Recapturing the Memory of Politics
Izaguirre, Inés
During his investigation into the disappearances of several Spanish citizens in Argentina during the military regime, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garz6n was questioning former navy captain...
...At the level of knowledge, this implies admitting that the repression, or genocide, was applied against a morally and physically "unarmed" population...
...In late 1985, they were sentenced to life imprisonment and were stripped of their military rank...
...This was evident in a recent survey in which two-thirds of those polled say that they believe that those responsible for the atrocities of the past should be held accountable for their actions, and that it is time to stop saying, "We did not know...
...It wasn't my job...
...Recuperaci6n de una identidad expropiada," Cuadernos del Instituto, No...
...Security forces and paramilitary groups engaged in actions on a daily basis not only against armed revolutionary groups, but also against unarmed militant trade unionists, political and student leaders and many other groups engaged in social protest...
...8.The occupational distribution of the disappeared is as follows: business leaders (3.2...
...The group brings together children of people who were killed or disappeared during the military regime, who are struggling to uncover the truth about their parents...
...9 A second interpretation of what occurred during the period of the military dictatorship, which is firmly upheld by most human rights organizations, emphasizes the repressive actions of only one of the actors and suggests that violence was unidirectional...
...10.See the interview of retired Gen...
...Argentina 1973-76...
...36 (December 1989), p. 15...
...1 0 But to officially recognize this during the 31REPORT ON ARGENTINA A mother whose son was disappeared during Argentina's dirty war vents her anger during a protest against the military...
...Many families who prior to the passage of this law had been hesitant to bring their cases before the courts decided to do so immediately, and the number of court cases against military officials quadrupled overnight...
...Another critical development in this process of recuperating memory that occurred in the aftermath of the 1994 confessions is the creation of a new organization named HIJOS--Children in Favor of Identity and Justice and Against Forgetting and Silence...
...Several accounts were uncovered, including a multimillion-dollar account under the name of current governor of the province of Tucumdn, retired Gen...
...In recent years-and especially after the military "confessions," which have had the effect of publicly vindicating the human rights struggle in Argentina-family members have started to publicly portray their disappeared relatives as social and political activists, and this image is increasingly displacing the portrayal of the disappeared as "victims...
...But it was not enough to placate some 29REPORT ON ARGENTINA The generals of Argentina's dirty war on trial...
...8 This parcelized conceptualization helps hide the social nature of the confrontation of the 1970s...
...The pressure was such that Alfonsin proposed a law to Congress that established a maximum period of 60 days for the initiation of all new trials against military officers...
...9 (1992), p. 46...
...This model negates the very existence of this sector, despite the fact that it cut across all classes of Argentine society...
...Sixty-two percent of those disappeared were kidnapped from their homes in the middle of the night...
...This is a first and critical step in the process of recovering a memory of politics, long dismissed and demonized by the dictatorship...
...1 5 The military's operations were characterized as genocide...
...This was illus- mitted the categorical transformation of the "subversive trated in a piece of artwork by Le6n Ferrari, an delinquent" into a legitimate antagonist...
...During his investigation into the disappearances of several Spanish citizens in Argentina during the military regime, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garz6n was questioning former navy captain Adolfo Scilingo, who in 1995 had confessed to his participation in the kidnapping and disappearances of Argentine citizens during the country's dirty war...
...Marx, Obras Escogidas (Moscow: Editorial Progreso, 1955...
...Rico took his inspiration from Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Alf Seineldin, an officer who not only justified the war against subversion but also the military's role in the Malvinas War and who declared himself in open confrontation with the army leadership...
...After the areas into which the armed forces had divided Argentine coup, the power exercised by the state was all-encom- territory...
...This narrative is perhaps the most widely disseminated representation of events in Argentine society...
...La historia secreta y la historia pOblica del jefe guerrillero Mario Roberto Santucho (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991), p. 249...
...Richard Gillespie, Soldados de Per6n...
