SW reviews a recently published book and essay, reminders that the desaparecidos remain at the forefront of Argentines’ minds and that answers are still needed
Nearly four decades after the military coup of March 1976 in Argentina, society has still not come to terms with its recent past. The intellectual conviction is that societies have to assimilate the past to be able to bury it in the history books, but this has not yet happened. A recent book hinted at the possibility of change, but early optimism sank rapidly. The book, by journalist Ceferino Reato, editor of Fortuna magazine, researches into the dark corners of the seventies, and provides a cold and cruel description of the military plan to murder thousands of opponents as told in nine interviews by an imprisoned former dictator.
Argentina’s dictatorship held power between 1976 and 1983. Although this was the shortest dictatorship of all those in the region the rule of the Junta of three armed forces chiefs was the bloodiest, the only one that had a systematic plan to detain its captives in secret camp and make them disappear. Thus Argentina gave the word “desaparecidos”, in Spanish, to the language of repression. Political groups and human rights organizations set the figure of disappeared at 30,000. But this has been a projection, not backed by the recovery of remains and identities.
The contemporary regimes that lasted into the mid eighties or longer did not have a premeditated plan of annihilation and the death toll was not as high. That goes for the regimes of general Augusto Pinochet, as from 1973, general Gregorio Alvarez in Uruguay (1973) and the armed forces, in Brazil, led by marshal Castelo Branco, general Costa e Silva and others, as from 1964. They lasted up to the late eighties.
In Final Disposal (Disposición Final, in the original Spanish), subtitled “The confessions of (ex general Jorge Rafael) Videla about the desaparecidos” (published by Sudamericana), author Ceferino Reato secured a chilling narrative from the dictator, now 86, who is serving life imprisonment.
“Let’s say there were seven or eight thousand people who had to die to win this war: we could not execute them. How could we execute so many people?” says Videla.
“We never used the phrase ‘Final solution’. ‘Final Disposal’ were the words most used; those are two very military words that refer to taking something useless out of service. When, for example, one speaks of clothing that is used no longer or is too worn, it goes under Final Disposal. It no longer has a useful life.”
The statements made by Videla now go a long way to help explain the failings of a society that allowed and even cheered the murderous military dictatorship that began in 1976. “Yes, but the guerrillas started killing first,” was often the rejoinder we got at the Buenos Aires Herald when editorially critical of the uniformed rulers. The guerrillas were not first, they were the product of the failure of constitutional government, of a whole society that considered itself the most modern and intellectually advanced in South America.
The armed forces, formed into the most powerful party in the country since the 1930s, had hampered, disrupted and overthrown elected governments at will. Wrecking an elected government should have been considered a crime. And, we argued from the pages of Argentina’s smallest daily, in English, “the State cannot descend to the level of its enemies, because killing people is wrong, whoever does it.” We did not get very far with that argument. When I quietly admitted to people that I had been an informant for Amnesty International since 1971 and writing for Index on Censorship since 1973, the ensuing question was, “Yes, but what side are you on?” You had to take sides in the politics of a country that was descending into horror.
“To avoid arousing protests in or outside the country, we reached the decision that those people had to disappear; each disappearance can be understood as a certain masking, a disguise of a death,” Videla told Ceferino Reato.
On a personal note, this quote takes me back to September 1976 and to a meeting at Government House in Buenos Aires attended by the then editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, Robert Cox, and myself as his news editor, with Videla’s Secretary for Information, a naval captain (later Admiral) named Carlos Carpintero. When we chided the minister about the secrecy and horror of the disappearances his rejoinder was, “D’ you want us to have all the adverse publicity that Chile has? No way. What would the IMF and all those international organizations say?” The flippant remark added to the horror. Robert Cox thought then that Videla was a dove among hawks. Since Reato’s book appeared, Cox has published two columns in the Herald stating that Hitler was alive and well and living in Argentina in the person of Jorge Rafael Videla. In one article Cox wrote, “(His) account of the holocaust unleashed on Argentina is notable for his lack of human decency and the coldblooded manner in which he tells his story... I see a tactic behind Videla’s confession. He has nothing to lose now, but by admitting responsibility for all the crimes committed while he was army commander and later de facto president, he has put a spanner in the works for trial judges who have to include him among all the accused who are currently on trial.”
