cable, BA 07366, US Embassy in BA to Secretary of State November 9,
1976, Subject: Congressman Drinan’s Visit to Argentina, Wiki.
49
Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina, 6. See also the Fondo Personal
Emilio Mignone, Subserie Ss 2.3 – Organismos Internacionales de Derechos Humanos,
2.3.2 – Amnistía Internacional, 1978–99, CELS; Tricia Feeney, “Summary of Argentina
Mission Report,” March 1, 1977, Series IV.1.3, Box 15, Folder: Country Files-Americas-
Argentina-Campaign, AI-USA.
Patricia Feeney, “harassment and intimidation from day one, really.”50

On one visit to a refugee hostel, the delegation noted the presence of
four Ford Falcons. (The unmarked cars were a “reigning symbol” of the
junta’s terror, used by plain-clothes officers to abduct citizens who were
then often tortured and disappeared.51) When Amnesty interviewed two
women in Córdoba, it later found out that both had been detained by
junta officials. “I know that I shall never forget the anguish I experienced
on Sunday, November 14,” Drinan later revealed in the US Catholic
magazine Commonweal, when he found that one of the woman, Josefa
Martínez, had been disappeared. (She was released one month later.)52
For its part, the Argentine press, controlled by the junta, produced
“fictitious incidents and carried gross misrepresentations,” in the words
of Amnesty’s report.53 The government’s official news agency, TELAM,
which was censored by the junta, cast Amnesty in a negative light,
portraying it as biased against the anti-Communist West.54 A similar
story ran in La Opinión, the newspaper of Jacobo Timerman (who
was later disappeared for criticizing the junta), where Amnesty was
lampooned for “not putting the same emphasis on the study of the
problem in socialist countries.”55 As with the Chilean junta, the junta
dismissed Amnesty’s criticisms as the work of Marxist propagandists;
they also invoked Argentina’s sovereignty as a shield against encroach-
ments by Amnesty.56
To further cast the mission in questionable terms, the press deliberately
misrepresented Amnesty’s actions. Newspapers told of protests against
the delegation at the Hotel Presidente that were entirely fabricated. State
50
Patricia Feeney, interview with author; Tricia Feeney, “Summary of Argentina Mission
Report,” March 1, 1977, Series IV.1.3, Box 15, Folder: Countries Files-Americas-
Argentina-Campaign, AI-USA.
51
Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 172. On the Ministry of Interior’s purchase of
Ford Falcons, see Expediente Secreto No. 274/77 in the Archivo Intermedio, Archivo
General de la Nación cited in “La orden que dio la dictadura para la compra de Falcon
verdes sin patentes,” Clarín (March 23, 2006).
52
Drinan, “Repression in Argentina,” 103.
53
Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina, 6.
54
Subject: Congressman Drinan’s Visit to Argentina – Meeting with GOA, Wiki; on press
censorship, see Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina, 15.
55
“Llegaron tres dirigentes de Amnesty,” La Opinión (November 9, 1976); “Lord Aver-
bury en Villa Devoto,” La Opinión (November 10, 1976); “Dirigentes de Amnesty
explicaron su misión,” La Opinión (November 11, 1976).
56
“Verificación de los derechos humanos,” La Nación (November 11, 1976).
officials encouraged a small group of young women and men referred

to as the “National Patriotic Movement” to shout offensive epithets at
their hotel windows: “How does the Church allow the priest Drinan to
defend killers and extremists?”; “Get out of our country, servants of
Communism.” The protesters carried a banner that informed their com-
patriots: “Argentina: You should know that Amnesty International is not
a friend of our homeland. Amnesty International is our enemy . . . it is the
legal apparatus of international communism.”57
Amnesty considered the government’s TELAM coverage to be the most
egregious affront. In a rare act – Amnesty typically ignored such cri-
tiques – it rebutted it and found ten factual errors. For instance, TELAM
insinuated that Lord Avebury displayed no concern for a woman whose
brother, a military officer, was killed by a leftist “subversive.” (The
woman apparently was sent by the junta in a staged incident.)58 Drinan
responded that Amnesty was “not interested in deaths at the hands of
subversives,” which TELAM took out of context to make it sound as if
Amnesty was selectively choosing its targets.
In some senses, they were right. Yet Drinan was repeating a core plank
of Amnesty’s mandate, which did not cover non-state terrorism. The
isolated quote mischaracterized Amnesty’s work to an Argentine public
unfamiliar with the organization. The press, moreover, mocked the dele-
gation’s clothing and behavior as representative of its supposed Commun-
ist sympathies. Lord Avebury was dubbed the “Red Lord” and was
singled out for wearing “patterned shirts,” which were disparagingly read
as “queer.”59 The epithet was intentional and a common practice of what
scholars call the cultural Cold War in the Americas: anti-Communist
dictators invariably linked homosexuality with the foreign threat of Com-
munist subversion.60
57
“Una protesta por la presencia de Amnesty,” La Nación (November 13, 1976).
58
Subject: Congressman Drinan’s Visit to Argentina – Meeting with GOA, Wiki.
59
Quotes come from Patricia Feeney, interview with author; “La actividad de los delegados
de Amnesty,” La Nación (November 16, 1976). See also Robert Cox, “The Truth about
Amnesty,” Buenos Aires Herald (November 13, 1976); “Una protesta por la presencia de
Amnesty,” La Nación (November 13, 1976).
60
On homosexuality as Communist subversion, see Ben Cowan, “‘A Passive Homosexual
Element’: Digitized Archives and the Policing of Homosex in Cold War Brazil,” Radical
History Review, vol. 120 (2014), 183–203 and Ben Cowan, Securing Sex: Morality and
Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press), 167–8, 239; Victoria Langland, “Birth Control Pills and Molotov
Cocktails: Reading Sex and Revolution in 1968 Brazil,” in Gilbert M. Johnson and
Perhaps the only Argentine newspaper to display some degree of