...This combination of events clearly suggests that times have changed, and that the popular sectors in Argentina are recovering their moral and political strength...
...2 28 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Inbs Izaguirre is a researcher at the Gino Germani Institute and a member of the Social Science Faculty at the University of Buenos Aires...
...I suggest, however, that in Argentina there was in fact a long process of class-based social, political and military struggles that took place in conditions of war which culminated in genocide precisely after the military coup of March 24, 1976...
...9. Karl Marx, in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (1852), and his works on the Paris Commune (1871), was the first to discern and analyze these confrontations between social forces while revolutionary processes were underway in France in 1848...
...5.On Seineldin's role as the link between the paramilitary Argentine Anticommunist Alliance ("Triple A") and the army since 1973, and his involvement in the counterinsurgency wars in Central America in the 1980s, see Laura Bonaparte, El mundo guarda silencio...
...17 Astiz made these comments in response to two recent initiatives: the motion to annul the Final Stop and Due Obedience Laws presented on January 6 in the House of h ti t S ta t a Deputies by five FREPASO congressional leaders and the order of arrest birds of issued by Spanish Judge Garz6n against several leaders of the armed forces nes say involved in the repression...
...1978 1,141 10.0 The dictatorship was careful to 1979 195 1.7 shroud its actions in secrecy, 1980 83 0.7 but made sure that society at 1982 12 0.1 large was aware that "some1983 9 0.7 thing" was going on...
...This article represents an effort to recuperate that political memory...
...As Habermas has said, "In a country without history"-or with a history in dispute-"whoever manages to give meaning to memory, define the concepts and interpret the past, wins the future...
...law was precisely the opposite...
...More than a million people had gathered to receive Per6n upon his return from exile when right-wing commandos opened fire on the crowd, killing 13 and wounding 365.14 Marin's study documents 1,543 deaths and nearly 1,500 wounded during the three years of the constitutional Peronist government of 1973-1976...
...28 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS la`~~st~ ?rl r? I1 Ii uREPORT ON ARGENTINA In 1983, the final year of the dictatorship, the generals passed an amnesty law for all military officers accused of crimes during the dirty war...
...It also impeded different components Argentina 1971-1983 of the enemy force, and espeDisappearances according to year of kidnapping...
...Perhaps the only exceptional aspect of this particular case is that it deals with the family of a young military officer who questioned the army's repressive methods...
...disgruntled sectors of the military...
...44 (1988...
...7 uch efforts to make the discourse of impunity part of everyday politics in Argentina have been resisted primarily because of the organized presence of relatives of the disappeared and of human rights groups, who have consistently challenged each and every measure aimed at institutionalizing impunity...
...But a sinister operation was simultane- ered up the existence of the ongoing war...
...In January 1989, a group of left-wing activists who feared that these were clear indications of a new military coup in the making, tried to take control of the La Tablada barracks, an action that was fiercely repressed by the army...
...Yet this process has been contested at each stage by important sectors of society...
...A similar delinking occurs with the social sectors which formed part of the other force-the revolutionary groups-including a broad segment of people who refused to submit to the dominant regime at the time...
...The Final Stop law was passed on December 24, 1986 under the guise of a reconciliation between Argentines, but the political effect of the VOL XXXI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1998 A photograph of Ana Maria Franconetti, a student who was disappeared by the Argentine military forms part of a homage to the disappeared in the Buenos Aires National High School...
...3.The National Commission on Disappearances was created by presidential decree on December 15, 1983...
...Martin Balza, publicly recognized the illegality of the methods used in the war "against terrorism," and the "immorality of obeying immoral orders"-the first time an active general has admitted the criminal behavior of the Argentine military...
...While Pernias was affirming in the Senate that "the only law" that was respected during the dirty war "was torture," Menem was claiming in a speech at army headquarters that the "rule of law" had triumphed...
...Human rights leaders provide a completely understandable political argument for their adherence to this conceptualization...
