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Obama to Unseal Files on Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’

WASHINGTON — President Obama is moving to declassify American military, intelligence and law enforcement records that could reveal what the United States government knew about Argentina’s brutal “dirty war” of the 1970s and ’80s, a senior adviser said on Thursday, hoping to pierce the shroud of secrecy that has surrounded a painful chapter in that country’s history.

Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, said that the president would use a visit to Argentina on Wednesday and Thursday, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of the 1976 coup that began the war, to honor the victims and formally begin the declassification process.

“On this anniversary and beyond, we’re determined to do our part as Argentina continues to heal and move forward as one nation,” Ms. Rice said during a speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

Human rights activists have long pressed for access to more classified United States records about the war, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, a period when the Argentine government and military carried out vicious crackdowns against dissidents and abducted thousands of people, including babies taken from parents who were detained.

The Argentine government had formally requested that the documents be declassified. The issue has taken on greater urgency in recent days, after human rights groups noted that Mr. Obama would be in Argentina on the painful anniversary and began pressing him to use the occasion to acknowledge the abuses that took place.

Several of the groups, including Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo — which works to find people who were taken as babies during the dictatorship and raised by families close to the military — submitted a formal request on Monday to the United States Embassy in Buenos Aires for Mr. Obama to release the secret records.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a group that opposes government secrecy, said Mr. Obama should be applauded for engaging in “declassified diplomacy.”

The president’s decision, Mr. Kornbluh said, “not only provides a historical atonement for early U.S. support for the coup and the repression in its aftermath, but also can provide actual evidence and answers to the families of human rights victims who continue to search for their missing loved ones in Argentina, 40 years after the coup took place.”

In 2002, under pressure from human rights groups, the United States government released 4,700 partly declassified State Department documents on Argentina from the period. Documents released in response to a separate freedom of information request by the National Security Archive revealed the extent to which top American officials had been aware of the Argentine government’s brutal tactics. Among them was an account of a conversation in 1976 between Henry A. Kissinger, then the secretary of state, and César Augusto Guzzetti, the Argentine foreign minister, in which Mr. Kissinger appears to condone the military’s crackdown.

“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” Mr. Kissinger told Mr. Guzzetti, according to the declassified account.

The administration refused at the time to do a multiagency review, so relevant records from the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation remain classified. Mr. Obama’s effort will include records from military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as the presidential libraries and the National Archives, a White House official said on Thursday.

The president plans to travel to Argentina after a historic visit to Cuba, where differences over human rights remain an irritant even as the United States seeks to begin a new chapter of engagement. He will meet on Wednesday in Buenos Aires with Mauricio Macri, the newly elected Argentine president, and travel to Bariloche with his family on Thursday.

A correction was made on 
March 19, 2016

An article on Friday about President Obama’s move to declassify records that could reveal what the United States government knew about Argentina’s brutal war of the 1970s and ’80s misidentified the source of an account of a conversation in 1976 between Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, and Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, the Argentine foreign minister. The account was in a document released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive; it did not come from documents the State Department declassified in 2002.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama to Unseal Files on Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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