Argentina's Missing Bones. James P. Brennan

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СКАЧАТЬ death. The testimony of the few survivors of the detention centers, especially La Perla, offers a unique glimpse into the terrifying world there but also the dreadful mechanisms of repression that existed in Córdoba and the role of the detention center–turned–death camp in the dirty war.

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       DEATH CAMP

      La Perla

       La Perla, did it exist? Yes. It was a meeting place for the prisoners, not a secret prison . . . the subversives were there but in the protection of each other’s company.

      —GENERAL LUCIANO BENJAMÍN MENÉNDEZ

      From the highway, the former death camp known as La Perla is barely visible, just as it was at the height of the dirty war. One of a number of the death camps from the dictatorship converted into sitios de memoria. La Perla functions now as an education center, a museum, and a memorial to the victims of state terrorism.¹ It is a place where schoolchildren and the occasional curious tourist can wander the large hall where political prisoners were once held, view the nearby sala de tortura (torture chamber) where men and women, some mere adolescents, were subject to electric shocks and beatings, terrorized, humiliated, and threateningly questioned, and now listen to the young guides laconically offer lurid details and anecdotes about the camp’s sinister history. Pictures of the victims with their names and date of disappearance, articles of clothing and jewelry left behind, writings scribbled to while away the long periods of boredom, crude rosary beads created from whatever materials were at hand, fragments of lives suspended from reality awaiting death, are among the museum’s displays. The bucolic setting, on a hillock overlooking a sloping field, and the relaxed atmosphere found there now can almost make one forget its history as a site of terror, torment, and death. The vast majority who rode in unmarked police cars or military vehicles up the winding driveway, blindfolded and handcuffed, never made the return journey. Some died under torture; most died in mass executions, their remains burned or buried in graves still never located.

      During the dictatorship, La Perla functioned as an integral piece of the repressive apparatus that waged the dirty war in Córdoba. With the official name of “Lugar de Reunión de Detenidos por el Destacamento de Inteligencia General. Iribarren del III Cuerpo de Ejército” (Meeting Place of those Arrested by Intelligence Task Force General Iribarren Third Army Corps), it occupied a position of dubious distinction as one of the largest of the death camps and the most important in the country’s interior.² The detention center converted to death camp was one of the distinguishing characteristics of the dictatorship. Most like La Perla were active only in the first years of the regime, with relatively few still in operation after 1980. While functioning, they replicated the military chain of command and hierarchy though all personnel, from the camp commander to lowly conscript, were expected to participate in its activities, in varying intensity and degrees to be sure, in a system that created a shared responsibility and unified ranks behind the guerra sucia. At the apex of the death camps were the commanders, followed by a middle rank of intelligence officers and operatives who planned and executed the kidnappings, below them a larger group responsible for sentry and maintenance duties of the camps themselves. All participated to some degree in the torture and execution of prisoners, in a rotating system, a “blood pact” system later adopted throughout the country but reputedly first adopted by Menéndez in Córdoba.³

      FIGURE 4. La Perla death camp as seen from Highway 20.

      Kidnapping and holding such large numbers of prisoners, and their subsequent mass executions and disposal of the bodies, required a complex internal structure and even a bureaucratic process. The military’s systematic destruction of its archives related to the dirty war deprives historians of ever fully reconstructing this essential component of its history and deciphering all its meanings but the recollections of formers prisoners, court testimony, and fragmentary information from military sources of various kinds give some idea of both the conditions in and functioning of the camp. Disappearances in Córdoba followed the general pattern found elsewhere in the country of abductions, torture, and death. Upon arrival, prisoners were assigned a number and subject to extensive interrogations with extensive files with personal data compiled for each. A torture session was invariably a prisoner’s introduction to the camp, but unlike the case of the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) and many other camps, in La Perla torture sessions would often be repeated after initial interrogation, if it was discovered that a prisoner withheld information or had been uncooperative.⁴ In other aspects, greater similarities existed with large camps such as ESMA, including a deliberate, purposeful approach to the torture, a search for useful information and intelligence rather than simply the sadistic infliction of pain, though wanton cruelty was certainly not unknown. To goad the tortured into compliance, the torturers would often hold out the possibility of survival in return for information, even introducing them before the torture sessions to militants who were presumed dead by their comrades outside the camp but whose continued existence was proof of the possibilities of survival in return for cooperation.⁵

      FIGURE 5. Entry gate to La Perla death camp.

      La Perla stands as one of the most notorious of these detention centers turned death camps. The only such camp in the country’s interior, it held during its roughly three years of operation, between 1976 and 1979, some 1,000 prisoners. The vast majority of those detained there were murdered and entered the ranks of the disappeared, but more than one hundred survived.⁶ In the months leading up to the 1976 coup, the army’s Servicio de Inteligencia (SIE) under the command of captain Héctor Pedro Vergez, a shady character later to be involved in the contraband of prisoners’ personal property and with close ties to the right-wing death squad the Comando de Libertadores de América, worked with the military police (Gendarmería Nacional) in identifying so-called subversives.⁷ Lists were drawn up, individuals were subject to surveillance, and abductions were set in motion. Menéndez made the decision to convert La Perla into a detention center and move some prisoners there from the Campo de La Ribera camp already in existence, largely due to the notoriety Campo de La Ribera had acquired by the end of the Peronist government and requests from the International Red Cross to inspect its premises. Henceforth, Campo de La Ribera, nicknamed La Escuelita (Little School) by the military, would function as a temporary detention center, either as a prelude for transfer to La Perla or to process prisoners regarded as less dangerous and whose status was to be legalized and their captive status formally recognized, by transfer to one of the federal penitentiaries, including the local UP1. Legal status also on very rare occasions could imply a formal trial by a military tribunal, a guarantee of a conviction and a prison sentence but certainly preferable to the alternative of assignment to the La Perla death camp.

      Though some deaths did occur at Campo de la Ribera, generally detention in La Escuelita versus La Universidad (La Perla) served as a transit point. Incarceration in La Perla usually meant death. The army already had a small administrative building on the site that Menéndez had hurriedly constructed in the first months of 1976, built by a private contractor, Carusso S. A., a more elaborate compound whose specific purpose was to hold, torture, and murder political prisoners. Surrounded by several smaller buildings with offices and living accommodations for the military personnel stood the cuadra or stable, a long rectangular building measuring fifteen by forty meters with a height of approximately four to five meters, flanked by toilets and shower stalls at one end and offices for military personnel at the other. There the prisoners slept side by side on straw-filled mattresses.⁸ Prisoners were held there, never more than one hundred at a time, most for relatively short periods of time—days, weeks, at most at several months—at which point they would be executed and a new contingent arrived.

      Adjacent to the cuadra was a large patio where the prisoners СКАЧАТЬ