Primero eliminaremos a los subversivos

“Primero eliminaremos a los subversivos” is the opening of a declaration by General Ibérico Manuel Saint-Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires province, describing whom the Argentine dictatorship intended to eliminate and in what order. The phrase names only the first target, but the sequence that follows makes clear how the designation of enemies expands until no political position offers safety.

The statement and its expanding targets

In May 1977, Saint-Jean told The Guardian that the regime would first eliminate subversives, then their accomplices, their sympathizers, and, last, the indifferent and the lukewarm. The wording presents repression not as a limited campaign against armed opponents but as a graduated purge of an ever-widening population. By the end of the sequence, even passivity or insufficient enthusiasm becomes grounds for persecution.

The statement is framed as an explanation of the new regime’s objectives, delivered without apparent embarrassment. Its blunt progression gives a public formula to a policy that reaches far beyond the people initially labeled subversive: guilt spreads outward through association, sympathy, and finally mere failure to take a side.

From decree to state terror

The account places this declaration in a campaign of political repression that began before the 1976 coup. On 5 February 1975, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued the first decree of annihilation, establishing Operativo Independencia. Presented as a military intervention against guerrillas in the jungle of Tucumán province, the operation divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders virtually unlimited power to repress subversives.

Brigadier General Acdel Vilas described the operation’s purpose as eminently cultural: in his view, guerrilla activity was only one aspect of subversion, and not its most important one. The campaign consequently terrorized civilians in San Miguel de Tucumán, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious people. The narrative identifies Operativo Independencia as a prelude to the more intensified and refined repression of the National Reorganization Process.

After the coup of 24 March 1976, the dictatorship made state terror central to its rule. Within forty-eight hours, former Secretary of State William P. Rogers anticipated extensive repression, while his successor, Henry Kissinger, expressed a desire to support the coup leaders rather than make them feel besieged by the United States. The passage presents this international climate as helping explain the regime’s impunity.

The machinery behind the words

Between the spring of 1976 and the autumn of 1982, the dictatorship forcibly disappeared thousands of people. Because many bodies were never recovered and estimates vary, the account gives an approximate total of 30,000 victims. Saint-Jean’s statement supplies an unusually direct counterpart to that scale: its targets do not stop at armed insurgents, but expand to include associates, sympathizers, the indifferent, and the lukewarm.

Repression operated through an indefinite state of siege and severe laws that suspended citizens’ rights and freedoms and denied them the possibility of leaving the country. Alongside those overt measures, a clandestine apparatus divided its work among task groups specializing in abduction and disappearance, secret detention centers, torture, executions, disposal of bodies, and the concealment of stolen children’s identities. Pregnant detainees gave birth in clandestine maternity wards and were separated from their babies, who were then placed with military or civilian families aligned with the dictatorship.

The death flights were an extreme example of this division of labor: military pilots carried living prisoners, bound and drugged, in fighter aircraft and dropped them into the open sea from thousands of meters above. The system could thus erase people physically while also suppressing the evidence and identities through which their fate might be established.

Meaning and consequence

The phrase’s force lies in the movement from a seemingly defined enemy to a category with no stable boundary. Each successive group is included because of its relation—or supposed relation—to the one before it; at the end, even indifference is recast as culpable. Saint-Jean’s words therefore expose the logic of a terror that treats social proximity and political silence as grounds for elimination.

The account also places Argentina’s violence in a longer history of authoritarian practice. Spain was a principal destination for exiles fleeing the Argentine terror, despite the recent death of Francisco Franco; Franco had first been protected and later protected General Perón, and Latin American dictators repeatedly praised Perón and adopted his example. Among the methods they adopted was the theft of children from political prisoners, a practice the narrative says had already demonstrated its effectiveness in postwar Spain. The declaration thus belongs not only to the history of a single regime but to a transnational inheritance of repression and the destruction of identity.