The 24th of March

José Claudio Escribano and I are probably the only two left of those who went through the entire 1976-1983 military dictatorship working in journalism and holding positions running a newsroom, and who are still doing so today. As there are fewer and fewer witnesses to that period who still hold the same role today, the responsibility to pass on that experience grows ever greater. I look forward to Claudio’s reflections with interest.

In my case, there is a mnemonic imprint in the body, one that cannot be felt by anyone who did not live through it. Just over two years ago I had spinal surgery at the Hospital Italiano; its head of traumatology later told me that, while coming out of anaesthesia, still unconscious, I was screaming in pain and talking about the torture at El Olimpo clandestine detention centre, where I was detained in 1979.

I have never hated. I've always been grateful to have been one of the survivors of El Olimpo, where 700 of the 750 detainees were murdered, and the same goes for after the Malvinas War in 1982, that time without the illegality of disappearance, when they ordered my arrest at the disposal of the Executive Power for treason to the homeland.

Being saved twice made the agnostic I was begin to have faith.

As the 50th anniversary of the March 24 coup draws – in recent days I have been reading many very interesting columns about that period. More than analysis, what I have to offer is personal testimony.

I met Videla, I met Massera and I knew Camps. Paradoxically, I did not meet the man who had me disappeared in January 1979 and who, after a week, had me released a few blocks from the headquarters of the First Army Corps, which he commanded, and made me cross the city with a hood over my head from Flores, where El Olimpo was, to Palermo to deliver a message to the “soft” military officers that it had been him: Suárez Mason.

Massera ordered the first ban on the circulation of the magazine I directed – La Semana – for publishing an article by historian Armando Alonso Piñeiro titled ‘Brown was a pirate and Güemes an anarchist.’ That’s how ridiculous it was.

Videla was even more ridiculous. In 1980, he summoned the directors of media to a meeting at the Casa Rosada for an important announcement. Present were Ernestina Herrera de Noble (Clarín), Bartolomé Mitre (La Nación), Aníbal Vigil (Editorial Atlántida), Bernardo Neustadt (Extra magazine), Hugo Gambini (Redacción magazine) – all now deceased – and myself for Editorial Perfil. At the time, radio and television were state-run and, of course, the Internet did not exist, so the only private media were printed newspapers and magazines.

The announcement was that Argentina was going to war with Brazil because the construction of the Itaipú dam at an “excessive” level was going to deprive the Paraná River of water. The desire for war was among them. Pope John Paul II had prevented war with Chile two years earlier, and I remember very well during interrogations at El Olimpo – which combined psychological and physical torture – their critical interest in the frustrated war with Chile, which “wants to take part of our far south.” I also recall the anti-Semitism that made them believe in the plausibility of the Plan Andinia, according to which Zionism planned to take over uninhabited Patagonia and establish a Jewish state there.

Those were the delusions inside the heads of a significant portion of those military officers, which explains not only the criminal nature of their actions but also their failure in governance on every level, from the economy to the Malvinas. That is why, unlike the contemporary dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, Argentina's dictatorship ended up so discredited, which allowed Raúl Alfonsín to carry out the only trial in human history against the same military officers who still had weapons.

I continue with the madness: Once the Malvinas War had begun, I met General Camps because he summoned me to “inform me” that once the fighting ended, I would be executed for treason for an article we had published by the US journalist Jack Anderson, the winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for the Pentagon Papers). Camps, shouting, told me there was no fleet of 40 British ships heading to the South Atlantic, that it was English lies to frighten our soldiers, and that I had collaborated by spreading defeatist information, serving the enemy. With a pistol on the desk, he told me: “We’ll shoot you when we win the war because now all the bullets will be used to kill the English.”

Episodes like the ones I recount led me to conclude that, above all, they were ignorant. Being very young, I found it difficult to understand how people so poorly prepared could have so much power. Without excusing them in the slightest, I found some consolation in Socrates’ moral intellectualism, for whom evil is ignorance and “he who knows the good acts rightly”. And in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase about the “banality of evil” while covering as a journalist the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. This does not mean evil is banal and, like Arendt, I never downplay the responsibility of the commanders of the dictatorship. I only want to convey that they were very mediocre people; the best example was Videla stammering when José Ignacio López made history by asking him, in a public press conference, about the disappeared.

