Abstract
This article aims to assess the impact of the 1976–83 dictatorship on the lifeworld of Argentine citizens, as reflected in testimonies and allegations during the oral phase of the 1985 trial of the military commanders responsible for masterminding policies of massive detention, torture and loss of life of thousands in Argentina. The text addresses the sequence of democratic breakdown, military rule, regime collapse and the transition to democracy, with a focus on one of the initial policies of post-transitional justice reported in El Diario del Juicio, a publication selling 250,000 weekly copies between May 1985 and January 1986. After years in which the public order imposed by the military government had been welcomed, tolerated, or ignored by majoritarian sectors, the testimonies and statements at the trial of the armed forces commanders certified the extent of abusive repression and allowed assessing the shifts many citizens experienced in their lifeworld and belated awakening from the narrative of the military government. In spite of the early closure of that initial stage of post-dictatorial justice, the trial managed to project the discourse of human rights onto the center of the public agenda in the transition to democracy.
Keywords
In their determination to end the highly politicized and violent conditions that democratic Argentina experienced in the early 1970s, the armed forces intervened and took state power in March 1976, as they had intervened many times before (in 1930, 1943–45, 1955, 1962, and 1966–73). Once in power, the security forces conducted operations of massive detention and torture in clandestine centers, and murdered thousands of people, making the remains of many of them disappear. After their defeat in the Malvinas-Falkland War in June 1982 and their mismanagement of the economy, the military rulers were compelled to launch a political transition. By December 1983, electoral democracy had been restored in Argentina.
The policies of the 1976–83 dictatorship have continued to be at the center of historiographical debates and controversies for decades in Argentina. Historians and social scientists have debated how to define that authoritarian government, its character, and the question of compliance or complicity of civil society; the subsequent policies of justice and their trade-off with historical truth; and the construction and reconstruction of historical memory. These debates have been redefined multiple times in recent decades, in tandem with political and policy shifts in Argentina, the solidification of the human rights normative domestically and internationally, and disciplinary trends among academics working on recent history and collective memory. 1
A key issue in these debates concerns the extent of civilian support, cooperation or consent that the government of the armed forces enjoyed, at least at the time of their onset and initial years, among the economic sectors, the middle class and the working class. For instance, in Consent of the Damned, David Sheinin posed the issue head-on as he indicated that in addition to violent control from above, there was a popular component to authoritarian rule that installed cynicism about human rights in post-dictatorship Argentine government policy, ‘the product of a society that could not put the legacy of dictatorship to rest’. 2 Related to where researchers stood on these issues, they defined that government either as a military régime, whose state terrorism was resisted, or as a civilian-military régime, whose rule was mainly consented in its initial phases. Scholars also debated whether the armed forces bore full responsibility or perhaps the radical left bore partial responsibility as well for what developed, and whether the government's repressive policies should be defined as human right violations and crimes against humanity, or perhaps even as a genocide decimating an entire generation of Argentine citizens. 3
In this paper, I would like to contribute to these discussions by analyzing the sequence of democratic breakdown, military rule, regime collapse and the transition to democracy, and then focus on one initial policy of post-transitional justice: the trial of the top commanders of the armed forces accused of masterminding policies of massive detention, torture and loss of life of thousands in Argentina. Revisiting those statements and witnesses’ testimonies at the trial reveals aspects of lifeworld under the dictatorship mostly sidelined by the other main mechanism of transitional justice, the CONADEP commission of inquiry, that installed the horrifying story of the thousands of desaparecidos at the core of post-dictatorial truth construction.
The article starts by reviewing the background of democratic breakdown and military rule, its collapse and the transition to democracy, then focusing on the initial policies of post-transitional justice accounting for massive human rights violations. It then moves to an analysis of the statements and testimonies at the trial as reported verbatim in El Diario del Juicio, a publication that sold 250,000 weekly copies between May 1985 and January 1986, discussing how the lifeworld of citizens was disrupted under military rule in ways unexpected by many. The article closes with a section on the sequels of that first attempt to deliver justice to the victims of repression in Argentina, a country whose democratic transition preceded those of neighboring Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile and whose government adopted policies of accountability unprecedented until then in the region and considered pioneer even worldwide.
Since the mid-1940s, Peronism expressed the social aspirations of popular sectors and turned into the pivotal movement of modern Argentine political system. Ostracized since 1955 and with its leader General Juan Domingo Perón in exile, Peronism managed to regain power in 1973. Returning from exile after the electoral victory of his delegate Héctor Cámpora, and elected once again to the presidency in September 1973, Perón managed to maneuver his left-wing and right-wing followers into a delicate balance or power that lasted feebly for a few months. Such political steering by the aged politician vanished as Perón passed away in July 1974 and his wife and running mate, Vice-President Isabel Martínez de Perón assumed as president.
