It was useless in 1957 to seek justice for the victims of “Operation Massacre,” just as it was useless in 1958 to seek punishment against General Cuaranta for the murder of Satanowsky, just as it is useless in 1968 to call for the prosecution of those who murdered Blajaquis and Zalazar and are being protected by the government.47 Within the system, there is no justice.
Other writers keep refining the picture of this oligarchy that dominates Argentines and is dominated by foreign interests. When considering taking up a fight against this elite class, it is important to remember that they are temperamentally inclined toward murder. This tendency should be kept in mind, not with the thought of doing as they do, but rather the contrary: so as not to be moved by the sacred ideas, the sacred principles, and more generally, the beautiful souls of the executioners.
Footnotes:
46These are all student or labor activists who were either killed or disappeared under the Argentine dictatorships of the 1960s and ’70s.
47Marcos Satanowsky was a lawyer who was killed in his Buenos Aires office in 1957. Walsh wrote an entire book about the crime entitled El Caso Satanowsky (1973) (The Satanowsky Case) in which he incriminates General Juan Constantino Cuaranta of the State Intelligence Service. No one was ever brought to justice for Satanowsky’s murder. Domingo Blajaquis and Juan Zalazar were killed in a shootout among members of the Metal Workers Union in Avellaneda, in the Province of Buenos Aires. Walsh recounts this event in great detail in his 1968 nonfiction investigative work, ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who Killed Rosendo?).
Operation in the Movies
In 1971, Jorge Cedrón decided to make a film out of Operation Massacre. He shot the film in secret due to the restrictions that Lanusse’s dictatorship had placed on most political activities, as well as some artistic ones.48 About thirty professional actors, most of them first-rate, accepted the risk of shooting the film.
They finished shooting in August of 1972. With the help of the Peronist Youth movement, union and student groups, and run-of-the-mill Peronism, it was screened hundreds of times in the neighborhoods and slums of the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires and throughout the country without ever falling into the hands of the police. It was estimated that more than one hundred thousand had seen it before May 25, 1973. Ever since that day, there has been a hold on a permit from the Film Institute to show it legally.
Julio Troxler plays himself nicely in the movie. After a conversation with him and Cedrón about the book, we came to the conclusion that the film should not limit itself to the events described in the text. Troxler’s active militancy for nearly twenty years gave him the authority to encapsulate the collective experience of Peronism during the difficult years of resistance, proscription, and armed struggle.
So the movie includes a text that does not appear in the original book. I have included it in this edition because I understand that it makes the book whole and gives it its ultimate meaning.
49
50
Footnotes:
48DG: Alejandro Lanusse was first appointed in 1968 as one of the commanders of the Armed Forces under General Onganía’s de facto presidency. He himself then served as the de facto President of Argentina from 1971 to 1973.
49DG: The FAP (Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas [Peronist Armed Forces]) and the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias [Revolutionary Armed Forces]) were left-wing Peronist guerrilla groups that were started in the late 1960s and mainly active during the early 1970s. In 1973, after much negotiation, the FAR merged with the Montonero movement. Walsh himself worked with the FAP before joining the Montoneros in 1973.
50The Descamisados (The Shirtless) were another left-wing Peronist guerrilla group active in the early 1970s that merged with the Montoneros in 1973.
Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta51
1. Censorship of the press, the persecution of intellectuals, the raid on my home in Tigre, the murder of dear friends, and the loss of a daughter who died fighting you, are some of the events that compel me to express myself in this clandestine way after having shared my opinion freely as a writer and journalist for nearly thirty years.52
The first anniversary of this Military Junta has brought about a year-end review of government operations in the form of official documents and speeches: what you call good decisions are mistakes, what you acknowledge as mistakes are crimes, and what you have left out entirely are disasters.
On March 24, 1976, you overthrew a government that you yourselves were a part of, that you helped bring into disrepute as the executors of its repressive policies, and that was coming to an end, given the elections that had been set for just nine months later. From this perspective, what you destroyed was not the temporary mandate of Isabel Martínez, but rather the possibility for a democratic process through which the people might remedy the problems that you have perpetuated and aggravated.53
Illegitimate since birth, your government could have legitimized itself by reviving the political program that 80 percent of Argentines voted for in the 1973 elections, and that continues to be an objective expression of the people’s will—the only thing that could possibly be denoted by the “national being” that you invoke so often. You have gone instead in the completely opposite direction by returning to the ideas and interests of defeated minority groups, the ones who hold back workforce development, exploit the people, and divide the Nation. This kind of politics can only prevail temporarily by banning political parties, taking control of unions, silencing the press, and introducing Argentine society to the most profound terror it has ever known.
2. Fifteen thousand missing, ten thousand prisoners, four thousand dead, tens of thousands in exile: these are the raw numbers of this terror.
