Argentina’s campaign against thepast

Marc B. Haefele

8 The memory place is near the northeast corner of Buenos Aires, where the eight-lane Avenida Libertador segues into Vicente Lopez, a posh, leafy suburb. “You have to drive past it all the time,” said one local. Most people claim they knew nothing about what went on there, though it is overlooked by high-rise apartments built before 1976. On March 24 of that year a military coup, widely welcomed by the Argentine majority, overthrew the weak and vicious presidency of Isabel Perón. Hundreds had been killed before, mostly by the right. But the 1976 coup was the beginning of the “dirty war” in which some 30,000 people were murdered.

On the 30th anniversary ofthe coup the Naval Mechanics School (known by its Spanish acronym,ESMA) reopened as “The Space for Memory.” Just months earlier afriend and I had taken a 15-cent commuter-train ride there from thefading, architecturally delicious Retiro station downtown. TheESMA’s low, 80-year-old white buildings spread across 67 boskyacres. Prosecutions of the ESMA torturers have resumed (some of themost culpable are under house arrest), so the entire site isevidence and can’t be refurbished until justice is served. Thepaint on the main building’s entablature is flaking, and russetdoves have nested there; you hear their cooing over the traffic. Thecampus of the ESMA is lovely in springtime, crowded with subtropicaltrees: deodar, jacaranda with purple flowers, tipa blanca with yellowflowers.

It is best to see the ESMA under rain and dark sky if youare trying to imagine it when the Ford Falcons and military trucksdrove through the spiked gate in the high wrought-iron fence (it wasdecorated then, as now, with gay little green-painted galleons,though now there are new life-size metal silhouettes representing thevanished victims). The trucks’ cargoes were people bound hand andfoot with black hoods over their heads. They were beaten and draggedinto this sanctuary to be tortured and either killed here or druggedand dumped from military planes into the River Plate estuary. Orcrudely cremated, sometimes alive.

Born in a country with120 years of constitutional history, the seven-year Proceso, ornational reorganization process, created a society of torture andmurder. It was also about vanishing. The victims officially vanishedfrom the earth, although at first bereaved parents might have beentold that their missing child was in France. Sooner or later everyone understood that you could be seized, tormented, and killedapparently at random. The terror’s intent was, nominally, societalbehavior modification. But you could burn your blue jeans and yourbooks, cut your hair and cut off your politically suspect friends,and still you and your family could bedisappeared.

The ESMA memory space is a key partof this swerving new democracy’s campaign against its past. Thereonce was talk of leveling the place, but President Nestor Kirchnerdecreed that it should become a museum, a memorial. Kirchner is thefirst Argentine president to dare wield history against hisopposition, which includes a merchants’ organization that prosperedduring the dictatorship and the Catholic Church, which supported thedictatorship and ratted out dissident clerics. On the 30thanniversary of the coup, Kirchner hosted a memorial that wasduplicated in all Argentine consulates and embassies. Some haveargued that he was playing politics with this most shameful episodein the nation’s history, that the “dirty war” should berecalled only in silence. But others say that Kirchner’s somberceremonials were far better for the country than what one scholarcalled the “percepticide” of official forgetting by two previouspresidents, Raul Alfonsin and Carlos Menem.

Theforgetting was not confined to presidents or to the police, navy,army, and air force. Didn’t the 12th-floor tenants onLibertador’s 8000 block see the headlights every night, see thegate open, hear the car doors slam, hear the screams of the abductedand the curses and blows? Didn’t they smell the improvisedcrematoria? Probably. Did they draw the curtains, turn on the airconditioner? Perhaps. What about the night shift at the Gilletteplant that used to be across the street? Did the workers takesidelong glances out the window? Kids at the polytechnic high schoolnext door said they heard loud music from the ESMA during the day,apparently played to drown out the screams.

And there were thosewilling to do the work. Some even asserted that their work saved thenation. Contrite torturers were absolved by their military priests.The military had its own diocese.

One of the scariest things aboutthe ESMA at that time was how its captives and captors intermingled.Workaday business, whatever that was at this terrible time—forgingdocuments, faking photographs, writing propaganda, inventorying thegoods stolen from the abductees, planning more abductions—went onas the prisoners were moved through working areas in shackles andblindfolds or black hoods like those used recently at Abu Ghraib.The Argentines even had a version of water boarding, which theycalled the submarino.

