Argentina's Missing Bones. James P. Brennan

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СКАЧАТЬ mirrored that found elsewhere in the country. Menéndez described the military’s tactics as “low-intensity warfare,” in other words an intelligence war with carefully targeted victims, not random violence, though in practice either the intelligence did not prove precise enough or the execution of its operations was so sloppy that random victims did occur. Special task forces (fuerzas de tareas) divided into operational task forces (grupos de tarea) undertook their actions separate from the larger contingent of the Third Corps conscripts. Menéndez and a select group of officers oversaw this parallel force with its specialized military intelligence personnel and the local police well integrated into its structure. It was this parallel force that most actively perpetrated the dirty war in Córdoba. Regular army troops were employed in guard and sentry duties in the camps, but not involved in the urban abductions.

      The “mode of destruction” in Córdoba also resembled that found in other parts of the country, but with some distinguishing peculiarities.¹⁶ Córdoba’s delegation in the truth commission charged with investigating the crimes of the dictatorship, the CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas), published a separate report on human rights violations there, benefited by the unique good fortune of actually acquiring some military files on the prisoners held in several of the detention centers. These and the oral testimonies of survivors relate over and over again the same pattern of nighttime raids, unmarked police cars, masked gangs, ransacking, abductions, detentions, and torture. For those who did not live to tell their tale, violent death was the final stage. Some of the disappeared such as the trade union leader and close collaborator of Tosco in the local light and power workers union, Tomás Di Toffino, and SMATA secretary-general René Salamanca, were prominent figures. Most were anonymous workers, students, lawyers, university professors, and others with suspected left-wing ties. The demographic profile of the disappeared in Córdoba resembled that of other parts of the country but with some variations peculiar to the province. One was the scale of the terror relative to its size. The CONADEP report placed Córdoba third, some 9 percent, in the total number of desaparecidos nationally, trailing only the more populous province of Buenos Aires and the federal capital.¹⁷ As in the rest of the country, males comprised the majority of the disappeared, but females were almost a third and the victims were overwhelmingly young. Over 70 percent were between the ages of twenty and forty, and of those 54 percent were between the ages of twenty and thirty. However, workers comprised the largest socioeconomic category of the disappeared, almost 42 percent, while students were the second largest, making up nearly 31 percent.¹⁸

      Calculation of the numbers of victims in Córdoba and their identities has grown more precise over time. The first rigorous attempt to compile a list of Argentina’s disappeared along with dates of disappearance and national identity card numbers, as well as fragmentary information on age, profession, and believed place of detention, was a 1982 report by the Comité de Defensa de Derechos Humanos en el Cono Sur. Based in São Paulo, the committee received testimony from Argentine exiles and visitors, former political prisoners among them, on the fate of the thousands of disappeared. The report compiled a list of 7,291 names with a subsequent supplementary report comprising an additional 494 names, not only of the disappeared, but also those who it was believed continued to be detained and others released from detention. Córdoba’s share of that 7,785 total figure, confined to those arrested strictly in the provincial capital and its environs, numbered approximately 457. The information revealed that of this number, more than half, some 250, disappeared in the first six months following the March 24, 1976, coup and another thirty-eight in the subsequent six months leading up to the first anniversary of the coup. Perhaps most surprising at the time was the large number, an estimated sixty-one, who disappeared in the six months prior to the coup. Though many of these were to disappear in the weeks preceding the coup, the remainder disappeared months and in some cases even as much as a year before the March 1976 military takeover. This confirms that the death squads were already in full operation in Córdoba and had adopted the practice of the disappearance in the final stages of the 1973–76 Peronist government. The military merely intensified the practice. Information on age in the report was more fragmentary, but of those with a recorded age, a clear majority were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, figures in line with the subsequent CONADEP estimates, confirming that the victims of the dirty war, in Córdoba and elsewhere, were overwhelming young. University students and young workers of both sexes were the dirty war’s victims.¹⁹

      The university, viewed as the breeding ground of subversion, became a target on multiple levels. Even before the coup, the interventor, Air Force general Raúl Oscar Lacabanne, had demanded quarterly lists with the personal information on professors and students for surveillance purposes.²⁰ During the dictatorship, the university hosted on several occasions representatives of the military government, such as the minister of planning and one of the chief advocates within the military for the antisubversive campaign, General Ramón Genaro Díaz Bessone, for the inauguration of a Plan de Desarrollo para Córdoba (PLANSECOR) while its philosophy and history departments promoted liberal thought, the critical and Marxist perspectives once dominant completely silenced. A thousand university faculty of the now thoroughly purged public university even sent a letter to the U.S. embassy protesting the Carter administration’s human rights policies and criticisms of Argentina.²¹ The replacement of civilian authorities by military personnel to administer the university, the massive purge of professors, even the requirement of a certificate of good conduct by the police for admission to the university, all testified to the university as a favored site of the dictatorship’s so-called Process of National Reorganization.²²

      The terror in Córdoba was not confined to just physical violence. Psychological terror was a deliberate outcome of the abductions and disappearances, one that affected far more people in the city than the victims of the task forces and political prisoners of the detention centers. Though many, in Córdoba and elsewhere, were totally oblivious to the state terrorism destroying lives all around them, others were fully aware. For every individual so directly touched by the violence, there were friends, family members, work mates, and others who were also affected. One of Menéndez’s particular obsessions and special targets was the local Jewish community. Due to the popularity of Jacobo Timerman wrenching narrative of his imprisonment, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, as well as Argentina’s reputation as a Nazi haven, perceptions outside of Argentina were often that the dirty war was animated largely by anti-Semitism. Though an exaggerated description generally, anti-Semitism did inflect state terrorism and was a prominent facet of the repression in Córdoba, probably more than anywhere else in the country. Despite the muzzling of the left-wing press, anti-Semitic publications such as the venomous El Caudillo encountered no censorship and circulated freely in the city under the dictatorship. In addition to Timerman memoir, accounts abound of unusually cruel torments inflicted on Jewish prisoners.²³

      Anti-Semitism was not simply ethnic or religious prejudice. It was interwoven with long-standing nativist strains in Argentine culture and more urgently with the association of the subversive threat with Marxism, and therefore the logic went, the country’s Jewish population, with prominent Jews such as Timerman and businessmen José Ber Gelbard and David Gravier suspected of financing left-wing groups, especially the Montoneros. Anti-Semitism among the military hierarchy took on perhaps its most bizarre, paranoid manifestation in the widespread belief of a Zionist plot with the full collaboration of Argentina’s Jewish population, to create a second Jewish homeland in the Patagonia, stoking fears of a larger Zionist conspiracy to dismember Argentina, an obsession that dovetailed neatly with the Cold War concerns of the internal enemy, threats to an idealized “ser nacional” and the country’s territorial integrity.²⁴ More real were the large number of Jewish victims of the state terrorism. The precise meaning of the generally accepted figure of 10 percent of the disappeared out of a Jewish population that numbered roughly 1 percent of the national total is difficult to decipher. Anti-Semitism as an independent variable in the disappearances is almost impossible to prove. The large representation of Jews had much to do with their higher than average presence in leftist organizations and parties as well as in professions such as psychiatry and journalism, and certain academic disciplines such as sociology, targeted by the military. Various СКАЧАТЬ