It continues to drizzle.
The man sighs and goes off, casting toward me, I suppose, a final glance of incomprehension.
5
In the entrance hall of La Opinion stands a weeping mother asking to see me. I don’t have the strength for this meeting because I’m as despairing as she. My secretary persuades the woman to give her reason for coming to see me. Her two children have disappeared. They were taken from the house while she was out. A girl and a boy, eighteen and fifteen years old. The neighbors said they saw two cars with armed men. She was told at her district police station that they had no knowledge of the incident, that it was not an official act. She’s convinced that the editor-in-chief of a newspaper is sufficiently powerful to find her children.
It’s a lie. She isn’t convinced, for she knows that I can do nothing. Everyone knows I can do nothing. But they’ve no place to go, and come to La Opinion because they claim it’s the only daily newspaper concerned about the disappeared. The majority are unaware of the existence of any other paper which on a daily basis bids the government respect the laws and at least publish a list of those who’ve been arrested. The Buenos Aires Herald is in English, and my visitors do not read English.
I could anticipate this woman’s story and therefore didn’t receive her. I receive some, others not. It depends on the degree of despair that I’m feeling the day they arrive. And they arrive in large numbers. How can I tell this woman that if I published the story about her children, it would most likely amount to a death sentence? How can I tell her that the government will never tolerate the assumption that a newspaper article can save a life? To permit this would mean losing the power of repression, the utilization of Fear and Silence.
Yet when my secretary tells me the story, how can I live with that?
Well, one can live with it. The Germans did, the Italians did, the Russians do, the Paraguayans do, the Chileans do, the Czechs do, the Uruguayans do.
Between 1966 and 1973 there are three military governments in Argentina, presided over by three generals. The entire institutional scheme is organized under the pompous heading of the Argentine Revolution. It begins with great optimism, but after 1969 finds itself on a dead-end street due to widespread resistance to the economic, social, and political situation. During this period Peronism begins to ally itself with all the other political parties in demanding that elections be called, and simultaneously starts organizing the Special Formations of urban guerrillas known as the Montoneros. Juan Domingo Peron calls them Special Formations because he doesn’t want to lend official support to Peronist guerrillas and thereby be accused of subversion.
The military dictatorship enters a crisis due to its inability to devise a suitable political formula to deal with the situation, and elections are called. All the political parties, newspapers, and institutions support this solution. Peronism triumphs by a wide margin, but with a candidate, Hector Campora, who is basically supported—and dominated—by the leftist and Montonero sectors of Peronism. A couple of months later the situation is again untenable, and Juan Domingo Peron organizes a denunciation of the individual who’d been his candidate because the army has vetoed him as a potential president. He denounces Campora, new elections have to be called, and no one this time can veto Peron. Besides, the nation longs for Peron, assuming that he has sufficient authority to end the violence.
By this time, Peron’s right wing has developed its own subversive activity through the Triple A (American Anticommunist Alliance), headed by Jose Lopez Rega, Peron’s private secretary for several years.
The Montoneros assassinate those engaged in their suppression; those who they believe are so engaged; those whom they regard as doing nothing to oppose those who suppress them; those who speak up against violence of both the Right and the Left because of their belief that members of the violent Left are accomplices of the Right; second-rank politicians who are friends of first-rank politicians who refuse to make deals with the Montoneros; politicians who they imagine might at some point interfere with their future plans because these politicians are liberals and would attract leftist youth; and leftist journalists who are opposed to violence and hence plant confusion in the minds of Montonero guerrilla fighters. The Montoneros engage in kidnapping as well, considering it logical that men who are able to afford a ransom should return to society their ill-gotten gains.
The Triple A engages in killing Montoneros, or those they assume to be Montoneros; they murder liberal politicians because their demands for legal trials of arrested Montoneros are regarded as a form of complicity with the Left; they murder defense lawyers of arrested Montoneros, regarding them as a branch of the guerrilla force; and they murder writers and leftist journalists, even though the latter may be anti-guerrilla, because their denunciations of right-wing terrorism are regarded as weakening the repressive will of Argentine society. The Triple A obtains its funds for salaries and the purchase of weapons and automobiles, and for its clandestine prisons, from the sale of booty acquired in raids and the ransom paid for kidnapped individuals—these generally being financially powerful members of the Jewish community.
The Montoneros succeed in forcing five hundred large business firms to pay a monthly protection sum against kidnapping or assault of their executives. The Triple A obtains a copy of this list and forces these five hundred large firms to subscribe to its financial support. The companies thus pay both organizations.
(On assuming power in 1976, the army incorporates into its operational structures the entire Triple A framework, with the exception of its leader, Jose Lopez Rega, who is out of the country, but not sought out. They also get hold of the list of the five hundred firms and negotiate a substantial contribution from them for the fight against subversion. Again the companies pay.)
