Patricia Derian and the Garbage Heaps of Buenos Aires
By Theo Marchetti ·
Notes kept from official channels describe how US intelligence agencies signaled to the Argentine junta that human rights mandates were merely cosmetic and could be ignored
People were picked up and taken to military installations to be tortured with water and electricity, or broken by methods of psychological disintegration. Those the killers deemed incorrigible were murdered and dumped on garbage heaps or street corners. For others, the junta staged a theater of death: they gave the prisoners arms with live ammunition and grenades, put them in cars, and drove them out to be slaughtered on the road, only to report the massacre to the public as a shootout or a response to an attack.
These are the facts of the ground in Argentina, a South American nation then ruled by a military junta that systematically liquidated its own citizens. What survives here is an archival description of notes written by Patricia Derian, not the original pages themselves. Derian was a civil rights activist who had fought racism in Mississippi before serving as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs from 1977 to 1981. She had traveled to Argentina to force the junta to reckon with the human rights policy of the Carter administration, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat from Georgia who sought to center US foreign policy on moral imperatives.
Garbage Heaps and Fake Shootouts
Derian’s mission was simple in theory: impress upon the Argentine officials the "seriousness of the Carter administration's human rights policy," the record states. Instead, she found a machinery of disappearance that operated with total impunity. The record describes a pipeline of state terror where detainees were filtered by their perceived utility; those thought to be "salvageable" were sent to prisons for further psychological conditioning, while the rest were erased.
As she documented these atrocities, Derian realized that the horror in Buenos Aires was not merely a product of Argentine cruelty, but was being sustained by a failure of American resolve. The notes reveal that as she fought to implement a policy of accountability, her own government was working against her. The record is blunt: "Through these agencies the United States government is sending a dangerous and double message."
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
The Double Message
That double message originated in the gap between the Department of State and the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, specifically the Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides military intelligence and combat support to the Department of Defense. While Derian was in Argentina demanding an end to the torture, the intelligence community was telling the junta that Derian did not actually matter.
According to the record, the military and intelligence services believed that the human rights policy "emanates only from the Department of State." They viewed the mandate not as a core national interest, but as a "political device and one with a short life due to its wide impracticality, the naiveté and ignorance of individuals in the Administration and to the irresponsible headline grabbing of members of Congress."
This is where the record earns its irony. The very people tasked with protecting American interests and gathering intelligence on the ground were dismissing the official policy of their own president as a fleeting whim of the "naive." By signaling to the Argentine junta that the human rights coordinator was an isolated figure with no real power, the intelligence community provided the junta with the psychological cover it needed to keep the garbage heaps full.
A Leak to the Press
Derian did not keep these observations within the official channels of the State Department. If she had, the desk's reading is that the resulting memos would have been sanitized to remove any admission that the US government was contradicting itself. Instead, the notes moved from a high-ranking diplomat to a journalist.
Derian provided these notes to Martin Andersen, a journalist and author who recognized that the internal friction within the Carter administration was as important as the atrocities in Argentina. Andersen eventually donated a copy of the notes to the National Security Archive, a non-profit research institution based at George Washington University that uses the Freedom of Information Act to challenge government secrecy.
The trajectory of this document—from a private notebook to a journalist to a non-governmental archive—suggests that Derian had reached a dead end inside the building. The record shows she realized there was "work to be done at home, too," but the fact that these notes exist as a leak rather than a policy shift suggests that the work at home was blocked by the very agencies she was criticizing.
The Silent Signal
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the "double message" was not a failure of communication or a misunderstanding between agencies. The pattern suggests it was a deliberate strategy. The intelligence community needed to maintain operational assets and flow of information from the Argentine security services, assets that would have been jeopardized if the US actually forced the junta to stop murdering its dissidents.
By painting Derian and the State Department as naive, the intelligence services were explicitly signaling to the junta that the human rights mandates were cosmetic. The message was clear: keep doing what you are doing, and we will handle the diplomats in Washington. This allowed the US government to maintain a public image of moral leadership under Carter while ensuring that the operational machinery of the Cold War remained undisturbed.
The desk's reading is that these notes are a window into a regional intelligence architecture—later known as Operation Condor—where South American dictatorships coordinated the kidnapping and assassination of political opponents across borders. The US intelligence community facilitated this architecture even as the State Department publicly condemned it. The "double message" was the grease that kept the gears of Condor turning; it told the killers that the American conscience was just a "political device" with a "short life."
What a full release of the related cables and the original, unredacted notes would show is the exact point where the intelligence services told the Argentine junta to ignore Derian. The still-withheld pages are protecting the names of the officers who told the torturers that the White House was bluffing. The people who paid for this silence were the "incorrigible" ones—the students, the union leaders, and the activists who were given a gun and a car, driven to a lonely road, and executed in the name of a stability that the US intelligence community found more valuable than human life.