The former dictator admitted to Reato that there were “mistakes and excesses” but that was not the case “with the disappeared”, whose fate was part of a policy. The “responsibility in each case fell to the regional commander, who used the method he thought most appropriate. Each commander had full autonomy to find the quickest and least risky method. Nobody was against that: I was not consulted. I consented by omission.” Elsewhere, Videla said, “each commander was master and ruler over the life and death of each detainee.” And the method for disposing of bodies, that sinister “Final Disposal”, was equally the responsibility of unit commanders, no questions were asked among senior officers. They could bury the dead in mass graves, burn them in a stack of tyres, destroy them with lime.
Videla denies that there was, “an order to abduct minors. There were cases, I know, but they were the result of our lack of controls, there was no systematic plan to steal babies from captured mothers. The military handed over 227 children of captives to neighbours or relatives or to juvenile courts. But the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who campaign for the restoration of young people whose identities were stolen through abduction (“appropriation” is the word they use) originally estimated that there were nearly 600 children missing. The figure claimed is now closer to 400, and just over 100 have recovered their original family names, lost in forced adoptions. However, the Grandmothers gave the figure of 190 children disappeared along with their parents on their official web on December 24, 2011.
When Reato’s book was published in mid-April 2012, the statements appeared to some to be the first signal of an aged former president and army commander wanting to come clean with the country he had presided over for five years (1976-1981). He even seemed to regret the terror. However, by May 2012, it was obvious that the aging monster had agreed to talk on the record to say that he had been the boss when the military decided that the nation had to be saved from the subversive menace (Marxist and nationalist Peronist guerrillas). For those most ingenuous Videla could be about to produce the documents that recorded the military crimes (officially, they were destroyed in 1983, just before the elections, under orders of the last de facto chief, general Reynaldo Bignone, now in prison). But that idea was demolished by a letter from Videla to the conservative newspaper La Nación, published on May 21, rejecting some of author Reato’s passages. Videla claimed that he had said, “according to reliable figures, seven or eight thousand had died.” He further added, “Mind, I do not regret a thing and I sleep soundly and at peace every night.”
Reato rebuked the former general showing twenty hours of his interviews in hand written notes (voice recorders and cameras are banned at the Campo de Mayo barracks where Videla is imprisoned). The roughs were typed at home by Reato who on each subsequent visit to the prison took the typed sheets to Videla, who read and corrected in his hand, and returned.
The strength of the conversations felt akin to those written up in the late seventies by the Vienna- born British journalist Gitta Sereny with the imprisoned Nazi Albert Speer (1905-1981). The aged criminal appeared at once generous with information and coldly brutal in his views of events. On more than one occasion in his replies, Videla said he was merely acting as a military officer in his country’s service.
What had given the first inkling of hope for answers was in Videla’s death-toll figures. The “seven or eight thousand” were not far from “official” numbers, but distant from the 30,000 claimed by activist and human rights groups. Under President Raúl Alfonsín, the first civilian to be elected after the dictatorship in polls that were largely the result of the defeat of Argentina by Britain in the Falklands-Malvinas war in April-June 1982, there were 8,960 “desaparecidos” during the dictatorship, not including people killed in gunbattles or armed attacks. This figure was recorded by a human rights group, known as Conadep (National Commission on Disappeared Persons) that Dr. Alfonsín appointed to compile the casualties list.
