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- [00:01]
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Narrator
It'S just gone 7am on April 12, 1976. We're in a packed metro station beneath the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina's illustrious capital. It's just two weeks since General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power and installed a military junta. A sharp wind rushes along the platform as the nose of a train emerges from the tunnel, sending a chill through the ranks of commuters. Those on the edge of the platform squeeze into the carriages and the next line shuffles forwards, taking their places. Nobody speaks. Suddenly there's movement on the platform. Three plain clothes police officers hurry down a staircase. The tightly packed crowd parts as they push through. Heads turn, but nobody dares stop them. The men jostle their way towards a woman in a fawn coat, her long dark hair falling to her waist. They grab her by the arms and frog march her backwards and away, muffling her screams of protest with a thick forearm. Within seconds, they're gone. The crowd is shocked, but nobody shows it. Slowly, the commuters rearrange themselves to fill the space where she'd been stood. It's as if she was never there. Argentina's military junta is at war with the public. Anybody they deem a subversive element is to be annihilated. She must have been one of them. The crowd are left thinking from the noiser network. This is part two of the Vedala story. And this is Real Dictators. It's in the early hours of March 24, 1976, that General Wedela executes his coup d'etat. The beleaguered President Isabel Martinez de Perron is whisked away by Air Force helicopter. Isabelita, as she's better known, is later flown south. She's placed under house arrest at El Messidor, a lakeside official residence in the picturesque region of Patagonia. Here she whiles away the hours reading Morris west novels and tending to the garden. But it's not all calm and relaxation for Isabelita. The military quickly put her on trial for corruption and misappropriation of funds during her presidency. The hearings take place in the house's lavish dining room. With the pressure building, she even tries to take her own life by swallowing a bottle of pills. But doctors manage to save her. In total, she will spend five years under arrest at several secluded residences around Argentina before being sent into exile in Spain. Back in Buenos Aires, three men are to lead the military junta. They are General Orlando Ramon Agosti, head of the Air Force, Navy Chief Admiral Emilio Eduardo Macera and of course, General Jorge Rafael Videla, US Ambassador to Argentina. Robert Hill sends a telegram back to Washington. He describes the coup as probably the best executed and most civilized in Argentine history. High praise indeed. On paper, power is to be split equally between the three men. Wedela promises that there will be frequent changes of leader at least every three years to ensure no one of them becomes all powerful. He will be the Junta's first leader. However, martial law is declared and People's Movement is curtailed. Surveillance is rolled out across Argentina. Everybody is under suspicion through the night. Union leaders have already been kidnapped and detained in industrial cities. Fidela knows that they are the backbone of the Peronist movement, the legacy of former President Juan Peron. The union leaders must be crushed if Verdela's self proclaimed national reorganization process is to be successful. By the morning of March 24, uniformed officers are patrolling every major city and tanks are parked on street corners. Professor Ernesto Seman the government takes control of the national media, radio and television bands, unions and political parties. That massive shutdown and violent shutdown of political life. That repression starts right away in the first hours of the dictatorship that is going to be perfected over time and that you can see the blueprint at that time. Just before 10am there's another announcement on national radio. The Junta will take up residence in the Edificio Libertador, the imposing rectangular seat of the Ministry of Defence. Just down the slope from the Presidential palace, the Casa Rosada. An underground tunnel connects the two buildings. The junta puts out 31 decrees in its first day in power. Among them, the death penalty is reinstated for anyone who seriously injures or kills military personnel. And war councils are set up across the country. Judges are dismissed from the Supreme Court and regional tribunals are suspended. Congress is dissolved and replaced by a legislative council which will approve the Junta's dictates without debate. The governorships of the provinces and major cities are all shifted into the hands of officials from the three branches of the armed forces. The only real civilian participation in politics is at municipal level, where loyalists to the Junta are installed. They give no time frame for a return to civilian rule. Professor Edward Brodney there's actually a lot.
