It was sometime in the 1970s. I was a kid in a public school in Southern California. I had to report a news article in front of my class on that day. My mother in her bathrobe and coffee that morning picked out the article and cut it out for me. I read it. I did not like it. Some blonde lady named Isabel Peron, had lost her position as president, in some country called Argentina. I had only heard of the country earlier by watching the Miss Universe pageant. But wow, a woman president! Except that she sounded incompetent and had a chagrined look on her face in the photo as she was being cast out. It did not inspire me. Years later, when I read the history, I found out that the incompetence of this ex-nightclub dancer and second wife of dictator Juan Peron, was much worse than the news article reported.

The exit of Isabel Peron lit the fuse to Argentina’s decade-long Dirty War. Generals took over and gave the hemisphere its most violent and horrible secret war against suspected internal dissidents ever waged. At least 30,000 people disappeared – and they were all killed. They were tortured first, often with cattle prods and then killed in a couple of horrific ways – one was that they were drugged, stripped naked, and ‘sent up’ on Wednesdays. That ‘sent up’ meant that they were put aboard helicopters and hurled out naked and alive over the open sea, off the icy Bahia Blanco waters. There were a couple concentration camps, but most were just killed. These Dirty War generals wanted to eliminate their dissidents very quickly. A few bones eventually washed ashore but most of the dead were never seen again.

Who were these evil people who did this? They were vile generals, led by a monster named Jorge Videla. He was an old style caudillo who assured U.S. policymakers that he was only eradicating ‘communists.’ The U.S., deep in the throes of Kissingerian ‘realpolitic,’ and anxious about the Cold War, to its discredit, believed him. Videla led various military people, including a navy “mechanic’s school,” into becoming monsters, who were surprisingly, motivated largely by theft and what they could steal from their victims. In the end they amounted to little more than gangs in black leather jackets with gangland solidarity and gangland accountability only to themselves. You can read about these thugs in Vuelo, an excellent account of the war told from the point of view of a torturer, by Horacio Verbitsky, who himself was an ex-leftist guerrilla.

It’s true that communists did wage a terrible war themselves in Argentina, blowing up shopping malls, shooting innocents and spreading terror ahead of it. They were imitating their hero, Fidel Castro, who was spreading that evil, via Che Guevara and others, in this era. And he inspired many more to act similarly after Guevara’s ignominious 1967 death in Bolivia.

But there were only about 300 such guerrillas in Argentina and many, like Verbitsky, actually escaped pretty easily.

The people who didn’t escape were Argentina’s middle class. Young people, students, labor union organizers, teachers, political dissidents. They were grabbed off the streets in their thousands, with the scariest year of it in 1976, the year Jimmy Carter’s administration took power in the U.S., his weakness emboldening the tyrants.

Most of the victims were left-leaning in some small way, but they were democratic left, civil society people, and more important, not the violent ones. By the time ‘Victim Number 30,000’ was reached, they weren’t leftwing at all. They were just victims of a monstrous military machine that seemed to target the nation’s young people.

My friend Brenda, an Argentine, told me of her mother’s terror when one of the creepy Ford Falcons of the Dirty Warriors followed her for no apparent reason on one day in Buenos Aires near the wane of the Dirty War. She had no idea what the men in the Falcon wanted but she knew they were coming to get her. She got away. Brenda’s family is rightwing and very middle class.

A random young Swedish teenager, age 15, her name was Dagmar Hagelin, wasn’t so lucky. She was the daughter of a Swedish diplomat, and grabbed off the street as a subversive, tortured, and murdered the same way as the rest of them. No one knows the full fate of what happened to her except that her death was a ‘mistake.’ And there was no accountability.

Victims’ families desperately tried to learn the fate of their relatives. The Dirty Warriors slammed the doors in their faces and made their lives a nightmare for asking. Some of these inquiring relatives were actually killed. And these generals fully expected to get away with it, for Argentines were largely peaceful, democratic people that gangsters under state imprimatur possessed no fear of. For they were the source of fear.

The Dirty War Generals were finally thrown out in 1983 by Argentina’s democratic revolutionaries. These generals had brought Argentina war and defeat in the Falklands, for, having destroyed all property rights and human rights, they moved on to the next atrocity they thought they could get away with — a war invasion of someone else’s country. It took mighty and resolute Lady Thatcher, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, to destroy them, something the broad international left even today remains in denial about. For when tyrants grow this brutal, it’s military force — not U.N. resolutions, not world condemnation, not signing petitions — that is the only real solution.

The Dirty War generals also ruined Argentina’s economy. They had raised public spending — for state-sponsored murder — by more than 300% – worse than anything that later President Carlos Menem ever did – triggering the ruinous hiperinflacion that so destroyed Argentina in the 1980s. To this day, there is nothing, not even currency devaluation, that scares Argentines more than hiperinflacion. Only Bolivia’s runaway hyperinflation in that era was worse.

Another Argentine friend, Diana, I remember working with in San Francisco in the 1980s. She had to do moneychanging for her dad the oil businessman at the bank each day – because they were desperately trying to lock in the value of the cash before inflation snapped it away. The Dirty War generals were responsible for all of this, in addition to their murderous evil against their fellow citizens. I don’t think this nation has ever quite healed. When I went to Argentina to report its meltdown in 2002, the most free-market libertarian people there spoke of the Dirty War in the darkest of terms — and some of them, too, had to flee into exile.

Today, 30 years on, Argentines are commemorating the monstrous Dirty War that did so much damage to their country. Over 100,000 Argentines rallied in the streets of Buenos Aires this past weekend to remember the dead. Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons has a fine writeup of what happened in Argentina in the 1970s well worth reading here and here.

UPDATE: Marc Cooper has a riveting must-read account of his own experiences during the Dirty War in Argentina — note that theft detail, which also had been described in Verbitsky’s memoirs, among many other things — posted here.