...On December 3, 1990, a group known as the carapintadas under the leadership of Major Carlos Abete, another of Seineldin's disciples, led yet another uprising at the Palermo Regiment...
...to plant mines and set off bombs...
...This wrenching story is just one of thousands of testimonies that the relatives of those disappeared and assassinated during Argentina's military dictatorship (19761983) have presented to human rights organizations, the National Commission on Disappeared People (CONADEP) and Argentine and international courts...
...middle-class professionals (13...
...La tragedia de Cahuelas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Catalogos, 1993...
...My understanding is that war always implies massacres and genocide, and in Argentina it was a terrorist state that was responsible for these abominations...
...Recapturing the Memory of Politics 1 .La Naci6n (Buenos Aires), February 2, 1998...
...6 A year later, in December 1988, Seineldin led another uprising in Villa Martelli...
...The Alfonsin government was under intense pressure from the military and other powerful groups to downplay the trials...
...Antonio Domingo Bussi...
...One such model, widely disseminated by the media during the period immediately following the dictatorship, reduces the war to a military conflict fought between armed groups, and is known in journalistic language as the "theory of the two demons...
...The discovery came about after the Argentine government requested that Switzerland lift its banking secrecy laws in order to investigate allegations that IBM had bribed Banco de la Naci6n employees to obtain an information-technology contract...
...When the family's chauffer was kidnapped shortly thereafter, they again set out to find his whereabouts, a search which led them to the Rio Santiago Naval Base...
...4. Later, as new legal situations emerged which provided reparations to the relatives of victims, some 2,000 new cases came to light, particularly of people from the interior who were generally more isolated and poorer...
...On March 24, 1981, the fifth anniversary of the coup and the day a new junta took power, Minister Albano Harguindeguy made the notion of "dirty war" part of the official lexicon...
...In other action into forms of criminal subversion...
...6.In 1991, Rico established a political party, the Movement for National Dignity (MODIN), which later split after Rico allied with the governing Peronist Party...
...bureaucratic, economic and social institutions as "busi- The covert nature of their operations effectively covness as usual...
...According to Scilingo, such a request was seen as treason, and Devoto was kidnapped and thrown into the ocean on one of the "death flights" organized by the Argentine military...
...5 The Alfonsin government had little backing from the military hierarchy and feared that a miltiary rebellion would have devastating institutional consequences for Argentina's new democracy...
...Ignacio Gonzalez Jantzen, La Triple A (Buenos Aires: Editorial Cathlogos, 1986...
...ut there are other processes that have kept the fact that Argentina was at war hidden...
...Mittelbach is a retired army official and founder of the Center of Military Officers for Democracy (CEMIDA), a center formed primarily by military officers who were forced out of the army during the early period of the dictatorship due to their opposition of its repressive methods...
...Despite the harsh characterizations of the state in this model, the failure to recognize this period as a war makes the official armed forces appear to be the only actors who are legitimately engaged in the use of violence...
...Translated from New German Critique, No...
...Unable-or unwilling-to turn the huge popular support it had to its advantage, the government caved in to the military pressure...
...It was comprised of 17 public personalities and its objective was to receive allegations of disappearances by the Argentine armed forces over a nine-month period...
...Within the population, therefore, there are only "victims," not activists or militants...
...In 1985, the members of the military juntas who were ultimately responsible for these killings and disappearances were tried and found guilty by an Argentine court...
...Impunity was consolidated just three months after Menem's inauguration as president on July 9, 1989, when he pardoned all military officers who had been convicted as well as those whose trials were underway...
...The trials and the public airing of the atrocities committed during the dictatorship had vast repercussions both domestically and internationally, and helped to identify and bring to trial hundreds of other military officers and their subordinates who were implicated in human rights violations...
...to kill...
...See the interview with Astiz that appeared in Revista Trespuntos (Buenos Aires), January 15, 1998...
...The Due Obedience Law was a true watershed in the institutionalization of impunity for those who had kidnapped, tortured, disappeared and assassinated thousands of people...
