The Vatican’s spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, told journalists that the accusations came from “anticlerical left-wing elements.” Given Verbitsky’s background this was accurate, but it had a defensive ring. Equally inconclusive was an initial statement by the other Jesuit concerned, Father Franz Jalics. From his retreat house in Germany, Jalics, who was still a Jesuit, said he and his former provincial had long since been reconciled, that he considered the matter closed, and that he was “unable to comment on the role of Father Bergoglio in these events.” But that only begged questions. If Jalics had forgiven Bergoglio, what had he forgiven—and why could he not comment on his former provincial’s role? A few days later, Jalics issued a second statement. “The fact is: Orlando Yorio and I were not denounced by Father Bergoglio.”
A week after Francis’s election, therefore, the media found themselves caught between two contradictory narratives: “the slum pope” versus “the pope of the dictatorship.” Because the two stories were hard to reconcile, a myth began to take hold: that in the early 1990s the “conservative” Jesuit provincial Bergoglio had become a “progressive” Cardinal Bergoglio as result of a conversion. The myth allowed liberal Catholics above all to praise Pope Francis effusively while retaining the right to wag fingers over his supposedly dubious past.5
* * *
IN almost every media report of the Yorio/Jalics allegations it was assumed that in the mid-1970s the armed forces had ousted a popular democratic government and imposed a horrific regime against the wishes of the people. The truth was very different. The deposed Peronist government was by then deeply unpopular, and the coup was broadly welcomed. If there were ever a clear mandate for the armed forces to take the reins in Argentina, it was in March 1976, when Argentines had been living with escalating internecine violence for the previous five years.
The recent phase of that violence had begun with the montoneros’ decision to break with Perón in May 1974 and resume their armed struggle. The general died two months later, leaving his third wife, María Estela (known as Isabelita), in charge of what became a disastrous presidency. The montoneros denounced her government in the name of Perón’s previous wife. Si Evita viviera, sería montonera, was the catchy cry of the time: “If Evita were alive, she would be a montonero.”
Faced with a tide of bombings and kidnappings, Isabelita declared a state of siege, unleashing covert death squads to wage war on the guerrillas. In the first seven months of 1975, the so-called Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) carried out 450 assassinations and two thousand “disappearances,” yet its actions only legitimized the guerrillas, whose leaders were convinced now that they could seize the state. The ERP and montoneros began to deploy heavy weaponry against army bases and regiments, paid for by millions of dollars earned from kidnappings of businessmen. Foreign capital was in flight, inflation reached 600 percent, and unemployment was soaring. By 1975, politics had been reduced to an escalating violent fratricide between two factions of Peronism. The media concluded that a coup was both inevitable and necessary, and all the main newspapers were calling for the tanks to leave their barracks.
Although the armed forces did not move into the Casa Rosada until March 1976, the so-called dirty war had begun the year before, when Isabelita gave the military free rein to pacify the northeast province of Tucumán. Between three hundred and four hundred Trotskyite guerrillas belonging to the Popular Revolutionary Army (ERP) were carrying out a series of major attacks there, battling the army in the mountains, destroying police stations, and hoping to create a liberated territory. Bergoglio in 2010 recalled that the attack “frightened and disorientated many people.” Isabel’s decree, which ordered the security forces to use all and every means to “annihilate subversion” in the province, was followed by a second decree in response to a major October 1975 montonero assault in Formosa. That decree gave a legal basis for spreading those methods—abduction, torture, and summary executions—to the entire country. These methods would become all too familiar after the coup a year later.
The decrees authorizing those methods were approved by a democratically elected government and had the support of all main parties. Those same parties—Radicals, socialists, conservatives—strongly backed the coup when it came. The politicians accepted the military analysis that extraordinary measures were needed to combat the guerrillas, and they had good reason for doing so. The ERP and the montoneros in the mid- 1970s had around 6,000 trained members, and the active support of perhaps 150,000. As a percentage of the population it was small, but they were organized, equipped, technologically capable, flush with money, ruthless, supported by Havana, and focused on taking power. It was, at the time, the largest guerrilla force in the Western Hemisphere.
The ERP attack in Tucumán and the montoneros’ offensive in Formosa were part of an insurrection strategy straight out of the handbook of the Argentine doctor turned Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto Guevara, known as “Che.” Once a society had reached an objectively revolutionary situation, his theory went, guerrillas could seize control of territory, and the people would gradually come out in their support. Over time, the liberated territory would expand, altering the balance of power. The guerrillas believed after Perón’s death that that moment had come, and the memoirs of the generals show that they, too, believed it was a real possibility. Even after the coup, when the state could wage war without due process, it took two years to defeat them: from 1976 to 1978, the guerrillas managed 748 murders, and the montoneros alone carried out more than two thousand “operations.”
It is arguable in retrospect that both guerrillas and the armed forces were deluded in believing that revolution was around the corner. Yet understanding how close to that point the country was perceived to be explains why Argentine civil society—political parties, trade unions, the Church—supported military intervention, tolerated a police state, and justified to themselves and to each other the extraordinary measures the armed forces deployed. Most people did not have a clear picture of what those measures involved, for the junta was highly effective in concealing its methods. Indeed, secrecy was a key part of the military strategy: Argentine military planners had learned the lessons from the 1973 coup of General Augusto Pinochet across the Andes in Chile, which had provoked international outrage by shooting hundreds of alleged left-wing militants.