- [08:08]
Tommy John Advertiser
Of pressure from the armed forces within the armed forces for a coup before March of 1976. There are those who are advocating as early as mid, late 1975 that the military needs to seize power, that the situation is out of control, that this is when they should intervene. Bedella kind of holds them all in check. He does not want to until, in his mind, the people are ready for this. He wants to make sure that when they do take over, and he's not pretending that that's not going to happen, that they do so with some veneer of legitimacy or popular support or whatever you want to call it, and in that, he is successful. When the coup actually does happen In March, on March 24, 1976, there are stories of opposition, especially among Peronist unions. People gathering guns together to go out in the street and oppose the military, people organizing marches, people preparing to fight against this coup. But in the end, that doesn't really happen again. This has been a long time coming. The situation in Argentina is very bad politically, economically, socially, generally speaking, the coup.
- [09:25]
Narrator
Is greeted with cautious optimism. After enduring the bleakest, bloodiest years of their lives under Isabelita's presidency, Argentines are hopeful that the terror will come to an end.
- [09:38]
Tommy John Advertiser
Even labor unions and workers who had grown tired of inflationary problems, of the violence, of the political instability. Things that I found in the archive that are fascinating are statements published by trade unions basically saying, welcome. This is what we needed, right? You can count on us to support this national reorganization project. An important part of this apparent consensus around the coup is that Argentina had lived through many, many coups by this point. The 20th century had been defined by military intervention since 1930.
- [10:18]
Narrator
After decades of turmoil, corruption and violence, the extremity of the junta's early actions quite simply doesn't seem so extreme. And so, on March 29, 1976, General Widela is installed as Argentina's de facto president. The ceremony lasts just 21 minutes. Fidela isn't comfortable in the limelight. Alicia Hartridge, his wife, says that the situation in Argentina remains too serious for idle self. Congratulations. For now, the couple and their children will live at the Campo da Mascho military base rather than at the traditional presidential residence. Alessio will not countenance a move there until the remains of both Juan Peron and his second wife, Evita, have been evicted from the crypt. Like her husband, she despises what Peronism has Done to the country. Vidala is 51 years old, tall and gaunt, with a trademark scrubby mustache and sunken eyes. He's awkward and shifty, hardly the typical image of a dictator. Over the past three decades, while Argentina lurched between extremes, he has risen through the military ranks. The army represents order, strength, discipline, everything his country desperately lacks. It's left Wedela with a deep, unshakable belief that the armed forces must be the guarantors of security. But he will have to work to get his message out there to establish his authority. Until recently, there was little known about him publicly, so people knew about him. And mostly towards the last two months or so, his name is of course mentioned as a possible face of the coming military regime. But I don't think more than that. A lot of things have to do with his personality, or lack of, but also, and this is not a compliment for him, but I think that he embraced this idea of discipline and social order at any cost. Fidela might not be a household name, but he moves quickly to establish a presence. He begins touring Argentina, always with the same message that democracy will be restored as soon as subversion is crushed. He completes five nationwide circuits in 1976 alone. Journalist Robert Cox arrived in Argentina in 1955, and by the time of Wedela's coup had become the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald newspaper.
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Robert Cox
To begin with, Videla was heralded as La Pantera Rosa, the Pink Panther. He was a nice, charming character from a cartoon who was funny and laughable and delightful. And he had this funny moustache. Before that, before he came in to the presidency, he was looked upon as the upright general, the man with a clean record. So much they called him Mr. Clean, which was a product at that time too. It's a disinfectant. And that's how he was looked upon. Not in any way a menacing character.
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Narrator
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Narrator
After the coast, the United States throws its diplomatic weight behind Videla's junta, recognizing it as the rightful government of Argentina. With Cold War tensions ratcheting up, the White House regards Wedela as a steadying anti communist force, similar to General Augusto Pinochet. Next door in Chile, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sends a brief secret cable to Buenos Aires. Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. It reads. The quicker you succeed, the better. The human rights problem is a growing one. We want a stable situation. We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. Three weeks after the coup, the US Embassy in Buenos Aires sends a cable back to Washington offering insights on the three leaders of the newly established junta. All are moderates and enjoy the respect of their subordinates. They will have to keep a close eye on hardliners within the ranks, however, and have to walk a thin line between control and repression in their attempts to deal with Argentina's myriad problems. The note concludes that General Vedela, General Agosti and Admiral Mosera will probably work well together as they draw on their long term professional association and personal friendship. Author Marguerite Feitlowitz.
