The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  The immediate result of the National Security Doctrine was ten military coups in Latin America between 1961 and 1964 against governments bent upon reform. The CIA abetted three more against elected civilian governments: Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973). Latin armies supported the status quo, opposition was subversion, and “irregular warfare” was the strategy against subversivos, the internal enemy considered communist. U.S. trainers and advisors directed the transformation of the continent’s regular armies into counterinsurgency forces.

  “Communist,” however, was a profoundly elastic term. It included anyone agitating for change. U.S. military manuals show that popular movements—students, labor—and public political demonstrations were considered communist-inspired. U.S. Army and CIA instructors taught how to use pain in interrogations and to weaken prisoners’ resistance by threatening their families. The manuals taught methods of assassination. As happened during the Reich, organizations that might have protested the brutality were dismantled one by one, first communists, then political parties from liberal to conservative, labor and student federations, courts and legislatures, and the independent press.

  Hundreds of faith-inspired individuals died for denouncing the Latin American violence. Others, including churchmen, supported armed forces claiming that they were doing God’s work against communism. By the 1970s, armies presented themselves as crusaders in a holy war, the only instrument capable of securing national survival in the face of the Soviet Communist threat. Where the institutional Church lined up with the strongmen, the dream of Christianized fascism held by some during World War II finally came to pass—in Latin America.

  Some key civilians and former military personnel participated in “anti-insurgency” through the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a militant global organization led after 1980 by Major General John Singlaub. His career had begun with the OSS and continued in South Korea, where he was chief of staff of both U.S. Army and UN forces. WACL members from Mexico to Argentina included former Nazi collaborators, neo-Nazis, and Central American death squad leaders. The men (they were exclusively men) who attended regular meetings in Latin America learned from each other by sharing experiences and techniques against the common enemy, subversivos. In the 1980s, President Reagan named WACL members as ambassadors to Guatemala, the Bahamas, and Costa Rica and sent congratulations to a San Diego conference with “best wishes for future success.”

  What fright the face of fascism causes!

  They carry out their plans with such precision.

  —VÍCTOR JARA, “Estadio Chile”

  In Argentina and Chile, people often speak of the Cold War dictatorships in language that calls up World War II: Nazi, Holocaust, genocide.

  In a Buenos Aires café, a history professor who belonged to a Perónist teachers’ group in the 1970s spoke about having to cull her books. “Sometimes I wonder why I survived and others disappeared,” she said. “My father-in-law survived Auschwitz. When I asked him how, he said, ‘Puro azar.’” Pure chance. “I think that’s why I’m here, puro azar.”

  An employee at the La Chacarita cemetery in Buenos Aires showed me tombs of the famous—the aviator Jorge Newbery, the tango icon Carlos Gardel, Juan Perón (his remains were transferred after political vandals raided the grave and cut off Perón’s hands). “Of course there are no remains here of those who died in our Holocaust,” she said, referring to the disappeared.

  Even the word “genocide” takes on a particular life in Latin America. Perpetrators of a range of human rights crimes are called genocidios.

  Such words have precise legal meanings that some experts say do not perfectly fit the Latin violence. But coming from the lips of the persons I was meeting, they stood for the worst experiences a people could have.

  Echoes of World War II sounded especially sharp when I heard the term “concentration camp.” We associate it with Nazi death camps, but it also described other kinds of incarceration, such as at Crystal City in Texas, U.S. camps in Panama, or Camp Algiers where Latin American Jews were held in Louisiana. Those in Chile and Argentina, however, were death camps.

  In Chile, thousands captured in sweeps immediately after the coup were dragged to soccer stadiums in Santiago where they went through physical and psychological torture, like false firing squads. Victor Jara, the internationally renowned folk singer and activist, sang to keep up the spirits of fellow prisoners in the Estadio Chile until guards recognized him. For three days they beat him in a locker room, breaking more than fifty bones, before riddling his body with gunfire and dumping him with other corpses outside a cemetery.

