The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  After the war Erich Priebke, the SS officer who presided over the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, lived a full life for fifty years in a city in the foothills of the Andes, about a thousand miles southwest of Buenos Aires. Priebke arrived with his wife and two sons at a ski and vacation destination, Bariloche, in 1948. Long settled by Germans and Austrians, Bariloche looks as if it belongs in Bavaria, with woody alpine architecture and vistas of tall mountains. Priebke ran a German deli and served as director of the German school and chairman of the cultural association.

  This cozy state of affairs came to an abrupt end in 1994 when an ABC-TV team, following a tip from the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center, pinned down Priebke’s whereabouts. The network flew journalist Sam Donaldson in with his crew, posing as ski enthusiasts. On a Bariloche city street, Donaldson identified himself to Priebke and staged a classic ambush interview. “Oh my,” said Priebke, confronted about the Italian massacre. “At that time an order was an order.”

  Priebke was extradited to Italy, convicted in 1996 for the Ardeatine massacre, and placed under house arrest. He lived for seventeen years in an apartment that belonged to his lawyer, dying in 2013 at age one hundred. Neither Argentina nor Priebke’s German hometown wanted his remains. The papal vicar for the Holy City forbade any priest in Rome to celebrate a funeral Mass; the mayor and the police chief ruled out a public ceremony.

  An ultra-traditionalist Catholic order offered to hold a funeral Mass outside Rome at its headquarters south of the city limits. Protesters gathered, mobbing the hearse. A crowd of neo-Nazis fought back. Police managed to carry Priebke’s coffin inside, but the street riot lasted well into the night, and the service was canceled. Authorities buried Priebke in a secret location. It was the only way, they said, to prevent his resting place from becoming a pilgrimage site for modern fascists.

  Walter Rauff’s 1949 voyage from Milan landed in Ecuador, from which he moved to Argentina and finally to Chile. There he worked for the West German Federal Intelligence Service and as an advisor to dictator General Augusto Pinochet’s secret police. He died of a heart attack at age seventy-eight in 1984.

  A wreath with a swastika lay at the church door the night of Rauff’s wake. The next morning, his coffin was brought to the general cemetery in Santiago. Two hundred mourners attended the funeral. When Rauff’s family left, five men stayed behind at the grave to raise their arms in the Nazi salute.

  14.

  CONNECTIONS, THE COLD WAR

  War once begun has few limits in time or space, as these chapters show. During the years in which I examined the era of World War II in Latin America, I often thought of later wars I covered as a journalist in Mexico and Central America, and of the South American Cold War dictatorships. Some four hundred thousand persons died or disappeared in political violence in Latin American countries in the 1970s and 1980s, most of them civilians, almost all at the hands of militarized governments supported by the United States.

  The fascists of Europe possessed characteristics in common with the authoritarians of Latin America. They defined groups as internal enemies, “the enemy within.” They tortured individuals to get information, for punishment, or for the pleasure of the torturers, and they tried to hide crimes of mass killings. They stole babies. They “concentrated” undesirables in camps, and counted on collaboration from professionals—medics, psychiatrists. Hitler’s secret “Night and Fog” decree (Nacht-und-Nebel-Erlass) of 1941, which ordered resisters of the Reich to be taken clandestinely and eliminated without a trace—as if swallowed by “night and fog”—prefigured the process that created thousands of Latin Americans disappeared by the 1980s, the desaparecidos.

  I wondered whether the horrors of World War II were connected to the spasms of terror that shook Latin states thirty years later. Or do tyrannies simply have similarities that mirror each other? Perhaps there is such a thing as a cycle of violence that inevitably repeats itself, with shared characteristics, erupting here then erupting there, never to be completely extinguished?

  I arrived at no definitive answers to these questions. But I met individuals who considered them in thoughtful ways, including a torture survivor, a forensic anthropologist, a pedagogical psychiatry educator, and a physician whose lifetime spanned Hitler’s Reich and New World fascism. Simply to listen to Gunter Seelmann, eighty-five, the physician, was to feel a connection between the tyrannies.

