Abstract
Argentina’s former dictator says he regrets nothing.
Nearly four decades after the military coup of March 1976, Argentina is still coming to terms with the past. The intellectual conviction that societies can assimilate trauma by burying it in history books is yet to be realised, but the publication of two revelatory accounts this year offered the possibility of putting the record straight. In nine remarkable interviews with the imprisoned former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who ruled Argentina from 1976 until 1981, journalist Ceferino Reato provided a chilling description of the military plan to murder thousands of opponents in his book Final Disposal.
The second book, by Norma Morandini, a former journalist and now senator in Argentina’s congress, is both a personal and moral exploration and an investigation of Argentine society in an attempt to explain the process of recovery from a state of denial. Her two younger siblings were ‘disappeared’ in September 1977. Morandini’s revealing account begins in a comfortable middle-class world in central Argentina, then moves through loss and exile. She watches her mother emerge from grief and then enters battle to seek her lost children. When she returns to Argentina she is guilt-ridden for surviving, rejected for jobs and discriminated against for having dead or ‘disappeared’ members of her family. She finally re-invents herself as a campaigner for a new culture in her country.
Writer and vice-presidential candidate Norma Morandini, whose siblings disappeared in 1977
Credit: Reuters
Argentina’s dictatorship held power between 1976 and 1983. Although this was the shortest dictatorship of any in the region, the rule of the junta of three armed forces chiefs was the bloodiest; the only one that had a systematic plan to detain its captives in secret camps and make them disappear. It was Argentina that gave the word ‘desaparecidos’ to the language of repression. Political groups and human rights organisations set the figure of disappeared at 30,000. But this has been an estimate, not backed by the recovery of remains and identities.
Ceferino Reato’s book is subtitled ‘The confessions of Videla about the desaparecidos’. The conversations between the former dictator and the journalist recall the late Gitta Sereny’s interviews with the imprisoned Nazi Albert Speer. The 86-year-old Argentinian criminal appeared at once generous with information and coldly brutal in his view of events. On more than one occasion in his replies, Videla said he was merely acting as a military officer in his country’s service.
‘Let’s say there were seven or eight thousand people who had to die to win this war: we could not execute them. How could we execute so many people?’ Videla told Reato.
‘The phrase Final Solution was never used. The words Final Disposal were used frequently: those are two very military words that mean taking out of service something that is useless. When, for example, you speak of old clothing which is no longer used or worn out, it is marked Final Disposal. That has no further useful life.’
Norma Morandini’s book, From Guilt to Forgiveness (De la culpa al perdón, in Spanish), is a painful and very personal essay written ten years ago, but published only a few days after Reato’s book last April. When I met her for an interview this summer, she rejected Videla’s figures: ‘If accepted they must be seen as the tally of the executioner. We can’t simply believe the killer and not the victims … During the trials of 1985 the figures and statements of the victims were put in doubt. For example, in those long hard six months of the trials of the juntas, former captives said that prisoners were drugged, tied, and dropped into the sea. Nothing happened. It was more than ten years later when the executioner, naval officer Adolfo Scilingo, confessed to Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain that the account of the bodies thrown from planes was true. Then it was believed. Human behaviour makes it reasonable to give credit to the killer but not the victim.’
Formerly national deputy and now senator for a leftist alliance, Morandini studied medicine and psychology in her native Córdoba province, then became a journalist. She fled Argentina after the abduction of her brother and sister in 1977, went to Brazil and found asylum in Portugal. She then worked for the magazine Cambio 16 in Spain, which was just trying out the discourse and freedoms of a new age after the death of Francisco Franco.
‘We are a country that has not had a state policy to deal with events in our recent past. Our education does not include the construction of a culture of human rights.’ These two sentences in part define the aim of Morandini’s book, to develop a ‘democratic society above the intolerance of the past’.
The statements made by Videla go a long way to help explain the failings of a society that allowed and even cheered the murderous military dictatorship that began in 1976. At the time, I was working at the English-language Buenos Aires Herald. ‘Yes, but the guerrillas started killing first,’ was often the rejoinder we got from readers and even officials, when editorially critical of the uniformed rulers. The guerrillas were not ‘first’, they were the product of the failure of constitutional government, of a whole society that considered itself the most modern and intellectually advanced in South America. The armed forces, formed into the most powerful party in the country since the 1930s, had hampered, disrupted and overthrown elected governments at will. Wrecking an elected government should have been considered a crime. And, we argued from the pages of Argentina’s smallest daily, ‘the state cannot descend to the level of its enemies, because killing people is wrong, whoever does it’. We did not get very far with that argument. When I quietly admitted to people that I had been an informant for Amnesty International since 1971 and writing for Index on Censorship since 1973, the ensuing question was: ‘Yes, but what side are you on?’ You had to take sides in the politics of a country that was descending into horror.
