Cleaning Up After a Dirty War

...We had a room in the Hotel Dora, where it was said the author Jorge Luis Borges took afternoon tea...

...Although the French government had lost interest in the case of the nuns, he had persisted on his own, and that week had been in court again...

...Obviously the junta had despised him...

...Those who had prosecuted the terror, including Captain Astiz, remained in uniform...

...For example, in 1980 spending on armaments was $8 billion—$z billion more than the country's foreign reserves...

...Like others with whom I spoke, Mignone retold the decline and fall of democratic Argentina, emphasizing not just the many coups since 1930 but the evil that entered the country's bloodstream after World War II when it accepted so many escaping Nazis...

...Buenos Aires is now a tributary of global capitalism, in which banks and international capital markets put up the front money for mobile phone networks, chain restaurants, and one-bedroom apartment blocks...

...The economy that the generals seized in their 1976 coup had a rate of inflation of 500 percent, high wage demands among workers, state control of key businesses, no foreign investment, and captains of industry whose only marketing experience was from the front lines of torture...

...Given the numbers that disappeared in the 1970's, I asked him why he had never been arrested...

...B efore leaving Argentina on this visit, I went again to the Jockey Club to meet Horacio Mendez Carreras...

...They had been on the front lines of the Dirty War...

...Chile and Uruguay had had their own dirty wars, but neither of those had 78 June 1998 • The American Spectator that had divided Argentina, one of the costliest civil wars in the Americas since that of the United States...

...Until I met Horacio Mendez Carreras, the Dirty War was an abstraction to me...

...During working lunches," recalled Miriam Lewin de Garcia, an ESMA survivor, before the Sabato commission, "Lt...

...As described by Martin Edwin Andersen in his Dossier Secreto, a definitive history of the Dirty War: The state and industry would march lockstep toward modernization orchestrated by a set of reciprocal relationships between nationalist, pro-industry military men...

...of the many burial sites and detention centers around Buenos Aires...

...Only through the foreign press, in 1976, did he first become aware that people were disappearing...

...or of cab drivers indifferent to being paid in pesos or dollars...

...ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick — and thus capable of reform...

...The new junta dissolved Congress, replaced the Supreme Court, and purged judges...

...A country with the sixth largest land mass on earth generated wealth from its meat and grain, which moved to foreign markets on railroads and ships financed by British and French investment houses...

...Peron used the country's dwindling foreign currency reserves to purchase the railroads built by the English and the French, and negotiated generous pay packages with the unions, but he balanced the budget by printing money...

...In response to several well-publicized guerrilla attacks, police and military units without search warrants or the instructions of judges were rounding up those deemed subversive...

...it abolished individual legal guarantees and decreed the death penalty for political reasons...

...In exchange for their support in the Cold War, especially in the jungle wars of El Salvador and Nicaragua, the generals were allowed to pursue their domestic agenda, which reached the heights of folly when Argentina sensed tacit American approval for the occupation of the Falkland Islands...

...We climbed a dim apartment-building staircase, as if behind the Iron Curtain...

...But though he was an heir to such tradition, he also did not mind going against its grain...

...Unemployment was down to 13 percent, and the budget deficit was less than 1 percent of gross domestic product...

...During the terror, bodies thrown from planes had washed up on the same shores that we now saw in the distance...

...Are you and your cousin close...

...Unable to cope either with nascent terrorism or rampant inflation, Isabel was overthrown by a military junta that saw in the opposition, both real and imagined, the threat that Hitler perceived in the Jews...

...In A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America, Carlos Marichal links economic cycles in the West with the periodic debt crises south of the border: The phases of the loan booms generally corresponded to a period of expansion in the industrial nations that spurred a rise in world trade and the accumulation of surplus capital in international money markets...the waning of these phases...cut short the flow of funds to Latin America and led to debt crises...

...of the Naval Mechanics School on the edge of the city, converted into a medieval dungeon complete with instruments of torture...