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Professor Fran Lesa
I think it's a mistake to focus just on Videla. He's not Pinochet. He's one among this sort of military mosaic, if you will. So in the first punta, you have these three characters and Massera is actually. He becomes the grand orator of the process. And so I think it's really important that they have this stereophonic kind of rhetoric and they each play off of the other. So where you have Videla at first, who is severe and calm and taking over more in sorrow than in triumph, and then you have Massera. He always considered himself very literary and very intellectual. His speeches are very high flown and hallucinatory and messianic and quite brilliant rhetorically.
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Narrator
Admiral Emilio Massera is ferociously ambitious. He enrolled in Argentina's Naval School in 1942 and graduated as a midshipman. Four years later, in late 1973, he was handpicked by President Juan Peron to be commander in chief of the Navy. Handsome and charismatic, Massera does not shirk the limelight. He has undeniable ambitions to be Argentina's savior. But contrary to that American diplomatic cable, he and Videla rarely see eye to eye. And he's made his fair share of enemies elsewhere in the armed forces too. Massera's private life is the subject of intense, albeit hushed, gossip. He's a member of a far right Italian Masonic sect called Propaganda Due and is known to engage in numerous extramarital romances with Argentine and foreign actresses.
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Robert Cox
Now, he was evil. I use that word rarely and my wife told me you should never use it ever. But I use it for Messere. He was really evil. I mean, to give you an example, he invited the husband of a woman that he was particularly interested in at that time out on a boating incident and had him drowned. And he would be like that all the time.
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Narrator
General Ramon Agosti, Junta Honcho number three, is a very different figure. He and Vedela are lifelong friends. They grew up together as youths. They would hang around the pool at the same country club. Acosti has a checkered past as a coup monger and is an avid anti Peronist. Caught between Videla's prominence as de facto president and Massera's force of personality, Agosti often finds himself playing a supporting role, though he holds the important responsibility of acting as mediator.
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Professor Fran Lesa
Each of these men were signature elements of the dictatorship. They each had their note. Depending on what your orientation was, depending on where you were, one might be more in your ear than others. But the effect was constant, the rhetoric was constant. They were on the radio all the time, they were on tv, they controlled the newspapers and they did some very clever things. They would read out military memorandum to the population to prove that the military is serving you. We are your ultimate moral reserve. We are serving you.
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Narrator
General Wedela now busies himself laying out the detail of his self described national reorganization process. It will be a messianic crusade to reorder Argentina in line with Western Christian values and the bloodiest campaign of wanton slaughter and state terror perpetrated by any of South America's 20th century dictatorships. Each morning he arrives at the Casa Rosada at 8am and installs himself in his office beneath a framed portrait of his father on horseback, where he reads La Prensa, a right wing daily newspaper. Come mid morning he meets with the head of the CD, the State Intelligence Service. And at 1pm he eats his lunch alone. The afternoons are spent signing presidential decrees amid clouds of cigarette smoke. Isabel Peron's disastrous tenure has burdened Argentina with foreign debt of $9.7 billion. Wedela puts the economy in the hands of a law professor called Jose Alfredo Martinez de Oz. I don't know anything about economics, Wedela tells him. Martinez Deos is one of just two civilians in Wedela's cabinet. He comes from one of Argentina's largest landowning families. Joe, as he's known, studied at the University of Oxford and enjoys the personal friendship of financier David Rockefeller, no less, who facilitates loans of nearly $1 billion from Chase Manhattan bank and the IMF. Above all, Martinez de Oss abhors Peronism. With politics suspended and unions and striking prohibited, he sets about reversing the policies of his predecessors. He wants to undo the recent populist redistribution in favor of a free market economy. He frees exports and imports by abolishing prohibitions, quotas and tariffs, and eliminates all price controls. The black market, which Argentines had come to rely on under Isabelita, all but disappears. Everything Videla is doing is based on the premise of rooting out subversive elements. Argentina is historically a western Christian country, he says. One becomes a terrorist not only by killing with a weapon or planting a bomb, but also by encouraging others through ideas that go against our Western and Christian civilization. And so the disappearances begin.