  On the night of November 9, 1938, in Aachen, Germany, seven-year-old Gunter was sleeping in his grandmother’s bed. Above was the attic from which he had watched the sleek silver Graf Zeppelin glide through the sky. Below was the small factory where his father made bedding and the storefront where the products were sold.

  At some moment he awoke to shouting, the sound of glass shattering. His father’s shop windows were being smashed. Later, those hours would have a name: Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass. Gunter’s father and uncle were taken to a work camp, Buchenwald.

  In midmorning, his grandmother walked Gunter through streets to the place where their synagogue had stood the day before. “I saw the smoke, still rising from the ruins,” he said. “I will never forget it.”

  Gunter’s father was released but never spoke to him of Buchenwald. Only twice did his son see him show deep emotion: once on the train platform as the family left for exile, and again later in Chile when he received a package from his longtime friend from Aachen, Otto Frank. Inside was a copy of a diary written by Frank’s daughter Anne, one of three thousand that he had printed in 1947 in hope that others might read her story.

  Relatives of the Seelmann family stayed behind in Germany and perished. In Concepción, Chile, about 250 miles south of Santiago, Gunter learned Spanish, studied medicine, and married a dynamic nursing educator, Hanni Grunpeter, whose Czech Jewish family had fled Europe, too.

  In 1970, when physician and former minister of health Salvador Allende became the first Marxist in history to be elected president of a democratic country, Gunter was the head of a pediatric hospital. At the time, Chile had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. “It is not possible to bring health and education to a population with poor nutrition, dressed in rags and who work in a landscape of merciless exploitation,” Allende had written. Gunter and Hanni agreed, and took posts in the new administration.

  Allende angered the international business community by nationalizing production of Chile’s major resource, copper, as well as the telephone system, both American owned. He upset the land-based oligarchy by introducing land reform in an attempt to feed the country—much of the best land had lain fallow or was held for speculation.

  Washington funded the opposition. In 1970, a CIA coup plot failed. Nixon’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger called the voters who elected Allende “irresponsible,” explaining that “the issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

  On the morning of September 11, 1973, forces commanded by General Augusto Pinochet surrounded the presidential palace, La Moneda, symbol of South America’s longest-running democracy. Allende refused to surrender, citing his constitutional duty. He addressed the nation by radio in farewell.

  Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk …

  Helicopter gunships assaulted La Moneda and Chilean Air Force jets bombed the palace until Pinochet’s troops swooped inside around 2:30 in the afternoon. Allende had committed suicide.

  Soldiers rolled up in a van before Gunter’s house and drove him to a transport that took him to a concentration camp on an island in Concepción Bay. He became one of more than 30,000 persons imprisoned and abused by the Pinochet regime in the next seventeen years, at least 2,279 of them executed by the state. (Twenty-one of those killed, noted Gunter, were doctors.)

  For eight months, Gunter went through interrogations, being “treated not very well,” he said blandly, disinviting further questions about his time on the island. Hel
mut Frenz, a Lutheran clergyman, intervened for him with a German diplomat, saying, “If the German fascists didn’t kill him, the Chilean fascists will kill him.” Gunter and his family accepted exile in Germany, “the last place I wanted to go,” he said, where he remained until 1985.

  At his house in Santiago in 2017, sitting tall in a chair, Gunter inscribed a book and handed it to me, his Political Memories. “I was much younger,” he said, pointing to the cover, where he stands looking handsome and serious to the left of a seated Allende during a municipal electoral campaign.

  On the back cover are printed his words, “History does not repeat itself and no one wants it to.” Nevertheless, Gunter compared the Nazi and Chilean intelligence systems to each other, both “very good, with unions, parties, and organizations successfully infiltrated.” The Chilean National Intelligence Directorate, called the DINA for its initials in Spanish, became Pinochet’s feared secret police. Sometimes the DINA is called Chile’s Gestapo.