...A lawyer then in his forties, with a warm smile, thick dark hair and Ivy League clothing, Mendez Carreras invited me to meet him at the Jockey Club, one of the parthenons of Argentina's establishment...

...Most of the country does not want to remember anything," he lamented...

...As Sabat quipped: "We had an inflation of generals...

...When we met later at the airport, I asked what she had purchased...

...Yet only the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who had lost children in the siege, and his friend Robert Cox took notice of the "disappeared...

...To their credit, Presidents Alfonsin and Menem made the same links between civilian authority and a sound currency, and like Margaret Thatcher, privatized state monopolies to reduce government debt and promote productivity...

...At about 5 a.m, several green Ford Falcons, the chariots of death driven by the security forces, had appeared outside (Continued on page 77) 41 Stevenson/Argentina (Continued from page 4r) their building...

...Listening to Mendez Carreras was like hearing someone read aloud from Dante...

...The effect of this silence was to indict the victims, or their families, for the crimes...

...All had been physically or emotionally scarred by the repression...

...My father, a believer in the simultaneous breakdowns of monetary and political stability, visited Argentina in 1981 and wrote: There was the sense of being on a foundering ship while watching the crew below decks playing blackjack...

...But no one suggested that the rule of law was whatever was shouted from the balcony of the Casa Rosada...

...Seeing the country at peace, I thought too about those I had met on our honeymoon...

...Inflation became the only growth enterprise...

...As we sat in the The American Spectator • June 1998 stuffed club chairs, he gave his account of the repression, which he saw both as a lawyer and as a columnist for the Buenos Aires Herald...

...was the question on my mind when I listened to accounts of the country's recent success...

...It's terrible," was the phrase that punctuated most of his paragraphs...

...Yet fate had proved them wrong, and Argentina had prospered...

...With the inflation rate exceeding 20 percent, the government defaulting on the national debt, and the military so firmly entrenched in Argentine culture, who had the appetite for a Nuremberg trial...

...Mendez Carreras remembered how many were quietly relieved—as if it might finally end the violence—when the prominent editor Jacobo Timerman was detained in 1977...

...The generals baptized their rule the Orwellian-sounding National Reorganization Process, known in Spanish as el Proceso...

...The American Spectator • June 1998 79...

...What, he asked, are the consequences of forgetting...

...and those granting the franchises to democracy are not above reviewing the small points in the leases...

...It seemed "altogether fitting" to find, on one of the walls around the patio, a bronze plaque engraved with the words of the Gettysburg Address...

...Only Thatcher, in restoring a British colony, had overthrown the government of occupation in Buenos Aires...

...Casting himself as the hero of an autobiographical romance, Peron once said: "If I had not been born Peron, I would have liked to be Peron...

...The view of water in the distance, the company of so many books, the presence of minds filled with both courage and warmth reminded me of the house on Long Island where I had grown up and where, two weeks before, we had been married...

...There was no war at all," was how Mignone remembered the period...

...Who won Argentina...

...During the years of turmoil, about the only U.S...

...D uring the summer before our wedding, though absorbed with preparations more detailed than those for the early space shots, I had found time to write the former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, Robert Cox...

...After a December meeting at which they prepared some publicity around the theme of a "Christmas of Peace," the nuns were abducted, tortured at the Naval Mechanics School, and "disappeared...

...But in Argentina family still means more than politics...

...What came as a surprise on this visit were the country's economic and political successes...

...My father was a judge...

...The military had been mustered from politics...

...Parity between the peso and the dollar has restored local savings, and even those whoonce tucked away their investments in the United States or Switzerland are repatriating their dollars, in some cases to buy government bonds...

...During the 1930's and 40's, Argentina flirted with fascism, maintaining links to the Axis powers though not confronting the Allies...

...Mignone recalled in a whisper...

...We listened as a man in a V-neck sweater and bedroom slippers, sitting with his wife on their living room sofa, told the story of May 14, 1976, the day their daughter Monica had disappeared...