objectivity in covering Amnesty’s visit was the daily Buenos Aires Herald.
The Herald, which only had a small readership of English-speaking
foreigners at that time was edited by Robert Cox, a British journalist
who gained some notoriety for his criticism of the military junta (for
which he was detained and deported in 1979).61 If the Herald was more
objective than the junta’s propaganda, however, Feeney saw it as a “right-
wing paper for the expat community” that was by no means “sympathetic
to the subversivos.”62
Still, Cox defended Amnesty’s visit.63 The piece opened with Argentine
protest letters complaining about Amnesty’s presence. Irrational and
biting, one suggested that the delegation take a “one-way Aeroflot ticket
to Moscow, Cuba, Angola, Uganda or some of the soap-box African
‘states’ where you can really see some action . . . and then just stay there.”
Responding to these letters, Cox called Amnesty a “terribly misunder-
stood organization”; in particular, Amnesty’s delegation in Argentina had
experienced a “tough mission – with crowded days of interviews and
meetings.” Even more, the junta’s trumped up TELAM reporting “almost
succeeded in sabotaging the effort to get the Amnesty International mis-
sion to see the full picture.” Despite his efforts, and given the junta’s press
censorship, Cox found himself unable to control the domestic fallout of
Amnesty’s visit. Amnesty could, however, make ripples in the inter-
national sphere.
In such a pursuit, from late 1976 until early 1977, Amnesty officials
crafted its report, which they released on the first anniversary of the
Argentine coup in late March 1977. At its headquarters in London, the
International Secretariat (IS) urged national and local Amnesty groups to
send letters to the junta to press Amnesty’s recommendations. The IS
published a primer for local adoption groups that mapped the differences
and similarities – broken down by the approximate numbers of deaths
and disappeared, as well as types of torture centers – to “see where
Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold
War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 308–49.
61
See, e.g, Robert Cox, “Argentina’s Heart of Darkness,” Buenos Aires Herald (May 26,
1979). For a hagiographic treatment of Robert Cox, written by his son, see David Cox,
Dirty Secrets, Dirty War: Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1976–1983: The Exile of Editor
Robert J. Cox (Charleston, SC: Evening Post, 2008).
62
Patricia Feeney, interview with author.
63
Robert Cox, “The Truth about Amnesty,” Buenos Aires Herald (November 13, 1976).
the links can be made” between Chile and Argentina.64 In these ways,
Amnesty turned South America into a testing ground for a comparative
and transnational analysis of state authoritarianism.65
As with its interventions in other countries in the region, Amnesty’s
legalistic and comprehensive report set the agenda for other human rights
organizations. The report’s introduction eschewed the junta’s simple
morality tale of escalating violence between leftist groups (Montoneros
and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo [ERP]) and the government-
sponsored paramilitaries (the Alianza Anti-Comunista Argentina [AAA]).
There was never parity between the two, as the “theory of the two devils”
would later popularize. Amnesty noted that the AAA and other “para-
police groups operate[d] in broad daylight and are never interfered with
by the public authorities.” The report also detailed the junta’s use of a
state of exception, in essence assuming power over the three branches of
government in order to rule by dictatorial fiat and, when necessary, a
rubber-stamp legislative committee.
The report’s most compelling sections discussed the conditions of
prisons, the use of torture, and the disappeared. Indeed, the report helped
to concretize the very idea of the desaparecidos for both Amnesty Inter-
national and a broader global human rights imagination. In estimating
that there were roughly 5,000–6,000 political prisoners, two-thirds of
whom had not been charged, and 15,000 desaparecidos, Amnesty pro-
vided the numerical benchmarks for other groups. They also identified the
main federal penitentiaries, such as Villa Devoto and La Plata, and the
death camps, such as ESMA and La Perla.
Acknowledging that “torture is not new in Argentina,” Amnesty used
the personal testimony of victims to paint a damaging portrait of the
pervasive nature of the practice.66 It described common techniques: the
picana (electric shocks); the submarino (waterboarding); beatings with
64
Robert Maurer to Group Leaders, “Re: Argentina Mission Report and Campaign,” April
20, 1977, Series IV.1.3, Box 15, AI-USA.
65
In the United States alone, the comparative breakdown was sent out to the press, the
Congress, the State Department, the Organization of American States, and other smaller
solidarity and human rights groups. See “Argentina” file, undated (1977?) in Series
IV.1.3, Box 15, AI-USA. For some press coverage, see “Report on Argentina Calls
Summary Killings Common,” New York Times (March 24, 1977), A10; “Argentina’s
Martial Law Assailed,” Baltimore Sun (March 24, 1977); and Daniel Southerland,
“Report Cites Argentina Human Rights Violations,” Christian Science Monitor (March
24, 1977); Tom Wicker, “‘Disappeared’ in Chile,” New York Times (March 20, 1977).
66
See, e.g., International Commission of Jurists, The Situation of Defence Lawyers in
Argentina (Geneva: ICJ, 1975).
fists, rifle butts, and sticks; kicks to the head and body; burning prisoners
with cigarettes; forcing prisoners to stand for hours; depriving them of
food, drink, and sleep; sexual abuse of women, up to rape; and harass-
ment with violent dogs. Particularly cruel was the practice of the “night
dance,” whereby prisoners were forced to stand outside naked at night
for hours on end, answer questions, and suffer humiliating treatment.
Twenty-seven-year-old Isabel Gaba de Negrotti told Amnesty how her
interrogators gave her “electric shocks on my breasts, the side of my body
and under my arms.” She continued:
They kept questioning me. They gave me electric shocks in the vagina and put a
pillow over my mouth to stop me from screaming. Someone they called the
‘colonel’ came and said they were going to increase the voltage until I talked.
They kept throwing water over my body and applying electric shocks all over.67
From such accounts, Amnesty concluded that torture was being “used as
an integral part of the counter-subversive strategy.”68
At the same time, Amnesty’s spotlighting of testimony furthered a set
of sensationalist strategies that it pioneered throughout the 1970s: the
foregrounding of a graphic torture scene, often with a female victim, and
carefully constructed with titillating details.69 Because of Amnesty’s belief
in “testimonial truth,” it rarely acknowledged the subjective unreliability
of such sources.70
Amnesty’s report dwelled at length on the problem of the disappeared.
While Amnesty acknowledged the sheer impossibility of accurately
accounting for the number of the disappeared, it included estimates from
three to thirty thousand, signaling fifteen as the “figure most frequently
quoted.” In evocative language, given its general staid and legalistic
tone, Amnesty wrote that a disappeared victim taken at night “joined
that ghostly army” that since the coup was so frequently referred to as
the “disappeared.” They identified a number of “unofficial” detention
centers, the most infamous referred to only by its acronym ESMA
(Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada; Navy Mechanics’ School), where
“a large number of people who disappear are unofficially executed.”
Amnesty confirmed these practices in interviews, which were corrobor-
ated by the “unidentified bodies” that were found “floating in rivers,
67
68
69
See, e.g., Barbara Keys, “Amnesty International’s First Campaign against Torture,
1972–1974: A Critical Appraisal,” unpublished ms.
70
Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 94.
at the bottom of lakes, decomposing on rubbish dumps or blown to

pieces in quarries.”71 In an appendix, Amnesty produced one of the first
lists of the disappeared, stating the name, date of abduction, and other
identifying information (e.g., age and occupation) for all the victims it
could trace.72
Amnesty clarified that these harsh tactics were the product of a deep-
seated belief on the part of the Argentine junta that it was a fighting a
“Dirty War” that “goes beyond good and evil.” Such a dangerous world,
it followed in the junta’s logic, justified “counter-subversive techniques.”
The junta did not hide this rationale; it promoted it. At the United
Nations in August 1976, for example, the Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Admiral César Guzzetti, explained that subversives were an infectious
disease that had contaminated the “social body of the country” and in
response the junta was forming “antibodies.” Junta officials went to great
lengths to popularize the notion that subversives were getting their
comeuppance – algo habrán hecho (they must have done something)
was a common chorus in Argentina among “certain sectors of society.”
“If anybody violated human rights in Argentina, murdering, torturing
and bombing,” junta officials explained to the Amnesty’s delegation, “it is
undoubtedly the terrorists.”73
Amnesty begged to differ. The junta’s assault on the so-called
subversivos “deprives all the citizens in Argentina of the most fundamen-
tal civil and political rights, their constitutional guarantees.” Rebuffing
Videla’s claims that the coup was intended to “not to trample on liberty
but to consolidate it, not to twist justice but to impose it,” Amnesty
bemoaned how “the majority [of prisoners] have been tortured as a
matter of routine.” Friends and relatives of missing persons, moreover,
“eventually discover that the disappeared person is dead.” While acknow-
ledging that left-wing guerrilla organizations had committed “outrages,”
Amnesty repudiated the junta’s justification for the violence, the theory of
the two devils, as “self-defeating: in order to restore security, an atmos-
phere of terror has been established; in order to counter illegal violence,
legal safeguards have been removed and violent illegalities condoned.” In
striking language, Amnesty concluded the “neglect of human rights in
Argentina is all the more alarming in that it has no foreseeable end.”74
71
Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina, 27–35.
72
Patricia Feeney, correspondence with author, June 19, 2012.
73
Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina, 34–7, 49.
74
Amnesty’s lists of recommendations suggested that Argentina invite the

