In 1976, a coup in Argentina brought to power the bloodiest of these regimes. Under General Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictatorship kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands of people. Videla’s regime cast a much wider net than Pinochet’s men did. This period is often called, somewhat incorrectly, the “Dirty War”—but there was no war. It was a top-down anticommunist extermination campaign with ideological roots in Argentina’s homegrown fascist movement.13 “Subversives” were tortured and killed for their real or perceived communism; for their real or perceived atheism; for their real
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