The Guardian: Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America

 It has taken decades to fully expose this system, which enabled governments to send death squads on to each other’s territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies – real or suspected – among their emigrant and exile communities. Condor effectively integrated and expanded the state terror unleashed across South America during the cold war, after successive rightwing military coups, often encouraged by the US, erased democracy across the continent. Condor was the most complex and sophisticated element of a broad phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people across South America were murdered or disappeared by military governments in the 1970s and 80s. [...]

Although Condor operatives hunted down targets in all member states, their work focused on Argentina in particular, which was a refuge for exiles escaping military dictatorships across the continent before it, too, fell under military control. Condor squads dispatched to Argentina from Uruguay and Chile used a series of makeshift jails and torture centres provided by their hosts. The first was the abandoned car repair garage, Automotores Orletti, where Anatole Larrabeiti was held and his mother Victoria was last seen alive. Larrabeiti still recalls seeing a jar of glittering metal in the garage, in which victims’ wedding rings were kept. [...]

The new information about the rigged cryptography machines follows the revelations, from a declassified document handed to Argentina by the US last year, that West German, British and French intelligence services even explored the possibility of copying at least part of the Condor method in Europe. A heavily redacted CIA cable from September 1977 is headed: “Visit of representatives of West German, French and British intelligence services to Argentina to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversive organization similar to Condor”. The visit coincided with cross-frontier terror campaigns by Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army. According to the cable, the visitors explained that “the terrorist/subversive threat had reached such dangerous levels in Europe that they believed it best if they pooled their intelligence resources in a cooperative organization such as Condor”.

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Rare Earth: The Nazi Pedophile Apocalypse Cult

Social Europe: Global Debt Is At Its Peak: Italy Stands Better Than We Think

Historically, the debt of a country, both public and private, tends to grow over time in positive correlation with the size of the economy, with the notable exception of sudden defaults that wipe out large portion of debt. Hence the huge size of total debt cannot provide per se enough information about its sustainability. Nor is it possible to infer that low total debt is a sign of financial stability. Indeed, it is more likely that a very low level, or even the absence of debt, would imply a complete lack of confidence such as to exclude all national economic agents from international credit markets, as was the case in Argentina in the five years following the dramatic 2002 default.  [...]

Global rankings, by using this more suitable measure, are reversed: Luxembourg ends up in first place with a total debt equal to 434 percent of GDP, almost all composed of corporate debt. At a distance, we observe Japan’s debt total hovering at 373 percent characterized by a preponderant weight of the public component (216 percent). The high incidence of both public and private debt places France, Spain and the United Kingdom in the top eight while Italy appears only in 9th place, with a well-balanced total debt ratio of 265% percent of GDP, due to low household and corporate debt that offsets the impact of consistent public debt.

But even a limited debt to GDP ratio cannot be considered a sign of virtue or economic health. At the bottom of the rankings stand out the paradoxical cases of Argentina and Turkey. Although both countries have total debts under control (private debt virtually non-existent in Argentine and Turkish public debt at the ridiculous value of 28 percent of GDP) they are still in danger of losing access to markets due to a currency and balance of payments crises. In a glaring apparent paradox, short-term interest rates are at 70 percent in Argentina’s low-debt financial environment and stably negative in the Japan of the monstrous debt.  [...]

There’s more. Official statistics do not consider the troubling issue of “implicit debt”, i.e. the burden represented by the present value of financial commitments made by governments on pensions and healthcare. In general, these future debts do not appear in the national accounts for well-founded reasons connected to the difficulties in estimating costs spread over very long time horizons. If these hidden charges were to be taken into account, US debt would, for example, quintuple to over $100trn. But Spain, Luxembourg and Ireland would be in the worst shape, since they would see their liabilities rise by more than tenfold, up to over 1000 percent of GDP in the Irish case. On the other hand Italy, from the point of view of implicit debt, under current legislation is the most virtuous European country.

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Quartz: Why Dutch and Danish retirees sleep well at night

No country has figured out how to finance a third of your life out of the labor force. But some countries have better systems than others. The latest annual, Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index , now in its tenth year, ranks the health and viability of national retirement systems around the world. It has once again awarded the Netherlands a top slot, and Denmark, last year’s winner, is right behind. They rank highly in terms of the level of benefits they supply, their sustainability (the Dutch and Danish don’t worry about their system going bust), and transparency. There are many things we can learn from their success, they show how most countries are on the wrong track. [...]

