The American Narrative | Censorship, Sanitization, and Silence
TL;DR
US intelligence heavily censored and sanitized the events of the "Dirty War" within their own circles and to the general public. Because of this, the atrocities committed in a faraway nation became tolerable. The public did not know the full extent to which the Argentinian government was terrorizing its own people.
The Article
In the previous article, we looked at how Cold War ideologies and tensions shaped the US' attitude towards Argentina's "Dirty War," framing the Argentinian repression as a geopolitical struggle against communism rather than a series of human rights violations. The US not only understood the logic driving the military regime, but anticipated it. Despite this, the US decided not to intervene. This refusal to intervene also shaped the way information concerning the situation was communicated, both within the CIA as well as the general American public. In other words, not only did the US refuse to intervene, they also tightly controlled how the narrative was told.
Declassified CIA documents reveal that US officials were highly aware of the importance that the spread of information had on Argentinian repression. Videla's military regime did not rely upon force alone; it strove to suppress and eliminate dissident voices using popular media. In one declassified US document of President Carter's report on Argentina, the view of General Ramon Camps, a senior Argentinian security official, warned that "parents, news, media, and dissidents were corrupting the minds of young impressionable people" 1. Here, the information itself is framed as a threat to the public, rather than an asset.
This framing is critical to the successful repression of the Argentinian people. By portraying journalists and dissidents as ideological enemies under the same umbrella, the military regime justified censorship in the name of national security. What's alarming is that US officials acknowledged this reasoning without objection. The document neither challenges the statement made by Camps, nor does it question the legitimacy of repressing the media. Instead, Camps' recount of the justification is given in a neutral, matter-of-fact tone. This tonality is widespread when reporting on the "Dirty War."
This tone and phrasing matters. As reports circulate within the CIA and other US offices, repression by Videla's regime is described as countersubversion, internal security, or for the benefit of the nation. The extreme acts of violence, such as forced disappearances, tortures, and extralegal murders, are acknowledged, but stripped of the emotional impact. This desensitizes and sanitizes the narrative to minimize the cost of human lives from state violence while preserving the geopolitical motivations behind it. This framing allowed US policymakers and officials to tolerate the atrocities in a faraway nation like Argentina without confronting their moral and ethical implications.
The censorship within Argentina and the sanitization within US reporting reinforced one another. As Argentinian journalists were silenced via intimidation and violence, American intelligence briefings filled the missing information with ideological justifications rather than the suppressed voices. The awareness of Argentinian events remained, but the emotional impact did not. The choice to minimize the narrative on the regime's victims allowed the "Dirty War" to remain on the periphery of the US public's mind, even as evidence continued to come in.
This selective narrative was not accidental. As the previous article stated, the Cold War ideological tension encouraged the United States to view the mass oppression in Argentina as a successful suppression of communist ideals. To further entrench the public in this view, media sanitization was a logical extension. In accepting Videla's perspective of leftist ideology as terroristic and violence as necessary, US officials contributed to an environment where state terror and internal persecution were normalized and commonplace.
Narrative controls how we understand, remember, respond, and take responsibility for events. The next article will examine how this narrative translates to the memory and legacy of the "Dirty War."