Tex Harris

Franklyn Allen "Tex" Harris (May 13, 1938 – February 23, 2020) was an American diplomat best known for his work as a political officer in the United States embassy to Argentina between 1977 and 1979, where he tracked the victims of "enforced disappearances" during the Dirty War of the Argentinian military dictatorship. Despite a lack of official support and even obstruction, his work proved consequential in exposing the junta's abuses and became a major influence on American foreign policy towards Argentina and human rights. He later served as consul to Melbourne, Australia and president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) before his retirement in 1999. He would later become a model of constructive dissent in the Foreign Service, being granted the Distinguished Honor Award by the State Department and getting an award for constructive dissent by AFSA named after him.

Early and personal life Franklyn Allen Harris was born on May 13, 1938, in Glendale, California, and spend his childhood in Dallas, Texas. According to Harris, his father Murray (originally Shlimka Simselowitz) was a Russian Jew who fled from persecution there to Germany and later the United States. His surname was actually the result of a misunderstanding where Murray replied to a request for his name with "Herr S.", which was interpreted as "Harris". Additionally, Harris stated that his first name is spelled with a "y" (as opposed to "Franklin" with an "i") as the former was a "Republican" spelling while the latter was considered "Democratic". He graduated with a B.A. from Princeton in 1960 and a law degree from the University of Texas in 1965, where he gained an interest in human rights after joining a group of law students advocating for civil rights. The same year, he joined the State Department, and married Jeanie L. Roeder in 1966. The atrocities included "forced disappearances" on a large scale, but as the intelligence sections of the embassy blamed the disappearances on "extremists" on both sides rather than the government, relatives of the missing were not allowed inside the embassy and there were only a few records collected. Harris successfully campaigned for the families of the disappeared to be able to deliver testimony at the chancery itself. Cards used to record the victims of forced disappearances, with "D" marked in the top-right corner to signify "disappeared" Eventually, many people would come to the embassy, with up to thirty to forty families coming per week. To assist him with collecting the data, Harris assigned his secretary Blanca Vollenweider, a Swiss-born Argentine librarian who had survived the Holocaust, to be his assistant. They established a system where relatives would come in, Vollenweider would get their basic information such as their names, Harris would then talk to them in greater detail, and they would record all information on index cards. The Argentinian government attempted to intimidate those who went in by using phone taps and filming everyone who went in and out of the embassy; nevertheless, Harris' records have been described as the most complete, with around 13,500 individual documents. He was also awarded the Order of the Liberator General San Martín in 2004 by then-president of Argentina Néstor Kirchner.

Harris died on February 23, 2020, at the age of 81. The Argentinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship expressed their regrets.