KISSINGER CAUGHT TELLING PINOCHET TO "DO IT QUICKLY" SAME DAY AS SUPREME COURT.......

KISSINGER TO THE ARGENTINE GENERALS IN 1976:
"IF THERE ARE THINGS THAT HAVE TO BE DONE,
YOU SHOULD DO THEM QUICKLY"

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 133

Edited by Carlos Osorio and Kathleen Costar

Washington, August 27, 2004 - A newly declassified document obtained by the National Security Archive shows that amidst vast human rights violations by Argentina’s security forces in June 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Argentine Foreign Minister Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti:

"If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures."

Kissinger’s comment is part of a 13-page Memorandum of Conversation reporting on a June 10 meeting between Secretary Kissinger and Argentine Admiral Guzzetti in Santiago, Chile.

After a series of pleasantries, Guzzetti went into the substance of the meeting by stating: "Our main problem in Argentina is terrorism. It is the first priority of the current government that took office on March 24. There are two aspects to the solution. The first is to ensure the internal security of the country; the second is to solve the most urgent economic problems over the coming 6 to 12 months. Argentina needs United States understanding and support...."

Replying to Guzzetti’s report on the situation, Secretary Kissinger said: "We have followed events in Argentina closely. We wish the new government well. We wish it will succeed. We will do what we can to help it succeed."

At a time when the international community, the U.S. media, universities, and scientific institutions, the U.S. Congress, and even the U.S. Embassy in Argentina were clamoring about the indiscriminate human rights violations against scientists, labor leaders, students, and politicians by the Argentine military, Secretary Kissinger told Guzzetti: "We are aware you are in a difficult period. It is a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist activities tend to merge without any clear separation. We understand you must establish authority."

Only two weeks earlier, on May 28, Ambassador Robert Hill had presented a U.S. demarche on human rights to Admiral Guzzetti. The Embassy was deeply concerned about the kidnapping and torture of three American women, among them the Fulbright coordinator for Argentina, Elida Messina, and the wave of attacks against political refugees from the Southern Cone. In contrast to Hill’s efforts, according to the memorandum of conversation Secretary Kissinger told Guzzetti:"In the United States we have strong domestic pressures to do something on human rights... We want you to succeed. We do not want to harrass [sic] you. I will do what I can...."

Another document recently unearthed by the National Security Archive and posted for the first time here, shows that on July 9, 1976, Secretary Kissinger was explicitly briefed on the rampant repression taking place in Argentina: "Their theory is that they can use the Chilean method," Kissinger’s top aide on Latin America Harry Shlaudeman informed him, "that is, to terrorize the opposition - even killing priests and nuns and others."

Documents published earlier by the National Security Archive show that in September 1976 Ambassador Hill complained again to Guzzetti about the astounding human rights violations occurring in Argentina. Guzzetti rebuffed him saying that, "When he had seen SECY of State Kissinger in Santiago, the latter had said he ’hoped the Argentine Govt could get the terrorist problem under control as quickly as possible.’ Guzzetti said that he had reported this to President Videla and to the cabinet, and that their impression had been that the USG’s overriding concern was not human rights but rather that GOA "get it over quickly."

Kissinger reiterated this message during another meeting with Guzzetti in New York on October 7 telling him "the quicker you succeed the better." Later, Ambassador Hill sent a bitter complaint to the Department of State that Guzzetti had returned to Argentina in a "state of jubilation" after meeting the Secretary. [See Kissinger to Argentines on Dirty War: "The quicker you succeed the better", December 4, 2003]

"The Memorandum of Conversation explains why the Argentine generals believed they got a clear message from the Secretary that they had carte blanche for the dirty war," said Carlos Osorio, Director of the Southern Cone Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. "It appears that Secretary Kissinger gave the ’green light’ to the Argentine military during the June 1976 meeting with Guzzetti in Santiago," he added.

The June10 Memorandum of Conversation was obtained by the National Security Archive’s Southern Cone Documentation Project through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of State filed in August 2002 and appealed in February 2004. The document was misdated June 6, 1976. The meeting took place during the morning of June 10, 1976, when Secretary Kissinger met with several foreign dignitaries attending the OAS General Assembly in Santiago. That afternoon he traveled to Mexico City [See Secretary Kissinger’s travels at the Department of State Historian’s web page and the Secretary’s calendar of events for that day].

In Santiago, Guzzetti told Secretary Kissinger of the difficulties the Argentine security forces faced in dealing with the refugees, mostly because of lack of information: "[refugees] do not want to register... We have no names. Only the refugee committees know something in detail..."

A day earlier, on June 9, 1976 clandestine Argentine security forces had ransacked the Catholic Commission for Refugees in Buenos Aires and stolen refugee records. The day after Guzzetti and Secretary Kissinger met, on June 11, twenty-four Chilean and Uruguayan refugees were kidnapped, held illegally for two days, and tortured by a combined Argentine-Chilean-Uruguayan squadron.

Guzzetti also described the intelligence coordination with neighboring dictatorships: "The terrorist problem is general to the entire Southern Cone. To combat it, we are encouraging joint efforts to integrate with our neighbors... All of them: Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil." This collaboration was codenamed Operation Condor.

At the time of the meeting, the Department of State suspected that the Southern Cone military regimes were carrying out a coordinated attack against refugees in Argentina; indeed Kissinger received a special telegram from Washington briefing him on this issue just before he met with Guzzetti that morning. But the Memorandum of Conversation contains no reference by Secretary Kissinger regarding the human rights concerns posed by the Southern Cone security cooperation.

By the end of 1976, 10,000 Argentines had been disappeared or assassinated by the Argentine security forces; half a dozen American citizens had been kidnapped and tortured. On the international front, the cooperation between Argentine military and intelligence forces and other Southern Cone militaries left hundreds of Uruguayans, Chileans, Bolivians, Paraguayans, and Brazilians disappeared, tortured, and/or dead.
What follows are excerpts from the Memorandum of Conversation and a chronology of events surrounding the June 10 meeting, based on previously declassified documents.

http://www.duckdaotsu.org/t082604-082704-kissinger-pinochet.html