  In Europe, Jews in the millions were eliminated because they had been born Jews, not because of their actions or associations as people were in Chile. “The killing of the Shoah was industrialized,” Gunter said. He sat back and seemed to ponder. Nevertheless, he said, “the ideologies were the same; they tried to establish fascism here, taking all the decisions over the lives of persons.”

  Night had fallen, and with his long view of history, Gunter Seelmann worried about the present. “We are in a very critical moment now, authoritarian regimes again are looking for enemies.

  “It seems like a cycle,” he said. “A cycle of dictatorships and the desire for power by war. Sometimes men have to demonstrate the bestial side of themselves.”

  * * *

  In Argentina Ana Maria Careaga, a torture survivor, told me she believes that the “beast in human nature” wreaks havoc if ordinary people deny the signs of its emergence, or if they deny its existence once it has seized power over society. Ana Maria was sixteen years old and four months pregnant on June 13, 1977, when soldiers pulled a black hood over her head and delivered her to the Athletic Club in Buenos Aires, one of three hundred torture sites under the dictatorship. She was blindfolded around the clock, hung from her arms and legs, shocked in her private parts with an electric cattle prod.

  Even now, Ana Maria said, some deny the extent and depravity of the violence of those years. Reports and human rights advocates put the number killed during the dictatorship at thirty thousand, but in 2017 President Mauricio Macri said that he “didn’t know” how many died, that the number may be as low as nine thousand. Another government official said, “There was no systematic plan for the disappearance of people.”

  Today Ana Maria Careaga is a psychotherapist in Buenos Aires, with long, dark hair and dark eyes, who keeps a thick volume about Nazi concentration camps on her office shelf. One evening after her last patient had left, she filled our discussion about torturers and the tortured with references to Freud and Hitler and Primo Levi and the phenomenon of surviving. Of fifteen hundred persons to pass through the chambers of the Athletic Club, only about three hundred left the place alive.

  When Ana Maria was captured, her mother Esther Ballestrino de Careaga was a leader of the Mothers of the Disappeared of the Plaza de Mayo, known by the Spanish word for mothers, Madres. Esther Careaga cofounded the Madres in 1976 when security forces kidnapped two of her sons and she met other mothers searching for their children.

  To denounce Ana Maria’s kidnapping, a delegation of the women went to the office of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, not to government-controlled papers where they assumed a notice would not see print. The Argentine journalist Uki Goñi told me that “the Mothers of the Disappeared used to come into the office in a group. Sometimes Esther would then come back alone and talk, and sometimes I would just hold her hand.”

  Esther Careaga held a PhD in chemistry and worked in a laboratory where she supervised a young assistant, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who later became a Jesuit priest. In 2013, Bergoglio became Pope Francis. “I remember her as a great woman,” Francis told two journalists who published a book of “conversations” with him. “She taught me the seriousness of the work.” They stayed friends. Careaga showed him that Marxists could be “good people.” During the dictatorship, however, Argentines could be condemned for the books they read. When Ana Maria disappeared, Esther called Father Bergoglio to administer last rites to a relative at her house, but it was a ruse. When he arrived, she begged him to take away the family’s books about Marxism and communism. He did.

  After four months in captivity, Ana Maria Careaga was freed, and the family flew to Sweden. Soon, however, Esther Careaga, then fifty-nine, bought a ticket to return.

  “Why have you come back?” Uki Goñi asked the first time he saw her again. She replied, “There are other children who remain disappeared, other mothers still looking.”

  Shortly before Christmas, Ana Maria called to tell her mother the happy news that her baby boy had been born healthy. But Esther wasn’t there.

  Security forces had captured her with five other Madres and two French nuns and brought them to the Naval Mechanics Training School, an elite center on green acres in the center of Buenos Aires. As cadets and officers went about classes, guards pushed the women through a door attached to the base commander’s private residence and into a basement where data about their personal characteristics was neatly recorded on official forms. They climbed flights of stairs to take places on the floor among other prisoners in a stinking, darkened room. Any pregnant women captives around them who had reached their seventh month were moved to a smaller room with pale walls where they received a glass of milk and a piece of fruit every day, besides the prisoners’ gruel. When they gave birth, attended by doctors and nurses, the new mothers were killed and the babies trafficked through officers and their friends.

