Trial of Argentine Ex-Presidents Begins Monday : Recalling ‘Dirty War,’ Nation Seeks to Come to Terms With Its Tortured Past

Sometimes, as they beat Norberto Liwsky with clubs and convulsed his body with electric shocks, his torturers would also scream at him, he recalled.

“You are dirt! You do not exist!” they would shout. “For you, we are everything! We are justice! We are God!”

Liwsky, a physician, is a survivor of Argentina’s “dirty war,” that epidemic of state terrorism from 1976 to 1980 that a presidential investigating commission has called “the greatest and most savage tragedy in our history.”

A Delicate Balance

Now, with courage and controversy, Argentina is seeking justice through law in a measured attempt to come to terms with its tortured past. It is a gamble by President Raul Alfonsin, angering both the left, which wants him to do more, and the right, which wants him to do nothing.

With about 2,000 survivors such as Liwsky on the witness list for the prosecution, Monday will be the opening day of a trial here of three presidents and six fellow officers who commanded three military juntas between 1976 and 1983.

In a departure from usual Argentine legal proceedings, the trial will be held in public. Most of the accused generals, admirals and air force brigadiers, though, will exercise their legal right not to attend the deliberations, which are expected to last at least five months. A battalion of 22 defense lawyers will relay reports from the courtroom to the officers housed in a nearby civilian jail.

Thousands of Victims

The former junta members are accused of kidnaping, torture, murder and lesser crimes as directors of a pervasive apparatus of official terror that claimed thousands of innocent lives while successfully destroying a Marxist guerrilla movement. The maximum possible sentence for each is 25 years.

“What we must determine is whether the state, in fighting criminals, has the right to use the same criminal methods,” said federal prosecutor Julio Strassera, who will present his case to six appellate court judges who will also function as jury.

Strassera rejects the generals’ assertion that the struggle against the guerrillas was a war and that excesses occur in all wars.

“They want to make us believe that there are good deaths and bad deaths--that is, in order to avoid the bombing, killing and kidnaping carried out by subversives, they bombed, killed and kidnaped tenfold,” the prosecutor said.

The summons to justice at Alfonsin’s behest is being officially portrayed as a trial of men who erred--not of the military establishment they commanded.

By contrast, leftist political parties, allied with human rights groups now that the shooting has stopped, see the trial as an opportunity to drive another stake into the heart of an Argentine military wounded both by its record of inept, corrupt government and its ill-advised, losing war with Britain in the Falkland Islands.

Some on the left demand that not just the commanders but all those guilty of human rights abuses, down to the meanest corporal, be tried individually. Alfonsin rejects this approach. His supporters argue that such vengeance would be impossible to achieve and would ultimately fan the hatreds that the upcoming trial is intended to dilute.

What is also clear in Argentina is that if the current group of generals--men who face no charges--believe that the survival of their institution is jeopardized, they will rebel.

The armed forces have been the dominant political factor in Argentina since 1930, most recently yielding power to the elected Alfonsin in 1983 after an eight-year rule.

With their right-wing political allies, many in the armed forces believe that the human rights debate is a waste of time, a sensationalist circus certain to humiliate the institution that they feel bravely rescued Argentina from Marxist chaos, ousting the ineffectual President Maria Estela Peron and crushing those even remotely associated with the brutal leftist guerrilla movements of the 1970s.

One retired army commander scornfully dismissed the trial of the junta leaders as a “Nuremberg against the victors,” a reference to the Nazi war crimes tribunal convened in late 1945.

Former President Jorge Rafael Videla, who led a 1976 coup and chaired a junta until 1981, commands enormous military respect for refusing to acknowledge the competence of a civilian court to try him or to cooperate with a court-appointed defender.

Former Presidents Roberto Viola, who led a junta for nine months in 1981, and Leopoldo F. Galtieri, who held power until July, 1983, will defend themselves more vigorously in a proceeding referred by Alfonsin to a civil court that will operate under the military justice system.

As a principal strategy, the defense will argue that any excesses were the work of overzealous subordinates operating outside the orders and beyond the knowledge of their commanders. Defense lawyers will challenge as biased and politically motivated the testimony of survivors and of the relatives of about 9,000 Argentines who disappeared during the dirty war and are still missing.

Anticipating the defense, Strassera will open the prosecution case with a procession of difficult-to-impeach witnesses, including international human rights activists who visited Argentina at the height of the dirty war and editors whose journals published accounts of what was happening.

Americans on the witness list include forensic specialists, former Rep. Robert F. Drinan (D-Mass.), a Jesuit priest, and Patricia M. Derian, assistant secretary of state for human rights during the Carter Administration.

The sum of their testimony, Strassera says, will be to demonstrate “illegal repression of indiscriminate nature” directed from the top.

Although apparently willing, though with extreme reluctance, to allow the sacrifice of their former commanders, the armed forces are using right-wing political voices to demand an amnesty. Alfonsin has, so far, rejected this call.

Seeking to demonstrate the government’s evenhandedness, he is also pressing for an early trial for Mario E. Firmenich, leader of the Montoneros, one of three guerrilla organizations whose maraudings triggered the military response. Firmenich has been in jail here since his extradition from Brazil last year at Argentine government request.

On the eve of the juntas’ trial, Buenos Aires is afloat with rumors of a possible coup. A pressure tactic by the right, the rumors are more ephemeral than substantive. Despite clear discomfort, there seems to be no military consensus for a coup, and no significant civilian groups that would support one.

Still, Alfonsin--whose popularity is being eroded by a failure to stem economic distress or control galloping inflation--is clearly feeling the pressure. He has scheduled two national addresses over the next six days and a mass rally “in defense of democracy” in the historic Plaza de Mayo.

For survivors such as Norberto Liwsky, a tender democracy is worth defending. After five months of imprisonment and torture that broke his health, Liwsky was released without charges in August, 1978. He now works as a doctor for the Argentine Public Health Ministry, counseling disturbed children whose parents disappeared during the dirty war.