‘Dirty War’ Confessions Revive Argentines’ Suffering : Human rights: A mother calls a radio show to hear an ex-officer admit to killing her son. ‘I felt crazed,’ she says.

Sara Steimberg lived 18 anxious years without knowing what happened to her son, who disappeared in Argentina’s “dirty war.” This month, she finally heard the brutal truth on a radio talk show.

Luis Pablo Steimberg, a 22-year-old law student, was drafted into the army in August of 1976. Perhaps because he had been a student council leader, plainclothes agents abducted him from a corner near home while he was on a short furlough from basic training.

Like thousands of other desaparecidos (missing ones), Luis Pablo never came home. Sara Steimberg assumed he was killed, but she didn’t know how.

In early May, she was listening to the radio in her kitchen and happened to hear an interview with a former army sergeant named Victor Ibanez. He was talking about the dire drama of terrorism and bloody repression that held Argentina captive during the 1970s.

Lately, those dark years have come back in a flood of painful memories, undammed by the public confessions of Adolfo Scilingo, a former lieutenant commander who told of throwing drugged political prisoners into the sea from secret navy death flights. Ibanez was making a similar confession as Sara Steimberg listened.

Ibanez said he had been in charge of three conscripts imprisoned at the national military college, notorious as a “dirty war” detention and torture center. He said the three prisoners were killed, but he did not give details. He did identify the three, however, and one of them was Steimberg’s missing son.

She immediately telephoned the radio station and went on the air with the talk show host, who relayed her question to the former sergeant.

“I told him to ask what he did with my son,” she said.

Ibanez deflected the question, asking for the mother’s forgiveness. She insisted: “I said for him to say what he did with my son.”

And after 18 years, the answer came.

“He said, ‘I ask your forgiveness again. I threw your son alive into the sea’ ” from an airplane.

Steimberg, 70, was aghast.

“I felt crazed. I thought my chest would explode,” she said.

She called her husband at his insurance office. They rushed to meet.

“We cried, of course,” she said with a breaking voice.

Now she has trouble sleeping.

“I have the image of my son falling to the sea,” she said. “I’ve been going to a psychologist.”

Despite her anxiety, Steimberg said the confessions of Ibanez and Scilingo have done some good. They have revived interest in a period that must not be forgotten and in the desaparecidos themselves, she said.

They also triggered unprecedented acknowledgments from Argentina’s highest military leaders that the armed forces were responsible for “horrors” during the “dirty war.”

Iurek Erlich hopes that the confessions will help him find out what happened to his sister, Margarita, abducted in 1976. Erlich, who now lives in Los Angeles, recently talked to Ibanez by telephone and is sending him a photo of Margarita in hopes that the former sergeant might remember her.

In a telephone interview, Erlich expressed bitter resentment that he must deal with a killer because the armed forces have not produced information about the fate of the missing.

“I have to send a picture to the devil, you know what I mean?” he said.

Margarita was 26 when five armed men, with federal police credentials, invaded their family’s home and took her away. Erlich came home to find his parents, both Polish immigrants who had suffered under Nazi Germany’s invasion of their first country, paralyzed with terror.

“I had never seen them like that before,” he said. “They were lying in bed, but they were like phantoms. They couldn’t move, they couldn’t react, they couldn’t do anything.”

A month later, an anonymous caller told Erlich that his sister was in Campo de Mayo, an army base that includes the military college. The family went to the base three times. They also sent letters and telegrams to the highest military authorities but found out nothing about Margarita.

Assuming she was dead, the family moved to Los Angeles in 1979.

“We didn’t want to stay in a country that did that kind of stuff,” said Erlich, now 41.

The “dirty war” ground to a halt at the beginning of the 1980s, and seven years of military government ended in 1983. A commission appointed by Raul Alfonsin, the civilian president elected that year, documented the disappearances of nearly 9,000 people during the harsh repression. Some human rights organizations estimate the total number of desaparecidos at 30,000.

Whatever the number, there is no question that the military and police systematically abducted, tortured and killed thousands of people. Because Argentine guerrilla and terrorist organizations were all but wiped out by 1977, it is also clear that most of the “disappeared” were not armed subversives.

After 1983, hundreds of military and police officers were charged in court with human rights abuses.

Five former members of military juntas were convicted and sentenced to prison for human rights abuses, and hundreds of other officers still faced prosecution. Unrest spread through the armed forces, and disgruntled officers staged a series of revolts.

Alfonsin persuaded the Congress to pass measures, called the “full stop” and “due obedience” laws, that put an end to the prosecution of most of the cases. President Carlos Menem, Alfonsin’s successor, issued a decree pardoning 39 remaining officers accused of “dirty war” abuses, then commuted the sentences of the five convicted junta members.

Since then, all “dirty warriors” have been protected by a virtual amnesty, which helped encourage this year’s public confessions.

