Argentina's Missing Bones. James P. Brennan

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СКАЧАТЬ in the high percentage of Jews among the disappeared.²⁵ Testimonies alleging Nazi swastikas in the torture chambers of detention centers and of insults hurled at Jewish prisoners nonetheless do not prove a systematic anti-Semitism at work in the state terrorism. Yet given the visceral ultramontane Catholicism so ingrained in the military and longstanding anti-Semitism within its ranks, neither can it be dismissed completely.

      In Córdoba, accusations of anti-Semitism emerged early, as in the September 1976 U.S. congressional hearings on human rights violations in Argentina.²⁶ Such well-publicized incidents as the arrest of the leader of Córdoba’s Jewish community, Jaime Pompas, in the first months of the dictatorship signaled the presence of anti-Semitism in Córdoba’s experience with state terrorism. Yet another example was Menéndez’s impounding of the assets of Mackentor, one of the leading construction companies in the country. Menéndez accused the company’s leading stockholder, Natalio Kejner, of financing leftist groups. Kejner’s status as a Jew with suspected left-wing sympathies made him a target for Menéndez’s obsessions with the idea of an international sinarchy, a fantastical alliance of capitalists, Jews, and communists. The army arrested some twenty-nine members of the company’s executive board, in Córdoba but also in branch offices in Buenos Aires and other parts of the country, while passing control of the company to various military officers, part of a pattern of spoliation of Jewish-owned firms that would occur elsewhere during the dictatorship.²⁷

      A 1980 human rights report on Argentina by the Organization of American States (OAS) mentioned a similar case of a local Jewish businessman, Jaime Lockman, arrested on the personal orders of Menéndez the day of the coup and still held prisoner at the time of the OAS investigation.²⁸ Prominent Jewish lawyer Mario Zareceansky was ordered by Menéndez while a prisoner to write a report on Córdoba’s Jewish community and suffered tortures for a report that failed to meet the anti-Semitic general’s expectations of detail and names.²⁹ Perhaps the most notorious example of Menéndez’s anti-Semitism was the kidnapping and imprisonment in La Perla of an entire Jewish family, the Deutsch family, whose plight came to the attention of the U.S. embassy and later B’nai B’rith, becoming an international cause célebre with coverage in the New York Times, prompting Videla to demand their release from a reluctant Menéndez and eventual exile for the family in the United States.³⁰

      The degree of complicity in these and other crimes stretched all the way to the top, to the government ministries and leading figures of the regime. The mechanism of deceit and denial became formulaic. During the worst years of the terror, from 1976 through 1978, individuals with missing family members wrote to the Ministry of Interior, requesting, often pleading, for information about their loved ones. In Córdoba, after reaching the ministry, such petitions would be remitted back to provincial authorities and have to pass through series of bureaucratic steps: first to the province’s Ministerio del Gobierno, then to the Jefe del Departamento Operaciones Policiales (D3), then to police’s Departamento de Inteligencia (D2), moving on to Jefatura de Policia de la Provincia, then to the Secretaría de Estado de Seguridad, and finally back to the Ministerio de Gobierno, at which point the Ministerio de Gobierno would remit a response back to Ministry of the Interior who would then inform the petitioner that the person in question was not in custody and the government had no knowledge of the individual. The Jefatura de Policía was the point at which official denial of knowledge of the prisoner’s whereabouts would begin. This bureaucratic maze allowed both for the fragmentation of responsibility and a belabored, drawn-out process meant to exhaust the petitioner and discourage continued inquiries. It also maintained the regime’s fiction of legality and rule of law. The final response was almost always the same, indeed employed identical language, effectively a canned response denying knowledge and any responsibility for the petitioner’s family member or loved one.³¹

      Since these letters date from late 1975 to late 1977, they do indicate the degree to which, in the very worst years of the disappearances and state terrorism, many were as yet unaware how extensive the state terrorist apparatus was and how complicit in it were the local police and provincial government authorities. A number of these same petitioners also submitted writs of habeas corpus to the local courts. The dictatorship oversaw a dismantling of constitutional guarantees of all sorts and, through decree, passed new laws in accordance with its antisubversive fixation, facilitated by an obliging judiciary. Among the most egregious abuses pertaining to the law was the systematic disregard of the right of habeas corpus. In courts all over the country, the judiciary cravenly accepted the military’s denial of knowledge of the individuals named in such writs and frequently resorted to procedural and jurisdictional excuses when a simple denial of knowledge of the individual in question was not sufficient. In other instances, the Supreme Court remitted cases to lower courts where they died a labyrinthine death in a jurisdictional buck passing that ultimately left the habeas corpus writs unattended.³² Such behavior contrasted with the courage of human rights lawyers who often paid with their lives for filing these writs and for their advocacy for political prisoners in general.³³

      Córdoba’s press was similarly cowed if not actually collaborative. The city’s leading newspaper, La Voz del Interior, parroted the language of the junta in the first days of the new military government and published the Third Corps’ communiqués as if they were mere news stories, neither questioned nor criticized by the newspaper’s editors. To mention just one example, the death, just days after the coup, of Mario Andrés Osatinsky, the eighteen-year-old son of Montonero leader Marcos Osatinsky, in nearby Alta Gracia, was reported as that of “extremists” killed while “trying to flee.”³⁴ The dubious veracity in the rendering of this particular incident becomes even more suspect with the content of news reporting in the weeks after the coup in which “extremists” invariably died in shootouts with the army and the brazen denial of abductions, at a time when Córdoba’s prisons and detention centers were overflowing with political prisoners. References to “guerrillas” gradually vanished from the newspaper’s pages to be replaced by terms such as “subversive delinquents” and “terrorists.”³⁵ In subsequent months, the newspaper failed to mention the abductions and disappearances and was silent on all matters related to the state terrorism, as was virtually all of the national press.

      The repressive apparatus stretched into the city’s oldest institution, one closely associated with its very culture and history. In Córdoba, as perhaps in nowhere else in the country, the complicity of the local Catholic Church, its hierarchy specifically, was deep and ongoing. Córdoba’s Catholic Church was wracked by internal factions in the years prior to the 1976 coup. The emergence of the powerful Third World Priests movement, which adhered to the positions of Vatican II, engaged in grassroots community work and maintained friendly relations with the Left, enraging the older, more conservative members of the local Church hierarchy, a number of whom were drawn from the ranks of Córdoba’s patrician families. That some of these activist priests were foreigners added nativist resentment to the generational and class one. The victims of state terrorism included priests and seminarians drawn from these progressive sectors of the church. The establishment of the Studium Teologicum in 1968, which gathered professors and seminary students from all the dioceses in the province of Córdoba, looms as a turning point. With a curriculum aligned with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, it offered classes in contemporary history, psychology, and sociology, among other subjects.³⁶

      One individual in particular, Archbishop Raúl Primatesta, stands as a key if controversial figure in the Church’s history in Córdoba during the dictatorship. Videla noted an early suspicion by the military government of Primatesta as a “progressive” prelate turned out to be inaccurate and the dictator eventually viewed the bishop a “reasonable man.”³⁷ Sociologist and Jesuit scholar of Córdoba’s Catholic Church Gustavo Morello has argued that Primatesta’s accommodation with the military regime was the result of fear rather than sympathy and moreover more apparent than real, and that privately he interceded on a number of occasions on behalf of Christian leaders in danger from Menéndez.³⁸ Such an interpretation is, however, a largely solitary one. As Morello himself notes, between 1972 and 1975 Primatesta restructured the curriculum of the Studium Teologicum СКАЧАТЬ