The guards possess other privileges that are revealed in these close quarters once you gain a certain measure of freedom and overhear their conversations. Coti Martinez is located in a northern suburb of Buenos Aires that has a night life. The torturers and their officers are entitled to control over prostitution in certain bars, to exploit some of the women, and to enjoy impunity in their protection of secret gambling operators.
Three very beautiful girls are inmates at Coti Martinez and service the guards’ sexual whims. The girls, accused of terrorism, are quite young, between twenty and twenty-two perhaps. They’ve been tortured, violated, and gradually corrupted, out of that need a prisoner experiences of building some sort of life that encompasses a measure of hope, some natural connection with life, some sort of reality besides the flight into madness or suicide. These inmates want to live, and they accept the lives of their torturers rather than resign themselves to the life of the tortured, or of the isolated inmate, that ghost who’s been in a cell for a year and can be heard coughing day and night. Curious relationships are established: one of the girls, the chief s lover, managed to obtain authorization for her father to come and live with her. Both occupy the same cell, and the father wound up being friends with his daughter’s lover. The father is an electrical engineer and attends to all the needs at Coti Martinez, especially those related to lights and the machines used in applying electric shocks. He goes out to do the shopping, brings me an orange, sometimes serves me a piece of meat with my meal.
It’s a world for those who are either resigned or mad. I haven’t the slightest notion what I’m doing here with my baggage of meditation, identification with the Holocaust, predictions on the inevitable future, that inevitable triumph of truth, democracy, human rights. Sometimes I engage the guards on these subjects—and they don’t know what to do. Normally, I would have been beaten for expressing such things, but they lack instructions.
At night, the torture sessions take place, and music is turned on to block out the outcries of those who are being tortured. In the morning, I’m asked if I heard anything. Occasionally, in the midst of a torture session, someone will need a fact, and I will be sent for. When did Lenin say such and such a thing? When did Herzl decide to build a Jewish state in Uganda? Who was Minister of Defense during such and such an Argentine government?
They’re glad when I’m taken away from this place. One of them cracks a joke: Once you're free, you'll order us all killed.
The reason for my removal from this location is an impending visit from Benjamin Gilman, an American congressman who’s taken an interest in my situation. I’m brought to the Government Building where Gilman has an interview with the president of the Republic. I’m warned that my conversation with Gilman will be taped, whereupon I realize that it isn’t me who’s being threatened, but my wife and children. So, there we are in the Government Building in Buenos Aires, with Benjamin Gilman questioning me with his eyes in the presence of an Argentine official, while I try to speak to him with my eyes. Those glances, comprehensible only to those who at some point have had to employ their gaze in like manner, using their eyes in ways for which there are no words, for which adequately explanatory words do not exist. Only glances.
Just as there are no words to conceive of the message in that father’s eyes as he departed from his sons at the hour of torture. The torture of all.
When the Argentine armed forces seized power in March 1976, they had already developed an entire philosophy of repression. As they plunged into full-scale repression, unleashed their madness, and began discovering that that repression in its daily manifestation conformed to the similar picture of other massacres, they realized that the verdict awaiting them would be no different than the verdict previously applied to earlier massacres.
The Argentine military at present perceive the Nuremberg Trials in the Latin American context not as a historic event but as an actual possibility. They still feel justified historically, but foresee the improbability of being pardoned by their contemporaries. They still believe that history will validate their personal destinies, but fear that in their lifetime they may be individually vulnerable.
It’s curious, the extent to which the recent years in Argentina have repeated—in a different geographical context, another culture, another period, another calendar moment— the world of terror, hatred, madness, and delirium that governed the Hitlerian epoch in Germany.
At the approach of the anticipated end of the satanic explosion that had been unleashed in Europe, many German hierarchs sought refuge in mystical explanations of their historic role vis-a-vis mankind. At present, the Argentine military is engaged in attempting to convince mankind that it was the first to confront World War III, the decisive struggle against leftist terrorism.
The Nazis believed that it was their obligation to carry the war to its ultimate lengths, for such methods—regardless of their cruelty—were imposed upon them by the historical destiny they were fulfilling. The members of the Argentine military claim impunity in the unleashing of brutality, insisting that the war against terrorism was imposed upon them, in which case methods matter less than destiny. Cruelty is an accessory mechanism requiring neither justification nor explanation. This common denominator of the existence of horror as one’s voluntary acceptance of an imposed destiny emerged with the same characteristics in Germany in the thirties and in Argentina in the seventies.
In Nazi Germany, the Jews were guilty through birth, the liberals through weakness and corruption, the Communists through ideology. The same equation of guilt proved suitable for the enemy of the Argentine military.
