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How else do you keep a running total? By throwing widgets in a basket?
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50 years after the coup, books, works and songs that demand Memory, Truth and Justice - Rolling Stone
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My wife was. And I had many a talk with the former Air Force General who lived next to us in Belgrano before he died a few years ago.
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The Hidden Power Behind Global Influence (And Why Your Story Matters More Than You Think)
What Confessions of an Economic Hit Man reveals about control—and how it applies to your life and legacy TL;DR Power today often moves through money, not armies. John Perkins’s book reframes how in…
journeyamerica.wordpress.com
Agreed jbeas. I read that book when it came out and then the dozens of analyses that followed in the media. It definitely colored my worldview at the time. As I got older though and met people involved in those sorts of things, the general consensus was that it was filled with half-truths and exaggerations. None of them knew Perkins' personally, some figured he had a real bone to pick or maybe his editor pushed him to sell more books. One fellow I spoke to said "some of these guys are just drama queens by nature".
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WTF are you even talking about? Argentina is not even mentioned.
Where Argentina Fits (Indirectly)
Argentina—and events like the Dirty War—fall into the same broader theme:
- U.S. influence in Latin America
- Anti-communist policy during the Cold War
- Support for certain regimes
But Perkins does not:
- Provide a detailed narrative of Argentina
- Break down the Dirty War specifically
- Claim direct involvement there
Now, the Mango Mussolini wanting to trade/give/whatever $20 billion to Argentina DOES fit. But that was decades later.
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Here is an article by Juan Pablo Spinetto, he works for Bloomberg and is a go to source for Argentina analysis, born in BA. This is about the Dictatorship legacy, which highlights that the Argentine people are one of the only ones to hold their leaders accountable for atrocities/crimes in the court of law. An impressive feat. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...LKsrgVYFw72efvLoI4PyDs&leadSource=reddit_wall
Uncle Wong
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🤣 That can describe a lot of people. Most people are drama queens.
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While Argentina stands out for the speed, scale, and success of trials—unlike Brazil (delayed prosecutions), Chile (Pinochet's limited accountability), or Guatemala (sporadic cases)—other nations like Peru (Fujimori convicted) and Ethiopia (Mengistu tried) have also held leaders accountable, though often later or less comprehensively.
Graciela Fernandez Mejide, once a Madre de la Plaza de Mayo, and who's son was disappeared and killed, has said the following: do we really think there were twenty thousand people who were disappeared, and no one -neither coworkers, fellow militants nor family members - ever bothered to report them as missing and presumably dead, especially when there was compensation involved?
The scale of state terrorism during Argentina's dictatorship isn't a "both sides" issue. ESMA alone accounts for roughly 5,000 to 6,000 kidnappings and murders, and it was just one of dozens of secret torture centers.
While right-wing apologists try to lowball the death toll to around 11,000, the 30,000 figure is widely accepted. The exact number is impossible to verify by design: the secret police kidnapped people, destroyed the records, and dumped bodies in the ocean or in unmarked mass graves. However, declassified US intelligence documents easily accessible online explicitly estimated 22,000 dead or disappeared by 1978 and the dictatorship continued for 5 more years. Add to that the systematic theft of at least 500 babies, a fact that is undeniable.
Compare this to the casualties caused by left-wing guerrillas like the Montoneros: well under 1,000 dead (likely closer to 500). The vast majority of those were armed soldiers actively fighting them, along with a handful of targeted executives and former dictators (like Pedro Eugenio Aramburu). The civilian collateral damage was incredibly low.
I don't justify any deaths; they are all wrong. But you cannot equate a guerrilla faction targeting combatants with a military junta that systematically vanished tens of thousands of entirely nonviolent citizens—often for their political beliefs, or for no reason at all. The hard facts are out there.
Vero
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I highly recommend that anyone truly interested in this history visit the ESMA Museum in Buenos Aires. It is located inside the actual military complex where thousands of people were imprisoned and tortured. This exact building was the departure point where sedated prisoners were loaded onto planes to be dropped alive into the ocean.
maps.app.goo.gl
Everything in the museum—the photos, the history, the exhibits—is based on surviving military records. In fact, the entire site is still legally classified as an active crime scene because, nearly 50 years later, the judicial inquiries are still ongoing. Go see it for yourself and then decide if you think this history is a "scam." When I visited shortly after it opened in 2015, someone called in an anonymous bomb threat. Clearly, there is still a segment of Argentina that desperately does not want people to see what is exhibited there.
One of the most chilling details you learn at ESMA is the economic motive behind the terror. When the secret police killed someone, they systematically looted their homes. They stole and resold everything—heaters, radios, clothing, and real estate—and pocketed the money. State terrorism was also a massive, state-sponsored robbery.
Compare that to the "both sides" argument. When the Montoneros assassinated the wealthy banker Francisco Soldati in a car bomb in November 1979, it was a brutal act of political violence—but they didn't profit monetarily from it. His family (who the Villa Soldati neighborhood is named after) remains enormously wealthy today, owning massive estates in Uruguay and major companies in Argentina. The military, on the other hand, turned kidnapping and murder into a profitable, institutionalized business.
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Everything in the museum—the photos, the history, the exhibits—is based on surviving military records. In fact, the entire site is still legally classified as an active crime scene because, nearly 50 years later, the judicial inquiries are still ongoing. Go see it for yourself and then decide if you think this history is a "scam." When I visited shortly after it opened in 2015, someone called in an anonymous bomb threat. Clearly, there is still a segment of Argentina that desperately does not want people to see what is exhibited there.
One of the most chilling details you learn at ESMA is the economic motive behind the terror. When the secret police killed someone, they systematically looted their homes. They stole and resold everything—heaters, radios, clothing, and real estate—and pocketed the money. State terrorism was also a massive, state-sponsored robbery.
Compare that to the "both sides" argument. When the Montoneros assassinated the wealthy banker Francisco Soldati in a car bomb in November 1979, it was a brutal act of political violence—but they didn't profit monetarily from it. His family (who the Villa Soldati neighborhood is named after) remains enormously wealthy today, owning massive estates in Uruguay and major companies in Argentina. The military, on the other hand, turned kidnapping and murder into a profitable, institutionalized business.
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