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Professor Fran Lesa
Sometimes it was theatrical. Sometimes people were taken in dead of night. As many said, Everyone knew someone who was disappeared. Every family knew of someone who was disappeared. Within days of the coup, bodies were.
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Narrator
Washing up the agnios diplomo. The years of lead have begun. Task forces in unmarked cars, usually green Ford Falcons, begin snatching workers, unionists, students and political activists from their homes or places of work. The junta's net soon widens to include lawyers and journalists with suspected ties to radical groups. Suspicion alone is enough to be taken. Some of those targeted are members of guerrilla organizations. The majority are not. The AAA and other right wing paramilitary groups are officially disbanded. But many of their members are absorbed into death squads and continue to work alongside government forces. Fidela has no time for the slow wheels of justice. Very few of the supposed subversives of charges brought against them. Instead, they find themselves piled into makeshift detention and torture centers. Within a month, Vedala's terror network has already established 40 facilities in two years. More than 350 are set up to receive the thousands of disappeared. And in total, there are thought to have been approximately 800 secret detention centers around Argentina.
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Professor Fran Lesa
So these are in military installations, they're in hospitals, they're in private corporations, they're in some private houses, they're in little neighborhood police stations, they're in schools, they're all over the place.
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Narrator
Detainees are stripped naked, beaten, and submitted to the most depraved torture. They're kept alone and upright in tall cells too narrow to lay down in, called tubes. Most are hooded and blindfolded for days on end, disappeared in darkness. Prisoners are told by their torturers, in here we are gods. It's October 1, 1976. A perfect spring afternoon in Buenos Aires. To the north of the city center is the Navy Mechanical School, or esma. There's a large white building surrounded by manicured lawns and eucalyptus groves. A young cadet steps out between the colonnades, warmed by the spring sunshine. He walks between dormitories and mess buildings, past a small chapel in an infirmary, making his way over to the sports ground at the back of the complex. He arrives at a narrow pedestrian bridge that leads over a busy highway. Here a an officer is standing in his path, rifles slung over one shoulder. The pictures are closed today, he says sternly. We're having a barbecue. Columns of yellow brown smoke rise behind him. The fires have already been burning for more than two days, giving off a sickly, acrid smell. The cadet understands immediately. They've got to get rid of the body somehow to ensure the disappeared stay just that. The Esmer becomes known as the Argentine Auschwitz. There, the Navy kidnap, torture and disappear. Around 5,000 men and women, more than 30 children are estimated to have been born. Born in the camp's makeshift maternity ward, they are illegally adopted, often by military personnel. Their mothers are disposed of after receiving lethal injections. We will fight not only to the death, but beyond death, declares Admiral Massera, who oversees the ESME camp. Across town, in the Campo Dimasho military base, close to where the Wedela family have been living, 4,000 prisoners arrive across two years. Only 94 survive, and with the country divided into zones under military control, the repression spreads far beyond the capital.
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Professor Fran Lesa
The dictatorship was experienced very differently depending on where you lived in the country, right? And in the far hinterlands, in the province of Corrientes, among subsistence tobacco farmers. There, the repression was absolutely medieval, with workers being macheted in the fields, etc. Etc. Another man by the name of Juan Jose Sorenile, also a campesino farmer, he saw two girls dropped from an airplane and they looked like they were twins. He had long, blondish reddish hair. One was wearing white sneakers, One had one red sneaker. And he said, I was out walking and they dropped from the sky. He said, I was working my fields, he said, they dropped from the sky. And he said, and then I was told I had to leave. And they were buried in a mass grave. And he said, When I came back, because he said I had animals, my animals would fall into these mass graves because they were shallow, they were a menace for my animals. And he said I would see all these bones, all these bodies.