This report led to the Junta trials in 1985. The results were later confirmed in a book by Conadep secretary Graciela Fernández Meijide, at one time a national senator and the mother of a disappeared son. Years later, in 1991, in a private conversation held at a book launch, Dr. Alfonsín accepted that totals found during his government could be projected to 14,000 maximum, to cover errors and omissions but he could not accept the figure of 30,000. The initial total of dead or disappeared coincided with reports compiled by Amnesty International in London and by the Clamor human rights group in Brazil, in the seventies, and is not too distant from that posted (7,954) on the national human rights secretariat web in 2009, under the current government of Mrs. Cristina Kirchner. And the walls of the National Monument to the Victims of Terrorism, on the edge of the River Plate, show 8,875 names.
However, we still have a long way to go for an answer as to what happened in the seventies.
If Argentina’s people are really intending to live in peace, we must be prepared to understand what happened to us in the seventies and before, and admit our share of responsibility. Admission of this will take us to a measure of self-compassion and forgiveness. That is the main message of an essay by a journalist and now a senator in Argentina’s Congress, Norma Morandini. She should know, her two younger siblings were “disappeared” in September 1977.
Norma Morandini’s recently published essay is a stream of personal and moral exploration and a search of Argentine society to try to explain recovery from a state of denial. It is a revealing account. Her own story begins in comfortable middle-class Córdoba, then moves through the loss of those dear, exile, and from a distance she sees her mother grow out of grief, first, then enter battle to seek her lost children as one of the mothers of the disappeared. The next stage in Norma’s life as a journalist is a return to Argentina, guilt-ridden for having survived, rejected for jobs and discriminated against for having dead or “disappeared” members of her family, finally to re-invent herself as a campaigner for a new culture and to enter politics.
Morandini’s book, From Guilt to Forgiveness (De la culpa al perdón, in Spanish, published by Sudamericana), is a painful personal essay written 10 years ago, only published now. It has a challenging sub-heading, “How to build an open society above the intolerance of the past”. The idea of forgiveness for the dictators of the past prompted an irate reader of Clarín’s Ñ cultural weekly to write in reply to a review and refuse compassion and pardon “for the criminals” of the dictatorship. But Senator Morandini is not suggesting we all go into an exercise of religious pardon of the sins of the monsters. She does propose that each one put their feelings in the balance and try to come to terms with their past as a necessary step into the present and beyond.
The book was published only a few days after Ceferino Reato’s Final Disposal last April. Reato brought into debate the casualty figures of the seventies. In conversation, Morandini dismissed, “Videla’s figures, because if accepted they must be seen as the tally of the executioner. We can’t simply believe the killer and not the victims” who claim that 30,000 disappeared.
Senator Morandini said: “During the trial of the Juntas in 1985 the figures and statements of the victims were usually put in doubt. For example, in those long, hard six months of the trials of the Juntas, former captives said that prisoners were drugged, tied, and dropped into the sea. Nothing happened. It was more than 10 years later when the executioner, naval officer Adolfo Scilingo confessed to Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain, that the account of the bodies thrown from planes was true. Then it was believed. Human behaviour makes it reasonable to give credit to the killer but not the victim”. There is no reason to accept Videla’s figures that “seven or eight thousand had to die”, Morandini argued.
Morandini, formerly national deputy (MP) and now senator for a leftist alliance (FAP), studied medicine and psychology in her native Córdoba province, then became a journalist. She fled Argentina after the abduction of her brother and sister in September 1977, went to Brazil and found asylum in Portugal, whence she worked for the magazine Cambio 16, in Spain, which was then just trying on the discourse and freedoms of a new age after the death of Francisco Franco.
“In Argentina) we are a country that has not had a state policy to deal with events in our recent past. Our education does not include the construction of a culture of human rights.” These two sentences in part define the aim of Morandini’s book, to develop a democratic “society above the intolerance of the past.”
Speaking in her office a block away from the National Congress building, Senator Morandini was emphatic on her need, and by extension that of Argentina, to put human rights and the understanding of them above politics. “And we’ve failed to do that for too long, which explains why some of our society can’t or won’t speak of the past, or argues that it is too long ago to carry on arguing or campaigning about old events. The trouble is we have not renewed our politics. Politics in Argentina were born dead at the end of the dictatorship. They have not changed style or discourse or policies from before the coup. We do not have politicians and parties that made sure a new political life was born to enhance democracy.
