The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  Upon assuming power, the military proceeded with extreme ruthlessness to kidnap, torture, and in most cases kill not only suspected leftist terrorists but also anyone who in their minds was politically liberal or left-leaning or seemed to care for the welfare and rights of poor people, and even people who were accidentally associated with intended victims – for example, happened to be in the same home when the victim was kidnapped. In the end they also tortured and killed for a variety of purely personal motives.

  The abductions, tortures, and murders were committed with the help of three major paramilitary forces. The organization was loose, but with leadership from the highest authorities in the military. Each branch of the military and local units enjoyed broad discretion in deciding the fate of captured persons.

  As early as 1975, the military established secret detention centers – in army barracks, old prisons, and police stations. It is at these centers, starting in 1976, that torture and sometimes killings took place.43

  The military’s practices were guided by the attitude expressed in the Institutional Act of June 18, 1976. The junta assumed the “‘power and responsibility to consider actions of those individuals who have injured the national interest,’ on grounds as generic as, ‘failure to observe basic moral principles in the exercise of public, political, or union offices or activities that involve the public interests.’”44

  While the junta’s defense was that it had been forced to fight a “dirty war” in which certain “excesses” and “errors” had been unavoidable, the pattern of repression followed far more closely the statement of Buenos Aires Governor, General Iberico Saint-Jean, at the time of the military takeover: “First we kill all the subversives; then.. .their sympathizers; then.. .those who remain indifferent; and finally we kill the timid.”45

  As Ernesto Sabato wrote in his proloque to Nunca Mas:

  All sectors fell into the net: trade union leaders fighting for better wages; youngsters in student unions; journalists who did not support the regime; psychologists and sociologists simply for belonging to suspicious professions; young pacifists, nuns and priests who had taken the teachings of Christ to shanty areas; the friends of these people too, and the friends of friends, plus others whose names were given out of motives of personal vengeance, or by the kidnapped under torture.46

  Nunca Mas clearly shows that there was a plan: procedures of the perpetrators varied in many details but clearly were based on a shared design.

  Some leftist guerrillas were killed when found or killed in the course of fighting, but most of the “disappeared” were abducted by groups of armed men in civilian clothes who drove in unmarked cars to the homes of victims, blindfolded them, and took them away. The kidnappers usually maintained that they were acting under military authority.

  When a victim was sought out in his or her home at night, armed units would surround the block and force their way in, terrorizing parents and children, who were often gagged and forced to watch. They would seize the persons they had come for, beat them mercilessly, hood them, then drag them off to their cars or trucks, while the rest of the unit almost invariably ransacked the house and looted everything that could be carried.47

  Usually the gang of kidnappers arranged a “green light,” or a free zone of operations, by calling the local police beforehand. They sometimes came in small numbers, but sometimes in huge force with helicopters hovering over the victims’ homes. They looted (sometimes on another day) and at times destroyed the home of the abducted person.

  When witnesses attempted to report kidnappings to local police, they were usually told that the police were unable to intervene. Victims were rarely informed about reasons for their arrest. When relatives tried to obtain information about the whereabouts of victims, from the police or through the courts using writs of habeas corpus, the authorities usually claimed that the person was not in detention.

  The blindfolded or hooded victims were placed on the floor of the back seat of the car and taken to the military establishments, prisons, or police barracks used as secret detention centers. Here they were kept under horrible conditions. Constantly blindfolded, they were totally disoriented and helpless. They received starvation rations in a manner designed to contribute to their degradation and helplessness. For example, they would be given soup on a flat plate, with a fork. They were repeatedly tortured and interrogated for as long as weeks, months, and in some cases even years. One purpose of this was to force confessions and get the names of other “subversives.”

  Electric prods were applied to all parts of the body; victims’ heads were immersed in water while covered by a cloth; they were beaten with fists, rubber, and metal; put into pens with vicious dogs until they were almost dismembered; put into a sack with a cat. There were mock and genuine executions in front of other prisoners and relatives. Pregnant women were also subjected to torture, resulting in miscarriages and sometimes death.48

  In most of this book, I have discussed the mistreatment and murder without providing a vivid picture of the suffering. I hoped this would allow a more careful analysis of the psychology and culture of perpetrators. However, this suffering and the perpetrators’ will to inflict it are the core of our concern. Nunca Mas quotes the testimony of victims extensively; I present some fragments here:

  Everything happened very quickly. From the moment they took me out of the car to the beginning of the first electric shock session took less time than I am taking to tell it. For days they applied electric shocks to my gums, nipples, genitals, abdomen, and ears....

  Then they began to beat me systematically and rhythmically with wooden sticks on my back, the backs of my thighs, my calves, the soles of my feet. At first the pain was dreadful. Then it became unbearable. The agonizing pain returned a short while after they finished hitting me. It was made still worse when they tore off my shirt, which had stuck to the wounds, in order to take me off for a fresh electric session. This continued for several days, alternating the two tortures. Sometimes they did both at the same time....

  In between torture sessions they left me hanging by my arms from hooks fixed in the wall of the cell were they had thrown me.