UN to send a more comprehensive investigative delegation, conduct trials,
stop torturing its detainees, end the state of exception, and publish a full
inventory of prisoners and disappeared.75 Finally, the report ended with
compilation of all the desaparecidos that Amnesty was “able to corror-
borate from other sources.” It was likely the first list of the disappeared
ever created.76
Why did the junta allow Amnesty to cross its sovereign borders and
conduct its own study on human rights? On one level, the junta was
feeling growing pressure from Western European governments, not just
from Amnesty and solidarity groups. Journalist Iain Guest called the
whole affair a “gamble” undertaken by the junta that failed miserably.
Argentine Foreign Ministry documents declared, “We have finished with
trying to get Amnesty to understand our situation.”77 The “gamble”
reflected the division within the junta between the moderates, led by
Videla, who wanted to improve Argentina’s international standing in
the West, which was as important from a reputational perspective as an
economic one (ensuring future foreign investment in the country). The
hardliners never believed it was possible to convince Amnesty that it was
any different than regimes in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, about which
Amnesty had just issued a series of critical reports.
This belief in the possibility of controlling the global narrative on
human rights in Argentina was increasingly outdated by the late 1970s.
It conflicted with the realities of a rapidly changing world of global
human rights politics, where information traveled transnationally.78 The
junta might have convinced itself it could assemble a convincing story,
buttressed by its Cold War patrons, the United States. (The Carter
Administration’s ultimate rejection of such brutality is taken up in Chap-
ter 7.) But the events surrounding Amnesty’s visit also reveal that the
junta never wanted to find an accord with Amnesty. From its very arrival,
the junta was aggressively confrontational. If the junta could not control
the international terms of the debate, it would, at the very least, ensure
that the domestic one played out on its own terms. Argentine exiles had
other ideas in mind.
***
75
76
77
Quoted in Guest, Behind the Disappearances, 85.
78
Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 97, 99.
Laura Bonaparte was an Argentine psychoanalyst exile in Mexico City.

She had participated in revolutionary leftist politics in her native country,
but the disappearance of three of her four children, two son-in-laws, and
one daughter-in-law changed her approach to politics. She described her
conversion to a “fight for human rights to find my sons,” for, she thought,
they must be “alive in some place.”79 Argentine exiles like Bonaparte
played pivotal roles in bringing knowledge of the desaparecidos to a
broader global public. In the process, they created their own distinct
version of transnational solidarity that built on similar institutional
bodies that developed in earlier Brazilian and Chilean campaigns. These
networks shared victims’ testimony, providing an on-the-ground picture
of Argentine state terror.80
The best study of exiles in Latin America shows that Argentines, in
contrast to the regional forerunners, chose their destinations based less on
political party identification; this was in large part because the Argentine
left was more fractured than its Brazilian or Chilean counterparts.
Although Spain and Mexico were the main destinations, exiles also settled
in large numbers in France, Italy, Sweden, Venezuela, Israel, and Austra-
lia.81 Some even traveled to Brazil in the late 1970s, as that country was
experiencing a liberalization of its authoritarian government.82 Historian
Pablo Yankelevich states that some 500,000 Argentines were exiled in the
second half of the twentieth century, and around some 60,000 during the
1970s.83 If divided by ideological differences, Argentine exiles were gen-
erally a more privileged group of middle- to upper-class men and women
from more professional classes. The most targeted sector of Argentine
society, the working class, did not have the resources to escape.84
79
Interview with Laura Bonaparte, conducted by Pablo Yankelevich, Buenos Aires, August
3–6, 1999, PEL/2/A/6, in Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de
Filosofía y Letras, Archivo de la Palabra (AP), Memoria e identidad, Política y cultura
del exilio latinoamericano em México (henceforth cited as: AP).
80
Méndez, Taking a Stand, 49.
81
Sznajder and Roniger, The Politics of Exile, 212; See Jensen, Los exiliados, 24–5.
82
Samantha Quadrat, “Exiliados argentinos en Brasil: una delicada situación,” in Pablo
Yankelevich and Silvina Jensen, eds., Exilios. Destinos y experiencias bajo la dictadura
militar (Buenos Aires: Libros El Zorzal, 2007), 63–102.
83
The difficulty of quantifying the number of Argentine exiles was compounded when, in
many instances, Argentine exiles to Italy or Spain would enter the country by reverting
back to ancestral identities. See Yankelevich, Ráfagas, 23–32.
84
Jensen, Los exiliados, 24; Pablo Yankelevich, Ráfagas de un exilio: Argentinos en
México, 1974–1983 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2009); Pablo Yankelevich
and Silvina Jensen, eds., Exilios: Destinos y experiencias bajo la dictadura militar (Buenos
Aires: Del Zorzal, 2007); Pablo Yankelevich, ed., México, país refugio (Mexico: Plaza y
Argentine exiles at times struggled to reconcile human rights with other