Scilingo said he broke a military pact of silence about the atrocities because his conscience tormented him. He was also upset that officers with records of atrocities had been passed up for promotion while their superior officers washed their hands.

Scilingo’s story, published first in a book and then printed in newspapers and aired on television, made a resounding public splash.

Argentines were suddenly confronted with a part of their country’s past that most of them may have preferred to forget.

“They knew these things happened, but now they had a face and a name to the perpetrators,” observed Andrew Graham-Yooll, editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language daily here.

Scilingo told of stripping the clothes off victims who were unconscious from injected drugs, then personally throwing them from two navy flights. Ibanez told a similar story of army death flights over the sea.

Argentine media gave the grisly confessions bigger play than “dirty war” atrocities had received before.

It all seemed to serve as a catharsis for a nation that largely had looked the other way during and after the era of atrocities.

For the armed forces, however, it was a mortification. No high officer had ever admitted publicly to anything more than “excesses” in the repression.

By breaking the silence, Scilingo and Ibanez had put the military on the spot.

Lt. Gen. Martin Balza, the army chief of staff, made what has been called a historic shift in the military position April 25.

“It’s time to assume the responsibility and no longer deny the horrors of the past,” Balza said, reading a prepared statement on national television. He admitted that the army had “employed illegitimate methods, including the suppression of life, to obtain information.”

The navy and air force chiefs made their own statements in the same vein during the following days.

“We openly acknowledge that we used mistaken methods which caused unacceptable horrors even in the context of a cruel war,” said Adm. Enrique Molina Pico, commander of the navy.

The “dirty war” confessions came awkwardly in the heat of a presidential election. Although it did not become a decisive campaign issue, Menem, who was reelected, showed irritation over what he has called “rubbing salt in old wounds.”

Defense Minister Oscar Camilion, a civilian, said Balza spoke for all of the armed forces in his TV admission of military “horrors.”

But Camilion said the “immense majority” of Argentines and the government do not want to change the “final stop” and “due obedience” laws that prevent further prosecutions.

“We would have the reopening of the confrontation between civilians and military, something that we don’t want,” he said.

Nevertheless, said human rights lawyer Horacio Mendez Carreras, families have a right to know what happened to their relatives.

“The families have a right, for humanitarian reasons, to know the truth,” Mendez said.

For 18 years, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have never stopped staging weekly demonstrations to demand the truth about their missing sons and daughters. On a recent Thursday, it was clear that these persistent women were not appeased by the military confessions.

“Let them go to hell with their repentance, and we will continue struggling so that some day we may see them in jail,” said Hebe de Bonafini, the group’s president. She was standing on the base of a statue and using a battery-powered bullhorn to harangue a small, supportive crowd in the plaza outside the presidential palace. Many of the women carried signs that said, “I don’t pardon genocides.”

In an interview later at the mothers’ office near the national Congress, Bonafini said the group demands not only to know what was done to their children but also who did it.

“We want lists of killers,” she said.

Bonafini said the group already has its own list and will publish a book this year detailing evidence against 120 officers blamed for atrocities.

Bonafini, 66, lost two sons and a daughter-in-law in the “dirty war.” She learned from released prisoners that they were held in military and police installations, but she never found out how they died.

Adriana Calvo saw one of Bonafini’s sons in a concentration camp near La Plata, a university city southeast of Buenos Aires. Jorge Bonafini had been Calvo’s student and subsequently a faculty colleague at the university. They were both abducted in 1977 and ended up in the same interrogation center.

Calvo was seven months pregnant then. Her interrogators, trying to find out about possible subversives on the university faculty, hit her in the head but were careful not to hurt her abdomen, she said.

Other prisoners, including Jorge Bonafini, were not so fortunate. She said she heard his screams from another room.

“I knew his voice,” she said. “I heard the torture. It was terrible the way they tortured Hebe’s son.”

But she lost track of Bonafini when she was transferred to have her baby.

As it turned out, a baby girl was born on the way.

“I was in the back seat of a car, with my eyes blindfolded and my hands cuffed behind me. And I had no help,” she said. When the car arrived at another detention center, a doctor removed the placenta, cut the umbilical cord and cleaned up mother and daughter.

“I thought I would die and that she would die. But it was a perfect delivery. Life won,” Calvo said.

She was released a few days later. The daughter born in captivity is now an 18-year-old theater student. The doctor who cleaned them up was later convicted of participating in torture sessions and now practices medicine in a Buenos Aires suburb.

“This country is unbelievable, unbelievable,” Calvo said with a wan smile--”returning the license of a doctor convicted of torture.”

The “due obedience” law canceled his crimes.

Calvo, president of an association of former political prisoners, said she continues to hope that “dirty war” criminals will be brought to justice, but she does not expect it to happen soon.

Maybe in 10 years, she said, maybe in 15 or 20.