Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number

by Jacobo Timerman

  “And, incidentally, you were doing the terrorists a favor. . . .

  “The country, Mr. President. Anyhow, I’d like to mention that I was the only newspaper publisher who personally signed articles condemning terrorism and accusing terrorist leaders, by name, of specific crimes.”

  “Some people say you did this to conceal your true activities.”

  “That’s a childish statement, Mr. President.”

  “You’re here to answer questions, not give opinions.”

  At a certain historical moment, in a specific geographic place, there are attitudes that are contrary to the nature of things. Why should a professionally competent, informed, and educated journalist have assumed that it was possible in the struggle against left-wing and right-wing terrorism to maintain an independent position, opposed to both and favorable to democracy?

  In Argentina, everyone not directly involved in the struggle was engaged in survival. The political parties, especially; and certainly newspapers. Why should someone who wasn’t attempting to survive fail to arouse suspicion? On more than one occasion, the Minister of the Interior assured me that there would be no conflicts between me and the military government if I ceased printing appeals for habeas corpus. With the exception of the Buenos Aires Herald, every newspaper had by now ceased doing this. It was an easy decision to make, yet impossible. Almost a desirable decision, yet impossible. Printing the appeals for habeas corpus that relatives of the disappeared presented to the courts for information on sons, husbands, and wives was seldom fruitful. Still, the faces of relatives that appeared at La Opinion, plus the absurd conviction that it was possible to recover a human being, plus the need to believe that a newspaper constitutes a powerful institution, precluded any position other than printing those appeals. Otherwise, one would have simply had to tell these people to forget about it, to accept death, that no one could do a thing, and that they should pray. But this was what religion told them. Or, perhaps, to tell them to be patient, which was what politicians told them. Or to tell them that it was best not to create a scandal, for that meant a death sentence, which was what the police told them. Or not to receive them, which was the policy of the other newspapers. Thus, the only remaining alternative was to receive them, print what had to be printed, inform them that instances had occurred of missing people reappearing and that they ought to keep fighting. Or else close down the newspaper.

  The one thing that proved impossible was to shut your eyes.

  More than once my staff and I considered temporary suspension of publication. Or for me and my family perhaps to leave the country, while the staff would gradually modify the nature of the newspaper, converting La Opinion into a more-or-less acceptable vehicle.

  I toyed with these easy, sensible, accessible, soothing notions. To sit down with the Minister of the Interior for coffee with a sense of immunity to danger; to close the newspaper for a while and forget about the daily desperation and that sense of impotence; to go abroad and allow the newspaper to undergo normalization, “naturalization,” adjusting to the naturalness of things. To desist from that vain battle, or that vanity of striving for principles which could only serve as examples, for in fact they had no practical ends. It would all have been so easy, and was so tempting.

  How could a military tribunal comprehend these doubts and fears? How could a military tribunal, a military government, conceive of someone feeling an obligation, the force of an idea, the inevitability of a conviction? How could the Argentine military government of 1976-77 accept the fact that a Jew would sacrifice his economic welfare, his tranquility, for an idea, unless that idea represented some illegitimate agreement, something as unnatural and illegitimate as his own birth, the unnatural circumstances of being a Jew?

  But even earlier, in 1973, when Peronism came to power, during those early months of Hector Campora’s presidency .and the decisive influence of the Montoneros guerrilla groups, how could the Left conceive of a Jew sacrificing his tranquility and income, risking his life to discuss with them their ideology, calling them the lunatic Left, Fascists of the Left, and denouncing their ideas?

  This was utterly suspicious to the extreme Left, the Montoneros, and equally so to the military government.

  What relationship was there between La Opinion's rational approach to Argentine life and the Argentine reality of those years? What were its strategy, motivation, goals, and mandates?

  In looking for an explanation that went beyond the unacceptable notions of democracy, freedom, tolerance, and coexistence, both Left and Right were bound to concur at some point. There had to be some imposed mandate that La Opinion was obeying. The newspaper was obviously not freely electing daily suicide, a dubious flirtation with death.

  Hence La Opinion was an adversary of the Left for being Zionist, an adversary of the military government for being terrorist, an adversary of mass culture for publishing sophisticated writers, an adversary of Christian morality for publishing leftist writers, an adversary of the Left for publishing Soviet dissidents, and an adversary of the family for publishing in its Science Section an article on the sexual habits of young Americans. La Opinion was a supporter of terrorism in opposing a break of relations with Cuba, claiming that this was disadvantageous to Argentina’s international policy; yet it was an adversary of the Left for admonishing Cuba to abandon its policy of exporting revolution and providing both haven and training to terrorists who had escaped from their own countries.

  La Opinion, in those years, was opposed to the natural order of things and refused to accept waiting patiently for that order to be modified, without intervening. It was this continual intervention at every level of life, incurring every risk, probing into the most confidential areas, that made La Opinion a suspect entity, for neither of the two sectors could understand what benefit was in store for the newspaper. And it was hard to acknowledge that there was none. This quest for the potential benefit to that Jew, to that impertinent newspaper, to that declared Zionist, that omnipotent journalist, this quest for the underlying motives behind such irresponsibility, lunacy, audacity, or manifest destiny, was pursued in Argentina by military courts, civil courts, secret terrorist tribunals, politicians, journalists, Jewish community leaders, and Zionist leaders.

