An Inventory of Horrors
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
An Inventory of Horrors Nunca Mas: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared Introduction by Ronald Dworkin Farrar Straus Giroux 463 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Arthur M....
...Pretty girls could be "disappeared" for sexual purposes, murdered, and characterized as subversives after the fact...
...As buddies of the gentlemen whosegeo-political vision produced the "dirty war," they should have to study every detail of how rubber truncheons, cattle prods and unmarked Ford Falcons were added to the arsenal of the Free World...
...Nunca Mas is a comprehensive catalogue of contemporary savagery...
...It was our only brush with what was going on almost invisibly around us, the "dirty war...
...the teachers simply bought what they needed themselves out of pocket...
...Although he offered no identification, he demanded to see ours and was clearly surprised to find we were Americans...
...Still, there are some Americans who should be forced to read Nunca Mas...
...University of California, Davis In November 1977 my wife and 1 were in the frontier (own of La Rioja, in northwestern Argentina...
...When prominent junta figures told the "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo" that they had no idea where their missing family members were, they were often telling the truth...
...We were there on business—studying insect biogeog-raphy, as it happened—but we couldn't avoid acting like tourists occasionally...
...I was glad when the task was over...
...Finally, we found an altar boy who, for a few pesos, let us in...
...A chapter toward the end of the book, entitled "The Doctrine Behind the Repression," contains some chilling quotations...
...The most memorable is from former President Roberto Viola, second head of the post-Peron junta, who declared: "This is a war and we are the winners...
...Readers of Nunca Mas will come away revolted, shaken and ultimately numbed by the repetitiousness with which the barbarism is inventoried, yet unenlightened as to how it all came to pass...
...Military types and their cronies maintained what were in effect private armies...
...Case after case is described in methodical, dispassionate detail: kidnappings, brutali/ations, robberies, murders...
...The English edition has an Introduction by the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin that provides the background and context most North American readers require...
...One must recall Hannah Arendt and her discussion of the banality of evil to render these events intelligible...
...And a great many—more than would care to admit it now—were willing to look the other way as long as they could believe the victims were really subversives...
...Nunca Mas ("Never Again") is the report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared (whose Spanish acronym is conadep...
...It had a strange effect on me and, as I later learned, on many of my Argentine friends as well: The more we read the more we hated it...
...The English translation, not surprisingly, has the same effect...
...That was the end of the incident...
...At last count, the original Spanish paperback version of the report had sold over 200,000 copies in Argentina...
...It is true that the Argentina taken over from Isabel Peron by General Jorge Raphael Videla in 1976 was internally at war...
...pregnant women tortured with electric cattle prods, bound and gagged prisoners tossed alive into the sea from military aircraft, parents abducted at gunpoint while their small children screamed...
...Reviewed by Arthur M. Shapiro Professor of zoology...
...Had we been Argentines, however innocent, the outcome might have been quite different...
...the "dirty war" waged under the Videla and Viola military regimes was decentralized and very largely out of control...
...If you happened to be the creditor of the wrong person, or an obstacle to the expansion of the wrong person's business, that was enough to brand you a "subversive.' A friend of mine, a teacher, told me of a school administrator embezzling money intended for classroom supplies whom no one would denounce, because whistle-blowers were too vulnerable to being labeled subversives...
...I bought a copy from the fourth printing in January 1985, only three months after the appearance of the first, and read it on the cold, lonely nights in the Patagonian Andes where I was then working...
...But this was not a case of Newtonian action and reaction...
...The grim findings became something one finishes, not out of absorption, but out of a sense of duty...
...The junta's actions were to an extent provoked by its Left-wing guerrilla opponents, the Montoneros, whose own atrocities are for the most part forgotten outside Argentina today...
...Superb as Dworkin's account is, though, it does not explain how good Catholic Argentines, acting in defense of Western civilization, could torture pregnant women with electric cattle prods...
...It was an odd time of day and we had some difficulty rousing anyone...
...But few Americans without a specific connection to Argentina will profit much from Nunca Mas...
...To grasp the enormity of what occurred there one would do better to see the movie The Official Story, or to read the novel The Gods, the Little Guys, andthePoliceby Humberto Constantini (a work that will remindmany of Mikhail A. Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita...
...conadep's report was essential for raising the Argentine public's awareness of the horrors perpetrated in their midst...
...When we came out, a man in plain clothes was waiting for us...
...if the armies of the Reich had won, the war crimes trials would have taken place in Virginia, not Nuremberg...
...site plans of clandestine torture centers, inventories of objects discovered, details of mass graves, photos of sordid rooms in decrepit buildings where ordinary people were burned, beaten, raped, shocked and shot...
...The possession of a uniform seemed to be a license to settle scores and to do almost anything else...
...What is left of the adobe walls is now encased in another building for protection...
...For Nunca Mas is an exhaustive list, the sort one might make of all the plant species found on a particular mountain—except the items are not plants, they are honors...
...One of Raul Alfonsin's initial acts following his installation as President in 1983 was the appointment of this commission, chaired by the distinguished man of letters Ernesto Sabato...
...Most Argentines did not know—indeed, barely suspected—the magnitude of the "dirty war...
...We wanted to see the ruins of the Jesuit mission, or reduccion, where Saint Francis Solano baptized the local Indians...
...Foremost among them are retired General John Singlaub, the Reagan Administration champion who is chairman of the World Anti-Communist League (the organization devoted to securing funds for the Nicaraguan contras in the private sector), and Senator Jesse Helms...
Vol. 69 • October 1986 • No. 15