The Nazis’ protest to the world was that their struggle had not been understood. They asked for world understanding regarding their national sacrifice against mankind’s common enemy. The members of the Argentine military are convinced that what they label the anti-Argentine campaign is the sole factor that has prevented the modern world from understanding the service they’re rendering mankind. They hold this “anti-Argentine campaign” responsible for focusing world attention on the tortured, the prisoners, the disappeared, rather than on the fact that Argentina is the ground where terrorism for the first time is being mercilessly defeated.
The Argentine military members, like the German Nazi rulers, have succeeded in reducing opposition to their theories to a minimum within their own land. As in Germany, those individuals who are untouched by repression, violence, and irrationality are happy. As in Germany, they are the majority. And, as in Germany, they enjoy the benefits of an order erected by those who give orders, for those who adjust to the established order.
German Jews, between 1933 and 1938, were convinced that things would improve, and they waited. They loved their homes and habits; they felt that they were German. Argentine Jews, untouched by irrationality, are annoyed when questioned about Jews who have disappeared, about the treatment of Jewish prisoners, the photographs of Hitler in clandestine prisons and barracks. German Jews maintained that it was still possible to resolve the problem; Argentine Jews contend that the experiences taking place do not constitute a policy but are the exception. Episodes of anti-Semitic hostility represent isolated outbursts of feelings among certain military leaders, not a philosophy or even an ideology.
Some German liberals went into hiding during Naziism, a very few; others escaped the country. The majority tried to become faceless in order to survive inside Germany. Argentine liberals are also trying to survive, imagining that the absence of a specific denunciation of the crimes being committed will facilitate a solution of common agreement with other military officials. The result is a complicity, Argentine style, similar to the complicity that prevailed in Germany among those who claimed unawareness of what was happening.
The Germans considered those who denounced Nazi crimes abroad as traitors. The Argentine military consider it anti-Argentine of those who are abroad to signal this incredible phenomenon of a civilized, educated country in the late seventies repeating the same incre
dible universe, the same perversion of human nature as overcame Germany forty years ago.
It is not, therefore, the number of horrors, the lengthy enumeration of crimes committed, the analysis of methods used in combating leftist terrorism, or the elaboration of methods that might have been employed without recourse to state terrorism; it is not the clarification of the role played by state terrorism, nor the perverse, aggressive inclination of the Argentine military toward anti-Semitism that constitutes the key to recent years in Argentina.
Nor is it the analysis and study of that anti-Semitic tendency which was openly displayed in a series of carefully laid scandals against prominent Jews, accusations never confirmed by facts; nor the dedication of Argentine Jewish community leaders to concealing these facts from international public opinion by disguising them as exceptional and isolated situations. Despite the fact that the Argentine military, as in Germany, has seized banks, business firms, jewelry, property, and furnishings belonging to persecuted Jews.
Nor does the key to Argentina, the interesting aspect of the Argentine case, reside in the fact that—as in totalitarian countries—most of the press was able to survive and preferred to do so by allying itself with that anti-Semitic, antidemocratic psychological warfare, that total concealment of crimes, by diverting attention to other realities, feigning an ignorance which at some future point could justify and prove total innocence.
No, in my opinion, the key to the present moment, to that profound mystery, lies elsewhere. How can a nation reproduce in every detail, though employing other forms, in every argument, though employing other words, the same monstrous crimes explicitly condemned and clearly expounded so many years before? That is the Argentine mystery: the fact that the world has been unable to avoid something seemingly destroyed forever in 1945, in the ashes of Berlin, in the gallows of the Nuremberg Trials, and in the United Nations Charter. The fact that, in the 1970s, a nation of no great importance, undergoing an explosion of lustful, murderous drives, has found coexistence with the world at large, without need of ideology and without need of despair. Merely as a bad hangover of that bygone period, and a forewarning that these hangovers still prevail and can recur, time and again, with barely a trace of hope.
Epilogue
The police in the clandestine prisons liked to joke. It was a form of omnipotence that consisted of converting a situation of horror into one of diversion. When a political prisoner was led to the torture chamber, they used to comment among themselves: will he sing an opera or a tango? If scant information was obtained, it was a tango. When it was a Jewish prisoner, the jokes would refer to the gas chambers, to Auschwitz—“We’ll show the Nazis how to do things.” Omnipotence likewise surfaced in the forms of consolation. “Well, don’t worry, you only die once.” And always, seemingly normal forms of humiliation. For example, gathering all the prisoners of a clandestine jail into a single room, throwing one on top of another, the men and women trying to guess their individual fates through some gesture of the guards, all this under the pretext of having to make a general cleanup.
Despite this, whenever someone was being prepared for transfer, his eyes blindfolded, his hands tied behind him, thrown on the ground in back of a car and covered with a blanket, he would have preferred to remain in the clandestine prison. You never knew whether you were being led to an interrogation, torture, death, or another prison where once again you’d have to discover the pathetic mechanisms of survival.
