by Marie Arana
Months later, the Guerra Sucia—the Dirty War—was in full throttle. Almost seven thousand more Argentines went missing within the course of a year. This was hardly a war; there had ceased to be combatants or any real give and take between foes. It was a campaign in which a muscular, armed military had brazenly undertaken to wipe out thousands of civilians, and it was fierce, unrelenting, and seemingly random. Hardly understood in its terrifying fullness at the time, a purge of inconvenient Argentines had begun. The goal was to rid the country of a wave of rebellious “Communist guerrillas” that had bedeviled the right-wing power structure for years. But it quickly became a genocide of leftists from any walk of life, including vague suspects, glancing associates, family members, and whomever the military didn’t much like: journalists, social workers, labor leaders, teachers, priests, nuns, psychiatrists, poets. In other words, a massive population of Argentines who were averse to hard-line, mano dura rule.
When Argentina’s steely military dictator, General Videla, who had overseen the hecatomb, was asked how the Argentine people should think about the thousands devoured by his maw of improvised justice, he answered archly that the question’s logic was all wrong. The Argentine people had seen law work on their behalf. They deserved human rights, and those rights had been threatened in Argentina. In an argument that swelled to Orwellian proportion, he explained that the truly loyal, honest citizens had been faced with a metastasizing terrorist threat—a Communist infiltration—and they needed to pay down that cancer in human blood. The victims, if there were victims, were nobodies. “Who is a disappeared person?” he asked rhetorically. “Anonymous. Nobody. He has no identity, is neither dead nor alive. Just disappeared.” His answer was all too reminiscent of the answer given to the debate that had raged in Seville during the late fifteenth century: Were the victims of the conquest truly human? The answer five hundred years later was still a resounding no. Not if the presiding force decided otherwise. They were chaff—and by virtue of their resistance, totally expendable.
* * *
The mass extermination that took place during Argentina’s Dirty War had been the brainchild of a sinister, secret campaign called Operation Condor, a concerted, multinational plan of repression hatched by right-wing dictators in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay; supported by Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela) and carried out by a vast network of secret police. The initial architects of the cooperation, security officials from those countries—many of whom had been trained at the US Army’s School of the Americas during the 1960s and 1970s—gathered in Buenos Aires under the auspices of General Videla to collaborate on methods they might use against “subversives.” The United States, a natural partner to anti-Communist initiatives in the region, was complicit, providing military and technical support to Operation Condor for more than two decades. Support began with Lyndon Johnson’s administration in the late 1960s and continued through the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1989, even though US government officials were fully aware of the extent of the atrocities. Indeed, in 1973, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received concrete evidence of the massacres, he stated that “however unpleasant” these circumstances might be, the overall situation was beneficial to the United States. “We want you to succeed,” he told the Argentine foreign minister in no uncertain terms. “We do not want to harass you. I will do what I can.”
In August 1976, when Kissinger was further informed that prominent subversives were not only game within Latin America but targeted abroad, he did not balk. Instead, on September 20 he instructed American ambassadors to stand down, not interfere with Operation Condor, and “take no further action” on deterring Latin American plots that might be under way. The very next day—September 21, 1976—a bomb under the car of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, a passionate critic of General Pinochet, exploded as he rode through Washington, DC’s Sheridan Circle, hurling the car into the air and killing him as well as a young American aide. The Chilean secret police, under express orders by Pinochet, were the perpetrators. The claws of Operation Condor had reached into the very heart of the American capital.
Two years later, although wholesale murders were by now a daily occurrence in Argentina, the military regime hosted the soccer World Cup in Buenos Aires. Even as women were being impaled by cattle prods in their vaginas, even as men’s anuses were being rammed by iron rods—even as prisoners were being flayed alive, or herded into concentration camps, or drugged and dropped from biplanes and helicopters into the Atlantic or the Paraná River—a grinning General Videla swanned through festivities with Secretary Kissinger, and the military ranks ran the games as efficiently as they did their torture machines. At the very apogee of the cruelty, with unidentified bodies washing ashore, with young girls being snatched screaming from buses, with a whole world watching, the 1978 World Cup closed with a victory for the home country. Argentina trounced the Netherlands by a score of 3–1. Thirty years later, when Argentina celebrated that victory, the memories were too painful. Nineteen of the twenty-two players didn’t join in the revelry.
In the end, as many as thirty thousand Argentines were killed by their government in that tragic decade between 1973 and 1983. In Chile, we know that a quarter million were taken into custody and interrogated by the military; ten thousand more detained and tortured; in excess of three thousand killed. Within the same period, the Paraguayan armed forces disposed of two thousand corpses. Because of the covert nature of Operation Condor, its body count over the years and throughout its many affiliated countries may never be known, but scholars estimate that as many as sixty to eighty thousand may have been murdered, including thirty thousand “disappeared” or presumed executed, and four hundred thousand more who were jailed and tortured. It is a numbing calculus, so easy to dismiss for its sheer implausibility. But the reckoning was all too real. The human costs of Condor were higher than American losses in the Revolutionary War or the Vietnam War; higher than the number of casualties in all US engagements of the past half century, including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps as costly as American combat casualties in World War I. And yet the methodical killing continued long after Operation Condor closed its ledgers in Argentina. It swept through the continent like a malevolent plague.
EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA
1960–1984
Let the history we lived be taught in the schools, so that it is never forgotten, so that our children may know.
—Commission for Historical Clarification, 1996
There was nothing uniform about the revolutionary contagion that ripped through Latin America in the 1960s and held it fast for the next four decades. Stark differences ruled its viral manifestations. After all, a white urbanite’s impulse to rebel could hardly be the same as that of an indigenous banana laborer. Nevertheless, something galvanic was in the wind. The Cuban revolution had shown a generation of Latin Americans that a people could grab hold of its destiny and change it. As a result, Soviet agents were suddenly, gleefully everywhere in the region—in the capitals, in universities, in burgeoning Communist cells—sowing that message to a restless young. The logic was powerful and clear: the raw divisions of class or race, the gaping abyss between rich and poor, were no longer tenable. Whatever their color, revolutionaries across Latin America now insisted on a break with the old order, a more liberal society, a leveling of classes, a culmination of the Marxist dream. But there was no consensus on the Left as to how to achieve it. Where there was unity and cooperation, ironically, was on the opposing side, among the old guard, the rich families, the descendants of conquistadors, an established power base that was adamantly reactionary. The military crackdowns that followed from Montevideo to San Salvador had startling similarities: they all featured draconian generals, tanks in the streets, martial law, heavily armed security forces, undercover death squads. And they could all count on the United States to take their side.
Shortly after Castro’s victory in Cuba, some of the coun
tries buffering South America from Mexico—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras—a cluster known as Central America’s “Northern Triangle,” erupted in fiery insurgencies at about the same time. For decades, El Salvador had been a bomb waiting to detonate. The country’s peasants had risen up in a massive revolt during the 1930s, but had reaped a deadly military retaliation called la matanza, “the slaughter.” Thirty thousand of the most humble Salvadorans had been massacred and shoveled into mass graves. The army, ruled by the country’s oligarchy—the “Fourteen Families”—and aided by the United States, dominated the jittery decades to come. But defiance was never far from the surface. It exploded once again in the course of the 1970s, when poverty rates in El Salvador were at 90 percent, wages plummeted by 70 percent, and the number of landless soared. Life expectancy among the poor had shrunk to thirty-seven years. Infant mortality and malnutrition were at all-time highs. As the wealthy turned a blind eye, left-wing guerrillas organized into a fighting force. When they were ready to challenge the right-wing military colossus, a deadly spiral of violence began.
For the full decade that followed, guerrillas proceeded to invade embassies, kill businessmen, and execute military commanders and police chiefs—targeting anyone who was perceived to be part of the machinery of oppression. They bombed factories, businesses, stores. They kidnapped the rich and held them ransom, scoring millions of dollars and netting a rogue popularity in the process. In 1979 they finally wrested power in a victorious coup over the old oligarchy. But it didn’t last long. With the help of $4.5 billion from the United States, a fighting force called the Contras, and spirited support from Reagan’s recently appointed and short-lived Secretary of State Alexander Haig, the old right-wing military slammed back with full force. A virulent civil war followed. For all the brutality perpetrated by guerrillas in the twelve years of that struggle—for all the arms and guns that poured in from Ethiopia and Vietnam to support the revolutionaries—the Salvadoran armed forces answered with a dwarfing detonation of fury. They unleashed death squads to eradicate any and all perpetrators, enlisted child soldiers, herded civilians into concentration camps. Mark Danner, reporting for The New Yorker, described the abattoir that the country had become:
Mutilated corpses littered the streets of El Salvador’s cities. Sometimes the bodies were headless, or faceless, their features having been obliterated with a shotgun blast or an application of battery acid; sometimes limbs were missing, or hands or feet chopped off, or eyes gouged out; women’s genitals were torn and bloody, bespeaking repeated rape; men’s were often found severed and stuffed into their mouths. And cut into the flesh of a corpse’s back or chest was likely to be the signature of one or another of the “death squads” that had done the work.
The Church protested, but the Salvadoran military answered by murdering nuns, declaring Jesuit priests enemies, and assassinating renowned human rights activist Archbishop Óscar Romero. When a quarter million faithful gathered before the cathedral in San Salvador to mourn the holy man’s passing, military snipers on nearby rooftops shot into the crowd, killing forty-two and wounding two hundred. There seemed to be nothing the Salvadoran military could do that would prompt Washington to cease its financial support. In the carnival of killing that followed, untold numbers of Salvadorans were disappeared; one million were displaced; seventy-five thousand were murdered. The United Nations estimated that leftist rebels may have been responsible for approximately four thousand of those deaths. In contrast, more than seventy thousand murders were committed by right-wing military-controlled death squads.
