I learned that former U.S. torture-center supervisor Gina Haspel would become the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency at an impossibly apt moment. I’ve just come back to New York after more than a year and a half abroad, and I spent Monday at the main branch of the New York Public Library to fill a hole in my research. The gap concerned the Movimiento Argentino Antiimperialista de Solidaridad Latinoamericana (MAASLA, the Argentine Anti-Imperialist Movement for Latin American Solidarity), a virtually unstudied Buenos Aires-based group that denounced repression and torture as explicitly transnational phenomena from 1972 to 1976. (They even used the word “transnational” itself; anyone who’s written a history grant recently will understand how exciting this is!)
I knew that in 1974, MAASLA had published a 40-page pamphlet titled “La CIA. ¿Qué es? ¿Qué hace en América Latina?” (“The CIA. What is it? What does it do in Latin America?”), with a skull-faced Statue of Liberty on its cover. Together with the table of contents, this was the only part of the document that I had seen; “La CIA” itself was missing from the Argentine archive where I’d learned of its existence. Fortunately the microform reading room at the main branch is the domain of miracles, and in place of acute curiosity and I now have a digital copy from microfiche.
As you may have begun to suspect, Lady Death was smiling at me from my computer screen as my phone buzzed Tuesday morning with the news that torture enthusiast Mike Pompeo would replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, and that Haspel in turn would lead the CIA. This coincidence was striking not simply because MAASLA’s 1974 pamphlet concerns the CIA, but because it emerged as part of the CIA’s first major scandal, which began to unfold publicly that same year. At a moment when the darkest stretches of the CIA’s gloomy past are showing with unusual clarity through the whitewash of the Obama years, I’d like to remember MAASLA and its efforts to turn up the heat in Latin America as the CIA faced an unprecedentedly broad attack at home.
The CIA had dealt with public-relations challenges before 1974, of course. The botched Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 and the discovery six years later of agency links to dozens of nominally independent groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom are just two among many public revelations that had battered “the Company,” as the CIA likes to call itself.
Yet even by those standards 1974 was an outstandingly rough year for U.S. intelligence operations. With the Company already tarnished by public recognition of its involvement in Nixon’s Watergate burglary, in June of ’74, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks — formerly of the CIA and State Department, respectively — published a book called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In it the two authors accused the Company of abandoning run-of-the-mill intelligence work in favor of complex and often inept covert operations designed to further U.S. imperial designs. Accounts had also begun to circulate concerning an upcoming tell-all book by CIA defector Philip Agee, to be published the following year in London under the title, Inside the Company. Agee had been stationed in Mexico, Ecuador, and Uruguay, and it was understood that he was going to name names (as indeed he would).
In the meantime some of Agee’s more damning anecdotes — among them accounts of CIA efforts to destabilize Salvador Allende’s government in Chile — had already leaked, including in a September 30, 1974 article in Time magazine, adding color to charges of U.S. interference abroad that had been all but confirmed by President Gerald Ford just weeks before. Even more damningly, in December New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh got a hold of parts of a 700-page internal CIA memo baptized “the Family Jewels.” As Hersh explained on the front page of the Times, the memo documented dozens of illegal activities undertaken by the CIA over the previous two decades, including assassination attempts against foreign leaders and domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens. (After countless Freedom of Information Act requests, the Family Jewels were finally declassified in 2007, so you can take a look for yourself — it doesn’t get much juicier than this.)
That is where MAASLA enters the picture. As the CIA’s “dirty tricks” were starting to leak, Argentina was experiencing a remarkable political moment. The dictatorship that had dominated the country since 1966 had been voted out of power in March 1973, and in its place, democratically elected President Héctor Cámpora had brought the left wing of the movement led by long-exiled former President Juan Perón into power for the very first time. While Cámpora would be made to step down after less than two months in office to clear the way for Perón’s personal return to the presidency in September, for a brief moment in mid-1973, it seemed that the entire Argentine political world had shifted far to the Left, and that revolution was just around the corner. This feeling lingered even as Perón turned decisively to the Right once in office, its permanence aided by the thousands of left-wing refugees from military-led Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil who had poured into the country. Even as Argentine political violence increased precipitously over the course of 1974, Buenos Aires stood out as a bastion of comparative freedom for the Left in a region offering few alternatives.
Amid this transnational churn, MAASLA emerged as an Argentine center for exile activism. While its executive leadership and national board were comprised predominantly of Argentine artists, academics, and politicians from the Left and Center-Left, MAASLA built strong connections with committees of exiles working to denounce political crimes in neighboring countries, and many of its own volunteers were exiles themselves. MAASLA expanded on the work of the coalition of groups that had sought to destabilize Argentina’s own recent dictatorship through the defense of political prisoners and the denunciation of its practices of “repression and torture”. Appeals on behalf of political prisoners were MAASLA’s bread and butter, salted liberally with accusations of systematic counterrevolutionary violence.