Argentina found itself in a maelstrom of intensifying violence and economic crisis for almost the next two years, as a power vacuum became evident. The Peronist and the Marxist leftist activists and guerrilla vanguards adopted violent tactics as they preached collective passion and revolutionary praxis. In the framework of the Cold War bipolarity, they faced the parallel political passion of right-wing forces, adamant at defending violently the values that were sacrosanct to them such as homeland, nation, family, religion, and the state, and soon willing to delegate power once again to the armed forces if needed. In the three years since the return of Peronism to power, 1358 persons lost their lives, including 677 civilians, 236 military and police personnel, and 445 members of armed revolutionary movements. Most social sectors and particularly the middle classes believed that the violence of left- and right-wing forces had created a near civil war affecting them, the self-portrayed innocent victims of increasing social conflict, polarized violence and ruling inefficacy. That conception and narrative pervaded Argentine middle classes for years to come, metamorphosing years later into the ‘theory of the two demons’ – the leftist guerrillas and state terrorism – whose violence tore society apart. 4
Many public opinion influencers and even intellectuals believed that in such a crisis, the armed forces represented the nation's moral reserve. For example, the magazine Extra, directed by Bernardo Neustadt, praised the appointment of General Jorge Rafael Videla as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces, calling him ‘one of the best minds that exist in our country today’. 5 Monsignor Antonio Plaza declared that facing the inefficacy of the political leadership to instill public order, and its lack of charisma and authority, the country needed the armed forces to undertake ‘the dangerous and selfless mission of combating subversion’ and ‘provide an image of austerity lacking in civilian circles’. 6 By December 1975, analysts predicted a military intervention as the main solution to the political crisis. Attacks on military stations and police officers continued as well as the summary executions or disappearance of leftist forces and of social and political activists, carried out by a para-military group, the Anti-Communist Alliance (aka the Triple A) created by José López Rega, once a powerful Minister of Social Welfare who by December 1975 had fled into exile. 7
In early February 1976, the newspaper La Razón openly stated in an editorial that ‘the country entered a cone of darkness, and the Republic is looking, in the darkness, for a way out’. 8 Political forces as well as the trade unions and economic forces called for president Martínez de Perón to resign or be institutionally replaced by Congress. 9 It was a ‘death foretold’ that lasted a few more weeks, with political interludes and repeated meetings of the high commands of the armed forces. Observers made repeated calls to find a constitutional solution to the crisis. 10 Yet, the National Congress seemed to have resigned itself to the inevitability of the military coup in the absence of a viable civilian solution. On 23 March, the front page of the newspaper La Razón announced that ‘the end is imminent. All has been said’ (Es inminente el final. Todo está dicho). 11
On 24 March 1976, the armed forces took power, claiming legitimacy ‘in defense of the [1853] Constitution’ and its protection of civil liberties, which had been affected by the intense leftist and para-military violence. Immediately, they imposed martial law in what they portrayed as an anomic situation of disarray and peril to the nation, its soul and interests. They issued state decrees establishing war councils to hold summary trials and declared that they would repress any attempt to promote or support subversive activities, any dissemination of news, communications or images aimed at ‘disturbing, harming or discrediting the activities of the armed, security or police forces’. 12 They intended to eradicate any sign of leftist rebellion of the contours of public order that they wanted to prevail. National Reorganization Process (Proceso de reorganización nacional, PRN) was the name they used to define their time in power, in which they envisioned to create a new model of social organization for Argentina.
The military believed they were destined by vocation to save the nation. They projected a prophylactic discourse, which metaphorically alluded to the forceful extirpation of malign elements, removing the cause of what they considered a collective disease. They declared their intention to ‘restore social order’ and enforce consensus. At that point, language became an articulator and normalizer of routine state violence.
The first military junta, led by Lt. General Jorge Rafael Videla, dissolved parliament, intervened in public agencies, suspended political and trade union activity, and carried out policies of persecution, torture and assassination of the sectors defined as ‘subversives’ and ‘enemies of the Nation’, while it carried out liberal economic policies of stabilization, adjustment, and opening of markets. In what seems to have been a cynical gesture, Videla – whose image the media praised then as a paradigm of personal correction, honesty, and professionalism – told the foreign press that freedom of the media would be guaranteed. For months, he also continued to claim that human rights were respected in Argentina. 13 In an ironic twist, the military government claimed to have abrogated civil rights supposedly in defense of human rights, a move that Amnesty International denounced as allowing ‘to detain anyone connected, however remotely, with any alleged crime of subversion’. 14
Many were delighted to get rid of the persistent specter of Peronism on Argentine politics, and others wished an end could be put on the violence dominating the public arena. At first, the appeal of those who promised order in the face of chaos and stability was so appealing that even intellectuals such as Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato applauded the coup. 15 Their statements were issued while a clandestine operation detained and murdered Uruguayan political exiles Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini, and more than 50 Argentine journalists, writers, film and theater directors and actors were forcibly detained and made disappear.