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Narrator
With the bloody repression in full swing across the land, General Wedela makes his first official foreign visit. In October 1976, he traveled to Bolivia to meet Ugo Banza, a fellow military dictator, to discuss the country's role in a sinister international spy network. It's known as Operation or Plan Condor.
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Professor Fran Lesa
Professor Fran Lesa with the passing of time, we see military coups unfolding in Bolivia in 1971, Uruguay and Chile in 1973, and then Argentina in 1976. All of these military regimes realized that they had a common objective, which was being able to silence activists of interest once they were no longer in their national territories. Plan Condor was a secret and transnational network, formally set up in a meeting held in Santiago in Chile in late November 1975, where they agreed to effectively coordinate their actions so that they could more efficiently go after exiles of interest.
- [30:45]
Narrator
Now at T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins. All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com did you know that the team behind this show has other podcasts too? Listen@noiser.com or wherever you get your podcasts. These military coups across South America have displaced thousands of people. Until General Fidela's own takeover in 1976, Argentina had been the one remaining refuge for exiles from neighbouring countries. As many as 500,000 people have fled persecution and settled in the country. A small number of these have been involved in guerrilla activities in their home countries. This gives Wedela a powerful bargaining tool. Indeed. When he meets with General Banza in Bolivia, he's able to offer him an illustrious prisoner, the head of a Bolivian guerrilla cell who had taken refuge in Buenos Aires.
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Professor Fran Lesa
In mid-1976, Brazil also joins Operation Condor. And by early 1978 we also have Peru and ECU become formally members. And so we have a secret and encrypted communication system Being set up, called condortel, which enable the CONDOR member states to communicate quickly with each other to share information.
- [32:38]
Narrator
The secret headquarters of the operation, known as Condoreje. Are located in a police building at number 2457 Billinghurst street in one of Buenos Aires wealthiest neighborhoods. From there, communications are monitored and information shared. So that targets can be picked off. Enemies of the participating dictatorships are hunted down across South America. But more than 70% of Operation Condor's crimes are committed on argentine soil. In 1976, Sara Mendez had settled in Argentina, having fled her native Uruguay. On July 13 that year, she is at home in Buenos Aires when there's a knock at the door.
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Sara Mendez
A large number of heavily armed plainclothes officers arrive at my house and violently break down the door. They spread throughout the house and there's one who's in charge. The first thing we realized was that we weren't going to get out of this alive. 20 days earlier, I'd had my son Simon. It was a moment of great upheaval, fear and insecurity. Simon was born on June 22, right on his due date.
- [34:04]
Narrator
Sarah's kidnapped and taken to Automotores Oleti, the secret detention center in Buenos Aires where we opened the previous episode. It serves as an interrogation facility for foreign detainees. She leaves behind her three week old son Simon, fast asleep in a cradle.
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Sara Mendez
When we arrived at Orleti, of course we knew nothing about it. We were handcuffed and blindfolded and had nylon bags which nearly suffocated us. Put over our heads in the car that took us there. We didn't eat the whole time. They never let us. Sometimes they took us to the toilet, but other times we had to do our business right there, where we were tied up. The torture started with the person being stripped naked. Man or woman, they made no distinction. Your body had been placed in the hands of your torturer. It was an orgy of horror because they would sing in Orletti. And there would be music playing constantly. With the radio turned up to drown out the screams of the victims. And the shouts of the torturers added to the clamour. They were clearly drunk or on drugs or something. Because they seemed to be putting on a kind of show. They'd turn on the engines of the old cars too. It was unbearable. Not just the noise, but the smell of the fumes from the engines too. Then they would take one of us and hang us upside down in a tank of water they had for the interrogations. Until the victims stopped moving. We saw it all. They never hid any of it, because they never intended for any of us to live to tell the tale.
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Narrator
THE NATIONAL REORGANIZATION PROCESSES War in Argentina isn't just an armed one. It's ideological and cultural too. Public gatherings are prohibited, mirroring the image of the leader. Men are made to wear their hair short.
