His voice was well modulated, what you might call an educated voice. He counted slowly, enunciating clearly. It was a pleasant voice. I remained silent, wondering:
“Was it inevitable for me to die like this? Yes, it was inevitable. Was it what I desired? Yes, it was what I desired. Wife, children, I love you. Adios, adios, adios. ...”
“. . . Ten.” Ha ... ha ... ha! I heard laughter. I too began laughing. Loudly. Great guffaws.
The blindfold is removed from my eyes. I’m in a large, dimly lit study: there’s a desk, chairs. Colonel Ramon J. Camps, chief of police of the province of Buenos Aires, is observing me. He orders my arms, handcuffed behind my back, to be freed. This takes a while because the keys have been misplaced. Or, again, it may have taken only a few minutes. He orders a glass of water to be brought to me.
“Timerman,” he says, “your life depends on how you answer my questions.”
“Without preliminary trial, Colonel?”
“Your life depends on your answers.”
“Who ordered my arrest?”
“You’re a prisoner of the First Army Corps in action.”
2
For a long while one could presume, with goodwill and a measure of liberalism, that Lenin had forecast Russia’s future and the Socialist structure in conformance with the way in which it was materializing. Stalin’s death, Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Party Congress, and information about the existence of the Gulags all indicated that the more logical point of reference for the Russian reality might still be Dostoyevsky. Something similar transpired in Argentina: suddenly all information and inquiries regarding its history and its present, all predictions as to its future, crystallized in a relatively short book, a curious novel of the late 1920s by Roberto Arlt, entitled The Seven Madmen.
The central idea of the novel—reached by way of endless ideological, mystical, political, emotional, and tango-inspired elaborations—found appeal among every violent Argentine group, as well as among Peronist supporters. In it, Arlt brought together seven madmen, ruled by a revolutionary-without-ideology called The Astrologer, whose mission it is to initiate the anarchist-socialist revolution in Argentina and to extend it throughout Latin America via terrorist groups financed by the profits from a chain of brothels. The simplicity of the device is attractive, and recurrent in all totalitarian ideology: to ignore the complexities of reality, or even eliminate reality, and instead establish a simple goal and a simple means of attaining that goal.
Curiously enough, Argentine politics during the last fifty years has in a sense been governed by this equation, applied in extravagant ideological formulas. Argentina’s democratic parties attempted compromise in order to avoid being swept aside by the Peronist landslide—a union and electoral mass that was decisive in elections, when elections took place, and, more often, created the climate for military overthrow of those legitimately elected.
Clearly, such a thesis is impossible to accept. It is also strangely hard to understand or explain. And it has perhaps turned Argentina into the invalid of Latin America, its ailment akin to that of the Balkans in Europe—an ailment so unique that the world has long delayed attempting any reaction to it and all such attempts to date have been focused on marginal aspects rather than on the fundamental issues.
Between 1973 and 1976 there were four Peronist presidents, including General Juan Domingo Peron and his wife Isabel. The violence enveloping the country erupted on all fronts, completing a development that had begun in 1964 with the appearance of the first guerrillas, trained in Cuba by one of Che Guevara’s aides-de-camp. Coexisting in Argentina were: rural and urban Trotskyite guerrillas; right-wing Peronist death squads; armed terrorist groups of the large labor unions, used for handling union matters; paramilitary army groups, dedicated to avenging the murder of their men; para-police groups of both the Left and the Right vying for supremacy within the organization of federal and provincial police forces; and terrorist groups of Catholic rightists organized by cabals who opposed Pope John XXIII’s proposals to reconcile the liberal leftist Catholic priests seeking to apply—generally with anarchistic zeal—the ideological thesis of rapprochement between the Church and the poor. (These, of course, were only the principal groups of organized or systematized violence. Hundreds of other organizations involved in the eroticism of violence existed, small units that found ideological justification for armed struggle in a poem by Neruda or an essay by Marcuse. Lefebvre might be as useful as Heidegger; a few lines by Mao Zedong might trigger off the assassination of a businessman in a Buenos Aires suburb; and a hazy interpretation of Mircea Eliade might be perfect for kidnapping an industrialist to obtain a ransom that would make possible a further perusal of Indian philosophy and mysticism to corroborate the importance of national liberation.)
In this climate, which dragged on for years, I conducted two interviews that illustrate Argentina’s impotence in finding adequate political responses to that most elemental of needs, survival. One was with a Peronist senator, highly influential in his party, a lawyer, a moderate, a student leader in his youth, a man cultivated and serene. In the United States, he would have been found in the liberal sector of the Democratic Party; in Israel, I imagine he would have been a pillar of the Labor Party; in France, he might have belonged to Giscard’s liberal wing. Our conversation revolved around violence—the year was 1975—and I explained to him, with ample statistics and thirty years of experience in political journalism, that the country was heading inevitably toward occupation by military power. I maintained that the only recourse left for preserving the existing political institutions was to make use of legal channels in order to put an end to all brands of violence, and that the army was the only group in a position to do this. I proposed that he, along with the Peronist majority in the Senate and the House of Deputies, should pass extraordinary legislation empowering the army to initiate measures against terrorist activity of all sorts, but that these powers should be limited by congressional statute within the constitutional framework, and should always remain under constant civil jurisdiction.