...model, the state's repressive apparatus appears legitimized in its use of violence against "subversives," though the model does acknowledge that some officers-but not the institutions themselves--engaged in "excesses...
...atorship Another element was the recent discovbe held ery of several secret accounts in Swiss banks with huge sums of money in the able for names of members of the army and the navy-which they themselves have actions...
...In this NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30REPORT ON ARGENTINA While one navy officer was affirming before the Senate that "the only law" that was respected during the dirty war "was torture," Menem was claiming that the "rule of law" had triumphed...
...Marin notes that in the first year of this unrecognized civil war, 80% of those killed were unarmed grassroots activists and social protesters-reflecting the fact that the decision to liquidate the most militant sectors of the popular classes had been taken well before the 1976 military coup...
...But more importantly, they represented the their first crack in the alliance of the elites who have sought to establish and institutionalize impunity in Argentina both as part of a new legal order and as part of a new cultural understanding of the country's recent history...
...The principal armed revolutionary groups, the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the Montoneros-who also believed they were at war-had sought recognition from the UN as a belligerent force as early as 1975, a juridical status that obligates the parties at war to respect the international conventions on the treatment of war prisoners...
...After hearing Scilingo's declarations, Lieutenant Devoto's widow, Marta Bettini, who fled Argentina after her husband's disapparance and has lived in exile in Spain ever since, went before the Spanish court to recount her family's story...
...This reductionist view fails to recognize the totality of the social forces that were linked to each armed group...
...The relatives of Argentine artist whose son was disappeared...
...The following day, an elite task force took Professor Bettini away and warned Devoto "that he should not involve himself in this matter any further...
...See Table...
...And, in a radical departure from the rationale of the Due Obedience Law, Commander in Chief of the Army, Gen...
...The coup on March 24, 1976 brought this era of unacknowledged confrontation he military organization that carried out counbetween antagonistic social forces to a close, and terinsurgency operations was public and covert at marked the beginning of a new era, which can be only the same time...
...1 One of the cases Scilingo mentioned was that of Lieutenant Jorge Alberto Devoto, who had been disappeared after requesting that he be allowed to retire from the navy because he objected to its repressive policies...
...Fausto Gonzalez, who in 1974 was an intelligence officer of the army in Maria Seoane, Todo o nada...
...The military was long convinced that it was fighting a war-a war against subversion which, as they were taught in U.S...
...and Ines Izaguirre and Zulema Aristizabal, "Las luchas de la clase obrera...
...In effect, governing elites have used the legal and juridical apparatus of the state to impose a politics of memory which is in fact a politics of forgetting...
...The first two years of the Alfonsin government represented the moment of greatest hope for those sectors of society that were demanding that those responsible for the torture, disappearance and murder of thousands of Argentine citizens be tried and punished for their crimes...
...The lat- 1976 through 3/23 420 3.6 TOTAL TH1S PERIOD 1,058 9.0 ter, meanwhile, armed only with its convictions, was 1976 after 3/24 4,079 35.3 slowly being undermined 1977 3,368 29.1 through sinister terrorist acts...
...Los Montoneros (Buenos Aires: Grijalbo, 1987), p. 303...
...Yet among these very sectors, there are strong ideological and epistemological obstacles to recognizing the existence of a confrontation between social forces prior to the military coup and to accepting the class-based nature of this confrontation...
...The rebellion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Aldo Rico, sought to disrupt the court cases in process...
...Inds Izaguirre, Los desaparecidos...
...Devoto was never seen alive again...
...Through its control over social discourse, it engaged in covert counterinsurgency operations, it also transformed dissidence, organized protest and political had to attend to more routine military matters...
...Theirs was a new, unknown fear, the fear of being identified as subversives or as accomplices and running the risk of facing the same uncertain destiny as those who had been disappeared-a fear which was not, as the story of Lieutenant Devoto illustrates, some paranoid fantasy...