  “Anyone who sees us will know what fascism really means for our family,” Jara’s British-born widow Joan told an interviewer. “Our daughters will never be the same people.”

  High-ranking officials such as Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to the United States and foreign minister, were taken to Dawson Island, a frigid speck in the Straits of Magellan. Letelier was among thousands who died in Operation Condor, the secret 1970s network of intelligence services of South American countries that shared information and eliminated each other’s enemies as they killed their own people, even reaching into Europe and the United States. Released from prison on condition he leave Chile, Letelier, an economist, went to Washington. A Condor agent placed a bomb on Letelier’s car that exploded as he rounded Sheridan Circle on September 21, 1976, killing him and an American colleague, Ronni Moffitt.

  The United States was complicit in Condor’s operation. For instance, to communicate secretly with each other, the Condor chapters used an encrypted system through a U.S. communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone that covered all of Latin America.

  * * *

  The camp at Dawson Island was reputedly designed by the Nazi war criminal Walter Rauff. Another Nazi veteran, former corporal and army nurse Paul Schaefer, linked the repressive methods of the Reich with the New World in a bizarre and ghoulish forced-labor camp he founded in 1961 called Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony).

  “They thought they would build a place where they would do good works and live like good Christians,” Horst Schaffrick told a London newspaper about his parents Helmut and Emi, who sold their house in Germany and gave the money to Schaefer on the promise of a new life in Chile. “They found nothing but slavery and suffering.”

  Acting as an evangelical preacher, Schaefer controlled the colony with terror, public “confessions,” sedatives, and sexual abuse of children who were separated from their parents. His huge, isolated farm, where all but his favorites were obliged to work, was surrounded by barbed wire and sensors hidden among bushes to prevent escape. German colonies, with German-style architecture and use of the German language, are not uncommon in the area, so Colonia Dignidad raised less suspicion than it might elsewhere. Schaefer befriended local landowners from the oligarch class that supported Pinochet. Authorities permitted him to run a state within the state.

  During the dictatorship, Schaefer gave the DINA free rein to import captives and torture them at Colonia Dignidad. Of about 350 prisoners brought to the Colonia, half died there. At times, Schaefer participated. Samuel Fuenzalida, a nineteen-year-old guard based at DINA’s Villa Grimaldi site in the winter of 1974, testified that he accompanied “a German” to the Colonia with a prisoner. After several hours, Schaefer suddenly appeared from “a kind of secret door” with a black German shepherd. “‘Fertig,’ he said. It was a word that I’ve never forgotten. Fertig. It means it’s over, it’s done. And I [understood] that … the prisoner was dead.”

  In 2005, Paul Schaefer was found guilty of sexually abusing children, and he died in jail at age eighty-eight. Today Colonia Dignidad has become Villa Baviera, a tourist destination where residents—including some who lived with Schaefer—are staff. German meals are served, Bavarian music piped from speakers. It is available for rent as a wedding venue.

  * * *

  Many places in Latin America where Cold War massacres occurred or
men and women disappeared are memorialized respectfully, just as the killing places of World War II are marked by stones or engraved tablets or made venues for tours. I have always left such sites feeling angry with the perpetrators who caused the pain and deaths, and sad. There has been one exception: Villa Grimaldi outside Santiago.

  Villa Grimaldi’s grassy grounds and a restaurant called “Paradise” were a gathering place for the best and brightest of Allende’s Popular Front government, a place to relax, to hammer out plans. In 1974, when Pinochet’s intelligence apparatus launched the selective repression phase of state terror, homing in on opponents one group at a time, Villa Grimaldi became one of the DINA’s foremost torture centers.

  Alberto Rodriguez, a professor of pedagogical psychology, is also the vice president of an association that developed Villa Grimaldi as a garden-like destination where the public might come and see where the worst of human behavior once displayed itself. With local members of base Christian communities, they wrestled the land in the 1990s from the intelligence service, which had been trying to cover up what happened there by breaking the site into lots for a housing development. They restored buildings and installed explanatory plaques, working to preserve history, educate the public, and honor the forty-five hundred persons who entered Villa Grimaldi’s walls through a heavy wooden door to be tortured and often killed. “Everyone who survived remembers the sound of that door closing,” said Rodriguez, who asked me to call him by his nickname, Beto.