About 90% of Danes also have access to a retirement account through work. It is similar to the US’s 401(k), where employers and employees contribute to an account and employees bear the investment risk. The wide coverage is what makes Danish pensions so special: In the 1980s only 35% had access to a pension account through work. The increase comes from the roll out of new pension accounts that targeted blue-collar workers. Danes contribute between 12 to 18% to their employee pension accounts. Benefits are paid as an annuity after retirement, though sometimes Danes can take it as a lump sum.[...]

Argentina is at the bottom of the rankings, and offers lessons about what makes a retirement system work. It primarily relies on state pension funded mostly by current tax dollars like the other countries, but with erratic tax revenue the funding is not secure. Argentine pensions used to feature individual saving accounts until the state appropriated them in 2008. The Mercer report has concerns about the pension’s sustainability and if it offers enough to the poorest Argentines. It shows how a lack of transparency, unstable institutions, and fiscal pressure can undermine any pension system.

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The Guardian: Argentinians formally leave Catholic church over stance on abortion

In the month since the country's senate voted to maintain a ban on almost all abortions, more than 3,700 people have submitted apostasy applications to the Argentinian synod, according to César Rosenstein, a lawyer and founding member of the Argentinian Coalition for a Lay State. [...]

“Apostasy is an important symbolic and political act,” said Rosenstein, who said that visits to the group’s website had shot up since the vote from 100 daily unique users to around 40,000 a day. [...]

In Argentina, 92% of the population describe themselves as Catholic – even though barely 20% practice their religion on a regular basis – and many express pride in a pope who once served as archbishop of Buenos Aires.

A constitutional reform in 1994 removed the requirement for Argentina’s presidents to be Catholic, but close ties remain between church and state. The Catholic church is financed to a large extent by the government. Bishops’ wages are paid by the state and Catholic schools receive state support, in accordance with a concordat signed in 1966 between the Vatican and Argentina’s 1966-70 military dictatorship and a decree passed by the country’s later 1976-83 dictatorship. [...]

But the vote has also galvanised women’s rights campaigners, and provoked a new discussion around the Catholic church’s role in the country. Hundreds of people had signed apostasy forms at Cael’s street corner stalls around the country, Rosenstein said.

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The New York Review of Books: ‘Silence Is Health’: How Totalitarianism Arrives

Sent by his German immigrant family to the Heimat for schooling at the age of nine, Darré later specialized in agriculture, the logical choice for someone with an Argentine background at a time when the succulent beef and abundant wheat of Argentina’s pampas made the country renowned as the “breadbasket of the world.” For a while, during the 1920s, he contemplated returning to Buenos Aires to pursue a career in farming, but that was before his writing caught the attention of Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi Party. His 1930 book A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, in which he proposed applying selective cattle-breeding methods for the procreation of perfect Aryan humans, dazzled the Führer. [...]

Subsequently, in my work as a writer, I focused on how hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators escaped to Argentina. This made me painfully aware of how their presence during the thirty years between the end of World War II and the 1976 coup had numbed the moral sense of what was then an affluent, well-educated nation, with disastrous consequences for its people. Argentines’ forced cohabitation with Nazi fugitives resulted, I came to believe, in a normalization of the crimes that the German émigrés had committed. “He came to our country seeking forgiveness,” Argentina’s Cardinal Antonio Caggiano told the press when Israeli operatives captured the Nazi arch-criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirited him out of Argentina in 1960 to stand trial in Jerusalem. “Our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he’s done.”  [...]

With every turn, the billboard schooled Argentines in the total censorship and suppression of free speech that the dictatorship would soon impose. The billboard message was the brainchild of Oscar Ivanissevich, Argentina’s reactionary minister of education, ostensibly to caution motorists against excessive use of the horn. His other mission was an “ideological purge” of Argentina’s universities, which had become a hotbed of student activism. During an earlier ministerial term in 1949, Ivanissevich had led a bitter campaign against the “morbid… perverse… godless” trend of abstract art, recalling the Nazis’ invective against “degenerate” art. During that period, his sister and his nephew were both involved in smuggling Nazis into Argentina. [...]