...Yes, of course...
...The military's response was not long in coming...
...They were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985 and pardoned by President Menem in 1989...
...1 6 For the rest of soci- Argenl ety, the difficulties of recording and interpreting these events remain daunt- that ing, particularly for the new generations, respon but there are hopeful signs...
...The government established CONADEP in an effort to document human rights abuses committed during the military regime...
...This supports my conceptualization of the period as one of a war between social forces-with the caveat that the number of deaths within the popular sectors increases as 32 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON ARGENTINA the day of the coup nears, a clear indication of the defeat repressive acts, kidnappings and assassinations...
...There were ample references to these pretation of events-that what occurred was a conacts of violence in the press, but the majority of the pop- frontation between two social groups-would have perulation learned to deny their existence...
...The repeal cannot ible for be enforced retroactively, but this does allow for future judicial investigations cities of into the crimes committed during the military regime...
...In a dramatic sign of the changing times, Balza also challenged the provocative declarations made by Captain Alfredo Astiz last January in the weekly Revista Trespuntos...
...Horacio Verbitsky, Ezeiza (Buenos Aires: Editorial Contrapunto, 1985), pp...
...skilled workers (32.5...
...The piece those killed or disappeared by the dictatorship who were consists of a collage of over 400 news stories and head- unarmed militants or social activists-the vast majority lines between May and December 1976 that refer to of whom were kidnapped from their homes--could not VOL XXXI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1998 33REPORT ON ARGENTINA arrive at this characterization themselves, since their children did not see themselves as part of an "armed social force," but rather as part of a radical Two-t social movement...
...In light of these confessions, numerous relatives of victims have sought to vent their cases in courtrooms outside Argentina, such as that of Judge Garz6n in Spain...
...But would I have tortured if I was told to...
...2. Cited by John Torpey, "Habermas y los historiadores," Revista Punto de Vista, Vol...
...For the government to legally and publicly admit that there was a war underway in Argentina, the state security forces would have been held accountable to other state institutions, and they would have been unable to employ the methods they did on such a massive scale...
...La acumulacibn primitiva del genocidio (Buenos Aires: Editorial La Rosa Blindada y PI.CA.SO., 1996...
...An important fact in terms of characterizing these confrontations prior to the 1976 dictatorship is that of the total number of 8,502 armed incidents, half were initiated by "countersubversive" forces and the other half by "subversive" forces...
...A key component of this process is the gradual reconstitution of the history of the 1970s and early 1980s from the perspective of those who were defeated by the military...
...The first in a series of uprisings, known as the "Holy Week uprising," took place in April 1987...
...This law restricted trials to military officers who held commanding authority (some 34 officers) during the period in which the alleged crimes had taken place and pardoned all those convicted for "obeying orders" (more than 1,000...
...To accept this interously underway...
...independent business owners (16.6...
...3 Human rights organizations had already documented over 6,000 cases of disappearances and assassinations at the hands of the military, and CONADEP documented 3,600 new cases...
...She is editor of Violencia Social y Derechos Humanos (EUDEBA, 1998...
...But they deny the war itself, as does most of Argentine society, by focusing on the principal agent of illegitimate violence-the terrorist state...
...The press portrayed the activities of their zones...
...referred to as "war booty...
...In last October's elections, he was elected mayor in San Miguel, a municipality in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, in which he promised to apply adopt an "iron-fisted approach" to corruption and crimes against property...
...Her father, university professor Antonio Bautista Bettini, and her husband, Lieutenant Devoto, began to search for the young man's body, which they found, full of bullet holes, buried in a common grave...
...Alineamientos y desapariciones en la Argentina de los 70," in Irma Antognazzi and Rosa Ferrer, eds., Una medicine en Argentina...
...Menem, who had stronger military and political backing-partly because of his hands-off approach to the military and partly because his neoliberal reforms won him key support among the economic elite-acted with greater conviction than his predecessor and ordered the repression of the military rebels...
