“DECLASSIFICATION DIPLOMACY”
The Argentina Declassification Project, as it is officially known in US government circles, is one of those rare cases in which Donald Trump completed rather than reversed a policy initiated by his predecessor. When Fernando Cutz, then the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs, briefed the new president in preparation for the April 2017 state visit of Argentine President Mauricio Macri, he explained to Trump that Macri personally requested the special declassification when Obama visited Buenos Aires a year earlier. Trump had personal ties to Macri: Decades before, they bar-hopped together while their fathers negotiated real estate deals in New York; more recently, the Trump Organization sought Macri’s assistance in its plans to construct a Trump Tower in Buenos Aires. “It helped to be able to present the project as a Macri ask rather than an Obama initiative,” Cutz recalled.
The real genesis of the Argentina Declassification Project, however, started with a presidential scheduling faux pas. In the spring of 2016, the Obama administration arranged a historic two-day trip for the president to Havana and, from there, a three-day trip to Argentina. The timing of the high-profile state visits was determined, in part, by the fact that it was spring break for Obama’s two daughters, and he wanted them to vacation in Cuba as well as in Patagonia in southern Argentina.
But the White House announcement that the US president would be in Buenos Aires on March 24, 2016—by coincidence the 40th anniversary of the bloody military takeover—sparked an outcry from human rights groups in Argentina. The United States was still viewed, in the words of Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, as “an accomplice of coups d’état in this region.” Massive protests, with banners declaring “Day of Memory: Obama Get Out,” were threatened. In meetings with Macri, human rights activists, led by the famed Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, demanded that he ask Obama to declassify intelligence records that might help them to locate their missing sons and daughters, and even the grandchildren who had been born in secret detention centers and then adopted by military families after their mothers were executed.
To redress this serious affront to the victims’ families, the White House and the Macri government orchestrated a round of what I call “declassification diplomacy”—the use of secret US documents to advance bilateral relations. On the morning of March 24, Obama and Macri visited the Parque de la Memoria (Remembrance Park) in Buenos Aires to pay their respects to the victims of the Dirty War. “Today, in response to a request from President Macri, and to continue helping the families of the victims find some of the truth and justice they deserve, I can announce that the United States government will declassify even more documents from that period, including, for the first time, military and intelligence records,” Obama stated in a poignant speech. “I believe we have a responsibility to confront the past with honesty and transparency.”