  Noisy green parrots flew from one lush araucaria tree to another, the scent from a garden of roses wafted through the air. I remarked on the beauty of a place that had seen such horror. “We live with this contradiction,” he said.

  Some survivors, said Beto, remember the scent of the roses in the midst of their torture. Others perfectly recall the design and color of the tiles on which we walked—they could be seen under the lower part of a blindfold. Beto opened the slim door of a replica of a windowless cell. With my arms extended I could not turn around. Thirty-nine square inches of floor space for three to five prisoners. When a captive returned from being tortured, the others would stand to give him or her room to lie upon the floor, diagonally corner to corner. “They stroked him, called him by his name,” Beto said. (On entry to such camps, guards called persons by numbers.) “Imagine the compassion.”

  Beto Rodriguez was telling me that a place that brought out the worst in man also brought out the best. On Good Fridays, hundreds, including many young people, come in procession to remember the dead and survivors and to demand justice in legal cases. They pass a monument inscribed with captives’ names, called the Wall of Life.

  Beto is easygoing and serious at once. To him, it seemed, Villa Grimaldi was not only a torture site but also a monument to resistance. His concept of Villa Grimaldi, indeed the spirit behind its transformation into a memorial, was one of admiration for those who paid the ultimate price for their beliefs. He had spent a lifetime thinking about it, and his view of things made it possible for me, eventually, to walk away feeling at peace, not depressed. He could not have greater authority on the subject.

  “My mother died here,” he said.

  He saw the look on my face and added quickly, “But coming does not upset me.”

  “Look, I was detained too—I was only six months old,” he said, and smiled, moving the conversation to the plane of dispensing information.

  Beto’s mother and father, Catalina and Rolando, were political activists and adherents to liberation theology that embraced the Church’s “preferential option for the poor.” At the intelligence agency headquarters, Catalina, age twenty-nine, was able to give the baby Beto to his grandmother before Catalina was brought to Villa Grimaldi, where she was tortured along with her father—Beto’s grandfather—and other relatives. Witnesses said on the night of November 18, 1975, they heard agents call for boiling oil to pour down the captives’ throats. Later they were found dead.

  Beto’s father and mother had pledged to each other that if one fell, the other would continue in the struggle. Beto’s father Rolando refused to leave the country. “His friends said they tried to convince him, saying, ‘Think of Beto, think of your son,’” Beto told me. But his father said, “I’m thinking of all the Betos of the world.” DINA agents found Rolando Rodriguez and another activist on October 20, 1976, and killed them.

  In a small, climate-controlled building, we looked at iron lengths pulled up from the sea—pieces of train rails. DINA agents tied bodies to the rails and army pilots dropped them into the Pacific where currents carried them away. On September 12, 1976, however, the tortured body of Marta Ugarte, the Communist Party education delegate in Allende’s government, washed up on a Chilean beach, having become separated from the rail used to weight it, a discovery that served to corroborate the regime’s system of disposal.

  We passed an empty swimming pool. When DINA occupied the Villa, officers brought their families to party and splash, as prisoners were being abused nearby. I thought back to my visit at the ESMA in Buenos Aires, attached to the home of the base commander, where during the time it was used as a torture center an officer threw a quinceañera, a fifteenth birthday party, for his daughter and guests.

  Beto said it did not faze him to make the rounds at Villa Grimaldi. “Why?” I had to ask. “Why do you do this?”

  He repeated the pact his parents made to each other. “If one falls, the other carries on.”

  Could totalitarian systems return to the Americas? “I cannot guarantee it would never happen again,” he said. All people have to do is “do nothing.” He repeated something I have heard over and again in these latitudes.