His reply went as follows: “Once we allow the military to step through the door, they’ll take possession of the entire house. This would be tantamount to a coup, leaving us on the outside. Furthermore, right-wing Peronists who support rightist terrorist groups that assassinate leftist Peronists will not vote for the laws; and leftist Peronists who support leftist terrorists who assassinate rightist Peronists will not vote for the laws. Moreover, the army will suppress only one sector of violence and not the other. It will pit one against the other, thus assuring its own survival.” And the conclusion? “Let’s leave things the way they are. Something will happen. God is Argentine.”
The second interview was with a high-ranking official in the Army General Staff. His reply was essentially the same, with only superficial differences. When I asked what were the army’s reasons for not using all its resources to combat violence, why it was concerned solely with retaliation for its own casualties, his reply was simple: “Do you expect us to go out and fight so that they [the Peronists] can continue to govern?” The Peronists had won the election with seventy percent of the vote.
Curiously, those long years of violence and extermination in Argentina, during which 10,000 people certainly perished and 15,000 others disappeared, constituted for Argentine leaders of all political leanings a gymnasium in terms of tactics and strategy, an exercise in opportunistic positions. But they were never perceived as a fundamental problem that had to be faced, as a grave peril undermining the very existence of the nation.
It is essential, I suppose, to attempt some explanation of what Argentina is. Yet I find it almost impossible to do so in normal terms, applying current political principles. The problem is not merely that I find it difficult to explain Argentina in comprehensible terms to outsiders, but that I myself perhaps am unable to understand her. Or it may be that I’ve lived through a period of such political and social disintegration that it is hard for
me to conceive that some coherent explanation would emerge from such disparate and anarchistic opposing elements.
In this context, a statement by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is, I think, useful. Borges remarked, some thirty years ago, that the Argentine is not a citizen but an inhabitant; that he lacks an idea of the nation where he resides, but views it as a territory which, owing to its wealth, can be exploited rapidly.
To my mind, this is a noteworthy comment on the Argentine problem. Nothing simple: Argentina as an entity does not yet exist; it must be created. But were I to assess how each of the diverse Argentinas existing at present within that territory—each regarding itself as the authentic one—would interpret Borges’s definition, that would provide a more descriptive and precise response, something akin to a French pointillistic canvas.
1. If Borges were to comment on his own definition, he would say that the Argentines’ error stems from their inadequate understanding of ancient Germanic literature. Borges would claim that it’s impossible to create a citizen unless he has read the books of the Veda or at least the Egyptian Mummy’s Prayer, which is recited prior to one’s admittance as a sacred mummy—in the French version rendered by the Lithuanian poet Lubicz Milosz. Borges would say (in fact, he has said) that “Democracy is an abuse of statistics.” In the end, he himself might not understand, or attempt to understand, the value of his own definition.
2. Right-wing sectors would accept Borges’s remark as an absolute truth, claiming that it was the flood of immigrants that was responsible for the destruction of the roots implanted by the Spanish monarchy—those Hispanic roots of the noble Bourbons and of Franco—immigrants who came merely to get rich, to “make” America. It was they who prevented consolidation of a notion of citizenry.
3. Liberal sectors would accept Borges’s remark as an absolute truth, claiming that it was the incapacity of the Argentine ruling class to understand the immigrant phenomenon —with all its contributions to creativity, culture, the republican and democratic spirit, its impulse toward civic activity, the struggle for human rights and man’s equality—and, specifically, the battle of the ruling aristocratic groups against unlimited immigrant access to every level of Argentine life, above all political life, that has prevented national consolidation, and hence the creation of an Argentine citizenry.
4. Leftist sectors would accept Borges’s remark as an absolute truth, claiming that a man can only genuinely feel that he’s a citizen within a Socialist nation, and therefore no bourgeois nation can expect its inhabitants to share any possible common interests.
5. Fascist sectors would accept Borges’s remark as an absolute truth, claiming that citizens exist only when a central power organizes them as such, and that it is precisely that central power, which is required to give explanations to no one, that is lacking in Argentina.
I could go on indefinitely, covering the vagaries of the infinite number of ideologies scattered throughout Argentina. Each would accept Borges’s statement as a logical, coherent explanation. That, of course, would be their only point of agreement.
Does this in any way clarify the Argentine drama? This vignette revolving around Borges, and closely resembling a Borges story, is actually a perfect embodiment of Argentina’s capacity for violence, as well as its political incapacity. What is more, it reveals that only nations capable of creating a political environment that embraces multiple political solutions for any situation are able to escape Argentina’s violence. No one is immune to episodes of violence and terrorism; yet it should be possible at least to avoid a situation in which terrorism and violence are the sole creative potential, the sole imaginative, emotional, erotic expression of a nation.
In a session of the Argentine Parliament, Carlos Perette, a centrist senator and an anti-Peronist, declared in a speech following one of the many daily murders: “In Argentina you know who dies, but not who kills.”