  Sometimes they put me on the torture table and stretched me out, tying my hands and feet to a machine which I can’t describe since I never saw it, but which gave me the feeling that they were going to tear my body apart.49

  Afterwards they beat me with sticks and a hammer which they used to smash my fingers whenever my hands were on the floor. They undressed me and tied my hands and feet to a bed frame they called a “grill.” For what must have been an hour they applied electric current to the most sensitive parts of my body: genitals, hips, knees, neck and gums.50

  I was arrested on 15 October 1976 by an army unit, which surrounded and raided my mother’s house, where I was living. Jorge Armando Gonzalez was arrested with me. We were tied up and blindfolded, then I was suspended from a tree with my hands tied behind me and beaten from noon until evening. I could hear my mother’s screams as she begged them not to kill me. I could also hear them hitting Gonzalez. At one stage they filled a container with water, hung him up by the feet and submerged him head first. That was repeated several times.51

  Women were interrogated in the same manner. They were stripped naked, laid down on the bed, and the torture session would begin. With women, they would insert the wire (to give electric shocks) in the vagina and then apply it to the breasts, which caused great pain. Many would menstruate in midtorture.52

  Even in a murderous system, the devaluation of victims and the violence inflicted on them can vary in degree. Consistent with the military’s ideology and prejudices, communists and Jews were the most horribly treated. Examples are provided by Amnesty International:

  On approximately November 1978, an active member of the Argentine Communist Party aged about 40 was kidnapped Several officers and junior officers tortured him savagely.... In the words of a special task force officer: “We killed him before the order came from abov
e (i.e., from superior officers) that we were to let him go without touching him.”53

  And about the torture of Jews:

  The situation of these prisoners was particularly difficult.... From the moment they were kidnapped until they were included in a transfer they were systematically tortured. Some of them were made to kneel in front of pictures of Hitler and Mussolini, to renounce their origins and humiliate themselves... .In the words of a Federal police officer nicknamed “Padre,” “In here, some people are mercenaries and others aren’t; but we are all fascists.”54

  Jews were made to shout “I love Hitler"; they had swastikas painted on their backs; they were especially humiliated in many ways.

  All kinds of torture would be applied to Jews, especially one which was extremely sadistic and cruel: “the rectoscope,” which consisted of inserting a tube into the victim’s anus, or into a women’s vagina, then letting a rat into the tube. The rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the victims internal organs.55

  Christian teachings about Jews and Christian anti-Semitism were influential in Argentina as well as Germany. Nazi propaganda and practices, which increased anti-Semitism worldwide, had especially strong effects on the Argentine military. The fascist inclination of military leaders had long been evident: some of them provided their troops with fascist and Nazi reading materials.56

  Prisoners for whom their captors had no further use were usually “transferred” – strangled, dynamited, or shot, sometimes after being forced to dig their own graves. Their killing was sometimes made to appear as a shootout between guerrillas and security forces, but there is overwhelming evidence that this was a deception. Many prisoners were injected with sedatives and dropped into the ocean from helicopters.57 Prisoners allowed to survive were often left to be “found” by an army or police unit, officially imprisoned, charged, and, because there was no evidence against them, released.

  The selection of victims: ideology, self-interest, caprice

  Individuals were defined as subversives or enemies of the state if they showed the slightest sign of either liberalism or concern for the poor. For example, people were abducted and houses destroyed in March 1976 after residents of a housing area demonstrated to get legal recognition as a housing community. Two years later again several people were kidnapped when a mass was called to celebrate the freeing of a woman abducted in 1976.58 Others were kidnapped because of their association with social welfare institutions. Still others because prisoners who were tortured gave their names to gain some reprieve, or by mistake because of similarities in names. Military conscripts suspected of leftist sympathies disappeared.

  Prisoners were tortured in response to world events that upset perpetrators.

  We would be beaten up and tortured for the slightest transgression of certain rules of the detention camp... .Any event related to repression outside the pozo, the death of a soldier, a gun battle, a politically significant act, events occurring in other parts of the world such as the advances of the Sandinista revolution, constituted a motive or pretext for intensifying the repression.59

  Pregnant women, while usually tortured, were often allowed to live until they delivered the baby. Often the perpetrators then gave the baby to childless military or other ideologically reliable couples who would raise the baby with the right world view. It is a curious comment on ideological fanaticism that apparently the Montonero guerrillas engaged in a similar practice. When members were killed, they refused to release their children to grandparents, who might raise them with the wrong ideology.60

  Although the military claimed to be defending Christianity, priests, nuns, and seminarians were among those kidnapped, tortured, and killed. The following gives a clue to the motives of the perpetrators:

  The person who was interrogating me lost patience, and became angry, saying, “You are not a guerilla, you don’t believe in violence, but don’t you realize that when you go to live (in the shanty towns) with your culture, you are joining people, joining poor people, and to unite with poor people is subversion... .the only error you have committed was that you interpreted doctrine in a too literal way. Christ spoke of the poor, but when he spoke of the poor he spoke of the poor in spirit and you interpreted this in a literal way and went to live, literally, with poor people. In Argentina those who are poor in the spirit are the rich and in the future you must spend your time helping the rich, who are those who really need spiritual help.” (Testimony of the priest Orlando Virgilio Yorio)61

  How can we explain this contradiction? First, Christianity was only part of the ideology. It was more important to eliminate subversives. Second, the definition of subversives was inexact, the line between ingroup and out-group poorly drawn. Varied elements of society were concerned with social change, the welfare of the workers or the poor, or held liberal ideas. The military believed that an international terrorist conspiracy had infiltrated most aspects of the nation’s life. As a result, the ideological net was broadly drawn. Third, the Christianity of the military had been modified to fit in with other strands of the ideology – anticommunism, nationalism, and hatred of social change.