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Tommy John Advertiser
He's very conservative, he's very Catholic. He has ambitions about the sort of reorganization of Argentina that I think go far beyond just the reimposition of order under the military. In terms of how it views its project, what it hopes to accomplish. It's a much bigger task than previous military dictatorships have taken on. There is a very traditionalist, moral, Catholic underpinning to this dictatorship. The institutional church, at least initially, is supportive of the coup, supportive of the dictatorial project. And the military envisions what they're doing as essentially re founding Argentina. The process of national reorganization was supposed to put Argentina back on that virtuous path. It was supposed to undo all of the bad, all of the missteps, the errors, the mistakes that had characterized the previous 60, 70 years, and restore Argentina to its rightful place as a leader in the world, in the Americas, and as a defender of traditional Western conservative ideas.
- [37:15]
Narrator
Literature, films and music are censored. Some books are taken out of circulation altogether or burned in great infernos. Artists are detained and disappeared. Children's fiction doesn't escape the sense of scalpel either. One work is banned by a junta decree because it depicts a strike among the zoo animals. Almost every day, children sitting cross legged on the floor in front of flickering television sets suddenly find Little House on the Prairie, interrupted by General Wedela peering down at them through thick spectacles with another important announcement. If they ask inconvenient questions in class about Peronism or the disappeared, teachers take them aside and warn them that these are not subjects to be discussed. While Wedela expresses his wish to embrace Western values, he very much picks and chooses which of those values are allowed.
- [38:23]
Professor Fran Lesa
They would bring in a lot of foreign films, right, to prove there's no censorship here. Except that all the foreign films, you know, they would cut out certain things. So you would see a film. All but 28 minutes are all but 17 minutes the same thing. They would bring in books of foreign writers, even as they were disappearing their own writers. So you could look at the newspapers and say, well, they're just reviewing the new book by John Barth, no problem here. And yet that was a facade. It was a facade.
- [38:54]
Tommy John Advertiser
You talk about cultural repression. This is an era in which sex becomes incredibly taboo. There's Censorship of sexual material. Drug laws are enforced in new ways and with far more severe penalties. Music is controlled. Censorship of the media becomes a far more robust aspect of everyday life. And so it is a cultural project as much as it is a political and economic project.
- [39:21]
Narrator
The Ministry of Education puts in place a program called Operativo Claridad. Operation Clarity. A surveillance squad set up within the ministry, referred to as Human Resources, is tasked with weeding out Marxist aggression. Security agents spy on schoolteachers and pupils and build blacklists. Hundreds of teachers are dismissed and more than 50 have disappeared. Thousands more fleets in universities. Some courses are banned and others have intakes suspended. Thousands of lecturers and students are exiled or murdered. Meanwhile, Wedela's justification for his anti subversion crusade remains intact. The guerrillas have been all but eradicated by his dirty war. But sporadic attacks do continue throughout 1976. Seventeen senior military officials are killed by left wing groups. In October, a bomb nearly kills Videla himself at a military parade in Campo di Maisho. It leaves a gaping hole in the seating area, exactly where he'd been moments before, having only wandered 50 yards from the spot. Having survived the assassination attempt, Wedela goes from strength to strength. Just a few days later, on October 20, he reaches the highest rank the army can bestow upon him. Lieutenant General. Around this time, Robert Cox was invited to meet Fidela at the Casa Rosada.
- [41:08]
Robert Cox
First time I met him was when Videla and the people around him were trying to paint a picture of a moderate, which the United States went along with somewhat. And I got an invitation to meet him with two other journalists. And he received us not in the main presidential office, which is very impressive, but in a little room on the side. He was dressed like somebody was going to go to the golf club in Swedes. And he was very pleasant, very edgy. I found him very nervous, man, incredibly nervous. I said, they're still rolling around and picking up people and people are disappearing still. What are you going to do about it? He got furious and then he edged up. There was another cartoon character he reminded of was a rabbit who used to stamp his foot. And that's how he reminded me at that time.