ideologies. Historian Marina Franco astutely notes that the turn to
human rights was only “one possible result among many.”85 For various
reasons, not all exiles felt comfortable speaking in a human rights lexicon.
Many associated with leftist guerrilla groups like the Montoneros and the
ERP continued to hold out hope that the dictatorship would be defeated
by way of a violent overthrow. Indeed, the Montoneros worked to disrupt
the World Cup in 1978 by planting bombs, and in 1979 they launched a
failed counteroffensive in Argentina. But by 1981 the junta had decimated
the remaining guerrillas.86
After so many failed military campaigns, Argentine leftists, like their
compañeros in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, naturally began to look for
alternative political solutions. One of the most alluring was human rights.
This move was at first seen as a tactical one: lives were on the line and
appeals to a politics of emergency were a practical way to help those
in need. But as rights discourses began to spread, a tipping point was
reached at which point it became a primary political language that acti-
vists deployed to challenge the junta. Historian Silvina Jensen describes
this as a moment of “rupture . . . a transmutation or reinterpretation of
the revolutionary tradition in which exiles had not so long ago defined
their political project.”87
Likewise, in a series of “Dialogues in Exile,” two Argentines described
how human rights reconfigured their view of politics. One explained how
he once looked at human rights activists “with a complacent smile,” as little
more than “innocuous reformers.” In a polarized atmosphere where many
leftists took an “all or nothing” approach to revolution, he believed the
ideology of human rights was not a viable option. Another Argentine exile
gradually came to the realization that the Argentine military “had no limits
on its power over us” and that “we had to acclimate ourselves to living in
hell and to dream of an Argentina where human rights were respected.”88
Valdés, 2002); Jensen, Los exiliados; Marina Franco, El exilio: Argentinos en Francia
durante la dictadura (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2008); Sznajder and Roniger,
The Politics of Exile; Jorge Luis Bernetti and Mempo Giardinelli, México: el exilio que
hemos vivido: Memoria del exilio argentino en México durante la dictadura 1976–1983
(Buenos Aires, UNQ, 2003).
85
Franco, El exilio, 23.
86
Ariel C. Armony, “Producing and Exporting State Terror: The Case of Argentina,” in
Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodriguez, eds., When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S.,
and Technologies of Terror (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 317.
87 88
Jensen, Los exiliados, 39–40. El Kadri and Rulli, Diálogos en el exilio, 98–101.
A window into how these dynamics played out locally is Mexico City,
which was an attractive destination for many exiles from both Chile and
Argentina; by the late 1970s, some 9,000 Argentines resided there.89
Exiles formed solidarity groups, such as the Committee in Solidarity with
the Argentine People (Comité de Solidaridad con el Pueblo Argentino;
COSPA), and they worked alongside groups like Amnesty International.
Laura Bonaparte’s experiences in exile were illustrative. She encoun-
tered different political perspectives among solidarity activists and NGOs
while working in Mexico City. After signing onto Amnesty International –
whose efforts she acknowledged led to the emigration of her grandson to
the city – she soon discovered that she did not see eye-to-eye with the
organization. “It became incompatible for me to be with Amnesty Inter-
national,” she said, “because Amnesty International has its . . . rules, you
see, you can’t take up . . . issues in your own country.” Bonaparte rejected
one of Amnesty’s foundational principles: Amnesty disallowed members
to work on behalf of prisoners or causes from their own country, which
they saw as a clear conflict of interest. Bonaparte saw this apolitical
approach as a contradiction. After all, it was only through the loss of so
many of her family members that she began to fight for human rights –
decisively not, as in the case of so many Amnesty volunteers, because she
cared about the suffering of a victim in a faraway land. She described her
work as “my political fight . . . human rights are a political fight, not
partisan, but political, and I wanted it to be politicized.”90
This struggle over the political content of human rights led Bonaparte
to depart Amnesty International to form the Solidarity Committee for
Argentine Families (COSOFAM). Her work brought her to the United
States, where she met with Mark Schneider and Brady Tyson at the US
State Department, as well as to London, where she pushed the British
government to more forcefully intervene in Argentina.91 But her conflicts
did not end there. She also spoke of tensions not only with Amnesty but
with local solidarity groups in Mexico City and the Madres, which she
characterized as a “miserable” relationship. To the Madres, political
women like Laura who had a history of leftist activism were suspect. In
their eyes she was the “subversive mother abroad” who abandoned her
fellow mothers in the moment they needed to unite in solidarity on the
home front. To Laura, the Madres were politically infantile – women who
89 90
Yankelevich, Ráfagas de un exilio, 29. Interview with Laura Bonaparte, AP.
91
David Stephen to Mr. Sindall, “Call by Sra Laura Beatriz Bonaparte de Bruschtein,”
September 7, 1978, in FCO 7/3466, British National Archives.
“did not have any idea of, and started to discover, human rights only
when it bit them in the ass.”92
In a similar vein, Argentine exiles discussed the merits of human rights
in a series of discussions in the Mexican magazine Controversia. Héctor
Schumcler’s 1979 article expounded on the state of the formerly militant
left that once strove for a revolution and now found itself in exile and
almost total collapse. He asked, in essence, what was at stake for the left
in human rights, which he argued was a narrower vision of political
change. In this light, Schmucler’s comments spoke to an extended debate
on the Latin American left over the proper tactics for confronting the
region’s authoritarian regimes. Schmucler expressed frustration that some
of the most vocal and globally recognized human rights groups, such as
the Madres, only emphasized the death of their family members since the
coup. In so doing, he argued, they silenced those who had fallen before.
“Are human rights valid for some and not others? Do there exist discrim-
inatory forms to measure the worth of one’s life and not another’s?”93
In short, he was asking: why were the victims of state violence before
the 1976 coup not covered in this new politics of human rights? He
rightfully worried that such a seemingly apolitical rights promotion on
the part of the Madres solidified the junta’s false “theory of two devils.”
The image of the guerrilla fighter, Schmucler contended, was purposefully
distorted by the Argentine junta. In bemoaning the new age of human
rights that turned a blind eye to the violence and sacrifices wrought by
the revolutionaries who came before, Schmucler was, in one historian’s
words, opening up a profound debate over the “nature and the scope of
the fight for human rights.”94 Schmucler pointed to the often arbitrary
nature of the politics of human rights, whereby certain groups monopol-
ized the terrain of human rights – at least in the sense that their cause
was seen as morally pure against the belief in revolutionary violence.
For many, the idol of the revolutionary guerrilla fighter had fallen.95
92
Interview with Laura Bonaparte; Laura’s search for one of her missing daughters is also
told in Paul Heath Hoeffel and Juan Montalvo, “Missing or Dead in Argentina,” New
York Times Magazine (October 21, 1979).
93
Héctor Schmucler, “La actualidad de los derechos humanos,” Controversia, no. 1 (Octo-
ber 1979), 3. See discussions of the article in Jensen, Los exiliados, 181; Yankelevich,
Ráfagas de un exilio, 166–72; Pablo Yankelevich, México, país refugio: la experiencia de
los exilios en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2002), 297–8.
94
Yankelevich, México, país refugio, 299.
95
Luis Bruschtein, “Polémica: Derechos Humanos: sin abstracciones ni equidistancias,”
Controversia, nos. 2–3 (December 1979), 3. See discussion in Yankelevich, México, país
refugio, 300.
But the subsequent solution was troubling: the erection of a false idol
of human rights.
***
On the eve of the 1978 World Cup, the Madres developed a media plan
that targeted the hundreds of foreign journalists. When asked a question,
they would repeat a simple statement: “We want our children. They must
tell us where they are.” In this way, the World Cup provided an oppor-
tunity for the Madres and other domestic human rights organizations to
work alongside international human rights groups, exiles, and foreign
teams to politicize the sport of soccer and embarrass the Argentine junta.
The Madres also sent postcards to politicians and television networks,
and found some success. On the Cup’s first day, instead of broadcasting
the opening ceremonies, Dutch television relayed film of the Madres as
they marched in the Plaza de Mayo; Dutch sympathizers presented two
carnations to each of the Madres. It was also the first time that Amnesty
International criticized the host country of an international sporting event
on the grounds of its human rights record.96
As historian Barbara Keys has argued, it was only in the twentieth
century that international sport became a catalyst for nationalism and a
means through which nations signaled that they were members of “the
community of nations.” Sport, then, “shaped the form and image of
nations as they entered the international order.”97 Argentina’s first suc-
cessful bid to host the world’s most popular sport reflected these two
goals: the desire to project an image of a united Argentina and the wish
for respect on the world’s stage. The junta would do much to turn
Argentine footballers into a type of masculine “nationalistic soldier,”
one that reflected the junta’s own battle against an effete, feminized,
subversive Other.98 They sought to use the international publicity pro-
vided by the World Cup to project a positive image of Argentina, one to
96
Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 82; Fisher,
Mothers of the Disappeared, 73, 82.
97
Barbara Keys, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the
1930s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 17.
98
Lowell Miller, “World Cup – Or World War? Soccer,” New York Times (May 21, 1978),
SM6; see also Abel Gilbert and Miguel Vitagliano, El terror y la gloria: la vida, el fútbol, y
la política en la Argentina del Mundial 1978 (Buenos Aires: Norma, 1998); on the gender
politics, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in
Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 112.
counteract what it viewed as the “anti-Argentina campaign” building