The Argentine junta, led by General Jorge Videla, believed that to eradicate the guerrillas it would be necessary to eliminate five thousand people and that killings of civilians on this scale would be unacceptable to a Christian society and to international opinion. Furthermore, only secret operations could achieve the shock-and-awe immediacy needed to break the guerrillas’ highly effective cell structure. The junta’s strategy, therefore, was to conduct torture and interrogations in clandestine military centers, and to dispose of the prisoners in secret, denying all knowledge of them: they would be “disappeared.” This way, they could act so swiftly that the guerrillas would be too disoriented to regroup or fade into the civilian population. Meanwhile, the junta would carry out a thoroughgoing reform of the state and the economy, hoping that peace and prosperity would over time lead the population to consider the armed forces their saviors.
The repression was massive, rapid, and secret. Most Argentines knew something—there were almost-daily reports of abductions—but years of living with Triple A and guerrilla violence meant they took time to grasp that something new and systematic was afoot. “I knew that something serious was happening and that there were a lot of prisoners,” Bergoglio recalled in 2010, “but I realized it was much more than that only later on. Society as a whole only became fully aware of events during the [1980s] trial of the military commanders.… In truth I found it hard to see what was happening until they started to bring people to me and I had to hide the first one.”
Only after the dictatorship fell in 1983 did Argentines discover the full scale of what had been carried out in their name: 340 secret detention centers that practiced routine
torture by electric cattle prods; prisoners drugged and killed by dropping them from helicopters into the sea, or shooting them and burying them in unmarked graves. The best contemporary estimate is that during the dictatorship (1976–1983) the state killed 7,201 people, all but 754 through “disappearances.” Added to the 1,167 (half disappearances, half executions) during the seven years previous to the dictatorship makes a total of 8,368 killed by the state between 1969 and 1983. A little more than half were active guerrillas, the rest unarmed civilians. Most were young people, between fifteen and thirty-five years old.6
As the death toll mounted in 1976 and 1977, grieving and confused relatives of the desaparecidos—a ghostly noun that the foreign media left in Spanish—found themselves stonewalled by the police, and many turned to the Church. The bishops initially sought to maintain relations with the junta, only to find that they had very little influence over it. While they managed to get some prisoners released, their policy of engagement—born of decades of identification with the state—gave the junta legitimacy and the bishops a reputation for pusillanimity: twenty-five years later they used Pope John Paul II’s millennium repentance initiative to ask forgiveness for their “indulgence of totalitarian postures” and their failure to do more to prevent the killings.7
That acknowledgment came with the benefit of hindsight. At the time the choices were complex. The bishops had heard that torture was being used and condemned it in their May 1976 statement, yet the same statement recognized the need for exceptional measures and for the army to be cut some slack. Jorge Casaretto, at the time the young bishop of La Rafaela, says the regime “admitted to us that excesses had been committed, but they never told us they had created an apparatus of torture and disappearances.” In May 1977, the bishops were bolder and clearer, speaking out in emphatic terms to condemn the atrocities. But the day after the statement was made, the guerrillas killed an admiral in a spectacular car bomb attack. “So the armed forces said to us: ‘Look what happens when you issue a condemnation,’” remembers Casaretto. “It was a heavy psychological blow.”
The bishops were also too divided to give a concerted response. The fifty-seven members of the conference split between rightists, moderates, and progressives. The rightists were numerically small—half a dozen—but they had some big dioceses such as La Plata and Rosario, and, more important, they included the military vicariate, a separate church jurisdiction that included more than two hundred armed forces chaplains. The vicariate’s bishops, Adolfo Tortolo and Victorio Bonamín, saw the dictatorship as salvation from the horrors of democracy, and the repression as a holy war that would save Argentina from communism. They knew what was happening, and justified it.
On the opposite wing were about a dozen progressive bishops, who from the start nudged the main body of bishops toward a firmer public line in favor of human rights. Because they headed peripheral dioceses and had many members of the Third World Priests’ Movement (MSTM) among their clergy, they learned before most of their colleagues what the repression involved, spoke against it, and paid the price: by 1983 three of these bishops had been killed in mysterious traffic accidents. In each case, they had faced increasing hostility from security forces, and in two cases were carrying files on the disappeared that then vanished from the scenes of the accidents.
The main body—about two-thirds—of the bishops shared the junta’s objectives of restoring order and peace. “We thought that the ‘inorganic’ violence could only be dealt with by an ‘organic’ violence,” recalls Bishop Casaretto. That made them, like most Argentines, inclined to be supportive of the junta and therefore slow to wake up to the ferocity of its measures. The bishops condemned torture from the start, but in 1976 and 1977 did not publicly break with the regime or denounce it; in that sense the bishops were bystanders, rather than complicit. By 1980, the pro-dictatorship bishops had been sidelined, and the bishops’ conference worked actively for a return to democracy.