When newspapers began publishing rumors that I was to be transferred to my home and kept under house arrest, the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Buenos Aires were afraid that this decision might be an invitation to extremist sectors of the armed forces to try to liquidate me before the transfer could take place. American diplomats informed my wife that they were considering a scheme whereupon at the moment of my transfer, which would certainly be kept secret, I should declare myself ill, simulate a heart attack or whatever, and request the presence of a well-known doctor. In this way, they could have exact knowledge of the event, could place an ambulance at my wife’s disposal, and would be in a position to control the situation to some degree. This was not necessary, although the transfer to my home possessed all the elements of anguish and terror. .
I had been under arrest for thirty months when the Buenos Aires newspapers began to publish the account. The Supreme Court would order the government to arrange for my release since there was no indictment against me. Although the military tribunal, in September 1977, declared that there were no charges against me and that I was free, I remained under house arrest by order of the military junta. A curious episode occurred. The legal adviser to the Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires claimed that my arrest was not illegal inasmuch as the Supreme Court had not been disobeyed: the Court had ordered my release from the president, but not from the military junta.
Finally, in September 1979, the Supreme Court again convened, and it was assumed that my release would be ordered. When this decision was taken, instead of my wife or attorney being informed, as befits judicial procedure, the government was told of the decision and kept it secret. The generals, in special session, decided that despite the Court order, I would not be released. The Supreme Court threatened to resign. The generals were prepared to arrest the Court. The president of Argentina, General Videla, declared that if the Court resigned, he too would present his resignation. My wife was in Washington working with a group of congressmen who were putting intense pressure on the Argentine government; the Vatican was also investigating the matter—at which point, I underwent the final transfer.
It’s Tuesday morning. The Buenos Aires newspapers report that there’s agitation at army headquarters, and that high-ranking officers are discussing what position to take toward the Supreme Court’s decision to order my release. Meetings of the military junta are being announced. It is said that on Wednesday there will be a definitive meeting at which the generals will put my case to a vote.
It is Tuesday noon, and Rabbi Roberto Graetz, a member of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights, visits me. He now lives in Rio de Janeiro since two attempts have been made on his life in Buenos Aires. He has noticed a considerable increase of policemen around my house, and tells me he had trouble entering. His wife has sent me a cake. They allow him to come into my apartment for five minutes only, then he leaves.
An hour later a high police official arrives. I’ve never seen him before. He’s accompanied by the police chief of the zone in which my house is located. He says he’s going to move me elsewhere, where I’m to sign some papers. I’m to take a bag with some clothing. I refuse, and insist on being told where I’m going, or that my lawyer or rabbi be called. He says that if I don’t go peaceably, I’ll be taken by force. I argue, the telephone rings, he answers and says that he’s leaving now. He hangs up and insists that he’s in a hurry. I’m alone in the apartment and upset because there is no witness to my transfer.
We descend in an elevator filled with policemen and go down to the basement of the building where a private car without any police markings is waiting for us. I’m told to take the back seat. There’s a great display of plainclothes-men. In the car I’m seated alongside a young, elegantly dressed woman. I ask her if she too is a prisoner; she tells me she’s a policewoman. We drive quickly, escorted by several private cars filled with civilians. They try to avoid being recognized.
At the federal security offices I’m informed that I have been stripped of my citizenship and expelled from the country, and will be transported at once to the airport. I argue that this decision is illegal since only a judge can take such a measure, and that in order for it to be valid, sixty days must elapse during which I have the right to appeal. “Appeal from Israel,” I’m told by the Assistant to the Minister of the Interior. So I learn that I’m to go to Israel. I’m handed a passport, which is valid for only two days. Then the Israeli charge d’affaires comes into the room and attaches the visa to my passport. He insists on accompanying me. A brief argumen
t ensues, during which he states that he won’t let me go alone, that he wishes to accompany me to the plane. We all leave the building together. They keep arguing. Israeli security men are waiting on the ground floor, where two automobiles are parked. The atmosphere is extremely tense. A police official indicates that we’ll be going to a heliport since a helicopter will be taking me to the airport, which is thirty kilometers from the city, and that the Israeli official can follow us in his own car.
Once in the heliport, the Israeli security men again insist on accompanying me to the plane. Then a high-ranking official says that no one can join the individuals on my helicopter, but a second helicopter will be escorting us in the event of an attack from land, and the charge d’affaires can go in that one.
We reach the airport, where an Aerolineas Argentinas plane destined for Rome is waiting. We get into the plane along with the airport commander, a patrol of air force soldiers, and the Israeli official—my companions. The individuals escorting me leave, the Israeli diplomat going last, so as to be certain that the door is closed and I remain on the plane. The plane takes off.
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number Page 16