The repressive policies in neighboring Uruguay and Chile, along with their projection and condemnation by NGOs, political exiles, and the international media, had created an awareness that moved Argentine military rulers to conduct repression mostly in clandestine ways. Moreover, in 1977 they started to cooperate regionally with the neighboring security forces across borders in regional operations of counterinsurgency. 16 By conducting repressive operations clandestinely, the military junta thought they would curtail the chances of a strong censure or monitoring of their actions, while their messianic vision was translated by officers carrying out repression into a carte blanche to eliminate any vestige of subversion, leading to flagrant violations of individual human rights.
Moreover, unlike Chile under General Augusto Pinochet's command, repression was conducted in Argentina in a decentralized pattern, according to which sectors involved with the Left were clearly targeted, but also individuals only tangentially connected and even individuals beyond the slightest suspicion of subversion. People were detained and made to disappear as they worked presenting judicial demands and habeas corpus on behalf of missing persons. Some were abducted in lieu of their relatives, and some by mistake. Others, for profit-seeking motivations or merely due to personal enmity, including individuals targeted within the armed forces. The number of missing and presumedly assassinated individuals is nearly 9,000 according to conservative assessments, and between 20,000 and 30,000 according to more radical estimates.
Still, major sectors of the population believed the new rulers’ professed intention to pacify Argentine society, and that if somebody was affected, s/he had probably committed some crime. Those who witnessed operations of forceful abduction often shrugged the implications by assuming that those targeted were involved in terrorist activities or other acts of violence (por algo será), a clear sign of major social sectors being ‘colonized’ by the rulers’ rhetoric and narrative of pacification. Leading public opinion modulators stressed time and again that the previous political and social disarray justified what the armed forces were doing. In August 1978, renowned political analyst Mariano Grondona stated that both the de jure and de facto governments that had governed Argentina since 1930 had not been ‘systems of power’. In contrast, the military government that began its rule in March 1976 stood out when compared to them: But today we have a system … True, the system is incipient. It is also limited since it only includes military people. It will have to develop. We will have to convert it from a military into a civil-military system … [We had] nothing less than the appearance of order amid disorder … Where the chance of ideologies and ambitions, circumstances and confrontations reigned, a contraction of power was installed that presided over everything. … In 1976 a new arrangement was signed between the military holders of power. The new Constitution will have to be built and will host in it the indeclinable philosophy of the old one. Ours is the revolution of order. Only those who have drunk the bottom of the chalice of disorder will recognize it and appreciate it.
17
Since the country was at war, judicial processes were not applicable to the enemy. No war has ever applied [sic] judicial process, and this war was no exception. This doctrine of internal war rationalized that, since the country was in a state of emergency, liberal principles should be suspended, although not abandoned. This rationalization pointed out the parallel that, in a wartime economy, economic freedom is forgotten. Exceptional conditions justify exceptional measures.
18
In 1981, the military junta, under the presidency of General Roberto Viola, initiated a dialogue with politicians towards an eventual transfer of power. Increasing economic instability and social unrest led his successor, General Leopoldo Galtieri, to foster popular nationalism and embark in April–June 1982 in a failed war with the UK over the Malvinas-Falkland Islands, a war that shattered the legitimacy of the government of the armed forces. Following a humiliating defeat, the disclosure of their inefficacy and corruption, and already weakened by their mismanagement of the economy, the military lost credibility and were forced to accelerate the transfer of power back to civilian democracy.
By November 1982, it became clear that the issue of the desaparecidos would be an essential part of the negotiations of the military and the civilians. Still, at that time, the authorities continued to prohibit publishing any mention of the desaparecidos or of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the press. Moreover, there were voices that even in early 1983 still argued that democracy would fail in the short term, as Argentines needed a dictatorship led by a charismatic and intelligent leader that could gather enough public support. 20 Facing mounting civilian protest around the theme of the detained-disappeared and with the Church intervening in the negotiations, on 29 April 1983, the military published a final report with their version on the war against subversion. Arguing that they acted ‘in service of the Nation,’ they claimed to have been forced to adopt unusual methods as they fought radicalized subversion and terrorism. They also argued that some of the missing persons reappeared later on while carrying out acts of terror, and that many terrorists committed suicide or had been killed in action, being buried as NN by their own comrades. Moreover, the military authorities indicated that whoever appeared in the lists of desaparecidos and was not abroad or hiding incognito, had to be considered dead for judicial and administrative purposes. The document also reiterated that in Argentina there were no secret centers of detention or clandestine detainees. 21
The document ignited public repudiation and added strong will to hundreds of thousands of citizens taking part in massive demonstrations and marches supporting human rights and demanding accountability for what had unfolded during military rule. Promulgated in late September 1983, shortly before the armed forces handed power and as political parties carried out their electoral campaigns, the military promulgated a self-amnesty law intended to prevent any judicial measures against members of their ranks, yet it was an implicit recognition of their involvement in punishable acts. As the presidential campaign closed, Raúl Alfonsín, the candidate of the Unión Cívica Radical party, who run on a banner of opposition to any political compromise that would leave human rights violations unpunished, won a decisive electoral victory and assumed as constitutional president on 10 December 1983.