Guatemala was no different. For years, it had been a virtual colony of American interests. The United Fruit Company, which owned vast tracts of lands in Guatemala, also controlled the railroads and the shipyards, as well as all modes of communication. But that unilateral control was suddenly threatened when citizens began to demand their rights. Beginning in 1960, one after another Guatemalan president fought that trend, sanctioning extrajudicial killings as protests against the prevailing regimes began to sweep the country. Like Cortés, who sent out armies to kill any Mayans who refused to work the mines, the military now relied on the sword to suppress defiance.
The troubles had started much earlier, in 1944, when Guatemalans decided to depose their corrupt dictator, hold a democratic election, and sweep Juan José Arévalo to power with a vigorous liberal platform of universal suffrage and a minimum wage. Arévalo was succeeded by President Jacobo Árbenz, who continued to defend the rights of the poor, nationalize the land, and parcel it out to the landless. Perceived by the United States as too Socialist for comfort in that volatile turf, Guatemala was soon targeted for a harsh correction. In 1954 the Central Intelligence Agency, supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, masterminded a coup to topple Árbenz’s government. They called its combatants “the army of Liberation,” but Guatemalans were quickly disabused when activists were rounded up and thrown in jail, tortured, and executed. Any whiff of rebellion was labeled as Communist inspired or foreign born. Guatemala soon became a pilot program for American military and covert political intervention in the Caribbean—a training ground for any armed engagements that might emerge.
Castro’s success changed all of that. With Cuba’s sudden victory, Guatemalan hopes were spurred once again to dreams of self-determination. Rebellion, all too rashly stirred and all too swiftly quashed, became widespread as the 1960s unfolded in its full revolutionary glory. Nevertheless, circumstances changed when President Julio César Méndez of the Revolutionary Party was elected democratically, and the Guatemalan military, fearing an erosion of its power, stepped in to make demands: they would fight any rebel guerrillas on their own terms, they would brook no government interference, and they would answer to no judge. By 1966, mass disappearances had become common. Students, professors, political activists, outspoken civilians, foreign diplomats—all were potential targets. And with good reason, because the intellectual and informed community was precisely where revolution lay.
It was then that indiscriminate bombings of villages began. For the next fifteen years, Guatemala proceeded to ravage itself, urged on by US advisors who were fresh from the bedlam of the Vietnam War. Murder became high theater as death squads festooned corpses with propaganda and ghoulish warnings, or disseminated death lists, or marauded the streets unchallenged. With each presidency that followed, the violence seemed to mount exponentially: the constitution was suspended, a state of siege was declared, kidnappings and mass arrests became steady fare.
For all the brutality of the torture and disappearances that followed, however, the left-wing dissidents refused to be cowed. Only a massive earthquake in 1976 seemed to unify the population briefly, if only because a spirit of mutual survival prevailed. But soon enough the death squads were back in business: in one month alone, August 1977, they murdered sixty-one suspected revolutionary ringleaders. The rebel movement answered by doubling its numbers and moving to the desolate mountains of the western highlands. A taste of the genocide to come was felt in early 1980, when an indigenous delegation, appearing in the capital to denounce the murder of fellow villagers, was snubbed by Congress, its lawyer assassinated just outside the doors of the police headquarters. In order to bring attention to the burgeoning violence, protesters then occupied the Spanish embassy, but they were fatally foiled when the police hurled Molotov cocktails into the gated embassy grounds, burning alive almost everyone within. International opinion didn’t seem to matter now. The military was hell-bent on taking power.
Passions were such that, in 1982, when General Efraín Ríos Montt hijacked the presidency in a violent coup, he lost all patience and identified the greater Guatemalan populace as the “internal enemy.” He ordered entire rural villages destroyed, whole populations massacred. Eighteen thousand Guatemalans fell victim to state violence in the course of one year. Most were recalcitrant Mayan peasants in the West, who for centuries had bucked repression and to whom promises of justice had spoken most emphatically
. Communities suspected as being rebellious were mowed down in wholesale executions, a large percentage of them women and children. The army by now was engaged in a full-scale war against dissent, striving to terrorize civilians into abandoning revolution. If it meant taking the lives of innocents, so be it. For the old guard, it meant preserving the world as they knew it; for the Americans who supported them, it meant keeping the world safe from the scourge of Communism. They ransacked village and town, indiscriminately raping females, young or old. Using techniques taught them by foreign advisors, they raided “safe houses” and snuffed out all life within. As an in-depth study of those years described it: “Methods of violence became ever more gruesome. . . . The army tended towards overkill, beheading their victims or burning them alive, and smashing the heads of children against rocks. The rape of women survivors, even when pregnant, became more common.”
Just as atrocities appeared to be reaching a genocidal peak, just as the international image of President Ríos Montt’s government couldn’t possibly get worse, press coverage came to an abrupt halt and human right groups were suddenly nowhere to be seen, allowing the terror to escalate in a harrowing silence. Meanwhile, President Ronald Reagan’s administration portrayed Ríos Montt’s regime as a major improvement of human rights in Guatemala. He’s “a man of great integrity,” Reagan avowed, “totally dedicated to democracy.” By the end of Guatemala’s staggering losses, there were as many as two hundred thousand dead or disappeared. One in every thirty of its citizens had been sacrificed to the carnage.