‘To avoid arousing protests in or outside the country, we reached the decision that those people had to disappear; each disappearance can be understood as a certain masking, a disguise of a death’, Videla told Ceferino Reato.
This blood-chilling comment takes me back to September 1976 and to a meeting at Government House in Buenos Aires attended by the then editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, Robert Cox, and myself as his news editor, with Videla’s Secretary for Information, a naval captain named Carlos Carpintero. When we chided the minister about the secrecy and horror of the disappearances his rejoinder was: ‘Do you want us to have all the adverse publicity that Chile has? No way. What would the IMF and all those international organisations say?’ The flippant remark added to the horror. Robert Cox thought then that Videla was a dove among hawks. Since Reato’s book appeared this spring, Cox has published two columns in the Herald stating that Hitler was alive and well and living in Argentina in the person of Jorge Rafael Videla. ‘[His] account of the holocaust unleashed on Argentina is notable for his lack of human decency and the cold-blooded manner in which he tells his story … I see a tactic behind Videla’s confession. He has nothing to lose now, but by admitting responsibility for all the crimes committed while he was army commander and later de facto president, he has put a spanner in the works for trial judges who have to include him among all the accused who are currently on trial.’
The former dictator admitted to Reato that there were ‘mistakes and excesses’ but that was not the case ‘with the disappeared’, whose fate was part of a policy. The ‘responsibility in each case fell to the regional commander, who used the method he thought most appropriate. Each commander had full autonomy to find the quickest and least risky method. Nobody was against that … I was not consulted. I consented by omission’. Elsewhere in the interview Videla said: ‘Each commander was master and ruler over the life and death of each detainee.’ And the method for disposing of bodies, that sinister ‘Final Disposal’, was equally the responsibility of unit commanders, no questions were asked among senior officers. They could bury the dead in mass graves, burn them in a stack of tyres, destroy them with lime.
General Jorge Videla, 1977
Credit: Rene Burri/Magnum
The military handed over 227 children of captives to neighbours or relatives or to juvenile courts. Videla denies that there was ‘an order to abduct minors. There were cases, I know, but they were the result of our lack of controls, there was no systematic plan to steal babies’ from captured mothers. In spite of his denial, on 4 July a court sentenced Videla to 50 years in prison for planning and executing a systematic plan to remove and hide babies born in captivity. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who campaign for the restoration of young people whose identities were stolen through abduction (‘appropriation’ is the word they use), originally estimated that there were nearly 600 children missing. The figure claimed is now closer to 400, and just over 100 have recovered their original family names, lost in forced adoptions. Last year, the Grandmothers published the figure of an additional 190 children who disappeared along with their parents.
When Reato’s book was published, the statements appeared to some to be the first signal of an aged former president and army commander wanting to come clean with the country he had presided over for five years, or perhaps set the historical and numerical record straight. He even seemed to regret the terror. However, by May 2012, it was obvious that the ageing monster had agreed to talk on the record, first, to claim that he had been the boss; second, that he wanted to be seen as fully responsible for the military takeover and its actions; third, that he was proud of his role as a sort of saviour of the nation against the subversive menace (Marxist and nationalist Peronist guerrillas). For some, there was a brief hope that Videla was about to produce documents that recorded the military crimes (officially, they were destroyed in 1983, just before the elections, under orders of the last de facto chief, general Reynaldo Bignone, now in prison). But that idea was demolished by a letter from Videla to the conservative newspaper La Nación, published on 21 May, rejecting some of Reato’s passages. Videla denies saying that seven or eight thousand ‘had to die’, but that, ‘according to reliable figures, seven or eight thousand had died.’
It seemed a cop out. He further added: ‘Mind, I do not regret a thing and I sleep soundly and at peace every night.’
