Vigilant Over Argentina’s Future, and Past

That no one ever faced justice for torturing and killing human rights attorney Angel Gerardo Pisarello is an anguish relived by his widow and daughter each morning. That is when a chauffeur-driven car delivers the accused mastermind of the outrage to an office across the street from their apartment.

Out steps retired Gen. Antonio Bussi, pardoned in a general amnesty for those accused of crimes during Argentina’s 1976-83 military dictatorship. The 77-year-old military man, who ruled Tucuman province under the junta, is now the elected mayor.

“It’s traumatizing to live in a society where every day you can come across a killer walking the streets freely,” said Aurora Prados de Pisarello, 50, the slain attorney’s daughter. “There can be no democracy in Argentina until there is justice.”

For the first time since 1976, when Pisarello was kidnapped by masked soldiers and his abused body dumped in a park, the family of a victim of what is known as the “dirty war” can hope this country will cast aside taboos and confront the crime.

President Nestor Kirchner has put Argentines on notice that the wrongs of the past will be dealt with. To the cheers of his people, he has also targeted corruption, government ineptitude and a legacy of subservience to the United States and international lending institutions.

Kirchner’s emergence from political nowhere this year to become de facto leader of a left-leaning alliance of Latin American powers has also caught the attention of the White House. After nearly two years of riveted U.S. focus on terrorism and the Middle East, the Bush administration appears to have noticed its neighbors’ drift out of Washington’s orbit, as Kirchner has been summoned to talks with President Bush today.

The meeting is expected to emphasize financial issues, primarily Argentina’s quest for a more accommodating repayment plan for its $150-billion foreign debt.

But the White House invitation also signals recognition of Kirchner’s dramatic rise to regional prominence and the respect he has won among Argentines whose disgust for government had reached historic levels before his surprise election.

Despite low expectations of a man who won only 21% of the first-round vote and emerged in May as the winner by default, Kirchner has rattled the cages of Argentina’s demons. Not only are the dictatorship suspects squirming in their mahogany-paneled clubs, but the civilian leaders who pardoned them and then oversaw the plundering of Latin America’s most prosperous country are also under intensified scrutiny.

An unassuming lawyer and former governor of a province in Patagonia -- the back of beyond, in the view of most residents of Buenos Aires -- Kirchner has earned the nickname “Hurricane K” for the speed and fury of his changes. He cleaned the courts, the police and the armed forces of figures who were tainted by association with or support for the junta that presided over the reign of terror in which an estimated 30,000 people are believed to have been slain. He’s threatened a crackdown on tax cheats, seized the assets of the national health service for pensioners, which is reputed to be the government’s most inept service, and taken tough positions on international lenders.

Putting the armed forces on notice that the fear-induced silence over the dirty war is being broken, Kirchner has hinted that he might meet human rights advocates’ demands that the 1990 pardons granted by former President Carlos Menem be rescinded.

Kirchner won those activists over with his assertion that Argentina needed a judicial airing of its dictatorial past akin to the Nazi war crimes trials conducted at Nuremberg.

The new president’s dynamic overtures, though dismissed as populism by critics, have kindled an emotional revolution among Argentines, who have suffered as much from political apathy in recent months as from the December 2001 economic collapse.

Despite the fact that half the nation’s 37 million people live in poverty, and that the 20% unemployment rate is the highest since the Great Depression, Kirchner, the sixth president in less than two years, has approval ratings topping 80%.

He confronted the military brass head-on when he attended an annual banquet June 30 and told the assembled officers to engage in self-examination because there would be neither social peace nor democracy amid “complicity and silence.”

That pointed remark sparked expectations that Kirchner would repeal a decree by former President Fernando de la Rua that shielded accused Argentines from extradition. It also encouraged a Spanish judge to reissue prosecution orders against 46 high-ranking officers accused of murder and genocide -- Bussi among them -- in cases in which the victims included Spaniards.

Kirchner’s moral cleanup has found favor even in parts of the military community.

“The wounded of Argentina have been unable to heal because, as a consequence of laws and pardons, a sense of impunity was installed that is rejected by the masses in Argentine society,” retired Gen. Martin Balza said.

Balza added that the army’s long-standing refusal to own up to its past has cast “a mantle of chronic suspicion over tens of thousands” of government servants.

