Living with Ghosts

By George Russell

The "disappeared" and charges of Nazism dog the military

Every Thursday afternoon the ritual of protest is repeated in front of Argentina's presidential Pink House in central Buenos Aires. A small group of women gather in the Plaza de Mayo under the watchful eyes of blue-uniformed police. There, for 30 minutes or so, the women walk in a large circle. There is no sound but their footsteps. Occasionally, the women may try to present a petition at the government building; almost always they are rebuffed. Then they disperse, returning to take up their vigil the following week.

The "Mothers of Plaza de Mayo" (or "Mad Mothers," as they are called by some cynical Argentines) are engaged in a mute contest of wills. Their aim: to discover the whereabouts of their kin, among the 6,000 to 24,000 Argentines who disappeared during the fierce war against terrorism waged by the military after it took power from the country's hapless Peronist government in March 1976.

Most of those who disappeared, the desaparecidos, were abducted by plainclothesmen claiming to be members of the Argentine security forces. The evidence is overwhelming that many, if not most, of those seized were tortured, murdered, and their bodies dumped in secret graves. The ferocity of the antiterrorist campaign made Argentina a special target for human rights activists in the U.S. Congress and in the Carter Administration.

Political murder no longer is common in Argentina; the number of thoroughly documented "disappearances" dwindled to twelve in 1980 and, according to the U.S. State Department, there have been none since. With that in mind, the Reagan Administration has endorsed the sale of arms to Argentina, banned by Congress since 1978, and last week supported loans to the junta by international development banks. But the memory of the terror is still raw, and Argentina, in the words of Emilio Mignone, one of the country's leading human rights activists, is "a country living with its ghosts."

These days there are ample signs that the ghosts, along with other problems, are haunting Argentina's ruling military circles. The land they govern is vast (over 1 million sq. mi.), sparsely populated (28 million people), and has long been one of the great granaries and beef exporters in the world. But Argentina's ceaselessly turbulent politics, oscillating for decades between chaotic populism and military dictatorship, have kept the country from realizing its enormous potential. Today, the Argentine economy is deteriorating badly. The inflation rate, for years the world's highest, had declined from 600% in 1976 to 88% in 1980 under the military, but now is estimated at 150%. Popular criticism, once cautiously directed only against the government's civilian economic team, is starting to turn against the military rulers themselves.

One indication of the restlessness beneath the authoritarian veneer was the scene last week as the government freed the country's last civilian President, Maria Estela Martinez de Peron, 49, after five years of detention. A onetime cabaret dancer, she assumed power after the death in 1974 of her husband, Dictator Juan Domingo Peron, but proved to be woefully incompetent and was jailed in 1976 by the military junta for misusing public property. The military finally arranged her release to remove a rallying point for her still loyal followers, who remain the most potent civilian political force in the country. As the ex-President was sped under close guard from a courthouse to her suburban retreat 25 miles outside Buenos Aires, a small crowd of Peronist bystanders chanted her name. Three days later, she arrived in Madrid, and immediately went into seclusion. According to Argentine military authorities, she is free to return to Argentina but is banned from holding public office or making public political statements.

While the regime was maneuvering at home, it was severely buffeted by criticism from abroad, stirred up by Newspaper Publisher Jacobo Timerman, a former military prisoner who has revived the terror issue by charging in a U.S. bestseller that Argentina's government is Nazi in nature. A Jew, Timerman has evoked the image of a new Holocaust.

One of the many ironies of Argentina is that Timerman was among the majority of citizens who welcomed that military coup in 1976. In the years before and after the 1973 return to power of former Dictator Peron, Argentina suffered the worst bout of terrorism on the continent. Thousands of left-wing Peronist disciples, known as Montoneros, allied with Trotskyite guerrillas to terrorize and murder at will. Among their victims: onetime Argentine President Pedro Aramburu, General Juan Carlos Sanchez, commander of the Argentine army Second Corps, and John Patrick Egan, a U.S. government representative. Some 700 people were killed by guerrillas, most of them members of the security forces. The guerrillas kidnaped scores of businessmen, particularly foreigners, and companies such as Kodak, Exxon, Firestone and Ford paid out millions of dollars in ransom and blackmail. In the kidnaping of two scions of the Argentine trading conglomerate Bunge & Born, the guerrillas reportedly netted $60 million.