A mass grave near Cordoba, Argentina, found in October 2003
Credit: Fer Arias/Photomasi/Camera Press
Reato proved the former general wrong with pertinent transcripts from his 20 hours of interviews in handwritten notes (voice recorders and cameras are banned at the Campo de Mayo barracks where Videla is imprisoned), reprinted in La Nación. The roughs had been typed at home by Reato who on each subsequent visit to the prison took the typed sheets to Videla, who read and corrected by hand, and returned.
What had given the first inkling of hope for answers was Videla’s death-toll figures. The ‘seven or eight thousand’ were not far from ‘official’ numbers, but distant from the 30,000 claimed by activist and human rights groups. Under President Raúl Alfonsín, the first civilian to be elected after the dictatorship in polls that were largely the result of the defeat of Argentina by Britain in the Falklands-Malvinas war in April–June 1982, it was agreed that there were 8,960 ‘desaparecidos’ during the dictatorship, not including people killed in gun battles or armed attacks. This figure was recorded by a human rights group, known as Conadep (National Commission on Disappeared Persons), that Dr Alfonsín appointed to compile the casualties list. This report led to the junta trials in 1985. The results were later confirmed in a book by Conadep secretary Graciela Fernández Meijide, at one time a national senator and the mother of a disappeared son. Years later, in 1991, in a private conversation held at a book launch, Dr Alfonsín accepted that totals found during his government could be projected to 14,000 maximum, to cover errors and omissions, but he would not accept the figure of 30,000. The initial total of dead, or disappeared, coincided with reports compiled by Amnesty International in London and by the Clamor human rights group in Brazil, in the 70s; it is also close to the figure posted on the national human rights secretariat web in 2009, under the current government of Cristina Kirchner – 7,954. The walls of the National Monument to the Victims of Terrorism, on the edge of the River Plate, list 8,875 names.
Speaking in her office a block away from the National Congress building, Senator Morandini was emphatic on her need, and by extension that of Argentina, to put human rights and the understanding of them above politics. ‘And we’ve failed to do that for too long, which explains why some of our society can’t or won’t speak of the past, or argues that it is too long ago to carry on arguing or campaigning about events of the past. The trouble is we have not renewed our politics. Politics in Argentina were born dead at the end of the dictatorship. They have not changed style or discourse or policies from before the coup. We do not have politicians and parties that made sure a new political life was born to enhance democracy.
‘We have had 30 years of democratic formalities and we do not have democratic values. This is because society has leaders who do not want to recognise their part or the role of their parties in the civic failure that led to the worst dictatorship in our history. Here people are still trying to convince themselves that we are a peaceful nation without admitting we were cutting each other’s throats throughout the 19th century and killing people because we didn’t like what they said in the 20th.
‘We have not been able to see the difference between guilt and responsibility. Admiral Emilio Massera, commander of the navy during the dictatorship, and the most notorious of the tormentors, told the court in 1985, “I am responsible, but I do not feel guilty.” He was speaking then as our politicians still try to make believe they can account for their decisions, but are not to blame for what goes wrong.’ The US academic Marguerite Feitlowitz has a remarkable study of the linguistic twists of Admiral Massera in her book, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture.
However, Norma Morandini has not lost hope for recovery. ‘For the first time in decades we are beginning to look at ourselves, our own mistakes. This change is coming from a new generation, the youngest, the children, and even grandchildren of the activists, sometimes utopian, and the disappeared of the 70s. This makes me feel we are on our way to a political culture that includes responsibility. At present we still have many old habits. We look at the crises in Europe and delight in their suffering, seeing it as a failure. What we don’t see in their plight is that the protesters are demanding more democracy.’
This is what Norma Morandini’s deeply personal essay is about: the need for understanding loss, with the admission that she was greatly inspired by Hannah Arendt’s writings: ‘We must see others now as we want to see ourselves, with understanding. We need a greater sense of self-compassion, coming to terms with the intimacy of pain suffered. For me to say this, now, is to come to terms with the guilt I have felt, the guilt of being older than my brother and sister who were disappeared. My political activism was lightweight, theirs was committed, dangerous. I saw the sadness of my mother and how she recovered and grew to an admirable strength. As a society, now, we must understand that the formulation of our past to ourselves will be the means by which we handle our present and even our future. We have to find a balance somewhere between being sucked down into evil which destroys us and choosing departure, escape, which robs us of the humanity needed to understand. It is a difficult balance. The book has “washed my soul” as the Brazilians say. We must try to learn the concept that one man is all men, the behaviour of one belongs to us all.’