Buenos Aires Herald
Monday, july 2, 2012
LIBROS:
LIBROS:
DISPOSICIÓN FINAL
La confesión de Videla sobre los desaparecidos
Ceferino Reato
Former Herald editor reviews a recently published book and essay, reminders that the desaparecidos remain at the forefront of Argentine's minds and that answers are still needed.
by Andrew Graham - Yooll
for the Herald
Nearly four decades after the military coup of March 1976 in Argentina
In Disposición Final, published by Sudamericana, author Ceferino Reato secured a chilling narrative from the dictator, now 86, who is serving life imprisonment. “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?” says Videla. “We never used the phrase ‘Final solution’. ‘Final Disposal’ were the words most used; those are two very military words that refer to taking something useless out of service. When, for example, one speaks of clothing that is used no longer or is too worn, it goes under Final Disposal. It no longer has a useful life.”
The statements made by Videla now 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. “Yes, but the guerrillas started killing first,” was often the rejoinder we got at the Buenos Aires Herald 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, in English, “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.
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, 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.
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. The military handed over 227 children of captives to neighbours or relatives or to juvenile courts. But 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 one hundred have recovered their original family names, lost in forced adoptions. However, the Grandmothers gave the figure of 190 children disappeared along with their parents on their official web on December 24, 2011.
When Reato’s book was published in mid-April 2012, 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 (1976-1981). He even seemed to regret the terror. However, by May 2012, it was obvious that the aging monster had agreed to talk on the record to say that he had been the boss when the military decided that the nation had to be saved from the subversive menace (Marxist and nationalist Peronist guerrillas). For those most ingenuous Videla could be about to produce the 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
However, we still have a long way to go for an answer as to what happened in the seventies.
** In spite of his denial, on 4 July, 2012, a court sentenced Videla to 50 years in prison for planning and executing a systematic plan to remove and hide babies born in captivity.