The ranks of the Triple A are made up of policemen and retired non-commissioned officers, usually those who've had disciplinary problems, committed some crime, or been punished for other offenses while in the ranks. The climate of violence envelops the entire nation. It is still assumed that Juan Domingo Peron can resolve the situation, and his margin of victory is even greater than that obtained by Campora. Despite being burdened in the election slate by the dead weight of his wife, he wins by almost seventy percent of the vote. He is now the third Peronist president in 1973. He cannot, however, quell the violence, and it’s hard to tell whether he actually wishes to do so. A year later he is dead, and the situation starts to deteriorate further on every level, especially in terms of the economy and violence. His widow, Isabel Peron, manages to remain until March 1976, when the armed forces take power. Her twenty-month survival in office is not the result of her political acumen. The military, according to some observers, required that amount of time to lay their plans. In fact, the plans were already laid. The military needed something that proved to be of much greater importance: for the situation to deteriorate sufficiently so that the populace—press, political parties, Church, civil institutions—would regard military repression as inevitable. They needed allies who could be converted into accomplices. They needed the presence of such fear—about one’s personal security, the economic crisis, the unknown— that it would provide them the margin of time and planning, and the needed passivity, to develop what they regarded as the only solution to leftist terrorism: extermination.
In Buenos Aires there’s a place that we habitues had converted into an almost private club—the basement bar and restaurant of the Plaza Hotel. The wood paneling, tables, chairs, china, decor, all had a pleasantly Art Nouveau look. The tourists didn’t bother us, they passed unnoticed. We were a sizable group, almost a crowd, of executives, businessmen, journalists, politicians, and high public officials.
We had our favorite dishes, enjoying that snobbism whereby maitre d’s, waiters, and sommeliers knew our tastes, and we knew them by name. We were all aware that whenever a table was reserved in advance, the secret service placed microphones to record our conversations, and this struck us as funny.
/> For years I held conversations in that place with future Argentine presidents as well as ex-presidents, with ministers and ex-ministers. I’d been practicing political journalism since 1946, and had come to that restaurant the first time as the guest of a politician. Now, head of a newspaper, I was the one who did the inviting.
Greetings were exchanged from table to table. I often saw high government officials greeting, in turn, civilians and military who were conspiring to overthrow that particular government. Sometimes people having lunch at one table wound up having coffee and liqueur with members of another table.
Diplomats came to ask questions, politicians to get information, journalists to gather news, the military to make contacts, corporate managers to do public relations with the present or future power.
That near-frivolous climate lasted for years, based on some of those slogans Argentines like to quote of themselves: “God is Argentine. Nothing will happen here.” “As long as bulls don’t turn homosexual, the Argentine economy will flourish.” But with the growth of rightist and leftist violence, the climate was changing. Our group began suffering some temporary casualties due to kidnappings and permanent casualties due to assassinations. We also missed those who had decided to live abroad. “Abroad” generally meant merely taking up residence in the beautiful beach resort of Punta del Este on the Uruguayan coast, barely forty minutes away by plane. We’d see them then on weekends or in the summer. But the fact is that during those years of 1972 through 1976, the participants began experiencing certain uncustomary worries and fears. Argentine reality ceased to have that air of gratuitous generosity, and we were overtaken by a constant uneasiness that we’d noticed among Europeans who had arrived in Buenos Aires shortly after World War II.
At one of these lunches, a few weeks after the fall of Isabel Peron, I met an officer of the Argentine navy. A common friend thought it necessary for us to speak to one another, and subsequently referred to our meeting as a dialogue between executioner and prospective suicide. It was assumed at that point, and I accepted it, that I was the suicide. Now, I’m not so sure.
Like many of the military of that period, he had an almost visceral hatred of the Peronist urban guerrillas. A political approach to the problem was hard for the military, even impossible, for on top of everything else their pride was wounded. The mere notion that the guerrillas wanted to beat them on the field of armed battle was more than they could tolerate. And though this was not the first time that the Argentine armed forces had taken power by overthrowing a popularly elected government, there had never been such systemized hatred. After all, the military had assumed power by dislodging elected governments in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and now in 1976. This man, between forty and forty-five years of age, undoubtedly had begun his career at the age of thirteen in the Naval Academy and later joined the service, all those years witnessing his teachers, then his commanders, then himself, participate in the staging of military coups. And he himself could verify that never had such hatred existed in his ranks, nor such pleasure in the hatred.
All my efforts to steer the conversation toward an analysis of long- and short-term political measures that would benefit the country clashed with this conviction of the inevitable hatred and the need for extermination.
Barely forty-eight hours earlier, it had been discovered accidentally that the food destined for a group of officers in a military building had been poisoned. Had the lunch, which was canceled at the last minute, taken place, twelve high-ranking officials would certainly have died.
“What would you do, Timerman, if the culprits were arrested?”
“It was obviously the guerrillas. I’d submit them to military law and aim for a public trial, inviting journalists and foreign jurists to attend.”
“For what purpose?”