...But by then— through corruption and economic stagnation, and with extremists on all sides claiming to be Peronists— the political center had collapsed...

...As Adam Smith wrote in a 1775 essay: "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice...

...President Alfonsin was under enormous pressure to pardon those responsible...

...Had the divisions really healed...

...We lost our daughter," Mrs...

...He got his chance to play Peron in 1973, when he returned from exile to lead a government that he hoped would keep at bay the extremes on the left and the right...

...Earlier this year, alas not on a second honeymoon, I went again to Buenos Aires...

...We read books in grand cafes and walked the crumbling sidewalks of a city that the poet Archibald MacLeish had praised in 1928: [Buenos Aires] is a great city as the ancients measured great cities...

...But otherwise the conversation could well have been the one we had had in the large padded chairs a decade and a half before...

...The speculation I heard was financial rather than political...

...Or did the country manage to heal itself, indifferent to American prescriptions...

...Why, he asked repeatedly, did the country want to forget its past so quickly...

...I asked...

...Speaking to me that same year, Mendez Carreras was pessimistic about the future of his country...

...Ruben Chamorro carried out the operation...

...He told them not to touch me...

...In the eat/ 1980's we flew down from Rio, after what seemed like five days in a Brazilian rain forest...

...Sometimes they were present when someone was kidnapped or tortured, but they never took part nor could they recall the details...

...One friend said ironically: "Menem will soon become Consul Vitellius as the first step to becoming emperor...

...The peso was pegged to the dollar, and the two currencies were freely convertible...

...From the hearings of the Sabato commission, convened to establish a chronology of the terror, Mendez Carreras at least knew the outline of the nuns' fate, but he still did not know where they were buried or if, as he suspected, they had been thrown into the ocean...

...Little wonder that the rise of Argentine democracy has coincided with the expansion in the global economy after 1983, or for that matter, that The Wealth of Nations was published the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed...

...No," he replied...

...I remember it as a perfect honeymoon day: We grilled an enormous steak, met his friends and family, and toasted our new marriage...

...Large industrial corporations were privatized...

...Men in dark leather trench coats had pounded on their door...

...In the newspaper that day, President Menem had alluded indirectly to Mendez Carreras, in criticizing those stirring the embers of the Dirty War...

...In 1977, the notorious Captain Alfredo Astiz, then a junior officer in the terror, infiltrated a group campaigning for peace that included several French nuns...

...The combined effects of fascism and inflation had collapsed the political center and left the government in the hands of "criminals using the resources of a modem state to commit crimes and cover them up...

...From journalists, lawyers, and judges, there was only silence...

...He served us coffee in his studio...

...In the notes I kept of the meeting, I found these names: "Louis 25, Claudio 23, Lela 2o," followed by: "Disappeared...

...I heard exemplary tales of those who had lost jobs in privatizations, now scrambling to open restaurants and boutiques...

...It's my life's work," he added...

...I went to the cafe and read my book...

...This time, instead of huddlingnear the door, we ate lunch in the dining room...

...By 1984, when Mendez Carreras represented the French government in the matter, there was no chance that the nuns were still alive...

...Defeat in the Falklands war had toppled the military junta, and less than a year before our visit Raul Alfonsin had been elected president...

...Leaving Argentina two weeks into the marriage, we had our first argument as husband and wife...

...hi 1946, a popular military officer named Juan Peron 40 June 19 9 8 • The American Spectator won the presidency on a platform that set cabaret fascism to the music of Eugene V. Debs...

...The good news was that I had not married a "shopper...

...But although he was one of those who had prevailed in the struggle, his tone was anything but that of a winner...

...Otherwise the city had changed as little as the design of the 1964 Ford Falcon that, under the banner of industrial self-sufficiency, was produced locally well into the 1980's...

...The enemy were "children...

...I had read press accounts of repression in the 1970's, but a state of siege in South America was as difficult to comprehend as the prose of the "fabulist" novelists then fashionable across Latin America...

...They wanted to kill me," he said...

