Dirty Cup: The 1978 World Cup in Argentina was played against the grimmest possible political backdrop. The recent marring of the Stars and Stripes has not been pretty, but it pales before memories of a military dictatorship run by Gen. Jorge Videla. His so-called National Reorganization Process witnessed the detention of tens of thousands of individuals and families who became known as los desaparecidos, the vanished. Many of his victims were abducted randomly and taken to detention centers or small concentration camps, where they were first tortured and then murdered, their remains scattered. Videla was among several Central and South American strongmen at the time, including Chile’s Pinochet, Paraguay’s Stroessner, Nicaragua’s Samoza and, perhaps, the worst of the lot, El Salvador’s “death-squad” mastermind Roberto D'Aubuisson, all of them for years in Washington’s good graces because of their mutual loathing of communism. Jimmy Carter created a human rights secretariat intended to rein in their abuses, only to see his successor, Ronald Reagan, disband it. But the big show, the cup, went off without a hitch, the Argentina of Mario Kempes ultimately defeating the Total Football of Johan Cruyff’s Netherlands in the final. Protests were held in some European cities, and a few enterprising reporters exposed Videla’s crimes, all in vain since on the heels of Videla came the equally repressive Gen. Galtieri, who maintained the same policies while also plunging Argentina into the 1982 Falklands War. The grisly desaparecidos period has lately been fully exposed, and families of the victims acknowledged, but all of it far too little, far too late, the Argentina of that time still remembered by some as Kempes’ night of glory.