Jonathan P. Baird

One interesting feature of wordpress blogs is the statistical feature which allows you to see how many people are reading and also what country readers are from. For reasons I do not entirely understand the book review I wrote last December about Marguerite Feitlowitz’s book “A Lexicon of Terror”, has been the most read piece on my website. I guess i would partly attribute it to interest in Pope Francis and the church’s actions around Argentina’s Dirty War but this piece had attracted interest before the pope’s selection. Since my blog has only a tiny readership, I decided to revise the piece and publish it as an op-ed so it could be more widely viewed. Thanks go to the Concord Monitor, my local paper, for publishing it.

I think it is interesting that there is also a trial going on now in Guatemala about crimes committed by the military regime of former General Jose Efrain Rios Montt in 1982-83. Rios Montt and his former chief of military intelligence, General Jose Mauricio Rodriquez Sanchez, stand accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. It does seem very positive for the evolution of the rule of law in Latin America that this trial can happen at all. Marcie Mersky, the Program Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice wrote about the Rios Montt case this way:

“Getting the case to court has been no easy feat in Guatemala, where decades of armed conflict and strict military control of the government left behind an enfeebled and politically compromised judicial system as well as a deeply entrenched expectation of impunity for even the most heinous of crimes. But the signficance of the trial stretches far beyond that small Latin American country: it is the first time that a former head of state is being tried for genocide in a credible national court, by the national authorities, in the country where the crimes took place.”

I will follow up on the Rios Montt case as that unfolds in court. For those of you who read an earlier version of this piece, sorry if it is all too familiar. I did not change too much. Anyway, here it is:

The selection of Pope Francis has focused attention on a period of Argentine history that is little known here in the United States. Argentina’s Dirty War, an episode from 1976 to 1983, shocked the conscience of the world. In the aftermath of a military coup, the military junta and their hired killers disappeared at least 10,000 people. Some estimates put the number at 30,000.

It is disturbing we in the United States are so unaware of the Dirty War. It was grossly under-reported here. It was also rationalized by apologists in the United States. Considering the depravity, that is hard to understand. The story is very well told in “A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture” , an important book written in 1998 by Marguerite Feitlowitz, who is now a Professor of Literature at Bennington College in Vermont. Feitlowitz describes an utterly surreal society where in the name of the fight against subversion, the Argentine military kidnapped, tortured, and executed thousands. As Feitlowitz says,

“The Dirty War regime eviscerated the best-educated generation in the history of Argentina…intellectual professions became categories of guilt.”

Students, artists, intellectuals, leftists, labor activists, Jews, and young people generally were singled out as enemies of the regime. Anyone considered suspicious could be put on a list and taken away. No proof of anything was required. This only happened a little over 30 years ago.

I was interested in how Argentine lawyers and judges responded to the Dirty War. I think the truth is that the society was so terrorized it made it impossible for a legal system to function. Fear overwhelmed daily life. Unmarked Ford Falcons cruised the streets and squads of goons would jump out and corner targeted people and take them away from their homes to be tortured, murdered and disappeared. Bystanders and observers would typically not make a peep. The Argentine military had a long list.

It was a rational and self-interested calculation for Argentine lawyers and judges to lie low during the Dirty War. The risk of going out on any limb was very great. Anyone thought critical of the process could be placed on a hit list. The rule of law was not strong enough to protect practically anyone from being disappeared.

Cases addressing crimes committed by the Argentine military are only now being prosecuted. There has been a long, torturous road just to get to the point where crimes could possibly be prosecuted. The history of the pursuit of justice for Dirty War victims is a worthy topic in itself.

The horror was extreme. Feitlowitz describes the many death flights where members of the Argentine military would drug captives, load them onto helicopters, strip them, and toss them out of the helicopters far out in the ocean. Argentine naval officers rotated death flight duty. We know this because of public confessions made in 1995 by Naval Captain Adolfo Scilingo. Following Scilingo, a half dozen other naval officers also confessed.

To give a sense of the mindset, Scilingo said that officers considered the flights “a form of communion”, “a supreme act we did for the country”. Scilingo himself shoved 30 individuals to their deaths on two flights. His victims included a 65 year old man, a 16 year old boy and 2 pregnant women in their early 20’s.

Feitlowitz performs a very valuable service by telling many untold stories of those tortured and disappeared. These lost stories need to be told. Witnessing and telling the stories is a first step toward accountability.

During the Dirty War, secret concentration camps dotted the country. Part of the surrealism described by Feitlowitz was the co-existence of torture very close to the domain of normal life. To give an example: the Argentine military ran torture cells in the basement of the renovated mall, Galerias Pacifico, which was located in the heart of Buenos Aires. Acoustics blotted out sound apparently. They had shopping next to torture.

A major focus of Feitlowtz’s book is the bizarre use of language by the junta (which explains the title). The junta twisted language to create a world of self-justification. Every torture, murder, and disappearance could be legitimated since it was part of the war on subversion. It was beyond Orwellian. Awful acts could be clothed in the regime’s language of honor and duty to the nation.

In their secret concentration camps, the torturers talked compulsively to their victims. Feitlowitz describes the torturers’ rap this way:

” “You don’t exist..You’re no one..We are God.” How can one torture a person who doesn’t exist? Be God in a realm of no ones? How can a human being not exist? Be no one in a realm of gods? Through language. Through the reality created by and reflected in words. In the clandestine camps there developed an extensive argot in which benign domestic nouns, medical terms, saints, and fairy-tale characters were appropriated as terms pertaining to physical torture. Comforting past associations were translated into pain, degradation and sometimes death.”

Language enabled behavior that was otherwise way out of bounds. Also, the junta’s language had only the remotest relationship to factual accuracy. They would report “subversives died in a firefight” when the truth was more like the capture of unarmed civilians by regime thugs who were armed to the teeth. The “subversives” were then “disappeared”.

The concept of people being disappeared goes back to the Nazis as part of their doctrine of Night and Fog. Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel , who had been Chief of the German High Command and who was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes described Hitler’s doctrine this way: “The prisoners will disappear without a trace. It will be impossible to glean any information as to where they are or what will be their fate.”

The Nazi influence was very much a part of this story. Pictures of Hitler hung in torture chambers and the torturers sometimes played Hitler speeches while torturing. While Argentina had the largest concentration of Jews in Latin America, Argentine society , particularly the Church and the military, were bastions of anti-semitism. After World War II, Argentina accepted Nazi refugees including Martin Bormann, Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann. Former Nazis integrated into the Argentine security service.

In this connection, I do want to mention another important book, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, by Jacobo Timerman. Timerman, who was Jewish and who had been the publisher of a leading Argentine newspaper, La Opinion, was disappeared, tortured, and as almost never happened, was released. The junta stripped Timerman of citizenship and expelled him from the country. Timerman wrote about the weird anti-semitism in Argentina and he analyzes it too. That book is also very much worth a read.

A sad aspect of this sordid story is the weak response of mainstream Jewish organizations to the Dirty War. With some notable exceptions (Rabbi Marshall Meyer and Rabbi Morton Rosenthal) the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations (DAIA), the major Jewish community organization, was largely silent and acquiescent.

There are many tangential themes that deserve attention. The role of the U.S., the baby trafficking, the brave role of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to name a few.

Not too many books deserve the word heroic. Feitlowtz’s book is a book that does.The Dirty War was a worst case scenario of what can happen when civil liberties are sacrificed in the name of security and combating subversion. Feitlowitz deserves credit for unearthing so many stories and for trying to get to the bottom of this atrocity. One is left wondering how a literate, relatively well-educated people could have gone down such a self-destructive, cruel road.