Could it possibly have been otherwise? The dead were found thrown into the streets, and identified. But as for killing, everyone was killing, and to identify the killers publicly, as you did privately, meant condemning yourself to death as well. In an article which I wrote in reply to that senator, who had shown greater courage simply by that innocent, innocuous remark than countless other political leaders, I stated that the only thing required would be for a congressman within the sanctuary of the House or Senate to repeat the names that had been uttered in the corridors of Congress, for that would enable public identification of the murderers. But would that have changed things? I suppose not.
We organized a group of political and labor journalists at my newspaper, La Opinion. We held a meeting to analyze the situation and decided that hope still existed; we merely had to begin the battle and explain everything. That day we wound up toasting each other for having committed ourselves, a true privilege for any civilized man—the privilege of combating fascism. I recall having said something to the following effect: “Our generation witnessed the struggle against fascism during World War II only through the street demonstrations that took place in Buenos Aires. We ran no risk. Nor did we run any of the risks faced by those confronting Stalinism and languishing now in the Gulags. Were lucky at least to be here, with a newspaper at hand, at a time when the country is being besieged by fascism of the Left and of the Right.”
Beautiful words. Now I understand (or perhaps understood then too) that we were aspiring toward a microclimate, creating a microclimate so as to avoid the decision suggested by so many friends, especially to me: Leave the country. Up to the last day, the day of my kidnapping, which was subsequently converted into an arrest, we persisted in this battle, and I refused to leave the country. In reply to an Israeli friend who begged me to leave, I sent a brief note which he later showed me on my arrival in Tel Aviv. It wound up by saying: “I am one who belongs to Masada.” How I would have liked to remember that remark during torture sessions.
Is it any easier now to understand? What is perhaps still lacking is the unifying link between Arlt’s seven madmen and Borges’s definition of the Argentine. But let us turn our thoughts to that wide range of terrorist groups who have killed one another, killed their enemies of other political stripes as well as adversaries within their own party: Peronists assassinating Peronists, the military assassinating the military, union members assassinating union members, students other students, policemen other policemen. And let us also consider those vast para-police or paramilitary terrorist organizations that required arms, munitions, training camps, transport, ideological training, identity documents, clandestine prisons, dwellings, maintenance, all of whose funds emanated from the same source: kidnapping and blackmail, booty and plundering. Large ransoms were paid by kidnapped industrialists or executives (the highest in history was $60 million, obtained by leftist Peronist terrorists in the Born brothers kidnapping); monthly sums were paid by companies to right-wing and left-wing organizations simultaneously to assure that their executives wouldn’t be assassinated or kidnapped; property, jewelry, and works of art were “confiscated” when an arrest or kidnapping took place. Doesn’t this recall The Astrologer’s proposal: an ideology financed by the exploitation of brothels?
But does it, in the end, explain either present-day Argentina or the Argentina of the last decade? To my mind it does not, for there still remain innumerable details, both tragic and ridiculous, of assassinations, organized or improvised, spontaneous or premeditated, prompted by personal motives cloaked in ideological terms, or merely by terrorist sensuality. Hannah Arendt referred to Naziism as “the banality of evil.” The extreme Left and extreme Right reached Argentina via the same criminal route, devoid of German precision but spiced with Latin American eroticism. Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer of the Left, wrote about one of his terrorist characters (admiringly, of course) as follows: “The first time in violence is like the first time in love.” The book is called Vagamundo (Vagabond).
Nonetheless, this mechanism of terror and violence still remains unclea
r. And it must be portrayed in its total dimensions, for it has reached such magnitude that it cannot be understood simply in political, cultural, or electoral terms. Nor does the old struggle of democracy against extremism of the Right and the Left aptly define the Argentine situation. It may be simpler and more terrible than anything hitherto known by our generation in Latin America. It is a struggle between civilization and barbarism within a country of 25 million inhabitants toward the end of the twentieth century. And this barbarism—whether it be private or governmental, civil or military—must obviously be eradicated before it is possible to enter civilization. The political question in Argentina remains in abeyance until that moment when the country is in a position to enter civilization.
During my journalistic career, particularly as publisher and editor of La Opinion, I received countless threats. One morning two letters arrived in the same mail: one was from the rightist terrorist organization (protected and utilized by paramilitary groups), condemning me to death because of its belief that my militancy on behalf of the right to trial for anyone arrested and my battle for human rights were hindrances in overthrowing communism; the other letter was from the terrorist Trotskyite group, Ejercito Revolucionario Popular (ERP)—the Popular Revolutionary Army—and indicated that if I continued accusing leftist revolutionaries of being Fascists and referring to them as the lunatic Left, I would be tried and most likely sentenced to death.
In the past I had never answered similar threats, but the incident struck me as so brutal and comical, so tragic and banal, that I wrote a few lines on page one of La Opinion in reply. I didn’t say much, merely that we would continue to maintain our standards (a statement reiterated by so many newspapers and journalists all over the world that by now it has become tedious), and that I felt genuinely curious to know who would wind up with my corpse—the terrorists of the Left or those of the Right.
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number Page 2