throughout the Western world.
However, the campaign against the Argentine junta splintered along a
number of fault lines. What was the proper way to protest the World
Cup? At the same time that a more radical set of exiles argued for a
boycott, others believed that the World Cup was inevitable and therefore
preferred to foment international solidarity to expose the state’s abuse
of the desaparecido. Among solidarity groups and exiles, one’s national
identity and one’s affinity for the sport of soccer exposed deep tensions;
this was especially true for Argentine exiles who found it difficult to
reconcile their love for the sport and their national pride with the reality
of state violence in their homeland. In cheering for Argentina, were they
providing tacit support to the junta? For its part, Amnesty International
worked to distance itself from the overtly political slant of solidarity
organizations. It did so as it continued to expand its activism beyond
letter-writing campaigns to experiment with new ways to raise global
awareness of the desaparecido as an alarming tactic of state terror. One
such new technique, with significant implications for the future shape of
global human rights politics, centered on the World Cup in Argentina.
Argentine leftists in general displayed contrasting approaches toward
the World Cup campaigns. Exiles wondered: should they use it as a
moment to put Argentina’s crimes on the world stage or should they
abstain out of respect for their patria?99 Most Argentines living in exile
in France and Spain, for example, denounced the politicization of the
World Cup without signing onto the more extreme boycott approach
favored by solidarity groups in Switzerland and Belgium. Whereas most
exiles accepted that the World Cup would take place in Argentina, the
most radical, like the Comité belge contre la répression en Argentine
urged others to view the boycott as “feasible” if “all the progressive,
democratic and revolutionary currents take [it] up.”100 Argentine exiles
were not entirely sure how to deal with the event. Two such exiles living
in Mexico City wondered: “Could we celebrate [the World Cup] together
without feeling a sense of guilt?”101
99
Marina Franco, “Solidaridad internacional, exilio y dictadura en torno al Mundial de
1978,” in Pablo Yankelevich and Silvina Jensen, eds., Exilios: Destinos y experiencias
bajo la dictadura militar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Zorzal, 2007).
100
COBRA, Répression en Argentine, no. 11 (February 1978), Brusels, 2, emphasis in
original, cited in Franco, “Solidaridad internacional, exilio y dictadura.”
101
Bernetti and Giardinelli, México: El exilio que hemos vivido, 136.
Even for those anti-junta activists who rejected the idea of a boycott,
the prospect of the World Cup in Argentina inspired action. The general
idea was to turn the World Cup into, in the words of the Montoneros,
“one gigantic press conference” to expose to the world the “tragedy” of
Argentina.102 They invoked the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, equating
the junta with Hitler; in fact, European solidarity activists regularly
labeled Latin American authoritarian regimes as fascist, less because it
was an apt description than because it was an effective piece of propa-
ganda. Solidarity groups distributed leaflets with rhetorical questions: “Is
it possible to play soccer in a concentration camp?” “Is it possible to talk
about soccer when 8 people die every 24 hours?” Such sentiments were
captured in cartoons and other iconography and distributed by solidarity
groups in fliers, books, press reports, and newspapers.103 In one such
graphic, an Argentine military official asks a group of foreign guests to
“excuse the state of the field,” for it had been turned into a graveyard of
the disappeared.
By describing Argentina as a land filled with concentration camps,
solidarity activists connected Videla’s political use of the World Cup to
Hitler’s manipulation of the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany. The
relationship was, at best, strained: Hitler in 1936 was showcasing
German modern technology as the most advanced in the world. Yet
cartoons depicted busts of Videla and Hitler as if they were standing on
pedestals receiving Olympic medals for playing the same game. (Hitler
won the gold – a signal of Videla’s subordination.) Pressing the analogy,
one Argentine exile in France wrote in the pages of the New York Review
of Books about his aunt who “escape[d] death under Hitler” only to find
herself and her family “again victimized by fascism.”104
These tactics traded in hyperbole, but sensationalism was the point.105
Other cartoons were only slightly subtler, employing the new discourse of
102
Quoted in Gilbert and Vitagliano, El terror y la gloria, 53.
103
“Se puede jugar al fútbol en un campo de concentración” leaflet in Folder: Argentina,
Archivo Gregorio y Marta Selser, Mexico City (hereafter cited as: AGMS); Mundial de
fútbol y represión; see similar statements in “El Mundial de Futbol 1978: El Desafío a la
Democracia” prensa temática, Caja 386, CELS.
104
Marek Halter, “Death in Argentina: An Appeal,” New York Review of Books (Novem-
ber 10, 1977); Marek Halter, “Pour lutter contre la barbarie,” Le Monde (October 19,
1977); Daniel Gutman, Somos derechos y humanos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,
2015), 248–9.
105
See Bob Cox, “The Man Who Would be Hitler,” Buenos Aires Herald (May 20, 2012);
and his “Comparing Videla with Hitler,” Buenos Aires Herald , 28 (May 29, 2012). The
other link that some solidarity groups made was to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, when
 . Cartoon of Jorge Videla, Leaflet from the Comité de Acción
Solidaridad con las Luchas de América Latina, courtesy of the Archivo Gregorio
y Marta Selser.
disappearances with fascist iconography as a way to galvanize global

attention to Argentina. One such rendering distributed by one solidarity
group showed Videla, in front of a battery of imposing images, shouting,
“And they know that either they win the World Cup or they’ll end up
joining the ranks of the disappeared!” Impeccably groomed, dressed in a
military uniform with preposterously large boots, the depiction of Videla
mocked the notion of the Latin American caudillo who controlled the
reins of government with military might; it supplemented this timeless
trope with the junta’s fervently professed desire to defend the fundamen-
tal tenets of Western civilization – here symbolized by a German iron
cross, which Hitler emblazoned with a swastika to show the fusion of
Christianity and fascism.
Anti-junta activists used the World Cup to link Videla with his more
notorious neighbor in Chile, Pinochet. Many of the same European
US athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists while on the
medal pedestal to channel their support for the Black Power movement in the United
States. See Kevin B. Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico and the
1968 Olympic Games (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), especially
Chapter 5.
 . Argentina as “The Terrorist Government,” Links, No. 6 (1978),