For MAASLA, the similarities among the repressive methods employed in these different countries underscored their common origin: “the same aberrant criminal techniques are instilled in ‘experts’ in repression at the police schools of [the] Panama [Canal Zone] and Washington,” they wrote. The effectiveness of this counterrevolutionary system was further enhanced by the “million-dollar budgets” of the CIA and related U.S. agencies, which play a “papel principalísimo” — a decidedly principal role — “in the commission of the crimes that we have denounced.”
MAASLA’s interpretation of regional repression would only be reinforced in 1973, as Uruguay and Chile joined Paraguay and Bolivia on the list of southern South American countries governed by military juntas. The Chilean coup in particular led MAASLA to call in September 1973 for the unmasking of “the common enemy that arms the fascists: yankee imperialism and its most direct agent, the fascist government of Brazil.”
This reference to Brazil was hardly a throwaway; indeed, the country held an increasingly privileged place in denunciations of South American repression as a transnational phenomenon. MAASLA documents make frequent reference to Brazil’s “mini-imperialism” in South America, citing Brazilian diplomats and security officials as they criss-crossed the region, facilitating coups and training their executors in the repressive techniques that had turned Brazil’s military government, in power since 1964, into a “model” for counterrevolution.
This belief in Brazil’s key role in the Right’s violent South American advance led MAASLA to collaborate intimately in the organization of the Second Russell Tribunal (1974-1976), a series of Europe-based hearings patterned on the First Russell Tribunal’s moral condemnation of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. Russell II was originally planned to center only on Brazil, but after the Chilean coup its purview was extended to include the whole of the region. Nearly a year before Allende’s overthrow, MAASLA was urging that the scope of the tribunal be expanded. Much of MAASLA’s correspondence with the tribunal’s organizers concerned its efforts to include more Latin Americans in Russell II and to keep the focus of the hearings squarely on the linkages among South America’s military regimes, all of which pointed due north via Brazil to the United States.
The central message of the well-sourced pamphlet, directed primarily to Argentine readers, was clear: it could happen here. Page after page documented past CIA incursions in the region, from the overthrow of Guatemalan reformist Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 to the more than decade-long financing of Allende’s Chilean opponents. The CIA was not the only U.S. agency devoted to destabilizing Latin America, the pamphlet contended; indeed, an organizational chart on page 8 includes numerous groups, among them the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Agency for International Development, responsible for the training of foreign police.
In cataloguing the activities of these groups, MAASLA did not shy away from naming names, and the pamphlet included deep dives into the personal histories of important intelligence figures. The last of these individuals to be profiled was then-current U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert C. Hill, who had previously been instrumental in the coup against Arbenz. Argentina had been encircled by repressive military dictatorships, and now its U.S. ambassador was an old hand at regime change. Without constant vigilance and firm political opposition, MAASLA insisted, Argentina would be next to fall.
In broad strokes, MAASLA was not wrong. In the months following the publication of “La CIA,” paramilitary violence against the Argentine Left increased vertiginously, much of it under the banner of a diffuse state-linked organization called the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A — a death squad similar in operation to units previously formed in Brazil and Uruguay. On Christmas Eve 1974, the Triple A attacked MAASLA’s headquarters in downtown Buenos Aires, killing Raúl Feldman, an Uruguayan exile and the only person in the office at the time.
Feldman had been working to transcribe interviews with Uruguayan torture victims from cassette tapes. These tapes were seized in the attack, together with the bulk of the group’s materials, and the office was destroyed. While MAASLA continued to operate out of a new space in 1975, deteriorating political conditions made the group’s work increasingly dangerous. Two months after Argentina’s own 1976 military coup, MAASLA was formally declared illegal and dissolved.
Accept or reject MAASLA’s nearly monolithic focus on the role of the U.S. in the rise of Latin America’s repressive Right, the bottom line remains the same. At a time of mounting interest in the clandestine activities of the U.S., MAASLA helped to ensure that investigations happening there had repercussions that extended beyond the U.S. itself. Its correspondence and publications, moreover, are valuable tools for contemporary historians seeking to reconstruct a moment at which the transnational dimensions of southern South America’s Cold War-era counterrevolution were coming clearly into focus for the first time.
- The doctrine of the “internal front,” or “ideological frontiers,” refers to the notion, dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, that the greatest threats to the national security of Latin American countries came not from external enemies but from internal attempts to subvert the political order. As such, the militaries of those countries should focus less on defense against potential foreign invasion and more on the policing of their own populations.