Elected president Alfonsín envisioned a new founding of the Republic and adopted a policy of truth and accountability almost unprecedented in the world. He established a truth commission, the CONADEP charged with clarifying the extent and depth of human rights violations, particularly the fate of the thousands of victims who vanished without a trace and whose remains were unknown. That report, presented in September 1984, as well as an early television broadcast of its findings, impacted hundreds of thousands of Argentine citizens. The report's introduction, published in book-length form under the title of Nunca más [Never again] was released by EUDEBA, the University Press of Buenos Aires. It contained the names of close to 8,960 missing detainees and 1351 officers, soldiers and civilians who had been involved in state terrorism and flagrant human rights violations in 365 clandestine detention centers, showing the systematic character of repression during the PRN. Through multiple editions and reimpressions, the book became a major best-seller since its publication in 1984. Still, the CONADEP ‘explained state terrorism as a response to guerrilla violence, placed the responsibility for the disappearances exclusively on the dictatorship and ignored the responsibilities of civil society and the political establishment in the [escalating] cycle of violence’. 22 Such narrative, while inscribing an authoritative account of massive human-rights violations under military rule, also lent credibility to the ‘theory of two demons’, according to which both the violent guerrilla and the repressive armed forces had torn Argentine society apart in the 1970s. By portraying the horrifying atrocities of state repression, it also projected an aggrandized image of fear and terror onto the public sphere.
In parallel, three days after assuming power, civilian President Raúl Alfonsín issued decrees ordering the arrest and prosecution of the members of the three military Juntas [governing councils] and former guerrilla leaders. Following a months-long reluctance by the armed forces to conduct a trial of the former commanders on their own, the case was transferred to a civilian court, according to the procedure envisioned by the reformed penal code promulgated by the new civilian administration.
At the same time, aware of how the top military commands portrayed his policies (calling him the Anti-Christ who wanted to destroy their institution) and willing to reduce the threat of reactive military counterattacks, Alfonsín chose to minimize the full institutional implications of his policy demanding accountability for the perpetration of massive human rights violations. Accordingly, he differentiated between the high commanders who designed policy; the officers who used sadistic methods and abuse, intimidation, repression and appropriation of detainees’ property; and the officers who fulfilled orders in stern ways without abuse. In that way, and while also struggling to consolidate the economy and control inflation, Alfonsín and his advisers tried to reassure the armed forces that the policies of truth and justice were not directed against them as an institution. 23
The military claimed institutional responsibility and stated that their actions had been justified by the country's state of anarchy on the eve of their coup. They also indicated that placing them on trial was an institutional attack on the armed forces, motivated by the same political interests that they had defeated. Before the initiation of the trials, Lt. General Videla defended the honor of the armed forces and criticized the new attempts by ‘subversives’ to discredit ‘the invaluable contribution’ of the armed forces to the security and stability of the country. However, at that stage, the renewed freedom of the press and the activities of human rights groups generated a different public climate in which human rights issues took center stage in the country's agenda. A sign of the changing times was that, to amass political capital, politicians of various parties addressed the situation by using the discourse of human rights.
In April 1985, the Federal Appeal Court moved to enter the public oral phase of the trial against the juntas’ commanders. The press applauded the decision, indicating that the trial implied carrying out justice in Argentina, a country where most people assumed that nothing happens eventually (‘al final, en la Argentina, nunca pasa nada’), that is, where citizens had come to expect a lack of personal and institutional accountability. 24 The court decided not to allow a live broadcast of the public trial, fearing collective catharsis and imposing effects on public order. Nonetheless, the media covered the trial, tracking its major highlights and explaining somehow the legal terminology and the proceedings.
A special weekly, El Diario del Juicio, reproduced witnesses’ testimonies verbatim, as well as the allegations of the prosecution and the defense. Starting its reporting in May 1985, the weekly also reproduced documents, explained the legal proceedings and terminology, and published interviews with public figures and analysts. By reviewing its pages, one can trace what was the lifeworld of the witnesses, reveal some of the less visible aspects of life in Argentina during the dictatorship; indicate the personal sequels of repression; and discuss how the management and construction of collective memory proceeded in Argentina during the immediate post-dictatorship era.