courtesy of the Senate House Library archives.
leaders who fostered solidarity with victims from Pinochet’s Chile wasted
little time after the 1976 coup to take out a protest letter in the New York
Times that expressed their “worr[y]” over “continuous violations of
human rights” in Argentina.106 They referred, for instance, to “Videla’s
Pinochet-esque dictatorship.”107 In the eyes of one British activist organ-
ization, the 1978 World Cup was little more than a “fiesta used to mask
Videla’s reign of terror.” The cover photo of its journal Links creatively
connected Pinochet and Videla over a foosball table; with Pinochet
manning the roll pins, and Videla nodding his head in deference, the
implication was clear: Videla was taking his cue from the notorious
dictator, Pinochet, who called (and made) the shots.108
Other anti-junta activists extolled the sport of soccer but denigrated its
association with an authoritarian state. A popular refrain was “Fútbol sí,
Tortura no.” This directly appealed to players and journalists traveling
to Argentina. “For every foreigner that steps in the country the month
of June to enjoy soccer,” one leaflet put it, “there exists an Argentine
in the jail and another disappeared.”109 A pro-boycott association also
played with this idea when it sent a list to the French national team where
each player was paired with the name of one of twenty-two detainees
in Argentina. Players were encouraged to think about the “incarcerated
and tortured” person while they played soccer.110 Appeals to players
on behalf of nationals detained from the same country also made some
strides. The Germany section of Amnesty International, for example,
met with the German Soccer Federation to encourage it to consider the
twenty-six illegally held Germans in Argentine prisons.
But some of these actions went too far. While the German Federa-
tion agreed to support Amnesty’s campaign, it rejected calls for an
international investigative mission because it didn’t want to “politicize”
the sport. This was a consistent refrain from soccer devotees in the
moment: soccer was the world of sports, not the world of politics.111
The Dutch players were the one exception, as they were some of the
106
See the advertisement “Argentina,” in New York Times (August 26, 1976), 31.
107
Jensen, Los exiliados, 48.
108
Links, no. 6 (1978), N 320 PAM/7, Latin American Political Pamphlets, Senate House
Library (SHL), London, UK.
109
“El Mundial de Futbol 1978: El Desafío a la Democracia,” prensa temática, Caja
386, CELS.
110
“Nadie se fía de Videla,” Cambio, no. 339 (June 4, 1978), in Folder: Argentina, Mundial
de fútbol y represión, AGMS.
111
“Alemania respalda a Amnistía Internacional,” in Prensa temática, Caja 386, CELS.
most sensitive to human rights issues; they even visited the Madres one
afternoon while in Buenos Aires.112
Amnesty International preferred a more understated approach. Amnesty’s
campaign to highlight abuses during the World Cup broadened its concep-
tion of human rights to signal the desaparecido as a new category of
victim.113 For the first time in its history, Amnesty officials made a con-
certed decision to uplift an international sporting event as a means to raise
global concern over rights abuses in Argentina, fighting the junta’s attempts
to “project a humane image of itself abroad.”114
Amnesty refused any direct collaboration with solidarity activists. At
Amnesty’s Latin American Research Department in London, a planning
memo for the campaign stressed in bold that it was “NOT the policy of AI
to suggest or request a boycott of the World Cup in Argentina.”115 It
provided clear instructions to never use the lists of disappeared and detained
that solidarity groups produced without seeking prior approval, as Amnesty
viewed these lists as “extremely inaccurate.” While emotional pleas mattered
to Amnesty’s success, accuracy and credibility took precedence.
For Amnesty’s World Cup campaign, the position of country coordin-
ator was created in each national section. Under the broad slogan of
“Fútbol sí, Tortura no ” – the same slogan used by solidarity groups –
London provided the facts, photographs, and summaries of Amnesty’s
1976 investigative trip. National country coordinators, in turn, fleshed
out the details of their campaign by selecting key “target groups”: polit-
icians, journalists, scientists, intellectuals, students, psychiatrists, academ-
ics, trade unionists, and church officials. London wrote exhaustive papers
on each “target group” to show the particular ways they were affected by
the junta’s violence.116
112
Juan Méndez, Taking a Stand, 54.
113
“Argentine Action on Disappearances, Circular No. 5,”April 10, 1979, AMR 13/25/79,
AI-USA; “Action on Disappearances in Argentina: the Argentine Roman Catholic
Church and the Problem of Missing Prisoners,” AMR 13/22/79, Series II.5, Box 2,
Folder: January–June 1979, AI-USA.
114
Letter to Inter-Religious Urgent Action Network, undated, Series IV.1.3, 1.3, Box 8,
Folder: Argentina Co-Group, Correspondence, 1977–80, AI-USA; see also David Hawk,
“Letter to the Editor,” New York Times (June 11, 1978).
115
AI, Latin American Research Department/Campaign Unit to all national sections and
Argentina/Latin American Coordination Groups, “Argentina Campaign,” January 24,
1978, AMR 13/04/78 in Series VII.2, Box 302, Folder: Argentina Campaign, May 18,
1978, AI-USA.
116
These were based on Appendix 5, “Representative Case Histories,” of the Report on the
Situation of Human Rights in Argentina, 63–9.
In these ways, Amnesty began to engage new actors in its expanding

approach to human rights publicity. If before Amnesty primarily thought
about persuading governments, it now started to think outside a statist
box. In a form of what today we would call “corporate social responsi-
bility,” Amnesty targeted public relations firms and companies to discour-
age them from helping Argentina.117 Amnesty also considered contacting
individual soccer players, although it feared that “national sports teams
may perceive [such overtures] as hostile pressure.”118
In these ways, Amnesty saw itself as an information provider; it was
not, officials persisted, an organization that advocated policy solutions.
By offering companies and groups like the World Bank and the Inter-
national Monetary Fund basic facts about rights abuses in Argentina,
Amnesty left it to others to make programmatic conclusions. “Some may
draw political conclusions from the facts we present,” a high-ranking
Amnesty official stated at an international meeting in 1977, “[but] AI as
an organization does not.”119
Meanwhile, the junta planned its own public relations campaign. The
counteroffensive began on the domestic front. Newspapers carried
stories of “World Cup protests in Europe” and of “so-called violation
of human rights” led by international agents of Marxist subversion. To
the junta’s supporters, human rights activists did nothing but “flirt with
the guerrilla [fighter] wearing a lamb’s costume” whose real intention
is “social chaos” and little else.120 The junta bragged of its guest of
honor, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who gave speeches to
audiences friendly to the junta, and met privately with President Jorge
Videla and writer José Luis Borges. Kissinger commended the junta’s
117
E.g., Amnesty to XYZ Corporation [n.d.], in Series II.5, Box 2, Folder: January–June
1979, AI-USA.
118
AI, Latin American Research Department/Campaign Unit to all national sections and
Argentina/Latin American Coordination Groups, “Argentina Campaign,” January 24,
1978, AMR 13/04/78; AI to all national sections/Argentina/Latin American Coordinator
Groups and Argentina Campaign Coordinators, “Argentina Campaign: Approaches
to Home Governments, Trade Unions and Other Institutions,” March 5, 1978, AMR
13/18/78; all in Series VII.2, Box 302, Folder: Argentina Campaign (May 18, 1978),
AI-USA.
119
Hammarberg’s speech at the 1977 10th International Council cited in AI, “Argentina:
Military Aid, Trade and Investment Transfers,” AMR 13/18/1978 in Series VII.2,
Box 302, Folder: Argentina Campaign (May 18, 1978), AI-USA.
120
“Campaña contra la Argentina en el exterior,” La Prensa (May 27, 1978); “World Cup
Protests in Europe,” Buenos Aires Herald (May 31, 1978); “El fracaso de la campaña
internacional contra el Mundial de fútbol, apela ahora a una epidemia de gripe,” La
Opinión (May 16, 1978).
“outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces,” complaining of how