...See In~s Izaguirre, "Los desaparecidos...
...Moreover, this model delinks the state security forces from the larger social sectors whose interests they were defending -the business elite, the Catholic Church hierarchy, high government officials and a "complicit" segment of the population...
...Translated from the Spanish by NACLA...
...Seineldin and other rebel military officers were sentenced to life imprisonment...
...12.Juan Carlos Marin, Los hechos armados...
...4 The government, using these testimonies as evidence, brought the members of the military juntas who governed between 1976 and 1983 to trial...
...The pardons represented the culmination of a controversial process through which impunity was institutionalized in Argentina...
...118-119...
...But the term also implies confrontation-the existence of social and political forces in conflict with each other, not just of two armed groups in combat...
...Here there was no war...
...Many leaders of the most reactionary factions of the military and the police who were involved in the Cordobazo, together with right-wing politicians and trade unionists, formed a loosely organized group that was part of the so-called Fascist International...
...Force appears to have been used by only one side...
...What it does mean is that there are broad social alignments split along an axis in dispute-what political and economic model to pursue, for example-around which different segments of society are mobilized, and which then tend to become articulated into two large forces with antagonistic class projects...
...to infiltrate and destroy an organization...
...there had been a war in Argentina...
...there was a manhunt...
...military-training schools, was a total war of extermination...
...This selfamnesty law was declared invalid just after democratic elections were held in December, and Rail Alfonsin of the Radical Party was sworn in as president...
...Four years later, however, they were pardoned by the Peronist government of Carlos Menem just three months after he assumed the presidency...
...Its report was entitled Nunca MWs (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1985...
...dictatorship would have had other implications...
...Twelve people were killed, 200 were wounded and 350 soldiers were arrested...
...Under Date unknown 1,596 13.8 such conditions, only small, TOTAL THIS PERIOD 10,504 91.0 isolated groups, such as the relatives and parents who were TOTAL THROUGH 1985 11,562 100.0 aware of their children's Source: Compiled by the author based on data from CONADEP, Nunca Mds (Buenos involvement in armed groups, Aires: Eudeba, 1985) and Jorge Watts of the Association of Formerly Detained- were able to recognize that Disappeared Persons...
...Both the relatives of the victims and human rights organizations have incorporated harsh, demystifying words to characterize those acts in their discourse-massacre, genocide, state terrorism...
...Nonetheless, the state persists in its efforts to further institutionalize impunity...
...In the first years of the dictatorship, the armed forces deliberately sought to deny that they were at war...
...Raices hist6ricas del presente (Rosario: Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 1996...
...Unofficial" ment of all forms of militancy or resistance coexisted task forces were created, and each commander was with the apparently routine forms of institutional gov- responsible for the clandestine concentration camps in ernment activity...
...In March, Congress repealed the Final Stop and hose Due Obedience Laws...
...But once the military coup lage's title reflects the climate of terror that permeated occurred, the lack of official acknowledgment of what society and the simultaneous denial of reality: "We did was being done became part of a strategy of the mili- not know," or "What really happened...
...My research documents an additional 5,000 political prisoners and 1,000 disappeared in the same period...
...16.CONADEP, Nunca MWs, p. 17...
...Confrontations between two social forces do not necessarily imply that there are massive "armed" confrontations, which may or may not be the case...
...In other words, as a handful of researchers have tried to demonstrate, this social confrontation started long before the "official" declaration of war in 1981, but it was a secret war kept hidden from the public eye.12 Juan Carlos Marin has noted that in the three years between May 25, 1973-the day the the Peronist government of H6ctor Cdmpora was inaugurated-and March 23, 1976-the day prior to the military coup-the newspapers registered a total of 8,502 armed incidents...
...We refuse to utilize the terminology of the enemy," they argue...
...The army taught me to destroy, not to build...
...The punish- respects, the military was highly secretive...
...The colof the popular sectors...