Over the years, and after more than 42 years of democracy, I have learned that – for the most part – those who reach the Presidency and lead Argentina do not possess superior virtue. They are just as flawed as the average person, exacerbated by the fact that excessive power distances them from reality.

In a column in La Nación, Carlos Pagni recounts that Videla’s secretary-general, José Villarreal, was a sympathiser of the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) and, citing Pablo Gerchunoff’s book El planisferio invertido, Alfonsín mentions the plan Alfonsín proposed to this sector of the military for a brief civic-military transition leading to democracy. What I can personally attest to is that Ricardo Balbín, president of the UCR until his death in 1981, tried to influence the less messianic members of the military leadership to call for elections after Videla’s five-year tenure at the helm of the Military Junta.

I personally interviewed Balbín in 1977 and the headline of the interview was a quote from the Radical leader saying: “Videla is a general for democracy.” Paradoxically, the Press & Dissemination Secretariat – that was its nameº– of the Presidency was controlled by the Navy, that is Massera, who also ordered the distribution of that issue of La Semana to be banned because interviews with any politician were expressly prohibited. Obviously, both the plan of Massera and much of the military’s high command was not to hand over power in 1981 but to continue for as long as possible. The Malvinas War was the attempt to re-legitimise the military government, which ended in the opposite result.

As for Alfonsín – he went to military high school and was of the same generation, so he knew many of the military leadership – I can attest that long before becoming president he had in mind a plan to prosecute the commanders – only those who had committed aberrant crimes – while limiting responsibility for lower-ranking officers, who had followed orders under the concept of “due obedience.” After the Malvinas War ended, La Semana published the first cover photo of Alfredo Astiz, the Navy captain from ESMA known as the “Angel of Death,” who had surrendered the South Georgia Islands to the British. Concerned about the consequences that cover would bring, Alfonsín came to the newsroom to warn me of the danger I was in: “Responsibility will be limited to the commanders and not the subordinates. Son, don’t publish that, we need him alive for democracy.”

I did not listen. Alfonsín was right. The dictatorship shut down La Semana and soon after ordered my arrest. Alfonsín later became the lawyer for the habeas corpus petition asking for my release, and after taking refuge in an embassy, I spent the last year of the dictatorship in the United States before returning with the arrival of democracy.

Walter Benjamin, in his On the Concept of History, explained the impossibility of seeing history as it truly was with the eyes of the present, comparing it to a flash of lightning, which can only be seen in the brief moment of its present, and then it’s gone.

Yesterday, Fernández Díaz, in the same La Nación supplement marking the 50th anniversary of the coup that published Pagni’s text, reflected by saying: “The history that, because of our age, we lived through at the time has subtly changed in our minds as these decades of maturity, study, reading and revelations have passed.” Yes and no. I must have forgotten much, but at the same time I still remember even the smallest details: the dreaded Interior Ministry during the first five years of the dictatorship, General Albano Harguindeguy interrogating me insistently the dawn after I was released from El Olimpo, or another ridiculous example of that time: when we published an interview with the last Secretary-General of the CGT before the coup, Casildo Herrera, famous for his phrase “I will disappear,” after managing to escape before the coup and live in Spain, Harguindeguy summoned me to the Casa Rosada, took me by the shoulder (he was quite large), and slipped a banknote from that time into my pocket. Seeing my surprise, he told me: “This is for Casildo, since you say he survives in Spain without resources.” One more: after my release from El Olimpo, I had to leave the newsroom whenever one of the military officers who drove around in four green Falcons called me under a pseudonym and, to intimidate me, took me on drives without saying a word. The pseudonym chosen was ‘Clark Kent,’ because I was a journalist.

“La Biblia y el calefón,” all mixed together like the tango lyric – the absurd, the banal, evil, mediocrity, nonsense. Before ideology, I saw stupidity in the context of a society that, perhaps like in 2023, tired of the Peronist madness of that time, did not measure the consequences of preferring authoritarianism. Just as nothing began in 1976, it had been coming from before, nothing ended in 1983 with what was paradoxically called the 'Process.' Today, the violence is verbal, but the anti-democratic attitude, opposed to deliberation and consensus, is the same.