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rfmcdonaldThe Bloomberg View's Mac Margolis writes about the newly-revealed complicity between Castro's Cuba and the atrocious Argentine junta in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Les extrêmes se touchent.
A search engine -- created recently as part of Argentine President Cristina Kirchner's campaign to strengthen democracy by lifting the veil on human-rights crimes committed under the military -- confirms those suspicions [of Cuban-Argentine alliance]. (Kirchner, a devoted Peronist, has been less eager to bare the secrets of other friendly authoritarian regimes, starting with that of the iconic Isabelita Peron) Argentines may now scour some 5,800 sealed documents from the dictators' crypt. The digging has just begun, but already media and civic groups have found a rare window on Latin America's blackest years, when guerrilla insurgency and bloody repression coexisted with a complex skein of cloaked commercial and strategic interests.
Although they kept it quiet, Argentina's dictators had a gentlemen's agreement with Castro. Under the pact, Videla supported Cuba's bid in 1977 to join the Executive Council of the World Health Organization, a diplomatic feather in Castro's beret. The quid pro quo was that Havana stump among nonaligned nations to name Argentina to the United Nations prestigious Economic and Social Council. Apparently Cuba's vote was the 18th and decisive ballot, landing Argentina the coveted UN seat.
Both sides profited from the arrangement. "The Cubans always, always supported us and we supported them," Gabriel Martinez, then Argentina's ambassador to Geneva, said, though no one appeared to be listening at the time.
[. . .]
It also shines a light on why Castro could carry on for hours in the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana railing against right-wing tyrants but never raise his voice against the Argentine junta, even as it threw scores of discontents in the dungeon or into the Atlantic.
[. . .]
Cuba effusively supported Argentina's disastrous South Atlantic war against Great Britain, which lasted 74 days and hastened the end of the crumbling dictatorship. It may even have funneled Soviet guns to the junta. Moscow had its eyes on wheat and imported 20 million tons of Argentine grains between 1980 and 1985, flouting the U.S. grain embargo against the Soviet Union.
