Book ‘I could not write’: Robert Cox’s tale of confronting Argentine junta told by son

Reporting Argentina’s Dirty War: an editor’s story

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Robert Cox risked his life chronicling the first years of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-83) that left thousands missing. Decades later, though, he still couldn’t bear to write his own story of confronting a deadly junta.

Now his son has told his story — how an editor at a small English-language daily in South America, the Buenos Aires Herald, courageously covered kidnappings and killings at a time most colleagues were silent.

“Dirty Secrets, Dirty War — The Exile of Editor Robert J. Cox” is a 221-page account by CNN Web producer David Cox of his father’s life reporting on the run-up to a 1976 military coup and the chaos that ensued in the South American country.

Published by Evening Post Publishing with Joggling Board Press, the book tells how his father dared to write about atrocities.

“This is the book that I could not write,” the elder Cox, 75, says in the foreword. “I still find it too painful to relive those malevolent times by writing about them.”

A state-backed plan to silence real or perceived foes swept thousands into clandestine torture centers. Official records put the number of disappeared at 13,000; human rights groups say some 30,000 were slain.

“Within the whole family we have been dealing with this for many years,” said David Cox, 42, who spent his early years in Argentina. “We all wanted my father to write the story of what happened to us and to him.”

Cox’s Herald raised early alarms about the junta.

“They warned him and tried to keep him in bounds, but he would publish lists of those who disappeared,” recalled F. Allen “Tex” Harris, a U.S. diplomat in Argentina at the time.

Argentines visited the Herald when authorities wouldn’t give them information about missing loved ones and the paper tried to pressure the government.

“On the newsstand, the only voice was Cox,” Harris said. “My stuff went back in the classified pouches to Washington. He’s a hero. There were so few people in the country speaking out.”

Cox’s accounts gained world attention after he became a stringer for such outlets as The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Cox and the Herald were allowed to continue the bold reporting — for a time.

“He printed in English and so few people in Argentina read English that it just wasn’t that important” to the military, Harris said. “Whenever anybody said there was no freedom of the press, they could point to Cox.”

Cox himself was imprisoned for a day after writing editorials pressing the government to release an imprisoned journalist. Finally, in 1979, he fled Argentina after death threats to his young family.

David Cox writes of taking different routes to school and rides with family in a battered Peugeot in fear of being stopped by the police. “That terror is a distant yet persistent memory,” he writes.

Robert Cox, whose career in journalism spanned six decades, retired last year after 26 years as assistant editor of The Post and Courier in Charleston.

The younger Cox says his father, despite the risks, is a “tremendously humble man” who simply reported what was happening in Argentina when others refused.

“He would say his was doing his job as a journalist,” David Cox said.