To comprehend would-be totalitarians requires understanding their view of themselves as victims. And in a sense, they are victims—of their delusional fear of others, the nebulous, menacing others that haunt their febrile imaginations. This is something I saw repeated in the many interviews I carried out with both the perpetrators of Argentina’s dictatorship and the aging Nazis who had been smuggled to Argentina’s shores three decades earlier. (My interviews with the latter are archived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.) Their fears were, in both cases, irrational given the unassailable dominance of the military in Argentina and of the Nazis in Germany, but that was of no account to my interviewees.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Argentine Right’s Pyrrhic Victory

The Campaign for Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion, an umbrella group headed by a handful of established independent activists and representatives from left and center-left organizations, has presented the IVE Bill seven times over the last thirteen years. Six times in a row it was shelved by lawmakers. This time was different. It came on the heels of a feminist revolution that has taken Argentina and the world by storm.

The proclamation of Pope Francis — an Argentinian — in 2013, and the election of conservative President Mauricio Macri in 2015, seemed to have taken abortion off the table. Then came #NiUnaMenos. The femicide of fourteen-year old Chiara Páez in 2015 prompted a group of women journalists to call for demonstrations against gender violence. An estimated two hundred thousand turned out. [...]

The truth is that the congressional debate of the IVE Bill is a product of the unbearable pressure exerted by the feminist movement. If Macri thought it could benefit him in any way, it’s backfired. He unleashed a feminist tidal wave focused primarily against his party, most of whose lawmakers oppose the bill. This generated a crisis among his base, which now holds him responsible for opening the door to legal abortion. One conservative group, for example, pasted posters all over Buenos Aires that pictured Macri with blood on his hands and read “No to Macri’s abortion law.” [...]

Unfortunately, the Campaign’s leadership adopted a mistaken triumphalist position, summed up in the slogan “abortion will be law on the 8th.” It placed excessive confidence in parliamentary negotiations, channeling efforts away from the streets and towards lobbying. The demobilizing effect was evident at the Tuesday pañuelazos, which were significantly smaller than before the June 14 vote.

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Haaretz: Israel's Long History of Cooperation With Ruthless, anti-Semitic Dictators

In mid-July, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will host the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for a state visit. The leader of the left-wing Meretz party, Tamar Zandberg, has been among those calling on Netanyahu to cancel the visit because of Orban’s anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish philanthropist George Soros during his recent election campaign. [...]

Begin cooperated closely with the murderous Galtieri regime in Argentina during the early 1980s. During this period, Israel sold Argentina over 20 Nesher fighter jets as well as numerous Skyhawks and Mirage jets and other military hardware. This was controversial for several reasons. [...]

"This worsening anti-Semitism is the latest expression of hatred against the Jews in Argentina. Leading anti-Semites who themselves identify with Hitler and Mussolini serve in high educational and cultural posts in the government. There have been hundreds of anti-Semitic acts against Jews. Yet in its seven years in power the Argentine government has arrested not one of the perpetrators of these acts."

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Vox: Argentina’s historic vote to decriminalize abortion, explained

Across Latin America, 97 percent of women live in countries with restrictive abortion laws. Argentina’s lower legislative house voted to pass a bill on Thursday that would decriminalize abortion in the country up to the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.

The vote was close, 129-125, and the bill is unlikely to get through the Argentine Senate. Still, activists see the fact that the issue is being voted on at all as a major step for women’s rights in the country and throughout the region.  [...]

Abortion is illegal in Argentina except in cases of rape or when the life or health of the woman is at risk. But even in such circumstances, abortions are difficult to obtain, especially in provinces where there are no guidelines for how providers should proceed or what they’re legally required to do, said Shena Cavallo, a program officer at the International Women’s Health Coalition. [...]

Argentine President Mauricio Macri called for Congress to debate the abortion issue earlier this year, over the opposition of the Catholic Church, which is still a major force in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Macri has not come out in favor of the bill and has tried to keep a distance from the discussion, encouraging those within his party to keep the discussion civil. He has said he won’t veto a bill if it passes.  

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Quartz: The scientific reason collective narcissists are so dangerous

In these examples, those who felt that their group had been insulted must have held the group in high esteem. But not all who hold their group in high esteem feel insulted and retaliate after real or imagined threats to their group’s image. So why do some feel that their group was insulted while others do not? And why do some feel that their group has been insulted even when no insult was intended and alternative explanations have been offered?