By the time the leading generals, admirals and air-force chiefs stepped in once again, the country had clearly slipped into anarchy. Then the new government unleashed what its own officials called its "dirty war." Plainclothes squads roamed cities by day and night, dragging off suspected subversives in unmarked cars. The government fought terror with terror, allowing cells of gunmen to act independently of any central command--and thus out of control.

The dirty war was eventually won: there have been no major terrorist incidents since late 1979. But not all Argentines who fell into the paramilitary vortex were terrorists by any means, and that fact has left ugly scars on the nation and its people.

Among those swept up in the antiterrorism drive, for example, were as many as 100 children under the age of seven (picked up with their parents), 1,000 expectant mothers, and probably thousands of victims whose only political crime was that their names appeared in a suspect's address book. Torture, including electric-shock treatment, was routine, and so unrelenting, says one foreign intelligence expert, that afterward "the subjects were simply not fit human beings." Rather than release such shattered prisoners, says this source, the authorities simply killed them.

The terror may be gone, but the anguish remains. Vignettes:

>A mother waits for word of her 19-year-old daughter. The two women were kidnaped by armed men four years ago, blindfolded and taken to a cavernous garage. The two were separated, and the mother remembers loud music that did not quite drown out the screams from nearby rooms. Finally, the mother sensed the presence of her daughter by her side and whispered her name. "Mother," the girl said, "I can't stand this torture any longer. I want to die." The mother was released. That was in 1977. She has heard nothing since about her daughter.

>A mother remembers a quiet Saturday when her only son, a physicist, was playing the organ in the living room. Plainclothesmen arrived. The men pleasantly asked the son to go with them and assured the parents that he would soon return. Five months later, an anonymous army colonel arrived at their home to say that their son had made "a favorable impression." A year after that, an army major told them that they would soon see their son again. There has been no word since 1979.

>Young relatives of high-ranking military officers tell of a water-skiing outing on Argentina's broad River Plate. Their boat's propeller fell away and sank near a military installation. One member of the group dived overboard to look for the gear. He climbed back into the boat shaking and vomiting. He had found an underwater grave containing dozens of weighted bodies, all beheaded.

Though outright violence has waned, a clumsy but determined form of repression still governs the country. Agents frequently detain "suspicious" individuals for any where from 48 hours to 60 days.

Political parties are still banned.

When fractious civilian politicians insist on gathering, they are routinely arrested and released with in 24 hours or so.

Press censorship is less systematic, but since some 60 journalists vanished during the previous years of chaos, only the most courageous journalists and publications speak out in Argentina these days. International press photographers run the risk of arrest for recording events like the protest marches of the Plaza de Mayo Mothers.

But the wary and paranoid military government was unable, finally, to gag Publisher Timerman. He was arrested in April 1977 by men claiming to be agents of Buenos Aires' Tenth Infantry Brigade. Timerman endured several months of brutal torture, including the use of electric shock, and then spent two years under house arrest before being expelled from Argentina in September 1979.

Timerman, who now lives in Israel, last May published Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, vividly describing his torture and the viciously anti-Semitic attitudes of his military captors. Timerman has implied that such attitudes characterize the Argentine military regime as a whole, and he attacked the Argentine Jewish community for standing passively by in the face of an overwhelming racial threat.

Many Jewish leaders in Argentina argue, as has the Argentine military, that Timerman's arrest was due to his connections with a mysterious Jewish Argentine financier, David Graiver, who is suspected of having acted as a banker for left-wing terrorists. Graiver, who owned 45% of Timerman's La Opinion, apparently died in a mysterious Mexican airplane crash in 1976. Timerman, however, indignantly points out that he was held prisoner for two years after Argentine authorities declared that there was nothing illegal in his relationship with Graiver. Timerman insists that his ordeal was based on his newspaper's espousal of human rights policies.

The key questions nevertheless remain: Is the Argentine military regime as rabidly anti-Semitic as Timerman says? Can any just comparison be drawn between Argentina today and Hitler's Germany in 1933? There is some ammunition for Timerman's argument but not that much.