- [42:14]
Narrator
By the end of 1976, after less than a year in power, the indiscriminate killing is finally landing Vedala in hot water. US President Gerald Ford has continued to stand behind the general, but reports of human rights abuses are flooding the foreign media and have even been debated in the US Congress. An Amnesty International delegation visits Argentina in November 1976, but finds its work frustrated by uncooperative soldiers. They're only permitted to visit one official prison. They do not get access to any of the detention centers. Yet its report, when it's finally published in March the following year, is damning. It says that at least 15,000 people have already been disappeared by then. Another seismic change has taken place. In January 1977, President Jimmy Carter's Democratic administration moves into the White House, marking an immediate change in policy. The following month, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance announces that military aid to Argentina will be slashed, explicitly citing human rights violations. He also presents Wedela with a list, the names of 7,500 disappeared people, demanding evidence of their whereabouts or legal proceedings. Congress then passes an amendment to the Foreign Assistance act prohibiting all military sales, aid, loans or training to Argentina. It's Saturday, April 30th, 1977. We're back in the Plaza de Mayo, the open square in front of the Casa Rosada. The autumn breeze is starting to bite as the offices around the square empty and people make their way home hurriedly. Heads down. 14 women are huddled around the squat pyramid in the center of the square. Speaking in whispers, they cast nervous glances around them. Most don't know each other personally. They refer to one another by surname only. But they all have one thing in common. Their son or daughter has vanished, and they have no idea what has happened to them. A soldier takes a pace towards the group and barks at them to keep moving. They're frightened. They're not activists. There's no plan. They know that congregations of more than two people are forbidden by the dictatorship. And so, arm in arm, in pairs, they begin walking, walking around the pyramid in the center of the plaza. One pulls a white handkerchief from her breast pocket and ties it loosely around her head to cover her hair. The others follow suit. They don't know it, but their silent protest will begin to resonate. The women agree to meet every Thursday to do the same thing. They nominate one woman from the original 14, Asukena Vishaflor, as their leader. They put in an official request to meet with President Videla to demand information on their children. Word of the protest spreads. So many others are missing relatives to recognize one another. They start wearing metal nails in their lapels. Soon there are 60 or 70 women walking silent laps of the statue. On Thursday afternoons, the junta takes to calling them Las locas, the mad women. Each week, after their protest, they go into the lobby of the Casa Rosada to see if they've had a response from Vedela. Each week, nothing. Then one winter's night, two months after their first protest, there's news. On July 11, General Albano Aguindohoi, Wedela's interior minister, will see Vichaflor and two others. But when they meet him, he is relaxed and feigns surprise. Grinning, Arguindehoy tells the three women that there's no such thing as disappeared people. They'd be better off checking the official police registers. Enraged, the mothers of the Placidimacho, as they've become known, vow never to leave the square until all of the women have answers. Meanwhile, General Wedela is increasingly preoccupied with the international image of his regime. On September 5, 1977, he travels to the United States to take part in the signing of the Panama Canal agreement. He holds meetings with President Jimmy Carter, who expresses grave concerns over human rights violations. Fidela, dressed in a dark alpaca wool suit and striped tie, grins and promises Carter that he will look into the alleged abuses. He reiterates for the first time on the international stage that he is fighting a dirty war, but a necessary one.
- [48:00]
Professor Fran Lesa
So Videla, for example in Washington on American tv, asked about this, said, there are no missing persons in Argentina. There are no concentration camps in Argentina. This is an anti Argentine campaign. This is madness. This is a myth that needs to be dispelled.
- [48:18]
Narrator
Despite receiving a grilling from his hosts, Argentina's dictator manages to afford himself some downtime. While in the US he meets with now former Secretary of State Kissinger while his wife shops for clothes in Manhattan. He buys his grandson a small motorized bike and, much to the horror of his aides, gives it a quick test ride across the carpets of the Waldorf Astoria. When Videla and Alicia Hartridge land back at El Palomar Airfield on September 11, measures are taken to hide their bounty from the journalists awaiting them on the tarmac. Not that this is particularly necessary. Back home, he enjoys a much easier ride in the press than he does overseas.
