During this campaign, military and security forces and death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA, or Triple A)[16] hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism, or the Montoneros movement.

After taking control, the armed forces proscribed Peronism, a decision that triggered the organization of Peronist resistance in workplaces and trade unions, as the working classes sought to protect the economic and social improvements obtained under Perón's rule.

These actions against victims called desaparecidos because they simply "disappeared" without explanation were confirmed via Scilingo, who has publicly confessed his participation in the Dirty War, stating that the Argentine military "did worse things than the Nazis".

During the resulting Falklands War, the military government lost any remaining popularity after Argentina's defeat by Britain, forcing it to step aside in disgrace and allow for free elections to be held in late 1983.

Alfonsín organized the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, CONADEP) to investigate crimes committed during the Dirty War, and heard testimony from hundreds of witnesses and began to build cases against offenders.

[citation needed] In 1986, the military forced the passage of the Ley de Punto Final (Full Stop Law) in 1986, which "put a line" under previous actions and ended prosecutions for crimes committed by the National Reorganization Process.

Perón was re-elected in 1973, backed by a broad coalition that ranged from trade unionists in the center to fascists on the right (including members of the neo-fascist Movimiento Nacionalista Tacuara) and socialists like the Montoneros on the left.

[44] On 19 January 1974, the Trotskyist People's Revolutionary Army attacked the military garrison in the Buenos Aires city of Azul, prompting a harsh response from the then constitutional president Juan Perón[45] and contributing to his shift towards the rightist faction of the justicialist movement during the last months of his life.

[46] Peronist guerrillas, estimated at 300 to 400 active members (Montoneros) in 1977[47] (and 2000 at its peak in 1975, though almost half of them related to militia[48]), committed a number of attacks during this period such as bombings at the Goodyear and Firestone distributors, Riker and Eli pharmaceutical laboratories, Xerox Corporation, and Pepsi-Cola bottling companies.

[67] The junta, which dubbed itself National Reorganization Process, systematized the repression, in particular through the way of "forced disappearances" (desaparecidos), which made it very difficult as was the case in Augusto Pinochet's Chile to file legal suits as the bodies were never found.

Cuban diplomats were also assassinated in Buenos Aires in the infamous Automotores Orletti torture center, one of the 300 clandestine prisons of the dictatorship, managed by the Grupo de Tareas 18, headed by Aníbal Gordon, previously convicted for armed robbery and who answered directly to the General Commandant of the SIDE, Otto Paladino.

There has been participation of senior executives of Ford, Mercedes-Benz,[73] Acindar, Dálmine Siderca, Ingenio Ledesma, and Astarsa[74][75] Victoria Basualdo, from Columbia University, investigated the complicity between large companies and armed forces.

Together they negotiated the buyout of Papel Prensa, the largest national manufacturer of newsprint, then owned by the widow of David Graiver, Lidia Papaleo and his family estate, after his death in a plane crash on August 7, 1976.

[79] She, along with Graiver's brother and father, were illegally detained by the Buenos Aires Province Police on March 14, 1977, on suspected financial connections her late husband had with the guerrilla organization Montoneros, and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, though an appeals court later cleared the defendants of all charges.

[83][84][85] In September 1978, a group of businessmen, among whom were Ernestina Herrera de Noble and Hector Magnetto from Grupo Clarín and Bartolomé Luis Mitre from La Nación, along with members of the military junta inaugurated the Papel Prensa plant in San Justo.

[87] During a 1981 interview whose contents were revealed by declassified CIA documents in 2000, former DINA agent Michael Townley explained that Ignacio Novo Sampol, member of the CORU anti-Castro organization, had agreed to involve the Cuban Nationalist Movement in the kidnapping in Buenos Aires of the president of a Dutch bank.

After returning to the United States, Novo Sampol sent Townley a stock of paper, used to print pamphlets in the name of Grupo Rojo (Red Group), an imaginary Argentine Marxist terrorist organization, which was to claim credit for the abduction of the Dutch banker.

[88] The exact chronology of the repression occurring before the Operation Condor's beginning in March 1976 is still debated, but some sectors claim the long political conflict started in 1969 as 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"[89] against left-wing guerrillas during Operativo Independencia (Operation Independence) in 1975[89] have also been suggested as dates for the beginning of the Dirty War.

[97] In 1979, security forces violently arrested and threatened the members of this group, made up predominantly of mothers who held weekly silent demonstrations in the capital's main square for over two years to demand justice for their disappeared children.

During this period, at least 12,000 "disappeared" were detained 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.

Some 11,000 Argentine 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, while others such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo refused to take any money from a government they considered to follow the same neoliberal policies dictated by Operation Condor.

These efforts ranged from bilateral communications between these countries to capture and monitor these groups; the fight against these "terrorist exponents" proposed to unify the greatest enemies of South America: Brazil and Argentina given that they saw the threat of communism as more dangerous than each other.

[118] In one frank memo, written in 1977, an official at the Foreign Ministry issued the following warning: Our situation presents certain aspects which are without doubt difficult to defend if they are analyzed from the point of view of international law.

[132] In 1980, the Argentine military helped Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Stefano Delle Chiaie and major drug lords mount the bloody Cocaine Coup of Luis García Meza Tejada in neighboring Bolivia.

[137] The importance of his role was not known about until The Nation published in October 1987 an exposé written by Martin Edwin Andersen, a Washington Post and Newsweek special correspondent, Kissinger had secretly given the junta a "green light" for their state policies,[138] being the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), founded in 1946 assigned the specific goal of teaching anti-communist counterinsurgency training, the place where several Latin American dictators, generations of their military where educated in state terrorism tactics, including the uses of torture in its curriculum.

[144] In Buenos Aires, Robert C. Hill, a five-time conservative Republican ambassadorial appointee, worked behind the scenes to keep the Argentina military junta from engaging in massive human rights violations.

[citation needed] Marie-Monique Robin also demonstrated that since the 1930s, there had been ties between the French far-right and Argentina, in particular through the Catholic fundamentalist organisation Cité catholique, created by Jean Ousset, a former secretary of Charles Maurras, the founder of the royalist Action Française movement.

Deprived of all communication with the outside world, held in unknown places, subjected to barbaric torture, kept ignorant of their immediate or ultimate fate, they risked being either thrown into a river or the sea, weighted down with blocks of cement, or burned to ashes.

[203] A Catholic youth leader, Juan Ignacio Isla Casares, with the help of the Montoneros commander Eduardo Pereira Rossi (nom de guerre "El Carlón") was the mastermind behind the ambush and killing of five policemen near San Isidro Cathedral on 26 October 1975.