“human rights was being used as a weapon against its [the United
States’] friends.”121
The second front was the international, where the junta projected a
“pro-Argentina campaign.”122 The junta established its own govern-
mental public relations body, the Ente Autárquivo Mundial ’78, to shape
global perceptions of the World Cup.123 With knowledge of the impend-
ing arrival of so many foreign journalists, the junta knew it would be
scrutinized for its human rights record.124 The junta instructed radio
stations to blast citizens with instructions to “behave better,” while taxi
drivers were told to wear shirts and ties.125 The Ministry of the Interior
issued very short visas of thirty-five days to all foreigners.126
The junta also appropriated Amnesty’s signature activist tactic.
Amnesty was known for unleashing legions of letters on countries
throughout the world, and the junta gave Amnesty a taste of its own
medicine. By way of the Argentine women’s weekly magazines Gente and
Para Tí, it orchestrated a letter-writing campaign where Argentine
women sent postcards to Amnesty International, the US government,
and other international organizations to question their criticism of Argen-
tina’s human rights record.127 The junta also arranged for 250 “leading
business and social organizations” to distribute a letter in six languages
that urged foreign correspondents to present the “real Argentina” – not
the one represented by those wielding “weapon[s] in the psychological
war which serves communism.”128
In one of its most high-profile moves, the junta paid American public-
relations firm Burson-Marsteller (Burson) $1.2 million to sell Argentina
121
US Embassy in Argentina to SecState, “Henry Kissinger Visit to Argentina,” Cable, June
27, 1978, 4937, DNSA.
122
“La campaña pro-argentina?” Buenos Aires Herald (June 14, 1978).
123
Gilbert and Vitagliano, El terror y la gloria.
124
Andre Van Dam, “Will the ’78 Spirit Endure,” Buenos Aires Herald (June 14, 1978).
125
James Neilson, “Argentina Goes on Exhibition,” Buenos Aires Herald (May 21, 1978).
126
See expediente secreto no. 374/78 in the Archivo Intermedio, Archivo General de la
Nación; see also “El Mundial 78: extranjeros rigurosamente vigilados,” March
23, 2006.
127
AI to all national sections/1978 Argentina Campaign coordinators/Argentina coordin-
ation groups/NS press officers, “1978 Argentina Campaign: Report and Evaluation,”
May 4, 1979, AMR 13/32/1979, AI-USA; Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, 40; Gilbert
and Vitagliano, El terror y la gloria, 50–63; María Magdalena Chirico, “El Proyecto
autoritario y la prensa para la mujer: Un ejemplo de discurso intermedio,” in El discurso
político: lenguajes y acontecimientos (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1987), 55–85, especially
79–80.
128
“Group Calling for Fair View of Argentina,” Buenos Aires Herald (June 23, 1978).
as a “new, progressive and stable nation” to eight countries: the

United States, Britain, Japan, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Holland,
and Belgium.129 Burson disparaged human rights activists as part of
“well-financed subversion campaigns of international origin.”130 Burson
also singled out Amnesty: it suggested that the junta hold seminars for
governmental officials on “how to deal with local, national, or inter-
national groups such as Amnesty International which carry out local
anti-Argentina campaigns.” To counteract this, the junta was to promote
foreign investment in Argentina as well as invite foreign journalists and
businessmen on “VIP tours” filled with parties, receptions, and a host of
entertainment events.131
Burson’s suggestions were heeded. Argentine businesses took out a
full-page spread in the New York Times and the Washington Post that,
against a backdrop of attractive photos depicting a roaring Argentine
economic engine, boasted of a newly minted Foreign Investment Law to
attract foreign capital. The ad emphasized the stability and attractiveness
of the “modern nation” of Argentina that “insur[es] the validity of human
rights to the population.”132 While not illegal under US law, these
entanglements between Burson and the junta struck Amnesty as troub-
ling. “If Madison Ave. is prohibited from making false claims on behalf
of a mouthwash,” they worried, “why should its advocacy of a foreign
government’s interests not be subjected to careful legal scrutiny?”133 In
protest of these connections, AI-USA held a vigil outside of Burson’s
offices in Washington, DC in May 1978.134
129
Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, 33; Gutman, Somos derechos y humanos, 261.
130
See “Montes aludió a la deformada imagen exterior,” La Coyuntura (May 22, 1978);
“Subversives Running Campaign Says Montes,” Buenos Aires Herald (May 22, 1978).
131
Quoted in Jack Anderson, “Projecting New Image for Dictator,” Washington Post (May
30, 1978), B11.
132
“Argentina,” New York Times (April 6, 1977); Washington Post (April 6, 1977).
133
Andrea Fishman and Richard Alan White, “The Selling of Argentina: Madison Ave.
Packages Repression,” Los Angeles Times (June 11, 1978), I2; see also R. Scott Great-
head, “Truth in Argentina,” New York Times (May 11, 1995); and Marguerite Feitlo-
witz’s discussion of these two articles in her Lexicon of Terror, 346, fn. 75; David M.
Sloan, “More Nations Seek a P-R Polish on Their U.S. Image,” New York Times
(August 6, 1978); see also Guest, Behind the Disappearances, 70; a copy of the report
can be found in the Congressional Record (October 14, 1978), S12435–S12447; Lars
Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 50–2.
134
“Advisory to the Media,” ND in Series VII.2, Box 302, Folder: Argentina Campaign,
May 18, 1978, AI-USA; for internal Amnesty discussions on this report, see Marketa
Freund to Bob Maurer, April 24, 1978 in Series IV.1.3, Box 8, Folder: Argentina-Co
Group, Correspondence, AI-USA.
Burson’s report to the junta was accurate in that foreign journalists

