The Disappeared: The Triumph of Memory
Benedetti, Mario
The terrifying revelations made by a navy captain of the "death flights" carried out during Argentina's dirty war show that memory will always fight to come to the surface. Consigning it...
...If 15 or 20 prisoners were eliminated in this way every Wednesday, the total number of victims would be around 2,000...
...Neither fear nor amnesia is democratic...
...From the well-known Dreyfus case (it was recently the hundredth anniversary of his scandalous conviction) to today, forgetting has always been filled with memory...
...A case in point is Uruguay's sadly renowned Law of Termination of the Punitive Pretension of the State (a true verbal macrame to cloak an amnesty law for the torturers...
...She tries to explain why Scilingo could re- One cuperate some elements of his sons humanity: noto...
...President Carlos Sadl Menem, by contrast, chooses to describe the corvette-ship captain as "wicked," but he does not deny the terms of the confession...
...Now it was Captain Scilingo...
...Of course, the first of these has to do with horror...
...In his by now well-known confession to journalist Horacio Verbitsky, which was disseminated not only in Verbitsky's book, The Flight, but also in the press and on television, Scilingo doesn't just talk about the obvious and routine generalities of torture...
...A scandal was unleashed in Argentina in March in the wake of the terrifying revelations made by corvette-ship captain Adolfo Scilingo of the practice of throwing men and women to their death from airplanes during the military dictatorship (1976-83...
...On another occasion, it could be someone else...
...A few hours after the confession of the corvette-ship captain, ten young people who in the midst of the military dictatorship had been adopted by various couples called for an investigation into their true identities...
...Everything was so peculiarly ethical that the doctor who administered the soporific injections did not participate in the act of letting the bodies fall into space in order not to violate the "Hippocratic oath" (which is not, as one might think, the father of hypocrisy, but of medicine...
...There will always be an elephant who cannot bear the pressure of his or her conscience and decides to tell the truth...
...It is true, however, that these declarations did not shock anyone...
...young Uruguayan poet, Rafael Courtoisie, wrote I this poem of just two lines some time ago: "One day, all the elephants met to forget/All of them, except one...
...Consigning it to oblivion is pointless, hypocritical and perverse...
...The pro-government press, addicted to the dictatorship, claimed that the cadavers were probably Asians washed ashore after a mutiny onboard a Japanese cargo ship...
...He personally participated in two of these lethal flights, but he says that other similar flights were carried out every Wednesday over the course of two years...
...Memory is so important that, to paraphrase Courtoisie, if just one elephant remains that remembers, that memory can change an entire country's history...
...They are inventions, let's say, to convince yourself...
...The much sought-after amnesty laws of "due obedience" or "full stop," passed under President Radl Alfonsin in 1984 and 1987 respectively, are now confirmed as a flagrant injustice that can never be erased...
...Just months earlier, in October, 1994, two captains (Antonio Pernias and Juan Carlos Rol6n) admitted before the Argentine Senate that torture had been frequently employed in interrogations of political prisoners...
...Another high navy official attributes to him the epithet "traitor and ungentlemanly," but he doesn't deny the terms of the confession either...
...One should not have "eyes in the back of one's head" (as President Sanguinetti once said in reference to the organizers of the referendum campaign against the amnesty law, whom he accused of stirring up old hatreds and conflicts...
...They thus provoked in the imagination of every citizen images of kicks, slaps, the plant6n (being forced to stand up for hours on end), the "submarine" (being held under water until near suffocation), the electric wire, and other varieties of excessive cruelty...
...That's not bad...
...The second vicepresident of the same episcopate, however, admitted that "the Church has always accepted that, while it is holy, it may give shelter to sinners who are in need of repentance...
...No country, however, can construct a true peace if it has a sinister past pending...
...They are demanding that the armed forces provide a complete list of those killed in the lethal flights...
...The flights were based on a fiction: that their existence could be forgotten, and the perpetrators exonerated of blame...
...But the hidden meaning is that we should renounce being just-that the essence of justice should disappear along with the disappeared...
...He goes into details, characteristics, and other particulars...
...Even so, the case of Captain Scilingo is something quite differNACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 10ESSAY / THE DISAPPEARED ent...
...Fear may spread and even overcome an entire society, but fear is never democratic...
...It was for a reason that Jorge Luis Borges, who lived through stages of incredible blindness before the glare of the sabers, nonetheless left this quotation that is almost a revelation: "Only one thing does not exist...
...Given the connivance and the fraternal alliance between the repressive forces of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia, Scilingo's revelations also implicate the entire region...
...From a psychological point of view, the character of Scilingo merits profound study...
...At the same time, the captain knows how to use his computer to do the calculations...
...Suddenly, the various human rights organizations, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, relatives of the disappeared, intellectuals, artists and even bishops see all their denunciations confirmed...