  To understand ideologically based violence it is important to notice how abstract ideals guide conduct. A vision of an ideal communal state of affairs can be divorced from the welfare of individuals. Thus, Christian ideals can exist without respect for individual priests and nuns; an ideal of humanity can be divorced from the value of specific human lives.

  But not all the killing was ideological, and not all victims were subversives even in the minds of the perpetrators. Nunca Mas describes cases in which the primary motivation was robbery. Wealthy victims were abducted simply to collect ransom or to loot their property. Originally this may have been justified as part of the war against subversion, but once violence becomes normal practice additional, totally self-serving motives for it can come into play, including greed, sex, or sadism. According to a book by two BBC reporters, “at the height of the terror... bored junior officers in the murder squads roamed the streets in their Falcons, looking only for pretty girls to take back to camp to torture, rape and kill.”62

  The reports of victims show the enjoyment of torture by some perpetrators and casual, callous brutality. Torturers would suddenly shift from casual conversation among themselves to a brutal assault on a victim. Nunca Mas indicates that the torturers’ behavior was planned. The victims were disoriented as a result of blindfolding, hunger, and psychological and physical torture. The torturers succeeded in their likely purpose: to make “casual,” but at least in part planned, brutality seemingly spontaneous and therefore unpredictable. It is known that other torturers, for example, in Algeria, have also shown such seeming caprice.63

  Occasionally a perpetrator was actually “punished” for officially unsanctioned brutality. Nunca Mas reports the case of a guard who raped a pregnant woman. He was arrested, held for ten days, and then reinstated.64

  The psychology of direct perpetrators

  As steps along the continuum of destruction continue, the intensity of violence increases, casual torture and the enjoyment of torture become more common, probably more acceptable, and the victim group expands. This occurred even in historical periods when torture was part of the legal process: at first used to extract evidence or confessions from low-status defendants, it was eventually used on high-status defendants and even witnesses.65

  We can distinguish between decision makers and direct perpetrators. Decision makers were guided by ideology and their need for defense against threats mainly to their self-image and world view, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Self-interest and maintaining privilege were also involved. However, to the extent the military leaders were protecting their status and position, they did so as part of a belief system and world view in which their long-held elite status had become their inalienable, “natural” right.

  The direct perpetrators had more mixed motives. Obedience to authority was involved. According to Amnesty International, superior of
ficers signed release forms for kidnappings.66 This relieved direct perpetrators of responsibility and thus made abduction, torture, and murder easier. The navy high command gave open support to the Task Force that carried out abduction and torture.

  Admiral Massera delivered an inaugural address to the appointed officers, which concluded with the exhortation to “react to the enemy with utmost violence and without hesitating over the means employed.” Massera also took part in the first secret operations of the Task Force under the pseudonym “Black” or “Zero” to demonstrate his commitment to the task assigned to his officers.67

  Direct perpetrators were also exposed to a different progression along the continuum of destruction, through their experience with victims. Their ideological and identity-related motive became integrated with other personal motives (e.g., power, stimulus seeking, sadism). People function better when their different motives join and support each other, especially if they have to overcome personal inhibitions or social prohibitions.

  Over time, their respect for human life had to diminish. The many types of victims made it difficult to differentiate between more and less worthy human beings. It became acceptable to torture and murder teenage girls, nuns, and pregnant women. Learning by doing stifled the torturers’ feelings of empathy and concern. They had come to see themselves as absolute rulers over the victims’ well-being and life, not subject to normal human constraints. They often talked to the victims about this absolute godlike power and the victims’ total dependence on them; as they did this, they strengthened their own belief in it.

  At this stage, whatever “higher morality” may have been the initial motive, ideological purity is lost. Violence can result from a desire for money, sex, or pleasure. What in this context must be regarded as “base” human motives are integrated with the “higher ideals” provided by leaders.

  The kidnappers, torturers, and killers were regular members of the military and paramilitary units. Conscripts were kept on the fringes of the secret detention centers. There is some information about the types of military and paramilitary units from which perpetrators with different functions were drawn.68 Guards and torturers were usually not the same individuals. Self-selection, selection by superiors, and training probably all contributed to the creation of torturers. It makes sense from the standpoint of the theory of learning by doing that guards, as Nunca Mas reports, at times showed concern for prisoners and other signs of humanity, while torturers did not. A very small percentage of prisoners consented to become part of the “task force” of perpetrators, the “mini-staff.”