Quiet Exit of Argentine Top Brass Says Much

Standing on the steps of the Liberator Building, the headquarters where he worked many of his 44 years as a professional soldier, Gen. Juan Carlos Mugnolo struggled to hold back his tears.

His wife and daughters were helping him cope, he told reporters, following his forced retirement two weeks ago. Forty-three other Argentine generals and admirals shared his misery in the largest housecleaning of the military since the nation returned to democracy in 1983.

Mugnolo loyally said he would accept the decision of his new commander in chief, President Nestor Kirchner.

“Military men shouldn’t offer opinions about party politics,” he said. Neither he nor any of the other dismissed generals have uttered a public statement since.

That Mugnolo and all the other generals and admirals left their posts with barely a whisper of protest is a sign of how much has changed in this country where, a generation ago, the military held sway in one of Latin America’s bloodiest dictatorships.

Most analysts say Kirchner purged the military to rid himself of one especially troublesome general, Ricardo Brinzoni, who had filled the top ranks of the army general staff with his allies.

The head of the army and the nation’s most powerful soldier, Brinzoni was an outspoken proponent of the use of the army in matters of “internal security,” including fighting terrorism.

“Brinzoni was able to shape the military in his image during the last two years” of economic and political crisis, said Ernesto J. Lopez, director of the Program of Investigations of Armed Forces, Security and Society at the University of Quilmes. “The military had become more autonomous. The president wanted to make sure they didn’t give him any problems later in his administration.”

Just uttering “generals” and “politics” in the same sentence is taboo here, where an estimated 9,000 to 30,000 people disappeared during the military’s “dirty war” against leftists.

“Twenty years ago, with even less trouble than we have now, there were tanks on the streets,” said retired Gen. Martin Balza, who commanded Argentina’s army from 1991 until his retirement in 1999. “Now we realize that each time the politicians came to knock on the doors of the barracks, it was a tragedy for Argentina.”

Kirchner and his ministers have also suggested that they will push for the repeal of two controversial 1987 laws: the “final point law” and the “law of due obedience,” both of which prevent prosecutions of military men implicated in the dirty war.

And Kirchner’s new secretary of human rights, Eduardo Luis Duhalde, is a civil-rights lawyer long linked to the radical wing of the Peronist party, which suffered greatly under the dictatorship. Duhalde spent many years in exile in Spain after one of his colleagues was killed by the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance death squad in 1975.

Repealing the 1987 laws will be a priority, said Duhalde, no relation to the former president of the same name. “For years I’ve been saying those laws are unconstitutional,” he said. “President Kirchner has said the same thing.”

The new government has suggested that it might extradite those generals facing charges in France, Spain and Italy related to the deaths of European nationals in Argentina at the hands of the military and death squads during the dirty war.

That would be a final indignity for the soldiers and officers who have become pariahs in the decades since their dictatorship gave way to democracy. Several generals implicated in the dirty war have endured house arrest and public humiliation.

Indeed, the military’s power in Argentina has been on the wane since June 14, 1982, the day that the state-controlled media announced suddenly -- after weeks of triumphant news reports -- that the Falklands War was lost. Several thousand Argentine troops returned home as British prisoners.

Months later, Argentina was a democracy again.

Over the years, Argentina’s legislature and president have slowly whittled away at the power of the armed forces. In 1995, following the death of a young conscript at the hands of an especially cruel commanding officer, the draft was abolished.

Every promotion to the rank of general or admiral must be ratified by a vote in the Senate, a procedure used more than once by human-rights advocates to block the promotion of officers with tainted pasts.

Unlike most of the military high command dismissed by Kirchner, outgoing army chief Brinzoni had one human-rights blemish in his record: He was an officer attached to the provincial government of Chaco when 22 political prisoners were summarily executed in 1976.

President Fernando de la Rua declared that Brinzoni was innocent in the Chaco incident when he appointed him head of the army in 1999.

De la Rua’s presidency slowly crumbled, and he was forced from office. Four of his successors followed. When rumors began circulating about a possible military intervention during 18 months of political chaos, Brinzoni quickly snuffed them out. The army, he declared, would respect Argentina’s Constitution and “remain in the barracks.”

Behind the scenes, however, Brinzoni appeared to ally himself with former President Carlos Menem, Kirchner’s bitter rival in the Peronist party. When Menem was released after spending several months under house arrest on arms trafficking charges, Brinzoni was the first person he visited.

And during Menem’s failed campaign for president, Brinzoni reportedly visited the candidate in his hometown, Anillaco.

Brinzoni also drew the ire of human-rights groups by lobbying for the laws that give former dirty-war soldiers and officers immunity from prosecution.

“People might disagree on whether Kirchner cut too much, but it was obvious that some surgery was necessary,” said Lopez of the University of Quilmes. “The lines that separate the military and civilian institutions have to remain very clear.”

To appoint a new head of the army, Kirchner reached down more than 20 places on the army’s seniority list, to an old friend who had only a year earlier been promoted from colonel to general, Roberto Bendini.

Lopez and others said clearing out the upper echelons will enable Kirchner to leave his own mark on the military.

A few days later, during his official farewell speech, Brinzoni issued a stinging, if indirect, attack on the new president.

“The intrigue that brought the barracks into politics has been eradicated in Argentina,” Brinzoni said. “The intrigue that brings politicians into the barracks is just as dangerous. And it appears to have returned after a 20-year absence.”

Mugnolo, chief of staff of the joint armed-forces command (a position less powerful in practice than Brinzoni’s) repudiated Brinzoni’s speech, as did a group of dismissed admirals.

Balza, the retired general, said the hubbub about the purge had been overblown.

“When I left the army and a new chief was appointed [in 1999], we had 33 generals in the army,” he said. “Of those, 12 were retired. Now there are 43 army generals and 18 were retired,” in addition to the admirals and the air force generals. “It’s a natural process.”

Still, Balza said, there have been profound changes in the Argentine military, an “evolution” he is proud to have helped push forward during his tenure as army chief.

“Our country will be much more important when what a general does isn’t news,” he said.