- [49:05]
Robert Cox
The problem with dictatorships in regard to the press is that it makes them lazy because they know that if they step out of line, they're in trouble. So they become so cautious. When I arrived there, the first thing that I did, I covered a press conference. And I was surprised that nobody took notes. The reason they didn't take notes was that they were waiting for the gazetija, the handout, which was handed out at the end, not before. Because if they hand it out before, they'd all leave. Unless they provided sandwiches, they would stay for the sandwiches. And some of those. I mean, they hardly Rewrote them. They just put them in because that's what they were used to doing.
- [49:47]
Narrator
With the national press under the control of the dictatorship, Robert Cox and his colleagues at the Buenos Aires Herald are receiving calls to its Marriages and Deaths section. A pattern emerges. Many of the callers cannot give it date of death. They simply do not know where their relatives are. One man tells a particularly harrowing story. He says the police arrived unexpectedly at his house in the middle of the night looking for his son. Initially his son was happy to cooperate.
- [50:23]
Robert Cox
And they said, oh, we have some questions. And they took it quite normally and so he left with them. And then the next thing they knew, they heard that his body had been found. They held a funeral. And when they held a funeral, a column of Ford Falcons came by throwing out leaflets which said that justice had been done to him because he had betrayed the Monteneros, that he's a former Montenero who betrayed the Monteneros and they killed him for that reason. Totally unturned. Nobody believed it. Finally we had just a mass of people coming. It was like a doctor's office. One time we had people lining up outside just to tell us, just to tell us.
- [51:07]
Narrator
Meanwhile, the US is keeping its own records at the embassy in Buenos Aires. Political officer Franklin Tex Harris sets about interviewing survivors and mapping the secret detention centers as best he can. He keeps his own daily count of the disappeared which is growing all the time.
- [51:29]
Robert Cox
Other things were happening at the same time. A wonderful man called Tex Harris put together a list of over 10,000 names, opened his office to the mothers of Placidimagine, said, come and tell me all about it. That was the period when under Jimmy Carter, US had a policy of human rights which had an enormous effect and definitely saved lots of lives because they would have gone on.
- [51:53]
Narrator
But even as the small acts of resistance grow, Vedala's strangled hold on. Argentina remains tight. The mothers of the Plaza de Macho are about to be given a terrible reminder of who is really in charge. It's December 20, 1977. A stub nosed transport plane belonging to the Argentine Navy climbs out from the military airfield of Buenos Aires. It arcs out over the River Plate towards the Atlantic Ocean. The horizon is brushed with an indigo haze which blends with the pinks and golds of the sunset behind it. A beautiful summer's evening. In the body of the Skyvan SC 76 limp bodies lull with the movement of the aircraft. Stupefied by an injection of tranquilizer administered back at the esma, they are barely conscious, their feet bound tightly. Vedala knows three of the prisoners on board personally. Two are French nuns named Alice d'aumont and Leonie Duquet, who previously happened to have cared for the president's sickly son, Alejandro, at a convent. But this hasn't brought them any favor. Right now they're almost unrecognizable. So badly have they been beaten. The two sisters officers have been punished because they have links to a dissident group of women who have been causing the general a headache. Next to them on the plane is Asukaina Vicheflor, one of the original mothers of the Plaza da Marcho. After a few minutes, the pilot glances down at his radar to see that they're several miles out over the wide mouth of the River Plate. This is far enough. He carefully lifts the COVID over a switch and presses down hard on the button. A hatch at the back opens, and the six bodies fall silently from the aircraft. The plane banks away to return to the airfield. The pilot loses sight of the bodies before they hit the water. As the murders and disappearances continue, Wedela publishes a document entitled A National Project for the New Republic. One figure stands out. He estimates that the regime will rule Argentina for another 12 to 15 years. So much for a swift return to democracy. But with international rancor growing, Wedela knows he must alter perceptions of his country and his rule. What he really needs is some effective pr. Fortunately for him, he has the perfect opportunity coming just around the corner. The 1978 FIFA World Cup. That's next time. In part three of the Vela Story.