The "Dirty War" (Spanish: Guerra Sucia), also known as the Process of National Reorganization (Spanish: Proceso de Reorganización Nacional or El Proceso), was the name used by the Argentine Military Government for a period of state terrorism in Argentina from roughly 1974 to 1983 (some sources date the beginning to 1969), during which military and security forces and right-wing death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A) hunted down and killed left-wing guerrillas, political dissidents, and anyone believed to be associated with socialism. The victims of the violence were 7,158 left-wing activists, terrorists and militants, including trade unionists, students, journalists and Marxists and Peronist guerrillas and their support network in the Montoneros believed to be 150,000-250,000-strong and 60,000-strong in the ERP, as well as alleged sympathizers. The official number of disappeared is reported to be 13,000. Some 10,000 of the "disappeared" were guerrillas of the Montoneros (MPM) and the Marxist People's Revolutionary Army (ERP). although it is estimated that the Montoneros and ERP had a combined strength of 5,000. The leftist guerrillas caused at least 6,000 casualties among the military, police forces and civilian population, according to a National Geographic Magazine article in the mid-1980s. The "disappeared" included those thought to be a political or ideological threat to the military junta, even vaguely, and they were killed in an attempt by the junta to silence the opposition and break the determination of the guerrillas. The worst repression occurred after the guerillas were largely defeated in 1977, when the church, labor unions, artists, intellectuals and university students and professors were targeted. The junta justified this mass terror by exaggerating the guerrilla threat, and even staged attacks to be blamed on guerillas and used frozen dead bodies of guerilla fighters that had been kept in storage for this purpose. Declassified documents of the Chilean secret police cite an official estimate by the Batallón de Inteligencia 601 of 22,000 killed or "disappeared" between 1975 and mid-1978. During this period, it was later revealed that at least 12,000 "disappeared" were detainees held by PEN (Poder Ejecutivo Nacional, anglicized as "National Executive Power"), and kept in clandestine detention camps throughout Argentina before eventually being freed under diplomatic pressure. The number of people believed to have been killed or "disappeared," depending on the source, range from 7,158 to 30,000 in the period from 1976 to 1983, when the military was forced from power following Argentina's defeat in the Falklands War. In 2003, The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons claimed the true number of disappeared to be around 13,000. After democratic government was restored, Congress passed legislation to provide compensation to victims' families. Some 11,000 Argentines as the next of kin have applied to the relevant authorities and received up to US$200,000 each as monetary compensation for the loss of loved ones during the military dictatorship. The exact chronology of the repression is still debated, however, and some sectors claim the long political war started in 1969. Trade unionists were targeted for assassination by the Peronist and Marxist guerrillas as early as 1969, and individual cases of state-sponsored terrorism against Peronism and the left can be traced back to the Bombing of Plaza de Mayo and Revolución Libertadora in 1955. The Trelew massacre of 1972, the actions of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance since 1973, and Isabel Martínez de Perón's "annihilation decrees" against left-wing guerrillas during Operativo Independencia (translates to Operation of Independence) in 1975, have also been suggested as dates for the beginning of the Dirty War.

Read full article on Wikipedia · CC-BY-SA