1976 Argentine coup d'état

The 1976 Argentine coup d'état was a coup d'état that overthrew Isabel Perón as President of Argentina on 24 March 1976. A military junta was installed to replace her; this was headed by Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and Brigadier-General Orlando Ramón Agosti. The political process initiated on 24 March 1976 took the official name of "National Reorganization Process", and the junta, although not with its original members, remained in power until the return to the democratic process on 10 December 1983. The coup was planned and executed within the framework of Operation Condor, a clandestine system of coordination between Latin American countries promoted by the United States, as part of the national security doctrine, which installed dictatorships in Latin America in order to maintain U.S. influence in those countries during the Cold War.

The military coup had been planned since October 1975; the Perón government learned of the preparations two months before its execution. Henry Kissinger met several times with Argentine Armed Forces leaders after the coup, urging them to destroy their opponents quickly before outcry over human rights abuses grew in the United States.

Given the systematic persecution of a social minority, the period has been claimed by some as a ‘genocidal process’. They point to the sentences of the trials of the perpetrators for crimes against humanity.