While analysts worry that Hurricane K could lose force in the complex debt-restructuring talks, his multi-front war against what has long ailed Argentina is winning the hearts and minds of his fellow citizens.

Pisarello was only one of an estimated 2,000 people executed in Tucuman province when the military was in power, apparently for daring to file legal complaints on behalf of the families of local desaparecidos, the junta’s “disappeared” victims.

“I’m already 75 years old. I don’t want to die without seeing him brought to justice,” Pisarello’s widow, also named Aurora, said of the prospect of Bussi’s prosecution.

Bussi has served as Tucuman governor and as a national congressman during the civilian administrations that followed the junta’s departure. He won the June 29 election for mayor by the narrowest of margins in what his detractors see as a still-prevalent climate of fear. His two opponents, though both children of desaparecidos, never dared make a campaign issue of the general’s role under the junta.

“The dictatorship period isn’t even taught in schools. No one talks about it because of this atmosphere of impunity, but also because they are afraid,” said Virginia Duffy, a human rights lawyer who sought without success to get Bussi declared morally unfit for public office by the province’s highest court. The case has been appealed to the national high court, where last month Kirchner forced the resignation of a justice who was long protective of rightist figures.

Civic leaders such as Fernando Bach, who owns a construction firm and heads the local business and charity foundations, blame Bussi’s election on corruption and insecurity that gnaw at the citizens of this impoverished northern province more than the unpunished crimes of the past.

“His being elected mayor shows the frustration of the people over the corruption of the 1980s and 1990s,” said Bach, who supports public discussion of the dictatorship era but says it needs to cover the behavior of leftist guerrillas as well.

Junta leaders have long defended their actions of a quarter-century ago as needed to protect the population from insurgents waging a violent attempt at revolution, inspired by Cuba’s Fidel Castro and aimed at bringing a communist government to power.

Bussi declined to be interviewed for this story but sent his political ally and former attorney, Roberto Lix Klett, to explain his position. Both conservative politicians contend that the wounds of the past have healed and that to dredge up the crimes for which the military has been pardoned would create more disruption than closure.

“This is a very arbitrary process being proposed by the president,” Lix Klett said. “If the military is going to be put on trial, so should the terrorists be judged for their actions.”

In Buenos Aires, another junta figure on the Spanish extradition list, retired Gen. Ramon Genaro Diaz Bessone, sat as straight and serene as an oak tree in the elegant Circulo Militar officers club as he denounced Kirchner’s resurrection of the buried conflict. While dismissing the extradition request as invalid and the president’s plans to revoke impunity as illegal, Bessone denied any wrongdoing in his roles as a regional army commander and Cabinet member within the junta.

“They only want ‘the truth’ from one side,” the general said of Kirchner, the Spanish judge behind his extradition order and other European courts seeking to prosecute Argentine suspects because courts in this country have not. “We are looking at the past with only one eye, the leftist eye.”

Conceding that there were mistakes and excesses as there would be in any civil war, Bessone insisted that he owed no apology as he never personally condoned those actions. “My conscience is calm,” he said.

Those, like Kirchner, who witnessed the brutal crackdown on dissenters argue that the immunity granted figures of the dictatorship has bred a contempt for law and government that is ruining the country.

“It’s very difficult to prosecute someone for robbery when those accused of awful crimes like torture and murder are at large,” said Horacio Verbitsky, an author and political columnist who belonged to the opposition Montoneros movement, from which thousands disappeared. “It has to be established once and for all that crime doesn’t pay.”

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‘Hurricane K’ hits Washington

Background: Nestor Kirchner, the son of a postal worker, is of Swiss and Croatian descent. He cut his political teeth in the Peronist left wing and was imprisoned for a short time during Argentina’s 1976-83 military dictatorship.

Career: An attorney, Kirchner served three terms as governor of sparsely populated Santa Cruz province in wind-swept Patagonia. He won an uncontested presidential runoff vote in May after his rival, former President Carlos Menem, quit the race.

Personal: The 53-year-old leader earned the nickname “Hurricane K” for the speed and fury of his reforms in the South American nation of 37 million people. His wife, Cristina Fernandez, serves as a federal senator.

Quote: “Our past is full of failures, pain and confrontations, energy wasted in sterile struggles. Now is the time for transformation, for the cultural and moral change the moment demands of us.”

Sources: Los Angeles Times, Reuters, BBC