Research from my PrejudiceLab at Goldsmiths, University of London shows that people who score high on the collective narcissism scale are particularly sensitive to even the smallest insults to their group’s image. As opposed to individuals with narcissistic personality, who maintain inflated views of themselves, collective narcissists exaggerate offenses to their group’s image, and respond to them aggressively. Collective narcissists believe that their group’s importance and worth are not sufficiently recognized by others. They feel that their group merits special treatment, and insist that it gets the recognition and respect it deserves. In other words, collective narcissism amounts to a belief in the exaggerated greatness of one’s group, and demands external validation.

Collective narcissists are not simply content to be members of a valuable group. They don’t devote their energy to contributing to the group’s betterment and value. Rather, they engage in monitoring whether everybody around, particularly other groups, recognize and acknowledge the great value and special worth of their group. To be sure, collective narcissists demand privileged treatment, not equal rights. And the need for continuous external validation of the group’s inflated image (a negative attribute) is what differentiates collective narcissists from those who simply hold positive feelings about their group. [...]

Such collective narcissism is so toxic it explains phenomena such as anti-Semitism and perhaps even two world wars. It might explain the 2015 terrorist attack on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly that published controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Recent research by Katarzyna Jaśko and her colleagues at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, College Park demonstrates that collective narcissists in radicalized social networks are ready to engage in political violence and terrorism.

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Haaretz: Secret Room in Buenos Aires Home Hid a Trove of Suspected Nazi Artifacts

In a hidden room in a house near Argentina's capital, police believe they have found the biggest collection of Nazi artifacts in the country's history, including a bust relief of Adolf Hitler, magnifying glasses inside elegant boxes with swastikas and even a macabre medical device used to measure head size.[...]

The investigation that culminated in the discovery of the collection began when authorities found artworks of illicit origin in a gallery in north Buenos Aires.

Agents with the international police force Interpol began following the collector and with a judicial order raided the house on June 8. A large bookshelf caught their attention and behind it agents found a hidden passageway to a room filled with Nazi imagery. [...]

The main hypothesis among investigators and member of Argentina's Jewish community is that they were brought to Argentina by a high-ranking Nazi or Nazis after World War II, when the South American country became a refuge for fleeing war criminals, including some of the best known.

As leading members of Hitler's Third Reich were put on trial for war crimes, Josef Mengele fled to Argentina and lived in Buenos Aires for a decade. He moved to Paraguay after Israeli Mossad agents captured Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who was also living in Buenos Aires. Mengele later died in Brazil in 1979 while swimming in a beach in the town of Bertioga.

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Atlas Obscura: Rock 'n' Roll and Military Dictatorships Almost Destroyed Argentine Tango

In the 1940s, Argentina was tango and tango was Argentina. Born in the marginalized outskirts and upscale brothels of Buenos Aires, the musical genre slowly but surely seeped into the very roots of the country’s culture and took a strong hold. Fathers would spend years teaching their sons how to dance, singers like Carlos Gardel were national figures, and social gatherings were always accompanied by the sound of the tango concertina, the bandoneon.

Then, two disparate but hugely impactful things arrived: a series of military dictatorships and rock ‘n’ roll. While in opposition in every other respect, the dictatorships and the new music genre inadvertently collaborated in dethroning tango and driving it to near oblivion. [...]

There was also the question of censorship. When tango first emerged, the church banned it because it was the music of  the “immoral” factions of society. It was no longer banned when the coup of 1930 occurred, but there was censorship of lyrics that supported populist ideas and used lunfardo, the slang of the working classes in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Even Peron banned songs like Cambalache for being too pessimistic. [...]

At the same time, a shift in social mentality began to occur. While there had previously been time to allot to social gatherings, the new economic models promoted by the regimes relied heavily on the idea of production. Marcelo Solis, an Argentine tango professor at the Escuela de Tango de Buenos Aires, who lived through the last two regimes, explained that in the mind of the military, if Argentina was a mess, it was because its culture was a mess. If the country wanted to be more prosperous, it should look at foreign countries and seek to imitate them. The xenophobic attitude of peronismo was replaced by the obsession of achieving a version of the American Dream. There was no time or money for something as frivolous as culture.

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Jacobin Magazine: Not One Less

The national one-hour industrial action, followed by a massive street protest, was called in response to rising violence against women. Using the hashtags #niunamenos, #paronacionaldemujeres, and #vivasnosqueremos — “not one less,” “women’s general strike,” “we want us alive” — it was planned in less than six days in response to the brutal murder of Lucía Pérez, a teenager who was drugged, raped, and tortured before being killed in the coastal city of Mar del Plata.