Even Timerman's critics acknowledge that Jews imprisoned during the dirty war almost invariably received harsher treatment than Gentiles. There have been stories for years of guards flaunting Nazi regalia in some Argentine jails. Many recall that Argentina was a haven for fleeing Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, after World War II, and that the country remained stubbornly neutral throughout the war. Today some Argentine officials make no secret of their prejudices. One police colonel has bragged to leaders of the Jewish community, "I love to kill Jews. We like to have fun torturing Jews. The only mistake Hitler made was not to kill all the Jews." A well-known law professor at the University of Buenos Aires has made a career of publishing anti-Semitic tracts and has warned students that he will "never permit a Jew to pass" his courses. Such bigotry has been casually tolerated by the military regime. Says one bitter Argentine who survived Auschwitz, the father of one of the desaparecidos: "I give eight more years to the Jews in this country. And when I leave, it will be with only the buttons on my coat."

Yet many Argentine Jewish leaders argue strenuously against Timerman's allegations. They point, first of all, to the fact that during the 1930s, Argentina openly received Jews fleeing German persecution. The Argentine Jewish community of about 350,000 is now the seventh largest in the world. Jews have not been subjected to racist economic and social sanctions. Jewish families are prominent in Argentine banking circles and own huge tracts of ranch land. They operate freely as businessmen. Some of the country's most successful film directors are Jewish, as are successful nuclear scientists, painters, architects and real estate developers. Says Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a New York-born scholar who has established the first rabbinical college in Latin America: "I can join more social clubs in Buenos Aires as a Jew than I can in the U.S. But in the U.S. I also receive the protection of the law."

The latter complaint, however, is not solely a Jewish one.

The key point made by Timerman's Jewish critics in Argentina is that Jews were not singled out for persecution during the dirty war. Complains Herman Schiller, editor of the left-leaning weekly Nueva Presencia, who once campaigned vigorously for Timerman's release from jail: "By making it so easy for the government to prove that Jews don't live in concentration camps in Argentina, Timerman has made a mockery of the real issues of Jewish life and human rights here. The police force contains anti-Semites, but on the most important holy days the police protect our synagogues."

Political Columnist Manfred Schoenfeld, a German-born Jew whose family fled Berlin in 1937, has been the military regime's most prominent critic in the pages of the conservative Buenos Aires daily La Prensa. But, says the widely respected Schoenfeld, "in playing the Jewish card, Timerman is unscrupulously behaving as an adventurer. There are anti-Semitic sectors of the country, and they are very strong, but I don't think my position is weaker because I am a Jew."

Three weeks ago, he was brutally assaulted--he lost five teeth--because of his political views, and his family was later intimidated. But he does not feel he was attacked because he is Jewish. Says Schoenfeld: "We are often fighting against very obscure forces and many vested interests that seem to be out of the government's control."

The paradox of the Timerman book is that by focusing renewed attention on Argentina, it may actually make the repression worse. The international furor is putting further strain on President Roberto Eduardo Viola, 56, who took office almost four months ago and has trouble enough with Argentina's economic problems. A relative moderate among the generals, Viola has promised a slow return to democracy (see box), but now he is denouncing a "campaign of destabilization" against his regime. One of Viola's problems is that he has relatively little power: real control is exercised by a three-man armed-forces junta that appoints the President, passes judgment on legislation and undergoes rotational changes in its own membership.

Timerman's evocation of the Nazis touches on the military's greatest fear: some day it might have to answer in a court for the atrocities of the dirty war.

Says a civilian confidant of high military officials: "The road the generals have chosen is very long and very dangerous. They are afraid of the consequences facing them. We all fell into the simplicity of doing away with subversion at any cost, and now we are paying the price." The Argentine military is in the isolated position that the country's foremost writer, Jorge Luis Borges, once described as the headstrong and independent role of all Argentines: "patriots without countrymen." Sadly, Argentina remains a country with far less need of patriots than of countrymen with a common cause. --By George Russell. Reported by William McWhirter/Buenos Aires

With reporting by William McWhirter

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