  Ana Maria said she lived in a state of “permanent uncertainty” after her mother disappeared. To deprive loved ones of knowledge about the missing or their fate is a way of inflicting mental punishment on survivors. In Central America, relatives told me a disappearance in the family felt like experiencing a death over and over, a never-healing wound. They longed at least to bury the remains of their dead.

  * * *

  During the Cold War, Latin governments tried to hide murders while pursuing deniability, “the way the Nazis did,” Patricia Bernardi of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team told me. Patricia has been a member since 1984, when the team was founded, and since then has worked all over the world. I had come to know her at a place called Dos Erres, the site of a Guatemalan massacre, where she labored for several days in 1992, much of that time deep in a well where bodies of unarmed peasants killed by the army had been tossed. In Latin America, she said, police and courts denied arrests, denied the existence of the torture centers. The military and secret police also learned from French methods in Algeria and counterinsurgency methods taught at the U.S. School of the Americas.

  In Argentina, prisoners were injected with a soporific and taken to an armed forces aircraft, often a helicopter, in which they were flown over the Atlantic or the River Plate and dropped to their deaths. In 2005, Bernardi’s team exhumed bones buried in a grave marked “unknown” that had initially been found on a beach in late 1977.

  “We saw they were bones of older women,” she said, which was unusual, because desaparecidos were typically under age thirty-five. The cause of death, the scientists determined, was “multiple fractures consistent with a fall from a great height.” With a thumbprint, they made a match: Esther Careaga. Ana Maria accompanied her older sister to confirm the identification of their mother with a DNA test.

  Patricia Bernardi said she was taken aback by the identification of the remains. “Every person is important,” she said. “But here was the president of the Madres.”

  “The torturers were defeated, both the Nazis and the Argentines,” Ana Maria Careaga had told me. They could not hide what they had done, and
“they both failed in the final solution.”

  The next day I visited the former naval school where Ana Maria’s mother had been held, commonly called ESMA for its initials in Spanish. I could not help but think of a visit I once made to Auschwitz. Just as in the Reich, in Argentina clerks obeyed a compulsion for order by maintaining detailed records of the doomed. Doctors and nurses kept the detained well enough for torture and interrogation. An ESMA room used to store goods confiscated from captives, from clothing to furniture to electric fans, reminded me of a mountain of shoes I had seen at Auschwitz, taken from Jews before they were executed. Auschwitz captives were forced to labor, notably at the IG Farben factory to produce artificial rubber; ESMA captives were forced to repair and shine up the confiscated goods for sale to profit the navy and support the torture site.

  “When they took out the Jews for interrogations, they beat them on the way even harder than the rest of us,” Ana Maria said of the Athletic Club. “I could hear the guards playing Hitler’s speeches, loud, while they were torturing them.” Prisoners held elsewhere tell of seeing Nazi swastikas drawn by guards on the walls of torture chambers and along halls, and in one case the Spanish word for “nationalism,” spelled tellingly with a “z,” nazionalismo. Jews were 1 percent of the Argentine population; they accounted for 12 percent of the victims of the self-styled “Western and Christian” regime.

  * * *

  Many Cold War Latin strongmen admired Italian Fascists and Nazis. However, everyone I spoke to in the region told me that the major outside influence on the Cold War regimes was not European fascism but the United States National Security Doctrine, Washington’s strategy to prevent the spread of communism and maintain a “stable” climate for U.S. business.

  In the early 1960s, when the Cuban revolution had succeeded and movements in other countries were challenging sclerotic, oligarchic regimes, President John F. Kennedy called Latin America “the most dangerous area in the world.” At a meeting of journalists and Florida officeholders in 1963, he said, “We … must use every very resource at our command to prevent the establishment of another Cuba in this hemisphere.”