“During the trial, the motives and methods of leftist subversion would inevitably emerge. Both the political hysteria of subversion and the dichotomy between their alleged aims and their methods would be clearly exposed. The whole muddle of improvised ideas that represents the guerrillas’ pattern of thinking would be exposed, stripped of the romanticism given it by gossip, its clandestine nature and presumed martyrdom. Argentina, from an internal point of view, would benefit from such a political and judicial process, a political clarification that hasn’t yet taken place. The political defeat of subversion is as important as its military defeat. Applying legal methods to repression eliminates one of the major elements exploited by subversion: the illegal nature of repression. As for the outside world, only legality can be acceptable to them. A government that adopts legal methods of repressing violence prevents the guerrillas from finding circumstantial allies among democratic men who are unable to accept the use of methods that inevitably recall those of Hitler, Stalin, or Idi Amin.”
“But, Timerman, don’t you understand that applying legal methods is equivalent to the death sentence? Those involved in the poisoning were soldiers. They’re subject to the Code of Military Justice. They tried to kill their superiors. That’s clear.”
“I know. It’s hard, but it’s acceptable.”
“So you’d be willing to accept the death sentence for those people?”
“Yes, I’d accept it. I do accept it.”
“Fine. Well, you can be happy—they’ve already been executed.”
“Without trial, defense, or anyone’s knowledge?”
“Had we followed the method you advise, we would have had to delay their execution after they’d been sentenced to death.”
“Why?”
“Because the Pope would have intervened.”
“Possibly, but it’s preferable to reject a petition from the Pope rather than mar the entire political process with a flagrant, bloody illegality that jeopardizes it in the future. All that you’d be accomplishing, once this phase is over, is a resurgence of vengeance and violence. The seeds of future violence are being planted.”
“You’re a Jew and don’t understand that we can’t deny a petition from the Holy Father.”
“But the Pope would agree to a life sentence. ...”
“And we’d be allowing a twenty-year-old terrorist to remain alive and maybe receive amnesty in ten to fifteen years when a Parliament in this country might pass amnesty laws. Imagine, he’d be only thirty or thirty-five, the age of a good military or political leader, with the added appeal of having been a martyr in his youth.”
“That’s why a political defeat is necessary, to create the conditions for democratic coexistence, to enable the majority of youth to seek their symbols elsewhere.”
“But if we exterminate them all, there’ll be fear for several generations.”
“What do you mean by all?”
“All... about twenty thousand people. And their relatives, too—they must be eradicated—and also those who remember their names.”
“And what makes you think that the Pope will not protest such repression? Many governments, political leaders, trade union leaders, and scientists throughout the world are already doing so. ...”
“Not a trace or witness will remain.”
“That’s what Hitler attempted in his Night and Fog policy. Sending to their death, reducing to ashes and smoke, those he’d already stripped of any human trace or identity. Germany paid for each and every one of them. And is still paying, with a nation that has remained divided.”
“Hitler lost the war. We will win.”
Entire families disappeared. The bodies were covered with cement and thrown to the bottom of the river. The Plata River, the Parana River. Sometimes the cement was badly applied, and corpses would wash up along the Argentine and Uruguayan coasts. A mother recognized her fifteen-year-old son, an Argentine, who appeared on the Uruguayan coast. But that was an accident—the corpses usually vanished forever.
The corpses were thrown into old cemeteries under existing graves. Never to be found.
The corpses were heaved into the middle of the sea from helicopters.
The corpses were dismembered and burned.
Small children were turned over to grandparents when there was mercy. Or presented to childless families. Or sold to childless families. Or taken to Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, and given to childless families.
The people who participated in these procedures were generally transferred after a time to other regions or duties. The places where massacres took place were altered. Old buildings were demolished, their sites converted into public gardens or sold so that apartment houses could go up quickly. New buildings were converted to other uses.
Night and Fog.
Yet even amid victory the Argentine military discovered that everything was known. And that is the chief advantage they’ve handed the guerrillas and terrorism: an acknowledgment of terrorist irrationality as a policy, and the fact that their own irrationality exceeds that of their opponents.
The guerrillas responded with equal ferocity, though fewer resources, whereby everything was reduced to a confrontation of resources rather than a battle in which one political concept challenged another, one set of morals was pitted against another. The guerrilla force placed bombs in military lecture halls, in public dining rooms. But it could not compete. Yet in the ideological and moral realm it remained undefeated, and still wields the irrationality of repression, the abuse of power, the illegality of methods. That is its charter for the future.
No, there was no Night and Fog policy, nor will there be.
What there was, from the start, was the great silence, which appears in every civilized country that passively accepts the inevitability of violence, and then the fear that suddenly befalls it. That silence which can transform any nation into an accomplice.
That silence which existed in Germany, when even many well-intentioned individuals assumed that everything would return to normal once Hitler finished with the Communists and Jews. Or when the Russians assumed that everything would return to normal once Stalin eliminated the Trotskyites.
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