  People say they didn’t see what was happening, but the truth is they looked away. To say they didn’t know is a lie.

  Overhead, parrots squawked and flew into the piney araucaria trees; a couple of bats and the first night birds flew out to catch insects above the branches. In the changing light, the brilliant pink bougainvillea alongside the dread door of death caught the sun’s rays and seemed to hold them for a moment. I noticed the door was chained shut, which turned out to be a symbol of determined hope. Beto said the key was in safekeeping, so no one could walk through again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deep appreciation goes to very special women who gave me support and posada during the years it took to report and write this book: June Erlick; Rasa Gustaitis; Nancy McGirr; Elissa Miller; Jean Molesky-Poz; Lucia Newman. Thank you to my agent Andy Ross who remained faithful and pushy throughout, and to my wonderful editor Elisabeth Dyssegaard and the skillful staff at St. Martin’s Press. Besides those I interviewed for these chapters, individuals in many countries contributed to the book, and I was nurtured by their enthusiasm for the idea of exploring a largely hidden chapter in the history of Latin America. Thank you, Maria Dolores Albiac; Marion Archibald and Russ Archibald; Adelfo Cecchelli and Margarete Bunje Cecchelli; Berlin Juarez; Susana Kaiser; Christine Kim; Rosalin Kleman de Mata; Ronnie Lovler; Andrea Gandolfi; Bernardo Mendez Lugo; Maxine Lowy; James McCarville and Haydee McCarville; Jorge Mario Martinez; Charles Munnell; Marco Palacios; H. Glenn Penny; Mario Pereira; Craig Pyes; Frank Viviano; Regina Wagner; Bill Yenne.

  I could not have written The Tango War without one of the greatest American institutions, the public library, especially the San Francisco Public Library system. Other groups and institutions whose staffs I thank in particular are Arquivo Histórico José Ferreira da Silva, Blumenau; Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina; Bletchley Park; Brazilian Military Cemetery of Pistoia; “Carlos Chiyoteru Hiraoka” Museum of Japanese Immigration to Peru; Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica; Curitiba Museu do Expedicionário; Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos ex-Esma; Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum; Fundação Cultural de Blumenau; German American Internee Coalition; Gruppo di Studi “Gente di Gaggio”; Hemeroteca Nacional de Guatemala; Historical Archive of Joinville; Londres 38, Espacio de Memorias; Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution and Peace; Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project; Marc Chagall Jewish Cultural Institute; Mechanics’ Institute Library San Francisco; Merano Jewish Museum; Museo Iola di Montese; Museu Histörico da Imigração Japonesa do Brasil; Museu Pomerano-Centro Cultural de Pomerode; Museum of Memory, Santiago; National Archives, College Park; National Japanese American Historical Society, San Francisco; the Rockefeller Archive Center; SS Jeremiah O’Brien Liberty Ship Memorial; St. Frediano Historical Collection, Sommocolonia; Centro de Documentación e Investigación Judío de México, A.C.; Royal Geographic Society, London.

  Robert DeGaetano and our daughter Maria Angelica DeGaetano have my deepest gratitude, not only for their own intellectual contributions to these pages but also for the many ways large and small they sustained me in these years. I cannot thank them enough.

  SOURCES

  1. THE FIGHT FOR SOUTHERN SKIES

  BOOKS

  Conn, Stetson, and Byron Fairchild. The Western Hemisphere. Vol. 1, The Framework of Hemisphere Defense. United States Army in World War II. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1960.

  Corn, Joseph J. The Winged Gospel. London: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  Daley, Robert. An American Saga: Juan Trippe and His Pan Am Empire. New York: Random House, 1980.

  Dobson, Alan P. FDR and Civil Aviation: Flying Strong, Flying Free. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

  Espiniella, Fernando. El tango y la aviación argentina. Buenos Aires: Editorial Dunken, 2012.

  Hilton, Stanley E. Hitler’s Secret War in South America, 1939–1945: German Military Espionage and Allied Counterespionage in Brazil. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.