...I never would have thought Death had undone so many...

...They had either been buried in anonymous mass graves or, like many others, thrown from planes flying over the Atlantic Ocean...

...Peron was ill, and he could do little more than ask his constituency not to cry...

...After many years as a lonely voice for justice, and more than a few death threats, he had moved his family to Charleston, South Carolina, where he wrote editorials for a local paper...

...The great truism about Argentina is that early in this century it had one of the highest standards of living in he world...

...Thus began the Dirty War...

...Fifteen years ago they had been pessimistic about the country's chances for a democratic future...

...We talked about countries —Japan after World War II, Greece after the colonels, Russia today—that had little use of history...

...His state capitalism married the worst impulses of Italian Fascism and Indian self-sufficiency...

...For the families of the "disappeared" what was hardest was that they suffered their pain alone...

...The military was no longer a threat...

...In the nineteenth century, Argentina adopted a constitution modeled on that of the United States, and until 1930 democratic government maintained the country's standards of living...

...Matthew Stevenson o doubt because I first saw Buenos Aires on my honeymoon, it lingers in my mind as a city of dreams...

...Nor could we buy anything in the duty-free shops, since a general strike had been called...

...As Martin Andersen recounts part of the story in Dossier Secreto: In fact a group operating out of the Navy Mechanics School [ESMA] headed by Rear Adm...

...And I had a cousin in the navy...

...Each had risked his life speaking out against torture when few wanted to listen...

...The American Spectator • June 19 9 8 77 No bank at the airport was interested in purchasing my pesos for dollars...

...Few were optimistic that he could tame MATTHEW STEVENSON (matthewstevenson@compuserve.com) travels for an international bank and lives in Switzerland...

...That's probably what saved me...

...They thought themselves above the law...

...The angry Peronist graffiti had been scrubbed from the parliament walls, perhaps because a Peronist, Carlos Menem, was serving as president...

...Jorge Radice showed off his black humor, saying with a sneer that his task force had carried out the murders of [Argentine diplomat] Elena Holmberg, the French nuns—he called them his 'flying nuns'—and the Palotine priests...

...members of the local manufacturing community (many of whom had grown fat on state subsidies...

...But as a lawyer he sought to account for those missing lives...

...As Andersen observes: The military reserved for itself the power to patrol what they called Argentina's 'ideological borders...

...In a memorable phrase, she explained the shift in American policy: "We're not going to sell thumbscrews anymore...

...The military men who had so far testified, he said, remembered few particulars...

...Did Jimmy Carter's confrontations with the generals, Ronald Reagan's quiet diplomacy, or Margaret Thatcher's iron fist bring about the changes...

...As he had said so many times when we first met: "It's terrible...

...in the sense in which Paris and London are great cities...a cosmopolitan, twentieth-century metropolis with all the fixings, crowds, avenues, parks, subways, visiting pianists, confusion of tongues, screaming of brakes, shining of movie theatres...

...Imagine Jayne Mansfield as president," was Sabat's off-hand remark...

...In the end the United States had little influence on events...

...and the working class, represented by a cooperative and quiescent leadership...

...Menem had retired many generals...

...In contrast, the Reagan administration's policy was to reduce pressure on the Argentine generals by explaining that they were authoritarian not totalitarian—to use the distinctions of the then-U.S...

...From my reading I knew him as a brave man who during the worst of the Dirty War had challenged the junta's campaigns of terror...

...This time, on similar outings, all I heard was that George Soros was now the country's largest land owner, that Wal Mart had opened many stores, or that the stock market was up 9 percent...

...True, the government was plagued with various scandals, and the president was making noises about rewriting the constitution to allow himself a third term in office...

...Few friends acknowledged their loss...

...He spoke about the hundreds of teenagers rounded up by the military...

...At the house, Mendez Carreras showed us some of his books, many of them on the American revolution, the South American wars of independence, and early Argentine law—three traditions that had probably saved Argentina...