By the mid-1970s, Argentine citizens expected a military takeover from an ineffective civilian government. Based on their ingrained experience with repeated military coups since 1930, citizens also expected that a military government would impose strict authoritarian controls. Yet, even coming after years of political confrontation, tumultuous protest and violence, the measures taken by the military government starting in 1976 went beyond citizens’ expectations of a forceful restoration of law and order.
People could not foresee the extent of the ‘remedy’. What they experienced before and immediately after the military coup affected many people's lifeworld’, i.e., the self-evident outlooks, unstated perceptions and given practices that people come to accept and experience as taken-for-granted when living in a particular time and place. 25 Those assumptions are often implicit, yet crises and epochal turns such as the 1976 democratic breakdown and dictatorship allow them to become vividly explicit. Such shifts were put in evidence as witnesses took the stand and reflected on their experiences and understanding while giving testimony at the trial of the military commanders. 26
In his court testimony on 29 April 1985, Miguel A. Laborde, a university instructor, recalled that he was at work when he received notification that his spouse had been abducted by armed civilians. His first reaction was to proceed and report it to the closest police department asking for help. Advised by friends to request police assistance by phone since the same people that abducted her could be also looking for him, he called the police by phone, receiving assurances that the officers will soon come and assist, something that did not happen. Instead, he himself was abducted by the security forces who travelled the streets in his pursuit. 27
At first, faced with hardship, Laborde and many citizens like him did not conceive that the police were part of the repressive methodology adopted by the de facto government. Moreover, once released after two and a half months, he was warned to conceal what he had experienced. Instilling fear in him and forcing his silence carried a great personal price. In addition to weakening his psychological assertiveness, for Laborde it involved losing his job. As he had been absent for many days from his workplace and being precluded from explaining and justifying that absence, he was fired and lost his university position. 28
Mrs. Sala de Cavaglia testified about the heavy burden she felt for helping her co-mother-in-law, Luisa Martínez de González, draw a letter informing the parents of a young women forcibly abducted by the armed forces that she had given birth in the hospital where Luisa Martínez worked as a nurse. That letter signaled the following forcible abduction and disappearance of Sala de Cavaglia's co-mother-in-law. 29
Daily rationality had lost ground as people faced authoritarian repressive arbitrariness. The loss of implicit meanings and assumptions was also reflected in the testimony of Mrs. Brodsky, the mother of Fernando Rubén Brodsky, another desaparecido, who as a witness indicated that everything for her and others had turned to be a total mystery (‘era una cosa misteriosa todo, estaba en el misterio absoluto’). 30
Under torture, abducted individuals were forced to face the phantasmagoric imaginaries of the repressors, who in addition to interrogating them about their connections to ‘subversion’, were interested in confirming their presumptions through the acknowledgment of those ‘confessing’ while suffering continuing pain. Sometimes, fitting into the repressors’ foreseen beliefs, could lead to the loss of life. In other cases, it could lead to redemption and eventual release. Jacobo Timerman, the abducted director of the newspaper La Opinión, testified that during interrogation by General Ramón Camps and his subordinates, the latter were more interested in confirming their suspicions about his life and loyalties, not necessarily about his political positions. According to Timerman, admitting that he was a Jew, a Zionist and a Socialist saved him, as General Camps kept him alive to justify his curiosity and confirm his conviction that a Jew like Timerman was disloyal to the nation, not a subversive. 31
The testimonies confirmed that repression, albeit decentralized and often erratic, was organized from the top-down. Repressors were conscious of the illegality of their actions, which explains why they took great care not to reveal their names or the specific task force to which they belonged; why they blindfolded their victims; or why sometimes they killed a detainee after s/he was harshly wounded while detained or during torture, as in the case of Dagmar Hagelin, with whom Miriam Lewin spent time in prison and who declared that Hagelin ‘was wounded, she could not walk and therefore, they could not liberate her’. 32
Navy Captain Jorge Félix Búsico, who spent the last year of his service in the School of Mechanics of the Army (ESMA), a major center of repression, confessed to the sense of complicity that he felt with what he witnessed at the time. ‘I as well as others practiced the politics of the ostrich, not willing to see (…) I tried to remain as far away as I could, avoiding knowing those things. Every time that I heard something, I felt great pain and immense impotence’. He also reported on his candid attitude when on 25 March 1976 he participated in the detention of a citizen in full gear and without concealing his uniform. At that time, he testified in the trial, ‘I did not understand a thing’. 33
When some individuals were released and confided in their relatives what they saw and experienced during detention, the horrible conditions, the abuse, the torture sessions and the assassination and purported disappearance of detainees, their audience found it hard to believe. In her testimony, Mrs. Enriqueta de Carlotto reported that when she and relatives heard the testimony of her husband after he was released, they ‘found it very hard to believe. It was like a fantasy, even if it was not’. 34
Even people with connections in high social circles and contacts in the top ranks of the armed forces were at first unaware of who stood behind the methodology of repression and disappearance and were uncritical of the diversion tactics used by those in power. Commanders and high-ranking officers denied responsibility and reassured their interlocutors that they would help in finding the whereabouts of relatives and acquaintances.