In the mid-1970s, however, the Church was itself a theater of war. La Rioja, the poor northwestern diocese where Bergoglio had gone with the general, Father Arrupe, was the most obvious example. Shortly after the coup, the head of the air force in La Rioja accused Bishop Enrique Angelelli of preaching politics and refused to allow his appointed chaplain to enter the Chamical air force base. When Angelelli in protest banned religious services at the base, the army bishop, Victorio Bonamín, overrode him and installed his own chaplain. Bonamín was close to the army chiefs who arranged for the abduction of two of Angelelli’s priests, whose bodies were found days later, tortured and riddled with bullets, together with a list of “subversive” priests who were warned they were next.
Because anyone who worked with the poor in the shantytowns was considered a zurdo (“commie”), priests and nuns were even more of a target than they had been before the coup. During the dirty war some twenty priests and members of religious orders were killed, eighty-four disappeared, and seventy-seven exiled, and many hundreds of lay activists shared their fate. In 2010 Bergoglio told the judicial inquiry:
There were some [at the time] who did theology with a Marxist hermeneutic [i.e., interpreting through a Marxist lens] that the Holy See did not accept, and others who didn’t, who sought a pastoral presence among the poor using a Gospel hermeneutic. The leaders of the dictatorship demonized all liberation theology, putting in the same basket both those priests who used a Marxist hermeneutic—who in Argentina were few compared with other countries—as well as those priests who were simply living their priestly calling among the poor.8
Some of those who were killed were connected to Bergoglio. On June 4, 1976, two Colegio Máximo students belonging to the Assumptionist order were disappeared from the nearby parish of Jesús Obrero in La Manuelita by uniformed guards looking for Father Jorge Adur, an MSTM priest who was for a time chaplain to the montoneros. A month later, five members of the Irish branch of the Pallottine order were horribly murdered at the church of San Patricio in Buenos Aires. One of them, the seminarian Emilio Barletti, was a student at the Máximo, and another, Father Alfredo Kelly, had Bergoglio as his spiritual director.
Because of the strong Jesuit presence in La Rioja, Bergoglio was immediately informed in July that the bodies of two of Angelleli’s priests had turned up by a railway track, having been tortured, and a Catholic lay worker gunned down in front of his children. Angelelli had told many people he would be next. Bergoglio was abroad when, on August 4, 1976, the bishop was driven off the road on which he was returning from a Mass he had held for his two murdered priests. On the backseat was a dossier of evidence naming those responsible, which was removed from the scene. Even though Angelelli had clearly been clubbed to death, the death was reported as an accident. Bergoglio, who knew it wasn’t, returned to Argentina at once.
Later, as pope, he supplied documents which assisted the prosecution, finally, of two senior military officers in Angelelli’s murder.9
* * *
AS provincial, Bergoglio had two objectives during the dirty war, both of which had been set by the general in Rome. The first was to protect the Jesuits. The second was to assist the victims of the repression. The two objectives were, obviously, in tension with each other: if it had been known that their provincial was abetting subversives sought by the state, all Jesuits would have been suspect. It was a high-wire act, but Bergoglio pulled it off. Not one Argentine Jesuit lost his life in the dirty war, and he managed to save dozens of people. What he did not do was speak out publicly against the regime, but he could hardly have done so without sacrificing his objectives, for no obvious gain.
He succeeded for two main reasons.
The first was the breadth and depth of his relationships. His main links were with the deposed Peronists, but he had contacts in the montoneros as well as in the armed forces, and a line to the navy chief, Admiral Emilio Massera. More important, he had the confidence of the three Jesuit army chaplains living in the Colegio Máximo, as well as a senior Jesuit, Father Enrique Laje,
who was influential in Argentine military circles. Bergoglio also had good links with bishops in both the moderate and the progressive camps, and with the Vatican’s representative to Argentina, the apostolic nuncio, Pío Laghi; last, as a provincial close to Arrupe, he had access via the Jesuit curia to the Holy See.
The second reason was his ability to play his cards very close to his chest. Only someone with Bergoglio’s legendary inscrutability could pull off the extraordinary feat of sheltering in the Máximo dozens of people fleeing the dictatorship, under the noses of the army chaplains (who never guessed) and the soldiers outside. They were known only as “students” or “people on retreat,” and not even his secretary, who drove many of the refugees to airports and train stations, knew who they were. For this reason, only Francis can say exactly who, and how many, he helped to escape. Beyond vague references in his judicial witness statements and remarks in his 2010 interview, El Jesuita, that he assisted people by sheltering them in the Máximo, he has given few details.
Until his election most of those whom Bergoglio helped respected his silence with their own. But in March 2013, angered by the injustice of the Verbitsky accusations, many felt compelled to step forward or were truffled out by journalists. Among those most surprised by the stories were the Argentine Jesuits themselves—especially those living in the Máximo at the time. Bergoglio had given nothing away. It was easy to see where he earned his nickname among the Jesuits, “La Giaconda,” the title of da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa, with her famously impenetrable expression.
The Great Reformer Page 18