...While the elite counterinsurgency corps was passing...
...tary's counterinsurgency war...
...As a result, there is a fundamental unwillingness to characterize the confrontations of that period as an armed struggle, or war, between social forces...
...And by not portraying the conflict as the result of social groups in confrontation with one another, it becomes possible to overlook the class character of those confrontations...
...Relatives of the disappeared whose property had been stolen during the dictatorship requested that Judge Garz6n investigate whether there were accounts in the name of army and navy officers...
...But even this did not bring an end to the military rebellions...
...the atr4 The first military "confessions" of 1994 and 1995-the first time that the dic members of the armed forced rec- should ognized that atrocities had been committed in the name of "following orders"- accoun reflected a fissure in the military...
...and unskilled workers (34.7...
...As a Disappearances of Total result, the armed segment of 1971-72 13 0.1 the popular movement was 1973 18 0.6 unable to perceive what was 1974 53 0.4 happening to the popular 1975 554 4.8 movement as a whole...
...His pardon also included the military officers who had risen up against the Alfonsin government...
...cially society at large, from having a clear understanding of Year/Period Number of Percentage the unfolding events...
...Moreover, a slow process of desconstructing this politics of memory is currently underway...
...public to the extent that high-ranking military officers Genocide occurs when one of the two forces in con- were in charge of the five zones, 19 subzones and 117 flict is effectively fragmented and isolated...
...Astiz brazenly justified the military's actions during the dirty war: I never tortured anyone...
...Since then there have been no further military uprisings...
...In fact, other interpretations of the confrontation which have become socially accepted serve to reinforce the invisibility of what I contend was a class-based struggle between two social groups...
...Alfonsfn brought the law of Due Obedience before Congress just weeks after the uprising...
...After 1973, this clandestine organization went by the name "Triple A," or Argentine Anticommunist Alliance.13 This paramilitary commando unit started to engage in daily operations against the popular sectors after the June 20, 1973 Ezeiza massacre...
...On November 2, 1994, a few days after navy officers Juan Carlos Rol6n and Antonio Pernias declared before the Senate that they had participated in kidnapping and the torture of prisoners as a routine means of obtaining information-the first of a number of military "confessions" in recent years-President Menem openly vindicated the actions of the military dictatorship...
...7.Horacio Verbitsky, El vuelo (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995), p. 23...
...In December 1987, Rico "escaped" from prison and led a second uprising in Monte Caseros...
...While the military officers who confessed their participation in crimes against humanity were largely venting their frustration toward their military commanders for having abandoned lower-ranking officials by denying that such orders existed, they have effectively broken the pact of silence that the military and its civilian allies had maintained for years...
...Indeed, that decision had been taken after the Cordobazo, a worker and student uprising in the province of C6rdoba in 1969 that was brutally repressed and that paved the way for the radical militarization of Argentine society...
...It is important to note that these events have taken place in a particular context-the October 1997 legislative elections, in which the Menem government was defeated by the Alliance for Jobs, Justice and Education, comprised of opposition groups which include several human rights activists among their leaders...
...But Devoto a a a insisted...
...XII, No...
...Federico Mittelbach, "Informe sobre Desaparecedores," El Periodista (Buenos Aires), 1984...
...In November 1977, Bettini's brother, Marcelo, was assassinated near the University of La Plata...
...I am the best-prepared man in Argentina to kill a politician or a journalist...
...It has its origins in the worst moments of terror that the family members of kidnapped prisoners had to face...
...He went to navy headquarters to meet with his former superiors in order to find out what had happened to his father-in-law...
...VOL XXXI, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1998 What does the word "war" imply that these other words do not...
...Notably, it was only after the dismantling of the guerrilla groups that the military began to speak officially of a war...
...I know how to do all of this well...
...Whatever the political positions these parties take in the future, it seems certain that they will have to contend with a citizenry that is determined to hold its political representatives to their promises...
Vol. 31 • May 1998 • No. 6