Torture at the ESMA became part of a workingbureaucracy: screams of pain, pleading, and fear rose among the inboxes and filing cabinets of the youthful clerks and naval guards,who were mostly age 16 to 20. Murder followed torture because it isthe logical end of the torment of human bodies and because whentorture victims survive they hold their tormentors to account. Outof the 5,300 people brought in to the ESMA about 200 survived. Wewill never know which of the 5,300 read the wrong books, had leftishsympathies, worked with guerrilla insurrectionists, or tossed bombs,because the regime destroyed its records when the dictatorship fell.There was no innocence. General Iberico Saint Jean said at the time,“First we kill all the subversives, then we will kill theircollaborators; then . . . their sympathizers, then those who areindifferent and finally we kill the timid.” But to many themilitary was never wrong; the mantra among the oppressors, thebystanders, and even some relatives of the victims was “they musthave done something.”

The tens of thousands who worked atthe ESMA—cadets, trainees, guards, clerks, janitors, cooks, andgardeners, not just the commanders and torturers—knew the realstory, knew the meaning of the people in eight-inch shackles arrivingby night and screaming in the torture chambers. They signed a pactwith the Devil just by cashing their paychecks. One pilot of theplanes from which prisoners were dropped, Adolfo Scilingo, confessedand is imprisoned for life in Spain. But most of his accomplices arestill free. There are stories of torturers stalking their victimswell after the dictatorship fell—even sending survivors Christmascards. It is as if the repressors and victims shared aterrible, secret language that no one else could understand. NoArgentine torture victim seems to have retaliated by attacking atorturer, even though knife-point vengeance is deep in the nationalfolklore, in the gaucho epic of Martin Fierro and the words of famoustangos such as “Silbando” and “Luz del Candil.” Thevictims’ collective desire is to see the offenders tried andpunished by the due process that they did their best to destroy.About a thousand names of accused oppressors have been published inthe daily papers, which still carry memorial notices for theabducted. Distrust of Argentine officialdom remains, but it seemscredible that justice is about to happen. Two pioneeringhuman-rights groups, the Mothers and the Grandmothers of the Plaza deMayo, say they trust the new government’s jurisprudence. Theydon’t want vengeance, but they cry out for justice.

A fewdays after our visit to the ESMA, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayoled a 24-hour march to mark the anniversary of the abduction andmurder of 14 of its original protesters, including the founderAzucena Villaflor and two French nuns. They were taken to the“officers’ casino” on the ESMA campus and then flown to a dropzone. The remains of Villaflor and ten other victims were recentlyfound; they had been buried in unmarked graves where their bodiescame ashore decades ago. Their reinterments received officialhonors. Villaflor’s ashes were buried next to the white pyramide inthe Plaza de Mayo at the center of Buenos Aires. The following night,for the first time in months, the nation’s capital dome wasilluminated with diamond-bright lights.

Villaflor’s protesthad been inspired by a simple idea: the government is murdering ourchildren and that is wrong. To silence this idea the governmentmurdered her and her friends. But the idea won. Now her daughtertells the crowd that the center of this city of 3.4 million belongsto her mother forever. The aging, white-kerchiefed Madres marcharound her in a line like a spoke of a wheel. Their signs say“Remember and punish” and “Silence is treason.” Around theirnecks hang pictures of their dead children.

The mothers’signs protest past policies against remembrance and punishment. Whenthe dictatorship crumbled after the 1983 Falklands War, the dictatorswere tried, sentenced, and then amnestied. Apart from realizingthe horror’s extent and the endless grief, the most appallingthing in the dictatorship’s aftermath was the amnesty and thecampaign to forget. The “put all this behind us” lobbywas typified throughout the 1990s by the flamboyantly corruptPresident Menem. In the language of clemency and kindness, theoblivion lobby begged the nation to forgive and forget both thevictims and the victimizers. The amnestied killers were only toohappy to be forgotten and much more so to have their victimsforgotten; that was the goal in the first place.

Theadvocates of forgetting—who included not just local politicians andtheir media but some outside reporters—became accomplices, evenafter the junta’s official disgrace, in obliterating the victimsand assuring that Argentines would never know whether the man in thenext car in a traffic jam, the middle-aged police sergeant at thenext café table, or the freshman legislator with amilitary background had been in the midnight task force that hadabducted, tortured, and murdered theirchildren.

* * *

On the day of President Kirchner’smemorials a former Argentine Ambassador to France, Fernando Gelbert,said, “The true memorial we are building is our democracy.” Butthe nation still needs monuments like theESMA.

Our guide, an anthropologist, has adoctorate in Maya civilization. Her tone is academic, evendispassionate, as though the dictatorship had happened 1,300 yearsago rather than during her childhood. Yet much of the task here isarcheological in a forensic way. In the 20 years that the navy heldthe ESMA after the dictatorship fell it stripped away and rebuilt agood deal. Elevators to the basement punishment blocks were removed,and stairways were sealed. A magnificent reception hall with parquetfloors and hardwood columns replaced the dingy entryway through whichthe victims were dragged in 1976. Also gone is the bugged phone boothwhere many captives were compelled to tell their families to notworry, that they were fine, to please not go to anytrouble.