But the strike also put a broader set of demands on the country’s agenda, and its echoes are now visible across Latin America. It participates in the new Purple Tide — so named because feminist groups identify with that color — a movement attempting to address capitalist patriarchy.

In the last month alone, twenty-three women have been murdered in Argentina, demonstrating an obvious uptick in gendered violence. But the movement wants to address the issue beyond the narrow limits of law enforcement. The first mass action against gender-related crimes took place in June 2015 where organizers put forward a list of demands to the state and citizens designed to confront patriarchy at all levels. [...]

A little-discussed aspect of these marches, for example, is that participants are making many work-related demands. Argentinian women — like women everywhere — have higher rates of unemployment and informal employment and take on 76 percent of unpaid domestic work. According to the country’s official employment numbers, women work, on average, two hours more per week while earning 27 percent less than men.

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The Conversation: Latin American women’s problem: we keep getting murdered

A Gallup survey has shown that Latin American women feel they are not treated with respect and dignity. Dissatisfaction was highest in Colombia, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru. The study attributes these feelings to widespread sexual violence and harassment against women and children, in combination with machista culture. [...]

Here are some statistics: in Argentina, 226 women were killed in 2016; and in Peru, there were 54.

And in Mexico, 40,000 women were killed between 1985 and 2014. Here, the systemic killing of women since the mid-1980s has been so severe that it led to the coining of the word feminicide as a sociolegal term for the deliberate killing of women, and its codification as a serious crime. [...]

Feminicide is, then, the murder of women because of their sexuality, reproductive features, and social status or success. Building on the Juarez case, Monárrez also coined the phrase “systemic sexual feminicide” to refer to the cultural, political, legal, economic, religious and social context that allows sexual violence to be widespread and feminicide to be its culmination.

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The New York Times: Obama, Acknowledging U.S. Misdeeds Abroad, Quietly Reframes American Power

Mr. Obama had similarly confronted American misdeeds this year in Cuba, Argentina, Vietnam and Japan, each time raising decades-old but still sensitive actions, framed in the language of reconciliation. In comparison, the last Democrat in the White House, President Bill Clinton, did so once and only indirectly: admitting, in a speech delegated to his secretary of state, the United States’ role in Iran’s 1953 coup.

Mr. Obama’s series of speeches reviewing historical trouble spots highlight several unusual facets of his worldview. They fit within his larger effort to reach out to former adversaries such as Cuba and Myanmar. They assert his belief in introspection and the need to overcome the past. And they highlight his perspective that American power has not always been a force for good.

The White House is not eager to call attention to this practice. The administration is still sensitive after being accused by conservatives of “apologizing for America” in 2009, after Mr. Obama spoke critically of his Republican predecessor during visits to Egypt and France. [...]

Professor Lind stressed that none of Mr. Obama’s comments constitute apology. But nor is the controversy around them without substance. Rather, these speeches touch on a longstanding domestic political divide over the nature of American power. [...]

Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said this idea, though widespread in the United States, is something of a fallacy. Only Americans believe that the United States’ power is inherently virtuous; elsewhere, people see this idea as not only false, but dangerous.

“The disjuncture in the way that this is seen abroad and at home is one of the huge problems in U.S. foreign policy,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is American. “This is an image that Americans have of themselves but is simply not shared, even by their allies.”

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Quartz: The history of the tango is actually kind of gay

From this perspective, the past few years of queer tango in Argentina are an innovation, an adaptation from the traditional gender roles. But, despite a mythology that links the tango with brothels, historical research shows that the tango was danced by male couples from the beginning. And so, rather than pushing boundaries, queer tango is a return to the origins of the dance. [...]

Men would practice together, perfecting their polka and waltz so that they could impress a woman when the time came. It seems the tango began in the tenements as the men’s fantasy dance. [...]

Though men began dancing tango with an eye to wooing women, Trenner says there was certainly a “semi-secret” gay culture. There were certain dancers who were famously good followers and who didn’t go to social dances with women. These men were “fought over,” says Trenner, as the preferred partners. “There was an unstated queer element of the male practice.” [...]

But though gay milongas still face some opposition, two men dancing together is the most traditional form of the tango. And in other ways, too, queer tango embodies the spirit of the dance. “The dance represents a culture that is not dominant. It’s not the mainstream culture,” says Taylor. “For a long time, this was an art not of entertainment but resistance.”

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