  In everyone’s eyes, something inexplicable and suspicious was going on, and there had to be an explanation. In that world of unceasing pathological obsession, who could acknowledge the existence of a limited group of people at La Opinion, the Buenos Aires Herald, and the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights adhering to some of the simplest verities and sentiments, which they refused to discard and which were stronger than fear? Sentiments that prompted certain Christian priests and rabbis, though terrified, to visit prisoners in jails and to search for missing people; that prompted certain lawyers to agree to serve as legal counsel to the families of those who’d disappeared; and certain journalists to publish articles and pray silently that the newspaper might suspend publication before the article left the printing press with their signatures at the bottom.

  How was one to encompass all of this, those dreams of freedom of the press, of democracy and coexistence, of tolerance and liberty? How was one to encapsulate it into the replies given to Colonel Clodoveo Battesti, president of Special War Council No. 2, who upon fulfillment of his high judicial military mission would be appointed executive head of a state television channel wherein life is seen to unfold with infinite humor, grace, beauty, spontaneity, and ease?

  In short, what is there to explain? To Colonel Battesti, nothing. But how to explain to myself those scores and hundreds of articles appealing for mercy for a kidnapped soldier, a missing terrorist, pleading for the lives of the very individuals who wanted to put an end to my own?

  Do I not, I ask myself, wind up being suspect in my own eyes for having undertaken that impossible choice, that permanent vigil of my own despair, experiencing a kind of omnipotence in being the victim? The Victim. Didn’t that hatred of all those who’d caused me to sur
render the best of myself, my courage and sacrifice, didn’t that hatred wind up asserting itself within my fear, leading me at times to believe that perhaps there was indeed some underlying motive, something that had escaped me—some vague guilt hidden behind my principles, my intrusive honesty, my inexplicable humanitarian mission?

  At times I felt like those Jews who wound up being convinced by the Nazis that they were objects of hatred because they were intrinsically hateful objects. At times my hatred became so intolerable that it resembled their need to hate, and even obeyed the logic of their hatred. I was torn by painful fantasies about humanity’s survival and the futility of that survival, while at the same time I’d be sending an open letter to the Argentine president pleading for the life of a missing Uruguayan politician or attempting to explain to the lunatic fringe of the Left that terrorism was alienating the Left from the people, that the people aspired to political struggle rather than terrorism.

  This whole oppressive universe toppling over me and bearing down on my anguish like a gravestone had to be encompassed within a single coherent reply to Colonel Clodoveo Battesti, who a few months after presiding over this court-martial would be devoting himself to decisions as to which chorus singers to use on the next Channel 9 show on Buenos Aires television.

  The members of the War Council, in the course of that fourteen-hour session, traced my entire life—or my presumed life as it emerged in the police reports accumulated under my name during my thirty-year span as a political journalist. That mentality, formed in military institutes which imbue the armed forces with its messianic sense, had already categorized me as a criminal by birth, although they’d unearthed no plausible crime that lent itself to publication under banner headlines in Argentine newspapers eager to prove that my kind of journalism was a romantic, childish fantasy leading only to disaster.

  That totalitarian mentality—proud to have at its mercy this impertinent intellectual, this leftist Zionist, this dreamy adolescent poet—found logical, coherent questions to reveal the high index of my criminality. Their legal adviser, however, a military attorney who’d made his way through university classrooms that were contemptuous of civilians and opposed them as a race, this uniformed attorney advised the court not to press charges that weren’t clearly specified in the anti-subversive laws or the Code of Military Justice.

  The War Council, from the onset of its investigation, realized that the anti-Vietnamese War campaign could not be classified as a criminal act. But still, how could Colonel Clodoveo Battesti refrain from alluding to certain articles in La Opinion as constituting part of the anti-U.S.A. Communist conspiracy?

  No normally acceptable or interpretable code would claim that an article in support of a firm U.S. policy toward General Pinochet, the right-wing leader of Chile, was part of a Marxist-Zionist conspiracy jointly plotted with Washington liberals against Latin American Christian governments. Yet, how could these self-serving officers refrain from the temptation of forcing me to explain those articles, that political line, that alternate support and criticism of the United States? How could they fail to discover in those conflicting aspects of international fact some Satanic combination of forces merging in this Jewish Zionist, leftist, arrogant, suicidal journalist?

  Special War Council No. 2 ruled that there was no existing charge against the aforesaid Jacobo Timerman, that he remained therefore outside their jurisdiction, and that there were no existing grounds for holding him under arrest. This occurred in late September 1977, and was communicated to me on October 13, 1977.

