Argentina: the past won’t stay away (I)

Buenos Aires Herald

Monday, july 2, 2012       


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 society has still not come to terms with its recent past. The intellectual conviction is that societies have to assimilate the past to be able to bury it in the history books, but this has not yet happened.  A recent book hinted at the possibility of change, but early optimism sank rapidly.  The book, by journalist Ceferino Reato, editor of Fortuna magazine, researches into the dark corners of the seventies, and provides a cold and cruel description of the military plan to murder thousands of opponents as told in nine interviews by an imprisoned former dictator. 

Argentina’s dictatorship held power between 1976 and 1983. Although this was the shortest dictatorship of all those 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 camp and make them disappear.  Thus Argentina gave the word “desaparecidos”, in Spanish, to the language of repression. Political groups and human rights organizations set the figure of disappeared at 30,000. But this has been a projection, not backed by the recovery of remains and identities.

            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 La Nación, published  on May 21, rejecting some of author Reato’s passages.  Videla claimed that he had said, “according to reliable figures, seven or eight thousand had died.”  He further added, “Mind, I do not regret a thing and I sleep soundly and at peace every night.”...

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.

* http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/105077/argentina-the-past-won’t-stay-away-

INDEX AT 40

THE LONG VIEW

Andrew Graham-Yooll on a hit literary year that included Mikhail Bulgakov and Death and the Maiden

When the Berlin Wall came down, Russia,the most powerful member of the federation that replaced the Soviet Union, became a field for fortune hunters and new millionaires. So why not authors’ rights and royalties? Into the Index office one Spring morning marched Vitaly Shentalinsky  of the Moscow Writers’ Union. He unloaded a bag full of goodies on the desk of director and publisher Philip Spender: the writings had been held in the bowels of the Union, deposited there in an act of bureaucratic self-preservation by KGB agents who had seized them from their prisoners.  We could only marvel at the names listed for we could not read Russian. Irena Maryniak, our Eastern Europe editor, was called in and after a glance expressed her delight, ‘How can we have them?’ she asked. Shentalinsky wanted money; we did not have the funds. I asked if I could check the copy with Irena, most of it printed in editions of Ogonyok magazine.  She sat by our unreliable photocopier.  I prayed that this time it would not fail.  I copied as fast as I could, threw the copies on Irena’s desk and returned to Spender’s office with the magazines. 

The result was a jumbo edition for August/September 1991. The cover read ‘USSR: the hidden literary treasure of the Lubianka’.  It included the diary of Mikhail Bulgakov, the interrogation of Osip Mandelstam, an unknown novel by Andrei Platonov, Isaac Babel’s case file and an interview with Vitaly Shentalinsky. He deserved the credit for gaining access to the archives. I felt very proud.

Shentalinsky had spent months campaigning for access to the Lubianka. When writers were arrested their archive usually disappeared with them. Shentalinsky estimated that at least 2,000 writers had been imprisoned. Hundreds vanished and around 1,500 died. Their manuscripts were the most important evidence that survived. The first success came in 1989 when access was granted to Isaac Babel’s case file. ‘As a society we are still shell-shocked from the Lubianka terror,’ Shentalinsky told Irena Maryniak. ‘Now they’re inviting us to get up and dance, and people won’t. It’ll take two generations to resolve. If you give a slave his freedom he’ll treat it as yet another arbitrary act. He’ll snatch at what was repressed within himself and make slaves of those around him.’

We were savouring our success when the Chilean author Ariel Dorfman called to ask me if we would publish his new play Scars on the Moon (Luna que se quiebra).  The title came from a romantic all-time favourite bolero by Mexican composer Agustín Lara. The play was a chilling account of a Chilean woman encountering the man who had tortured her during the Pinochet regime.  I told Ariel Dorfman we had a budget of one hundred pounds and that was it.  He said he had expected a bit more, but relented.

Dorfman had returned to live in Chile from the US the previous year. In an interview published alongside the play, he told me: ‘Basically, there will always be a co-existence in many societies between those who committed crimes and those who were repressed. This co-existence is a fact of contemporary society. It does not happen only in the Chilean transition to democracy, which in its own way is very Chilean. It happens in all transitions – in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. We call the situation created la impunidad – the state of impunity. We have to understand what we have done  to ourselves, and that somehow we can stop.

‘The point about the play is that it works in the grey zone of ambiguity. It allows each person in the audience, or each reader, to ask themselves who they are in relationto each character. In Chile, everybody has lived that situation. How do you make the truth, how do you pervert one truth to bring out another?’

Within weeks, the title of the play had changed to Death and the Maiden and opened at the Royal Court Upstairs, thanks in many ways to Harold Pinter.  In October 1991, Nick Hern published the Royal  Court edition.  Then came Roman Polanski’s film. The play had outgrown us. That was as it should be.

Andrew Graham-Yooll was editor of  Index from 1989 to 1993. His latest essay in English is Who do you Think you Are? in the Index-Seagull manifesto series.  His most recent book is a bilingual anthology of Argentine poets, published in Buenos Aires.

* www.indexoncensorship.org