“We have had 30 years of democratic formalities and we do not have democratic values. This is because society has leaders who do not want to recognize their part or the role of their parties in the civic failure that led to the worst dictatorship in our history. Here people are still trying to convince themselves that we are a peaceful nation without admitting we were cutting each others’ throats throughout the nineteenth century and killing people because we didn’t like what they said in the twentieth.
“We have not been able to see the difference between guilt and responsibility. Admiral Emilio Massera, commander of the navy during the dictatorship, and the most notorious of the tormentors, told the court in 1985, ‘I am responsible, but I do not feel guilty.’ He was speaking then as our politicians still do trying to make believe they can account for their decisions, but are not to blame for what goes wrong.” The US academic, Marguerite Feitlowitz has a remarkable study of the linguistic twists of Admiral Massera in her book, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (OUP, 1998).
In a breakdown of her essay the senator explained some of the multi-form behaviour of the seventies that still requires understanding by later generations. “The infamous naval torture centre, the ESMA, is not just a symbol of the worst of State Terrorism. ESMA forced its captives into slavery to allow them to survive.
One of the best examples of resistance was that of Víctor Melchor Basterra, a printer by trade and an activist of the hard-line Peronismo de Base, who had to forge documentation, contracts, passports, property deeds, and shady arrangements by the naval command. This was perverse, because he was ‘disappeared’ but was being used as an office clerk. He was freed on Fridays, went home and Sunday night they came for him to take him back into captivity at the ESMA. The man had the courage to remove copies of files on people disappeared and killed. In a system that ‘disappeared’ people without trace, that somebody should have to take photos of the condemned is perverse. They are very disturbing photos (a remarkable exhibition of some of this material was shown at the Palais de Glace six years ago). But those documents and photos were the only concrete and real elements of proof that reached the trials.
Basterra’s story can be linked to the day that writer Jorge Luis Borges went to the hearings. We were not allowed to have recorders or cameras. We had to take notes and none of us who covered those six months could really convey the horror. Borges, in 40 lines said what we failed to in six months: “He was not a Peronist, not a Communist, he was a man who suffered” (the article was published in Clarín, July 31, 1985). Borges conveyed humanity to the inhumanly distorted.
“That trial, famous as it became, was held behind closed doors. The country was afraid to know what had happened, and much of that feeling remains.”
Morandini has not lost hope for recovery. “For the first time in decades we are beginning to look at ourselves, our own mistakes. This change is coming from a new generation, the youngest, the children, and even grandchildren of the activists, sometimes utopian, and the disappeared of the seventies. This makes me feel we are on our way to a political culture that includes responsibility. At present we still have many bad old habits. We look at the crises in Europe and delight in their suffering, seeing it as a failure. What we don’t see in their plight is also that the protesters are demanding more democracy.”
This is what Norma Morandini’s deeply personal essay is about: the need for understanding of loss. She was greatly inspired by Hannah Arendt’s writings. “we must see others now as we must see ourselves, understanding. We need a greater sense of self-compassion, of the intimacy of pain suffered. For me to say this, now, is to come to terms with the guilt I have felt, the guilt of being older than my brother and sister who were disappeared. My political activism was lightweight, theirs was committed, dangerous. I saw the sadness of my mother and how she recovered and grew to an admirable strength. As a society, now, we must learn that the formulation of our past to ourselves will be the means by which we handle our present and even our future.
“We have to find a balance somewhere between being sucked down into evil which destroys us and choosing departure, escape, which robs us of the humanity needed to overcome. It is a
difficult balance. The book has ‘washed my soul’ as the Brazilians say. We must try to learn the
concept that one man is all men, the behaviour of one belongs to us all.”