did pose one of the most direct threats to the credibility of the junta’s
version of events. One way to counteract this was to simply pay for their
reporting junkets and spoil them, as the junta did in the case of James
Nelson Goodsell. In the pages of the Christian Science Monitor, Goodsell
repaid them with highly favorable coverage.135
But the junta could not buy off everyone. Enterprising philosopher-
cum-investigative-journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy penned dramatic por-
traits of his time in Argentina. “In Buenos Aires, the people are afraid,”
Lévy wrote in the pages of The New Republic, “afraid of themselves,
afraid of others, afraid of today and of tomorrow.”136 In the same
publication, journalist Steven Kinzer described Argentina as “destroy
[ing] itself” by “pretending everything is normal.” Kinzer inveighed
against the “terrorists in military uniforms” who had “unleashed a reign
of savagery unmatched in the modern history of the western hemi-
sphere” – outpacing both Chile and Haiti.137 Foreign journalists received
special scrutiny, and were at times apprehended for merely carrying
questionable materials.138 Lévy claimed that he was detained for five
hours just because he carried Amnesty’s report on Argentina; in his
exaggerated manner, he told reporters that he believed someone tried to
run him down with a car on Corrientes Avenue.139
Despite such criticism, the junta’s counteroffensive – its campaign of
“pretending everything is normal” – paid off. In large part, this was
serendipitous: Argentina won the World Cup, delivering a significant
boost in nationalistic sentiment. The victory seemingly united the country
and produced a facade of tranquility. In its wake, journalists observed a
“swelling of national pride, a sense of popular unity and an improve-
ment in public manners.”140 The campaigns against Argentina – the
135
Christian Science Monitor (October 13, 1978), 12–13; see Schoultz’s more general
discussion, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America, 52, fn. 8.
136
Lévy, “Argentina Today, II,” New Republic, 17.
137
Steven Kinzer, “Argentina in Agony,” New Republic (December 27 and 30, 1978).
138
Juan de Onis, “World Cup Tournament is More Than a Game for Argentina,” New
York Times (May 28, 1978).
139
Raymond McKay, “To Die in Buenos Aires?” Buenos Aires Herald (June 6, 1978); see
the rather crude satire of foreign journalists in RH, “Down in No Man’s Country,”
Buenos Aires Herald (June 4, 1978). The author writes, “Our objective is that no
reporter shall have to go back home without a convincing argument to get a week’s
leave from his editor.”
140
Juan de Onis, “Argentina After World Cup: Will the Team Spirit Prevail?” New York
Times (June 30, 1978); “Cup Comments,” Buenos Aires Herald (June 28, 1978).
comparisons with 1936 Berlin, for instance – looked “ridiculous” to

one Argentine journalist.141
To Argentines in exile, the World Cup victory brought on a flood of
contradictory emotions. Two Argentine exiles in Mexico City described
their confusion as television commercials projected an array of beauti-
ful images of their homeland. The pictures brought on a “nostalgic”
sense that caused “major depression.” But after Argentina won the final
match, the authors recalled an impromptu parade of sorts that began at
one Librería Gandhi and carried along Avenida Insurgentes, heading
north. While celebrating the victory, they joined in shouting anti-junta
choruses:”military killers/of the Argentine people” (“Milicos asesinos/
del pueblo argentino”); “Tell us where they are!” (“¡Qué digan dónde
están!); “It’s coming to an end/the military dictatorship” (“Se va a acabar/
la dictadura militar”). Exiled men and women came together in a “recu-
peration of national identity” that had been so soiled by the military
dictatorship.142
For solidarity activists, as well as for Amnesty, the World Cup cam-
paign was a mixed blessing. Most preferred to look on their efforts with a
positive light. One newsletter distributed by the Argentine Commission
for Human Rights claimed that as a result of their work “the Argentine
case is now better known by a larger public in all countries.” Deploying
the same language that political scientists would later use to describe a
model of transnational activism, solidarity activists spoke of a “boomer-
ang effect” that resulted in a “wave of solidarity” after the World Cup.
The wave led to the creation of “committees in all European countries”
that pressured the junta to stop its human rights violations.143
Amnesty wrote in its evaluation report less than a year later that its
campaign had “generally achieved all its objectives.” But it acknowledged
it had far more success in attracting press coverage than in signing on
sports teams and players to the campaign, for many felt that one should
not “mix sport with politics.” In spite of the strong counteroffensive
carried out by junta officials, Amnesty believed that Argentina would
henceforth be known as having “one of the worst patterns of violations
141
“Argentina’s Scars Begin to Heal,” Buenos Aires Herald (June 4, 1978); Jensen, Los
exiliados, 54.
142
Bernetti and Giardinelli, México: El exilio que hemos vivido, 137, 139.
143
CADHU Boletín, “El Mundial: Boomerang Contra la junta,” Junio–Julio 1978, no. 4,
AGMS; on the political science of “boomerang,” see Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond
Borders, 12–13.
of human rights in the American continent.”144 In reaction, Amnesty

noted, some European governments opened up more visa slots for Argen-
tine victims – a modest goal for a campaign aimed at embarrassing
Argentina on the world’s stage.
***
In the years after the March 1976 Argentine coup, the world of global
human rights politics was still a very new one. As the controversies over
Amnesty’s visit reveal, 1970s human rights activism continued to be
experimental and based on trial-and-error. The Argentine junta, for its
part, flirted with a variety of strategies to justify its actions and protect its
image abroad, from intimidation of the Amnesty delegation to outright
fabrications in the domestic press. And while the junta could largely
control the domestic story, it encountered far more trouble abroad.
Despite tensions among solidarity activists, exiles, and Amnesty over the
appropriate political response, their combined efforts went to great
lengths to raise the global specter of Argentina’s desaparecidos. But how
much did it matter? By the end of the decade, as with the cause of torture
in Brazil and Chile, the plight of the disappeared animated thousands to
join the cause of human rights activism – even as the terms of that
engagement were far from settled. The 1978 World Cup inaugurated
the advocacy turn to criticizing host countries of what are now called
“mega sporting events,” but their impact is still questionable today. It
was no surprise, then, that the first attempt to attack Argentina was met
with disappointing results: the problem of the disappeared remained,
viscerally and urgently present; and the junta was firmly entrenched in
power – buoyed by its recent win in the World Cup, the most popular of
global sports.
144
AI to all national sections/1978 Argentina Campaign coordinators/Argentina coordin-
ation groups/NS press officers, “1978 Argentina Campaign: Report and Evaluation,”
May 4, 1979, AMR 13/32/1979, AI-USA.

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6

The Global Specter of Argentina’s Disappeared

 . Hebe de Bonaﬁni, head of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, in

until the publication of the report by Argentina’s truth commission,

of the decade. Initially dismissed by some on the left as a “petty bourgeois

anti-Peronist military to ascend. With the country suffering from rising

concentration camps whose images implanted in the embryonic global

(Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos; APDH) and the

later concretize in Argentina’s 1984 truth and reconciliation report,

other concerned parties in the US Congress, the Department of State, and

politics of human rights as they looked to international groups to legitim-

The junta vacillated between occasionally providing information and

presence, going far beyond his role as an Amnesty representative and

Patricia Feeney, “harassment and intimidation from day one, really.”50

ofﬁcials encouraged a small group of young women and men referred

Perhaps the only Argentine newspaper to display some degree of

at the bottom of lakes, decomposing on rubbish dumps or blown to

Amnesty’s lists of recommendations suggested that Argentina invite the

Laura Bonaparte was an Argentine psychoanalyst exile in Mexico City.

Argentine exiles at times struggled to reconcile human rights with other

counteract what it viewed as the “anti-Argentina campaign” building

disappearances with fascist iconography as a way to galvanize global

 . Argentina as “The Terrorist Government,” Links, No. 6 (1978),

In these ways, Amnesty began to engage new actors in its expanding

“outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces,” complaining of how

as a “new, progressive and stable nation” to eight countries: the

Burson’s report to the junta was accurate in that foreign journalists

comparisons with 1936 Berlin, for instance – looked “ridiculous” to

of human rights in the American continent.”144 In reaction, Amnesty

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