Since the ordinary jails were filled to the brim, you created virtual concentration camps in the main garrisons of the country which judges, lawyers, journalists, and international observers, are all forbidden to enter. The military secrecy of what goes on inside, which you cite as a requirement for the purposes of investigation, means that the majority of the arrests turn into kidnappings that in turn allow for torture without limits and execution without trial.54
More than seven thousand habeas corpus petitions have been denied in the past year. In thousands of other cases of missing people, the petition has not even been presented either because people know ahead of time how useless it is, or because they can’t find a lawyer who will dare to present it, since the fifty or sixty who did have been kidnapped one by one.
This is how you have done away with any time limit on torture. Since the prisoner does not exist, there is no way to present him before the judge within ten days, as stipulated by the law that was respected even at the heights of repression during previous dictatorships.
The lack of any time limits has been accompanied by a lack of any limits when it comes to your methods: you have regressed to periods when victims’ joints and internal organs were operated on directly, only now you use surgical and pharmacological aids that the old executioners did not have at their disposal. The rack, the drill, skinning alive, and the saw of the medieval Inquisition reappear in testimonies alongside the picana and waterboarding, the blowtorch of today.55
By succumbing repeatedly to the argument that the end of killing guerrillas justifies all your means, you have arrived at a form of absolute, metaphysical torture that is unbounded by time: the original goal of obtaining information has been lost in the disturbed minds of those inflicting the torture. Instead, they have ceded to the impulse to pommel human substance to the point of breaking it and making it lose its dignity, which the executioner has lost, and which you yourselves have lost.
3. The refusal of this Junta to publish the names of the prisoners is, moreover, a cover for the systematic execution of hostages in vacant lots in the early morning, all under the pretext of fabricated combat and imaginary escape attempt
s.
Extremists who hand out pamphlets in the countryside, graffiti the sidewalks, or pile ten at a time into vehicles that then burst into flames: these are the stereotypes of a screenplay that was written not to be believed, but to buffer against the international reaction to the current executions. Within the country, meanwhile, the screenplay only underscores how intensely the military lashes back in the same places where there has just been guerrilla activity.
Seventy people executed after the Federal Security Agency bombing, fifty-five in response to the blasting of the La Plata Police Department, thirty for the attack on the Ministry of Defense, forty in the New Year’s Massacre following the death of Colonel Castellanos, and nineteen after the explosion that destroyed the Ciudadela precinct, amount to only a portion of the twelve hundred executions in three hundred alleged battles where the opposition came out with zero wounded and zero forces killed in action.
Many of the hostages are union representatives, intellectuals, relatives of guerrillas, unarmed opponents, or people who just look suspicious: they are recipients of a collective guilt that has no place in a civilized justice system and are incapable of influencing the politics that dictate the events they are being punished for. They are killed to balance the number of casualties according to the foreign “body-count” doctrine that the SS used in occupied countries and the invaders used in Vietnam.
Guerrillas who were wounded or captured in real combat are being killed just to make sure they are dead. This additional piece of evidence was taken from the military’s own press releases which stated that, over the course of one year, there were six hundred guerrilla deaths and only ten or fifteen wounded—a ratio unheard of in even the bloodiest of conflicts. This suggestion is confirmed by a sampling from a secret news source which showed that, between December 18, 1976, and February 3, 1977, over the course of forty live battles, the armed forces suffered twenty-three deaths and forty wounded, and the guerrillas suffered sixty-three deaths.56
More than one hundred prisoners awaiting their sentence have also been slain in their attempts to escape. Here, too, the official story has been written not to be believable, but rather to show the guerrillas and the political parties that even those who have been acknowledged as prisoners are held on strategic reserve: the Corps Commanders use them in retaliation depending on how the battles are going, if a lesson can be learned, if the mood strikes them.
That is how General Benjamín Menéndez, Commander of the Third Army Corps, earned his laurels before March 24: first with the murder of Marcos Osatinsky, who had been arrested in Córdoba, and then with the death of Hugo Vaca Narvaja and another fifty prisoners through various, merciless applications of the escape law; the official story of these deaths was told without any sense of shame.57 The murder of Dardo Cabo, arrested in April 1975 and executed on January 6, 1977, with seven other prisoners under the jurisdiction of the First Army Corps led by General Suárez Mason, shows that these incidents do not constitute the indulgences of a few eccentric centurions, but rather are the very same policies that you plan among your general staff, that you discuss in your cabinet meetings, that you enforce as commanders-in-chief of the three branches of government, and that you approve as members of the Ruling Junta.
4. Between fifteen hundred and three thousand people have been massacred in secret since you banned the right to report on the discovery of bodies; in some cases, the news still managed to leak, either because it involved other countries, or because of the magnitude of your genocide, or because of the shock provoked among your own troops.58
Twenty-five mutilated bodies washed up on Uruguayan shores between March and October 1976. This was a small portion perhaps of the heaping number of those tortured to death at the Naval Mechanics Academy and dropped into the La Plata River by navy ships, among them a fifteen-year-old boy, Floreal Avellaneda, his hands and feet bound, “with bruising in the anal region and visible fractures,” according to the autopsy.