The redecoration began even before the Organizationof American States launched an investigation of the ESMA in 1978.But when the investigation began the rebuilding shifted into highgear. Prisoners being held at the ESMA were killed or moved to adistant island called El Silencio, considerately provided by thearchdiocese of Buenos Aires (a torture victim’s forged signaturewas on the title document). A torture chamber that had been linedwith egg cartons to absorb screams was renamed “the audio-visualcenter.” The OAS team was not fooled, though, because the navy hadforgotten to remove their cattle prods. Since then, the attics andbasement where the prisoners were held, tortured, and killed havebeen gutted and turned into bare, dark, echoing spaces withconcrete floors and steel rafters.

The archeologists aretrying to confirm the original floor plans. But we know that thespace was constantly changing. Cubicle partitions went up and down atthe whims of commanders. The architecture of this torture factorylives in the memories of those who suffered here, who whileblindfolded carefully recalled where this table was, where thatstaircase was, how many steps from the cell to the torture chamber,where you turned left, and where right.

The space formemory is now mapped as the victims experienced it. One memory-baseddiagram shows that there were five torture cells located against thebasement’s north wall in 1977; the next year there were four. The“maternity ward,” barely large enough for two beds, moved everyyear (the babies were given up for military adoption, the motherskilled). The “infirmary,” where the tortured were bucked up bydoctors for more abuse, is always close to the torture cells in thevictims’ memories. The reconstruction was by prisoner labor,of course. Another prisoner specialty was translating militaryinstruction manuals from English to Spanish. These skilled captivesgot to live in an attic facility called the pecera, or the aquarium.But the attic had a torture chamber, too. Later, the pecera’s roughbathroom, whose toilets the inmates had scrubbed with their barehands, was replaced by a luxury bathroom with black marblecountertops for the officers who lived next door. By the end of ourtour, my friend and I badly needed a bathroom, but neither of uscould bring himself to use this one.

* * *

The day wevisited the ESMA boys and girls about the same age as the conscripts30 years ago were on the campus setting up exhibits on human rights.Derechos humanos was a phrase practically forbidden by thedictators.

Buenos Aires is a different city now.Poorer, but, I think, happier with its chancy economy and newfreedom. November’s huge fourth annual gay-pride parade and a marchfor abortion rights drew hundreds of thousands. A gigantic condomwas pulled over the municipal Obelisko in honor of AIDS AwarenessDay. The city is rebuilding at a great pace, but there are still manyimpoverished but dapper street merchants selling city guides, freshgardenias, ballpoint pens, magnifying glasses, dish towels, sopranorecorders, and clock calculators. Many people need several jobs toget by.

Yet to the visitor Buenos Aires is abundant,exciting, and incredibly cheap. It is full of young peopleborn since the dictatorship. They are making out in doorways amongthe falling blossoms of springtime and feeding each other freshstrawberry sundaes in cafes. They were stenciling fuera Bush on thesidewalks in the aftermath of his unfortunate November visit. Theyare having babies.

Down in the Recoleta flea market, amongthe old magazines, worn-out bellows cameras, and ancienttypewriters, I found a perfect pair of photographs in solid silverframes: a doll-faced Evita and an angelic Hitler. Someone hasprobably bought them by now—an older person who still believes thatthe dictatorship saved Western civilization. There are probably manysuch people, though they have had little to say in the editorialpages of the mainstream Buenos Aires papers.

How many survive whomarched in the Proceso’s parades? Who still believe that theguerillas of the 1970s killed more people than the dictatorship?There didn’t seem to be many people from the middle class at therally honoring the Madres’ interment. You wonder how manyArgentines support Kirchner despite his dedication to uncovering thedictatorial past because he sticks it to Uncle Sam or becausethe stock market and exports are rising, unemployment is falling,and the towering foreign debt that the dictators left behind is beingredistributed.

There was a recent scandal about naval intelligencespying on civilians; officials claimed that this was “anexceptional case.” But increasingly this is a country ofinheritors. Perhaps they can’t remember the dictatorship, but theydon’t seem to want it to happen again.

We walk out of the ESMA as an old Ford full of young people exits the gate of death. The kids flash us peace signs. They see two 60ish graybeards from the far side of the life that waits for them. We raise our hands and flash them back: V for peace, V for victory. <

Marc B. Haefele has been covering California state and local politics for 25 years for publications that include the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. He writes a column for the weekly Los Angeles Alternative.