Argentina’s Dictatorship Was Not a “Dirty War.” It Was State Terrorism. — Constanza Dalla Porta

Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship relied on widespread torture and disappearances to eradicate all political opponents, real or imagined. Seeking to conceal the junta regime’s one-sided terror, the Right still refers to those years as a “dirty war.” But the only accurate way to describe the dictatorship is as a period of “state terrorism.”...

We can only understand the term “dirty war” within the greater context of the Cold War, and the American fight against communism more broadly. The US doctrine of national security identified what it saw as internal security threats facing each country in Latin America. Through specific training programs for local armed forces, the US military taught torture and counterinsurgency techniques destined to fight against what was seen as communism and to destroy internal enemies.

But the political repression in Latin America went far beyond these declared objectives. Members of left parties and trade unions, as well as Jews, homosexuals, and many others seen as not conforming to the Catholic conservative view, were labeled “subversives” or even war enemies — a designation that wrongly suggests that these political activists and mobilized citizens were warriors bearing arms....

Our guys again.

Sadly, this was the case during "the red scare" not only in Latin America. When I was serving in the Western Pacific as a naval office during the Vietnam era, I discovered that the US was not "spreading freedom and democracy" as advertised but supporting a corrupt elite against a popular uprising. 50, 000 American young men went to their death over it and the country of Vietnam was devastated. This is still going on in the world today under the banner of liberalism.

Jacobin
Argentina’s Dictatorship Was Not a “Dirty War.” It Was State Terrorism.

Constanza Dalla Porta