Héctor Manuel Hidalgo Solá, Argentina's ambassador to Venezuela, was abducted in July 1977 while visiting the homeland year-and-a-half after his appointment. In her testimony at the trial, Mrs. Delia García Rueda de Hidalgo Solá, his spouse, declared that she declined to hear the advice of those recommending that she should ‘make noise’. In despair upon the abduction of her husband, she opted instead to use her connections to try to find out his whereabouts. Both Lt. General Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera met her in private, yet according to her, they did nothing to help locate the ambassador, whose tracks were unknown. In the trial against the Juntas, Mrs. Hidalgo Solá testified to what she learned in due time; that the inner tensions between the Army and the Navy could have been at the basis of her husband's forcible detention and disappearance. She told the court that she also met the US Ambassador asking for help, and that he told her and her sons that he knew that an increased number of cremations had been conducted in the Chacarita cemetery, a statement which she understood as alluding to the fate of the desaparecidos. 35
An awakening from lifeworld expectations was particularly experienced and reported by witnesses with a privileged social position, who were devastated as they realized that the repressors ignored previous status precedence while driving to eradicate any resistance to their rule. Imperceptibly, old social hierarchies had lost influence. Former civilian president Arturo Frondizi reported that he had three nephews forcibly disappeared and one brother, a university professor, who was shot while in detention. 36
Even General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, the de facto military president of the country between March 1971 and May 1973, declared having been unable to release journalist Edgardo Sajón, whom he knew as his former spokesperson and was willing to testify about Sajón's integrity. Meeting General Lanusse, General Videla confided that other high commanders such as Guillermo Suárez Mason, Ibérico Saint Jean, or Ramón Camps, probably had been responsible for Sajón's abduction. As a witness, General Lanusse testified that both General Videla and General Roberto Viola had advised him not to get involved. 37 Likewise, General Mario H. Laprida, who had been a de facto military governor of Argentine provinces twice, in 1943 and 1966, declared that he could not obtain information on Isidoro de Carabaza, his son-in-law who had been abducted in October 1978. 38
A released detainee, Arturo O. Barros, referred to a common practice used to pacify relatives of individuals forcibly detained and disappeared. Barros was forced to call his parents from jail to let them know that he was fine and that they should not make any procedural move (‘que no realizaran ninguna gestión’), including presenting a habeas corpus. 39 As she gave testimony, Raquel Hazán indicated she had the same experience. Her son José Luis, forcibly detained, called from time to time from a detention center to assure his mother that he was fine and advise her ‘not to move papers’, that is, not report it to the police – the taken-for-granted source of relief in normal times – nor fill a habeas corpus. 40
In February 1977, Mónica Córdoba was liberated after three gruesome days of abduction and torture and was left in a remote location; as she confided what happened to her to a local resident, asking for directions to return to her place, that person suggested to take her to a police station to present a demand, a suggestion that she politely declined. Major sectors of society not affected by the repression still assumed a year after the coup that normal procedures were still enforced, a belief that those who had experienced even a few days in a detention center had already dismissed. 41
Arturo Barros was eventually liberated. José Luis Hazan and thousands of other detainees were assassinated, and their remains were not returned to their families. They remained desaparecidos, that is, missing people whose remains have not been located. The tactics of disinformation wrapping illegal acts in an aura of normality and seeming legality were repeatedly raised by witnesses. The repressors even forced some detainees to participate in forged interviews with the press, denying that they or their relatives had been forcibly abducted by the security forces and even reinforcing the official story that those responsible for such acts were leftist organizations. 42
The same tactics of denial were used in international fora such as the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights, a recurrent trend highlighted by the prosecution. 43 Patricia Derian, former subsecretary of Human Rights under President Carter, testified that ‘during my first visit, the military commanders recognized that things happened, but that they were out of control. Contrastingly, in my second visit, such recognition was no longer there (…) They denied that there were problems. After a harsh discussion, they would concede that problems existed, but that others, the communists and the terrorists, were causing them’. 44
