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10/02/2004:

"Kissinger Cool to Criticizing Juntas in '76"

by Diana Jean Schemo
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - In June 1976, three months after the military seized power in Buenos Aires, Henry A. Kissinger, then secretary of state, learned that the American ambassador, Robert C. Hill, had just cautioned the country's new government over its wholesale violations of human rights. Mr. Kissinger was unhappy with the warning.

"In what way is it compatible with my policy?" he asked his top official for Latin America, Harry W. Shlaudeman.

"It is not," Mr. Shlaudeman replied.

"How did it happen?" Mr. Kissinger asked.

"I will make sure it doesn't happen again," Mr. Shlaudeman promised.

"If that doesn't happen again, something else will," Mr. Kissinger persisted and then asked who had given the ambassador the instruction to lodge his complaint. "I want to know who did this and consider having him transferred."

The exchange comes from 3,216 transcripts of telephone conversations, released some 27 years after Mr. Kissinger stepped down as secretary of state in 1977. The transcripts, obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive, appear to document in the most explicit fashion yet a reluctance on the part of Mr. Kissinger to criticize directly the military governments in Chile and Argentina, and a behind-the-scenes hostility toward forceful demands from United States diplomats that the dictators uphold civil liberties and human rights as they eliminated leftist insurgents and, more broadly, political opponents.

Mr. Kissinger was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

Full Article: NY Times