  The interrogations, declarations, and explanations were over. But the government of the armed forces kept me under house arrest two years longer, until September 24, 1979, when for the second time the Supreme Court of Justice declared that it found no grounds for my continued arrest. How could the Supreme Court appraise the army’s conviction that Jacobo Timerman was the Antichrist despite the fact that this was impossible to prove? The Minister of the Interior stated that he was convinced Timerman was a subversive, but had unfortunately been unable to prove it. The army generals met and voted by a broad majority, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, that the accused Timerman ought to remain imprisoned, preferably in a military garrison, and furthermore, that the Supreme Court ought to resign. Only when President Jorge Rafael Videla, under international pressure, threatened to quit if the Supreme Court’s order to release Timerman was not respected, did the army come up with a Solomon-like solution (unaware, perhaps, that Solomon was a Jewish king): it annulled Timerman’s Argentine citizenship, expelled him from the country, and confiscated his goods, without heeding the release order that had been given a second time by the Supreme Court.

  Need one add that Argentine newspapers, jurists, political friends of the government, Jewish community leaders—all those who will one day claim they knew nothing, like the Germans who claimed total unawareness of the existence of concentration camps—congratulated the government for obeying a court ruling and faithfully respecting the majesty of Justice?

  10

  Some ideologues of the Argentine military dictatorship felt that the best means of explaining their own motives and actions was by trying to define the dangers facing Argentina. This method of explaining a goal not by what one desires to obtain or accomplish but by what one desires to avoid is typical of the left-wing and right-wing totalitarian mentalities whose terrorist violence broke out in Argentina. They could never explain what it was that they wished to construct, but were always categorical in terms of what they wished to annihilate.

  One of the most elaborate definitions went as follows: “Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.”

  For any moderately civilized individual, this statement reveals a clear desire to revert to the society of the Middle Ages. It is a form of rejection of modern society, and of attempts to understand the contradictions of the contemporary age. For a totalitarian mind, there are no existing contradictions to justify a pluralist, tolerant society. Nothing exists but enemies or friends.

  For a Jew, the description put forth by a military ideologue as to the nature of Argentina’s main enemies is like the appearance of an ancient ghost, since the figures chosen to illustrate the enemy are three Jews. True, one of the most virulent anti-Semitic tracts was written by Marx himself in his book The Jewish Question. But whereas some fairly civilized Communists feel that this book contains certain erroneous evaluations and must be analyzed in light of the problems of the period when it was written, a right-wing totalitarian sees it merely as proof that Jews sometimes employ contradictory methods to confuse non-Jews and to make them believe that the Jews are divided.

  Some Argentine military sectors do not concur with this argument, but will never admit it for fear they might appear pro-Jewish. Indeed, at various times, they’ve voiced the need to avoid any expression of anti-Semitism, maintaining this as a tactical necessity, however, rather than an ideological position or an expression of principle. Their main argument in favor of avoidance of any suspicion of anti-Semitism invariably has been the need to avoid confrontation with the powerful Jewish community in the United States. These sectors have always been obliged to act with special care to forestall being accused of “weakness before the enemy,” one of the chief anathemas that can befall an Argentine military man, particularly if it stems from his own ranks.

  This group of moderates was largely counterbalanced by the extreme wing of the armed forces, and the policy of repression and extermination during the first four years of the military dictatorship was in the hands of this sector. Its adherents hung pictures of Hitler in the rooms where Jewish political prisoners were interrogated; special tortures were invented for Jewish prisoners; the food allotment to Jewish prisoners in clandestine prisons was reduced; rabbis who dared to go to the
jails to visit Jewish prisoners were humiliated. And, basically, the extremists encouraged and protected books and magazines that contained anti-Semitic literature. Some magazines pronounced that President Jimmy Carter was a Jew and that his real name was Braunstein with the same blend of levity, hatred, and rationalizations used by the Nazis in their claim that Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew.

  This book ... It’s painful... Most of the time I feel paralyzed. I cannot prevent the memories of the tortures from spreading themselves over my daily life, over the long hours that make up a daily life—like a jigsaw puzzle that a neat and careful child spreads piece by piece over the floor of his room. The scenes of beatings, electric shocks, solitary confinement, cold baths in winter, combine themselves into the final image, and the result is always the same: the shout with which my interrogators used to insult me when they were really furious—Jew!

  I try to remake my life, those long empty spaces of daily life, and I spread the pieces out again. I remake the puzzle with new scenes, small new figures, bits I lift out of places close by, from two years, three years ago. And again the result is the insult they shouted with utter pleasure, enjoying it—Jew!

  Again and again the Jew returns to history; to my personal anecdote and to all of history. In the decade of the seventies, in a remote country, the southernmost of all countries, in a nation just 160 years old, in that far country torn by a war between Right and Left, all those who kill push the Jew into the present, and into history. And during those years I saw the Jew trying to understand, to escape, to survive, to hide, to convince, to ask for forgiveness.

  In the decade of the seventies, in a remote country, I saw repeated, promoted, and exploited the scandal of the political Jew, the economic Jew, the journalist Jew, the subversive Jew—with words and ideas that translated into Spanish of the 1970s the same ideas of the corrupt Jew, the erotic Jew, the lying Jew, the cowardly Jew, the traitorous Jew as were expressed in German in the 1930s and 1940s.