...Society will have a hard time forgiving that person but, just the same, it will be grateful for his or her sincerity...
...After each of the punitive flights, priests "comforted the officials with scripture from the Gospels about the necessary separation of the wheat from the chaff...
...Four years ago, when s her President Menem pardoned ics, a Massera, Vida, Viola and Camps--the leaders of the dictatorship-I wrote that "the pardoning of the crime reenacts the crime...
...I The irony does not end there...
...The highest naval authority, Admiral Enrique Molina Pico, disqualifies Scilingo because on a certain occasion he purchased a stolen car, but he too does not deny the terms of the confession...
...I doubt that the encapuchados ["the hooded ones," unidentified military personnel who have violently protested the human rights trials of military officials] had been human at any time...
...That scandal gives rise to more than Mario Benedetti is a distinguished Uruguayan poet and novelist His most recent work is La Borra del Cafe (Nueva Imagen, 1993...
...Does this mean that for the canons (cannons) of a consumerist and neoliberal society, the purchase of a stolen automobile represents a more treacherous crime than the ominous throwing into the ocean of 2,000 citizens who had not even received a trial...
...She adds: "What Scilingo did cannot be changed, but he did reveal one great truth...
...Translated from the Spanish by N4ACLA one interpretation...
...The testimony of the corvetteship captain is one of flabbergasting realism...
...So all the characteristics that make a military officer human are blocked out...
...It is forgetting...
...The permanent commission of the Argentine episcopate, for its part, clarified that "neither the Argentine episcopate nor its authorities were ever consulted about the correctness or viability of the denounced procedures for the elimination of the detained, nor did they ever give any form of consultation...
...This memory has always fought to come to the surface in order to show the world that consigning it to oblivion is pointless, hypocritical and perverse...
...The true character of that law-which was sponsored and implemented during the first government of current president Julio Maria Sanguinetti (and approved in a contentious plebiscite in 1989)becomes clear thanks to the captain's testimony...
...An orgy of blood and drugs, read a newspaper headline from this fearful time...
...Uruguayan public opinion had no doubts that the cadavers came from Argentina, but the only journalist to initiate an investigation was pressured to abandon the issue...
...It is curious that the top military hierarchy, as well as President Menem, fervently disqualify the testimony of Scilingo only because at one point he acquired a stolen car...
...It must be prohibited to look backward, they decree...
...It is public and notorious that here, there and everywhere, human rights are violated, preferably those of human beings on the left...
...As is to be expected, different sectors have reacted to the disturbing revelation in different ways...
...After being injected with even stronger sedatives, they were thrown, unconscious but alive, into the ocean...
...He has proven us right...
...In reference to the Scilingo case, the March 10 edition of the Montevideo weekly Brecha recalls that 30 cadavers appeared on the Uruguayan coast between 1976 and 1978...
...An ideology like a militarist one forces you to encapsulate your own subjectivity through rationalizations that justify your actions...
...of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo protest disappearance at the Navy's School of Mechan rious torture site during the dictatorship...
...The human rights organizations are no longer the crazy men and women...
...Society, or at least its most dignified part, will not demand revenge but justice and, above all, information...
...They referred to these punishments, though, in a generic way, giving few details, characteristics, or other particulars...
...They were given strong sedatives that they were told were vaccines, and then put on a plane...
...The public debate made them realize that they might be children of the disappeared...
...He himself was so involved in the actual operation that during one of the flights, in the midst of throwing prisoners out of the plane, he slipped near the small door and was close to accompanying them in the lethal fall to the sea...
...The person who was able to unblock him- or herself was able to do so because he or she had a human drive to identify with another human being...
...Yet they are not concerned that hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of officials who stole lives are not in jail...
...The superficial meaning is that we should not cultivate hatred or VOL XXIX, No 3 Nov/Dsc 199511 VOL XXIX, No 3 Nov/DEC 1995 11ESSAY / THE DISAPPEARED vengeance...
...The history of each person may be different, depending on the sensibility with which he or she has been raised...
...The psychologist Laura Bonaparte, one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, overcoming her own tragedy (the military killed her ex-husband, her two daughters, her two sons-in-law, her son and her daughter-in-law), offers a profound analysis in the March 12, 1995 edition of the Buenos Aires daily Pdgina/12...
...It had been an orgy, it is true, but one of cynicism and vileness...
...He cannot give life back to our loved ones...
...Prisoners were notified of a simple and even promising transferal...
...It is always a bad symptom when a ruler tries to base his or her power on collective amnesia...
...it is necessary to always look forward...
...The second and perhaps most important reading of the surprising and self-incriminating testimony is that from now on, no one can any longer close their eyes before the evidence of a monstrous collective blame...
Vol. 29 • November 1995 • No. 3
