Argentina's Missing Bones. James P. Brennan
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Название: Argentina's Missing Bones
Автор: James P. Brennan
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Violence in Latin American History
isbn: 9780520970076
isbn:
DICTATORSHIP
Terrorizing Córdoba
I say again that this war, like all wars, is total. One loses the war that one does not wage in a total way.
—GENERAL LUCIANO BENJAMÍN MENÉNDEZ
On March 24, 1976, the Argentine armed forces overthrew the government of Isabel Perón and assumed power with every intention of wielding it indefinitely. The military junta immediately issued an edict that superseded the national constitution giving the military sweeping new powers, prohibiting public demonstrations, suspending collective bargaining, and interdicting numerous organizations associated with the former Peronist government. The latter included the Peronist trade union confederation, the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), and the Confederación General Económica (CGE), the business association that adhered most to nationalist economic policies and one generally supportive of Peronist governments. Mass firings of public employees followed suit, a draconian censorship was imposed, the national congress and provincial legislatures shut down, and a series of labor laws were repealed.1
Yet Argentines had seen this drama before. What was novel, and most characteristic of this new experience with military dictatorship, was not its hostility to civilian rule, its union-busting tactics or even efforts to muzzle any expression of dissent and free speech. It was the scale of violence and terror that accompanied such policies. The regime initially directed most of its fury against the by now gravely wounded and tottering but still active Left. At its most benign, the junta proscribed all the country’s left-of-center parties, and froze their bank accounts and impounded their assets. At its most murderous, the already outlawed Montoneros and Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) faced an underground war of extermination, while lists of subversivos were drawn up and kidnappings and disappearances reached unprecedented levels.2 Not even the worst years of the fallen Peronist government had witnessed state terrorism on this scale. The junta attempted to invest a patina of legality on its repressive policies via a series of laws that ranged from criminalizing the dissemination of partisan political literature to mere assembly and even the display of political insignias. The death penalty was also reintroduced though never applied since the preferred methods of abductions and disappearances were by their very nature clandestine and illegal. Formal trials rarely occurred. The junta also built institutional scaffolding that included the application of military law to civilians via the newly created special Consejos de Guerra (War Councils) though again actual trials were few in number. The Ministry of the Interior, a veritable appendage of the Defense Ministry under the military regime, held jurisdiction over all matters relating to political prisoners.
All this represented the public face of the dictatorship, but not its true, essential character. What did was a terrible triptych: disappearance, detention, and death. People were generally abducted by small bands of civilian-dressed masked men, patotas (gangs) as they were known in the Argentine vernacular, comprised of both military and civilian individuals. Abduction typically though not always took place at night. Abductions occurred throughout neighborhoods in and around the city: none were spared, though working-class neighborhoods such as Ferreyra, San Vicente, and Yapeyú; poorer ones like the northern periphery of Alta Córdoba with its villas miserias (shantytowns); and traditional student enclaves such as Barrio Alberdi and the Ciudad Universitaria in the city’s southern districts were special targets (Map 1).
MAP 1. Sites of disappearances and deaths by neighborhood and number.
Abductions took place most frequently in private homes but also in the streets (en la vía pública was a common claimed point of disappearance) and even at factory gates. Detention then followed, sometimes prolonged but more often brief, a matter of days or weeks, a torment of torture and interrogation that made captivity seem much longer than it really was. For the vast majority, death followed, generally in Córdoba by gunshot. Bodies of the disappeared throughout the country were disposed one of four ways: dumping them from airplanes (sometimes drugged and alive) into the sea, buried as N. N. (Ningún Nombre or “Without Name”) in municipal cemeteries, cremated, or buried in clandestine, often mass graves.3 Such violence was calculated in its purpose, not merely for intimidation and certainly not for “spectacle” but to annihilate what the military perceived as the subversive threat.4 First to acquire the intelligence needed to defeat the armed Left while it still posed a legitimate threat and then to eliminate any sympathizers who remained in society at large, and ultimately to erase entirely the Left’s cultural influence. The military government perhaps adopted the precise method of the disappearance to create a culture of fear, but more tangibly to insulate it from foreign scrutiny and possible criticisms, even sanctions, that would result from a less concealed state violence. Disappearances rather than mass executions were the chosen method to prevent such consequences.5 The decision to eliminate an initial estimate of six to seven thousand “subversives” had been taken at the highest levels of the military leadership in the immediate aftermath of the coup. The failure of the court system to prosecute and punish such individuals during the 1973–76 Peronist government persuaded the military to adopt the practice of the disappearances, a “final disposition” for such individuals at the national level.6 The junta’s general policy of a violent, clandestine campaign to eradicate the so-called subversive threat nonetheless was decentralized in its application, with local commanders given near complete freedom on the precise tactics on how to wage it and even the ultimate decision of how to dispose of bodies that were to disappear without a trace, whether to cast them into the sea, to be buried in a secret sites, or cremated in ovens.7
The military government’s attempts to terrorize and purge Córdoba of all its perceived radical elements, indeed to transform it socially, politically, and culturally, became apparent at the outset, as did the role that the army’s Third Corps would play in the effort.8 Plans were laid for undertaking a violent campaign against the “subversives” months before the March 1976 coup. The military’s so-called Comunidad Informativa met weekly in Córdoba, each Thursday, for months prior to and after the coup to work out precise tactics and assign responsibilities for conducting the guerra sucia in the city. These meetings took place at either the headquarters of the Third Corps, commanded by General Menéndez, or the IV Brigada de Infantería Aerotransportada, the principal combat unit in the province and the Third Corps’ operative wing under the command of General Juan Sasiaiñ. Also attending were the commanders of all those responsible for intelligence gathering and security: the Third Corps’ Destacamento de Inteligencia 141, the Secretaría de Seguridad de Córdoba, the Gendarmería Nacional, the Servicio de Inteligencia de la Aeronáutica, Inteligencia de la Agrupación Escuela de Aviación, the provincial police’s Jefatura de Inteligencia (D-2), the Estado Mayor del Tercer Cuerpo, and Córdoba’s delegations of the Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado (SIDE) and the Policía Federal.9
Documents recovered from the delegation of the Policía Federal on the activities of the Comunidad Informativa revealed the precise methodology of the state terrorism before and after the coup. A December 20, 1975, memorandum showed Menéndez creating a separate interrogating group and conferring interrogation responsibilities to the police. The memorandum emphasized the continued responsibilities assigned to the police, but only in coordination and with the authorization of the army. In keeping with the future violation of legal norms, current prisoners under the presidential authority of the Poder Ejecutivo Nacional (PEN) were to be denied judicial proceedings that might lead to their release, while another of the Comunidad Informativa’s memoranda just weeks after the coup asserted Menéndez’s authority over the removal or hiring of individuals in the public administration while determining a “background check” of those abducted in operations and determination of arrest or “elimination” (aniquilamiento). Most interestingly, an assessment of the СКАЧАТЬ