In August 1976, a local man went diving in the San Roque Lake, Córdoba, and discovered a genuine swamp of a cemetery. He went to the precinct, where they would not file his report, and he wrote to the papers, where they would not publish it.59
Thirty-four bodies turned up in Buenos Aires between the third and the ninth of April 1976, eight in San Telmo on July 4, ten in the Luján river on October 9; this, plus the massacres on August 20 that left a heap of thirty people dead fifteen kilometers from Campo de Mayo and seventeen dead in Lomas de Zamora, are all part of the same pattern.
These reports put an end to the make-believe story spun about right-wing gangs, alleged heirs to López Rega’s Triple A, who would be able to get past the largest garrison in the country with military trucks, carpet the La Plata River with bodies, or throw prisoners to the sea from the First Aerial Brigade60 without General Videla, Admiral Massera, or Brigadier General Agosti knowing about it.61 Today, the Triple A has become the 3 Branches, and the Junta that you are running is not the balancing point between “two kinds of violence,” nor is it the impartial referee between “two terrorisms”; rather, it is the very source of the terror that has lost its way and can do nothing more than babble on in its discourse of death.62
The same historical continuity ties the murder of General Carlos Prats, under the previous government, to the kidnapping and death of General Juan José Torres, Zelmar Michelini, Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, and dozens of political refugees whose death killed off any chances of democratic regimes in Chile, Bolivia, and Uruguay.63
That the Federal Police’s Department of Foreign Affairs—which is led by officials who received grant money from the CIA via USAID (like Commissioners Juan Gattei and Antonio Gettor) and are themselves under the authority of Mr. Gardener Hathaway, Station Chief of the CIA in Argentina—was undeniably involved in those crimes is the seed for future revelations like the ones that today shock the international community. The revelations will keep coming, even after a light is shined on the role that both this agency and high-ranking officers of the Army, led by General Menéndez, played in the creation of the Libertadores de América Society—the same Society that replaced the Triple A until their general mission was taken on by this Junta in the name of the 3 Branches.64
This tally of destruction even includes the balancing of personal accounts—like the murder of Captain Horacio Gándara, who had been investigating the dealings of high-ranking Naval Chiefs for the past decade, or of the Prensa Libre journalist, Horacio Novillo, stabbed and burned to death after that paper reported on ties between Minister Martínez de Hoz and international monopolies.65
In light of these incidents, the definition of the war, as phrased by one of its leaders, takes on its ultimate significance: “The battle we are waging knows neither moral nor natural limits; it takes place beyond good and evil.”66
5. These events, which have shaken the conscience of the civilized world, are nonetheless not the ones that have brought the greatest suffering upon the Argentine people, nor are they the worst human rights violations that you have committed. The political economy of the government is the place to look not only for the explanation of your crimes, but also for an even greater atrocity that is leading millions of human beings into certain misery.
Over the course of one year, you have decreased the real wages of workers by 40 percent, reduced their contribution to the national income by 30 percent, and raised the number of hours per day a worker needs to put in to cover his cost of living67 from six to eighteen, thereby reviving forms of forced labor that cannot even be found in the last remnants of colonialism.
By freezing salaries with the butts of your rifles while prices rise at bayonet point, abolishing every form of collective protest, forbidding internal commissions and assemblies, extending workdays, raising unemployment to a record level of 9 percent68 and being sure to increase it with three hundred thousand new layoffs, you have brought labor relations back to the beginning of the Industrial Era. A
nd when the workers have wanted to protest, you have called them subversives and kidnapped entire delegations of union representatives who sometimes turned up dead, and other times did not turn up at all.69
The results of these policies have been devastating. During this first year of government, consumption of food has decreased by 40 percent, consumption of clothing by more than 50 percent, and the consumption of medicine is practically at zero among the lower class. There are already regions in Greater Buenos Aires where the infant mortality rate is above 30 percent, a figure which places us on par with Rhodesia, Dahomey, or the Guayanas. The incidence of diseases like Summer Diarrhea, parasitosis, and even rabies has climbed to meet world records and has even surpassed them. As if these were desirable and sought-after goals, you have reduced the public health budget to less than a third of military spending, shutting down even the free hospitals while hundreds of doctors, medical professionals, and technicians join the exodus provoked by terror, low wages, or “rationalization.”
You only have to walk around Greater Buenos Aires for a few hours before quickly realizing that these policies are turning it into a slum with ten million inhabitants. Cities in semi-darkness; entire neighborhoods with no running water because the monopolies rob them of their groundwater tables; thousands of blocks turned into one big pothole because you only pave military neighborhoods and decorate the Plaza de Mayo; the biggest river in the world is contaminated in all of its beaches because Minister Martínez de Hoz’s associates are sloughing their industrial waste into it, and the only government measure you have taken is to ban people from bathing.
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