In his defense, Lt. General Roberto Viola – one of those standing trial – claimed that Argentina went through a war without conventional norms, and he denied that those detained were subject to physical elimination. He claimed not to know that there were disappearances. ‘I became aware of just five disappearances or deaths’, he said. 45 Lt. General Leopoldo Galtieri, his successor at the head of the military government, denied the existence of clandestine centers of detention. Admiral Armando Lambruschini claimed that the detainees were sent to the judicial system (‘los detenidos eran derivados a la Justicia’). Brigadier General Omar Graffigna indicated that he was only aware of what the daily press published, and Brigadier General Arturo Lami Lozo declared he did not know of any denuncias [judicial complaints]. 46
Contrastingly, in his closing arguments, Admiral Massera stuck to the narrative used by the armed forces to justify their actions. The Navy commander whose branch of security forces oversaw the ESMA, one of the most terrible locales of forcible detention, repression and torture, and who was facing charges for 83 assassinations, 523 illegal abductions, 267 confirmed cases of torture, 102 thefts, 201 falsification of documents, and a long list of additional crimes, told the court as he addressed it boldly: I did not come to defend myself. Nobody should defend himself for having won a just war. Notwithstanding that, I am here, facing a trial because we won a just war. If we had been defeated, neither you nor we would be here, since the senior members of this Chamber would have been replaced by turbulent people's courts, and a fierce, unrecognizable Argentina would have replaced the old country, but we are here because we won the war of weapons and we lost the psychological war. Perhaps due to professional deformation we were convinced that we were defending the Nation, and we were convinced and felt that our compatriots not only supported us, but even encouraged us to win [the war] because that was everyone's triumph. This self-absorption prevented us from clearly seeing the exceptional propaganda resources of the enemy, and while we fought, a very effective system of international persuasion began to cast the most sinister and deformed shadows on our reality, until transforming it to the point of turning those attacked into aggressors, the victims into victimizers, the innocent into executioners. This psychological war has not ceased, it has been hitting people's sensibilities for more than ten years, helped by the extraordinary support of a certain press … In this war, a war between legal forces, if there were excesses these were exceptional excesses, while it was terrorism where excess was the norm.
47
[t]he nine former junta members expressed their contempt for the court by being absent during most of the testimonies or by chatting with one another, reading a book, laughing, snickering, and staring at the ceiling. Their attitude changed when the prosecution began its plea on 11 September 1985 and ended seven days later with the words ‘Never again!’ The audience exploded with a standing ovation. The prosecutors smiled and embraced one another, while General Viola hurled angry words into the court room.
48
That inference served the line of defense of the members of the second and third juntas, as the court used this interpretation to find four of the nine defendants not guilty. The judges also attributed differential blame onto the different branches of the armed forces, finding the Army and the Navy much more implicated than the Air Force. The terms of the sentences reflected a differentiated assignment of blame. General Videla and Admiral Massera received life sentences; General Viola was sentenced to seventeen years; Admiral Lambruschini to eight years; and Brigadier Agosti to four years. Admiral Anaya, General Galtieri, Brigadiers Graffigna and Lami Dozo were liberated. The judges also recommended prosecuting every officer and soldier accused of bearing responsibility for gross human rights violations.
The testimonies at trial supported a momentous point in the demand for accountability for the policy of massive human rights violations dictated by the top commanders of the armed forces and perpetrated by many of their subordinate officers. The statements of the small fraction of detainees that survived the repressive ordeal would further inscribe in the collective consciousness the horrors of authoritarian rule. Retired Naval Captain Jorge Bussico told the court that he could not believe how the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA), the institution in which he served, had turned into a center of detention where detainees were subject to such brutal treatment. 50 In her testimony, Myriam Lewin de García characterized Teniente Jorge Acosta, whom she knew from her confinement in the ESMA as ‘the boss of life and death of all of us, irrespective of military hierarchy. He used to say that this was a just war, that Jesus was on his side, and that we had to collaborate’. She attributed her survival to being part of slave labor in Admiral Emilio Massera's grand plan of becoming another Perón after the dictatorship. 51 Witnesses provided detailed accounts that led to an unprecedented sentencing of some of those who had exercised almost absolute power over the lives of millions of citizens.