...Mignone, although a Peronist, believed that Britain had saved Argentina from despotism...

...Cox had generously given me the names of writers, artists, and bankers to contact, and on an old rotary phone in the Dora I tracked a number of them down...

...When we had first met in 1984, after our conversation in the Jockey Club, we had spent a day together in the countryside outside the capital...

...Thus, if one is searching for analogies to the collapse of civilian authority in Argentina, it is to the Weimar Republic, which paved the way for the kind of general totalitarianism that Timer-man describes in particular, that one should turn...

...Times were better in Argentina, Mendez Carreras admitted...

...Oh, here," she said handing me back a great wad of small bills...

...Thus my wife and I spent our honeymoon in the company of strangers who soon became friends...

...The problem with this is that those down the chain are serfs to changing consumer tastes...

...For the next twenty years the armed forces and weak civilian governments ran the country along the constitutional principles of musical chairs...

...The bad news was that Argentina's depleted foreign exchange reserves were up $300...

...Only the war in the Falklands had reversed the tyranny of the generals...

...That helped me...

...But the lawyer would carry on until he found out who was responsible and what happened...

...Echoing the sentiments of many I met, he concluded: "They should put up a statue for Margaret Thatcher...

...First we met Hermenegildo Sabat, an illustrator, painter and political cartoonist whose pointillist studies of tango captured both the pageantry and dark tragedy of Argentine life...

...export to Argentina was advice on how to reverse the country's political decline...

...She was later credited with saving lives...

...The guerrillas were few and badly organized, and faced a well-equipped army...

...But I wrote a column for Bob Cox...

...Between 1976 and 1983, the debt rose from $io billion to $39 billion...

...W ith Mendez Carreras, I went to see Emilio Mignone, a leading human rights activist...

...Argentina's non-convertible currency and its isolation from global markets were more reasons, I now believe, that it descended beyond the first circles of the civilized world...

...When we sang the praises of Buenos Aires, Sabat said, yes, it was beautiful but also "a facade, a moving picture," and that underneath the broad boulevards like those of Barcelona and the parks like those of Paris lay the quiet brutality of Leningrad and the legal labyrinth of Kafka's Prague...

...38 June 1998 • The American Spectator The American Spectator • June 1998 39 the dragons of militarism and ruinous inflation that had turned Argentina into a metaphor for national mismanagement...

...convertibility only went one way...

...Interest and principal was being serviced on foreign debt, and hard currency reserves exceeded $3o billion...

...At war with the Catholic Church, estranged from the middle-class, and threatened by a military revolt, Peron resigned and fled the country in September 1955...

...After his death in 1974, the presidency passed to his second wife and former belly dancer, Isabel...

...While driving me around Buenos Aires in 1984, friends would quietly point out this detention center or that military barracks...

...On a number of occasions President Jimmy Carter sent his assistant secretary of state, Patricia Derian, to preach the sermon of human rights to the military junta...

...Before going to say good-bye to friends, I had given my wife the equivalent of $3oo in Argentine pesos, assuming that she would go shopping...

...But the junta responded to piety as Josef Stalin might have done, and the worst government torture and killing corresponded to Carter's time in office...

...But the preference of Argentine politicians for Tammany rather than Independence Hall, and the historic sense that the military had founded the nation always left the country vulnerable to men on horseback...

...Mendez Carreras drove my wife and me to see his sister's house, built around a Spanish courtyard and graced with worn tiles, overlooking the River Plate...

...In 1984 Argentina had just emerged from the long shadows of the "Dirty War," the years from 1976 to 1983, when more than 30,000 people lost their lives at the hands of government death squads or urban guerrillas...

...Foreign debt had plugged the gap between revenue and expenses...

...Those armed men had carried the screaming Monica away...

...You got it now...

...The economy was strong and linked to the West...

...Many of those "disappeared" were targeted for their work with social causes, but the threat from the left was exaggerated...

...He hates me...

...Little of this money found its way into businesses that could generate foreign exchange...