Dirty Secrets, Dirty War

Dirty Secrets, Dirty War a biography of Robert Cox written by his son David

Argentina is finally celebrating an unsung British hero who three decades ago pitted his tiny English-language newspaper against ferocious generals in order to publicize the fact that tens of thousands of people were being made to "disappear" in concentration camps.

When Army tanks rolled into Buenos Aires on March 24, 1976, to depose the constitutional government of Maria Estela Peron (the widow and vice-president of Argentine strongman Juan Peron who had died in office in 1974) London-born Robert Cox was the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, a sleepy, century-old English-language daily with a circulation confined to Argentina's "Anglos," the cricket-playing and tea-consuming descendants of immigrants who had arrived in the late 19th century to work on the country's British-built railroads. The new regime imposed strict press censorship and set up secret death camps in which up to 30,000 mostly young opponents of the regime were eventually "disappeared."