However, the verdicts left many victims and human rights activists disappointed. While some rejoiced in the long convictions dictated on five of the top commanders, the grading of punishment was severely criticized by human rights activists. Their disappointment was expressed in recriminations towards the Executive. On the day the verdicts were published, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo organized a public demonstration to denounce the injustice of what they perceived as lenient verdicts, irreverent to the martyrdom of their beloved. Even more pragmatic activists were upset by the result of the trial, as their expectations that the trial would provide a conclusive historical judgement were not met. As Mark Osiel indicated, the courts are often incapable of fulfilling the aspiration to settle historical judgment at once. By its own logic, the judicial system enforces legal rules, a logic of individualization of acts and responsibility, and an adversarial structure in proceedings that can seldom fulfill the totalizing expectations of either side. 52
Human rights organizations felt betrayed and protested massively. In parallel, the court's recommendation of opening new trials of officers and soldiers implicated in human rights violations confirmed the armed forces’ fears of an imminent judicial escalation and officers started rebelling against the civilian authorities. The crossfire of conflicting demands would soon derive in policies of closure and a regressive cycle of accountability for past human rights violations perpetrated massively by the security forces during the dictatorship. 53
Moreover, the survivors had to live among sectors of civil society who tacitly accepted the thesis of ‘the two demons.’ In their struggle for recognition and to put the blame on the perpetrators, various human rights groups and many survivors giving testimony at the trial had pursued a narrative that de-politicized the victims, presenting them as innocent victims. Unwillingly, that argumentation intertwined with the narrative of the defense attorneys and their witnesses at the trial, which attempted to discredit the evidence about the disappearances and equated victims’ political or social involvement with subversion, and thus a sign of culpability. 54 Prosecutor Julio Strassera's emphasis on the fact that the trial was about processing perpetrators of crimes committed without due legal process, and not about the innocence or culpability of the victims, did not change the persisting discourse of attribution of blame installed for years by the armed forces in public discourse. 55 It is likely that the images of outstanding victims like the pregnant women, the stolen babies born in captivity or the elderly and incapacitated, served to fully convey the ultimate evil of the system of repression, abuse and annihilation operated by Argentina's military juntas. 56
Another major issue in the early stage of democratic transition concerned the possible return of political exiles who had fled abroad during the dictatorship. A barrier of suspicion hung between exiles and ‘insiles’, i.e., those who had remained in the country during the dictatorship. The PRN's policies of disinformation and demonization had convinced many Argentines that exiles, particularly the Montoneros and ERP guerrilla members, were as responsible as the top military commanders, and perhaps more, for the political violence and subsequent loss of life of thousands of citizens. There was also widespread social reluctance to compensate exiles for their ordeal, a trend further reinforced because democratization coincided with an economic recession. Suspicion hung over the exiled radical activists, who were marked as one of the ‘two demons’ spreading violence. The democratic administration was not interested in favoring the return of Peronists and Leftists, fearing that they could disarticulate the fragile balance of power of the transition. Accordingly, the government did not take the initiative to lift the judicial processes opened by the military against many exiles, leaving legal barriers in place that prevented or hampered their return. Given those circumstances, it took years for some returnees to normalize their situation and receive legal compensation and reparations, something achieved only after courts ruled in their favor in legal claims filed against the State. 57
After the 1985 trial against the military Juntas, the public convictions and the beginning of several hundreds of new trials against suspected perpetrators of crimes, Argentina soon entered a regressive cycle of mounting pressure by the armed forces, which coincided with an economic crisis. That constellation led President Alfonsín to promulgate laws foreclosing the possibility of new trials and legal actions against military and police officers and civilians involved in human rights violations. 58 Moreover, the next administration suspended continuing trials against dozens of officers in August 1989, and two months later President Carlos Menem pardoned those officers and guerrilla members who had been already convicted.
In conclusion, after years in which the public order imposed by the military government had been welcomed, tolerated or ignored by majoritarian sectors, the trial allowed those affected directly and indirectly by state terror to have their voice resonate widely. Their testimonies reproduced in El Diario del Juicio allowed certifying the extent of abusive repression and assessing the shifts many experienced in their lifeworld and belated awakening from the narrative of the military government. Still, the early closure of that initial path of post-dictatorial transitional justice left public opinion divided, with mixed messages about the 1976–83 period. In spite of the pioneer policies of truth and justice adopted by Alfonsín's administration and their wide immediate effect on public opinion, as reflected in the resonance of the Nunca más book and the massive reception of the Diario del Juicio, major sectors of Argentine society remained for years divided on the centrality of human rights in their interplay with realpolitik considerations.
While few would dispute thereafter the contours of the dictatorship's repressive system, its conceptualization, roots and causes remained debatable, with some social sectors viewing them as a necessary evil, thus endorsing the premises of the theory of ‘two demons’. Even as a new cycle of judicial cases opened in 2003, under President Néstor Kirchner, and human rights became part of the state bureaucratic apparatus, human rights activists continued to be criticized by some sectors as driving social divisiveness, while survivors experienced fear of retaliation for declaring in some trial of military or police officers. 59
The specter of abuse, disregard for human rights and impunity persisted in Argentina, connected with the ups-and-downs of governments’ political will and efficacy in enforcing legal order and accountability. Since the return of democracy, the unfettered use of force and impunity generated broad media coverage and indignation among the general public, resulting in some cases in a redefinition of legal parameters and organizational reforms. Santiago Galar has analyzed how in Argentina the proliferation of different types of murders in the 1990s–2010s generated polemics, debates, newspaper articles, and popular mobilizations. Media attention placed topics such as police violence, femicide, and human trafficking on the political agenda, and the public's demand to put an end to impunity was partially translated into institutional changes. 60 Although not always successful, the growing demands for effective justice and an end to impunity were raised as rallying banners. Their effectiveness has been aided by the resonance and achievements of previous struggles, starting with the initial momentous stage of post-dictatorial accountability and justice that projected the discourse of human rights onto the center of the public agenda during the transition to democracy.
