Paris Agreement, which led to the end of the Vietnam War, turns 50

It was a tense meeting, with few words and a gloomy atmosphere. But out of this broth came an armistice by which delegations from the United States and South and North Vietnam intended to end the conflict that would become the greatest Achilles heel in American military history.

The Paris Peace Agreement, signed on January 27, 1973, exactly 50 years ago, determined the withdrawal of US troops from the Vietnam War, after nearly two decades of bombing and more than 1 million deaths.

Peace negotiations had been taking place since 1968, albeit slowly and with initiatives almost always coming from Washington. In January of that year, efforts for a truce were intensified after the so-called Tet Offensive, which consisted of coordinated attacks by communist North Vietnam, supported by the Soviet Union, against South Vietnamese and American positions.

The strategy, which would prove decisive for the course of the war, caused thousands of casualties in the US Armed Forces. The total number of victims of the war is uncertain: it is known that at least 1.1 million Vietnamese were killed, but estimates suggest that the real number could reach 3 million; on the American side, there were 58,000.

In the context of the offensive, public pressure was growing in Washington against the conflict, accelerating the attempt to establish a ceasefire. “In 1973 the US had reached military exhaustion in the conflict. There was no longer any technical viability for the Americans to win the war”, says Leonardo Trevisan, professor of international relations at PUC-SP.

One of the architects of the agreement, then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, even told senators at a closed-door meeting that the country’s troops would not return to what he called the “Vietnamese quagmire”, in a reference to American setbacks on the front. .

The North ended up agreeing to negotiate after pressure from China, as Gunther Rudzit, a specialist in international security and professor of international relations at ESPM, recalls. Beijing’s move came after the regime received the American commitment to recognize the communist leadership – which had expelled the nationalists to Taiwan after the Civil War – as the only legitimate one in the country.

“The Americans decided to referendum the People’s Republic of China because they wanted to distance it from the Soviet Union. It was a masterstroke on the global chessboard”, says Rudzit. “And China gained recognition. In 1971, the country gained a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.”

The treaty signed in Paris established that the US would withdraw the military from Vietnam within two months – American forces reached a total of 540,000 simultaneous troops in the region. An exchange of prisoners was also agreed, in a process supervised by forces from Canada, Poland, Hungary and Indonesia, and a ceasefire, which was never implemented in practice.

Bombs were dropped by the Americans shortly after the pact was signed, according to Trevisan. “It was a chaotic war, very difficult. The American forces received orders that were contradictory and disconnected from each other.” Then, North Vietnamese forces took advantage of the lack of US support for the South Vietnamese and advanced.

In the end, the professor assesses that the armistice turned out to be positive for the US and for North Vietnam. The big loser, he says, was South Vietnam. “The Americans managed to get out of the conflict in a minimally agreed way, with a peace agreement foreseen. And the North began an effective task of conquest, in a certain way authorized”, says Trevisan.

The craftsmen of the agreement —Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, head of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam— won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, in a controversial decision to the point that the Vietnamese refused the laureate. On March 28th, after the signing of the agreement, the headline of Sheet nailed: “After peace, doubt”. And, indeed, the conflict would continue, with at least 50,000 deaths in one year.

The only US servicemen who remained in South Vietnam after the deal were the 150 or so Marines guarding the Saigon embassy, ​​plus a few officers from the military attache’s office.

But it was only on April 30, 1975 that the Viet Cong finally took Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, ending the conflict for good —some of the most striking records of the war are from that same day, with a line of people trying to escape by helicopter from the American embassy .