Argentina’s Dirty War: Justice Is Now Put to the Test

The most controversial best-seller in local bookstores these days was written by Argentine novelist Ernesto Sabato--but it’s no work of fiction.

“Nunca Mas” (Never Again) is a 490-page government report, commissioned by President Raul Alfonsin, in which Sabato and other distinguished Argentine citizens detail the sad story of the so-called dirty war--the campaign against leftist subversion carried out by Argentina’s security forces in 1976-80. The Sabato Commission has called the dirty war one of the greatest tragedies in Argentina’s history. Its prologue sadly notes that during that period Argentina had the dubious distinction of contributing a new word to the political lexicon of Latin America: desaparecidos-- the disappeared.

Argentina, the Latin American nation with the best-educated and most prosperous population, was also the first Latin country where the kidnaping of political opponents became a common government practice. It was so widespread that it swept up not only genuine terrorists but also thousands of innocent people guilty of nothing more than having the “wrong” friends or relatives.

Human-rights groups say that 30,000 persons were seized by government agents during the dirty war, although the Sabato Commission was able to document only 9,000 such kidnapings. Most of the desaparecidos were never heard from again, and are now presumed dead--killed by their captors after being interrogated and in some cases tortured in secret prisons. So effective was the dirty war in wiping out opposition to the government that Argentine advisers carried the brutal tactic to smaller Latin American nations like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where it was eagerly accepted and is still used.

Despite the strong words of the Sabato Commission report, the dirty war and the desaparecidos are subjects that most Argentines, who like to think that they are “different” from other Latin Americans, would like to forget. They cannot.

This week Argentines began learning even more about the dirty war, as the trial of nine former junta leaders--including three ex-presidents who headed the government at the height of the disappearances--opened in Buenos Aires. The nine generals and admirals are charged with a series of human-rights violations in indictments that echo the accusations made against former Nazi officials at the Nuremberg trials. They stand accused of giving the orders that led military and police agents to engage in brutality.

Considering the fact that Alfonsin has been in office only a year and has been dealing none too successfully with a shaky economy, he is displaying remarkable courage in moving against the former military leaders. For the trial has angered as many Argentines as it has pleased: those who believe that the dirty war was necessary, and many others who feel that the Alfonsin government has not gone far enough in prosecuting the individual soldiers and policemen who executed the campaign against terrorism.

Among the dissatisfied is Adolfo Perez-Esquivel, Argentina’s best-known human-rights activist who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his outspoken criticism of the military government during the dirty war. Perez-Esquivel and other activists are convinced that the tragic experiences of that era will be repeated unless everyone involved in the anti-subversion campaign, down to the lowliest corporal, is punished.

But there are other human-rights figures here who realize that this would be too far for Alfonsin to go, who argue that an-eye-for-an-eye justice would only compound the brutality of Argentina’s recent past.

One of these is Jacobo Timerman, the Buenos Aires newspaper editor who was tortured and spent nearly three years under house arrest and in secret prisons.

“Yes, I want to see them punished for what they did to me,” Timerman said of the junta leaders a few days before the trial opened. “I want to see the trial run its full course, and I want them to be convicted. But afterwards,” he added quietly, “Alfonsin can declare an amnesty if he wants. He can let them spend a short time in prison, and then pardon them. I won’t be offended by that, and I don’t think most other Argentines would be, either. Most of them want to put this behind us and move on to the future.”

Timerman is reluctant to publicly criticize human-rights activists such as Perez-Esquivel. But he said that many people here do not understand the significance of what Alfonsin is trying to do.

“For the first time in history,” he said, “a civilian government in Latin America is putting military men on trial for crimes they committed while in power. That is unprecedented.”

Indeed, one need only recall how often military men have seized power with impunity in Latin America--more than a dozen times here and almost 200 times in neighboring Bolivia--to realize that Timerman is right. If the Alfonsin government can persuade an Argentine court to say that the dirty war was a legal and moral travesty, it will be an important precedent for the entire region.