Decoding the Dirty War in Argentina
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
Decoding the 'Dirty War' in Argentina A Lexicon of Terror By Marguerite Feitlowitz Oxford. 302 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Arthur M. Shapiro Professor of evolution and ecology. University of...
...But the food was good, the buses ran on time, and right through the worst of it all no one ever called me a "filthy Jew," even when (as it turned out) I was staying a few blocks from a clandestine torture center where Jews were being brutalized...
...Cabdrivers confided that "the Jews and the Greeks own the world's banking system...
...One of the oddest stories in this book concerns the 1977 kidnapping of Marcos Resnizky, son of Nehemias Resnizky— then president of the umbrella group for Jewish community organizations, known as the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations...
...To an uncomfortable degree, in her view, it was willing to largely ignore a "limited" amount of repression in order to prevent a wholesale pogrom...
...A few old guys," he replied...
...Sometimes the wrong people were killed...
...They signed it "The Centurions...
...Marguerite Feitlowitz was not in Argentina during the Dirty War...
...So many times they rubbed me out So many times I reappeared...
...Another article declared "Los malhechores cayeron en un feroz tiroteo...
...Surely, therefore, whatever was happening must be happening to those who deserved it...
...I kept right on singing Singing to the sun like the cicada After a year under the ground Just like the survivors Who return from war...
...One marveled at the efficiency (and marksmanship...
...I remember once asking a vendor, "Do people buy this stuff...
...A Lexicon of Terror isn't the first book to reveal gory and horrifying details...
...A Lexicon of Terror doesn't really tell us...
...Thus there followed a spate of related articles in other journals and collections that are included here, plus extensive interviews with people who played critical roles in the Dirty War...
...Much of the military regime's phraseology was bizarre, inverted and surreal, but did this represent a departure from the historic pattern of both popular and official neologisms and nonstandard usages in the Argentine Republic...
...The bad guys fell in a fierce firefight...
...It's prudent to have it") At a fine antiquarian bookshop in Buenos Aires one encountered a display of classic anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic works, including Henry Ford's The International Jew...
...To understand the work she needed to read Nunca Mas: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared, and in doing so was sucked into the vortex of linguistic manipulation that characterized the period...
...None of the unidentified bad guys ever did any harm to the police...
...for example, the killing of Bishop Enrique Angelelli of La Rioja, who was beaten to death on August 4,1976, after surviving a staged traffic accident...
...The biggest surprise is that amid all the Process' different factions, Harguindeguy was able to find out who had Marcos Resnizky...
...A good deal that was surreal occurred then in everyday life...
...nonetheless, they ended up as part of the terrorist body count...
...Feitlowitz succumbed to a hazard many non-Argentines experience when they get to know that country—a revoltijo ("mishmash") of love, horror and fascination in about equal parts...
...Whether we can move beyond such mixed emotions to a dispassionate historical and sociological understanding of the roots of the Argentine nightmare, and whether—or when—Argentina itself will lay to rest its many ghosts, no one can yet tell...
...The author has, however, pretty well captured the feeling of what it was like to be there...
...The biggest surprise is not that young Resnizky got out alive, or that government goons killed Army goons...
...There was no harm to police...
...Newspapers, as Feitlowitz points out, were written in code...
...A singular service the book does perform is its documenting for a wide readership the little-known Dirty War campaigns conducted in the rural, near-feudal province of Corrientes...
...of the "forces of order...
...In the torture center known as "Olympus," the torturers, who called themselves gods as they brutalized their victims, hung a facetious sign: "Welcome to the Olympus of the Gods...
...Assessing the stance of the Jewish community as a whole, Feitlowitz finds it to have been overly accommodationist...
...You went to the corner kiosk to buy a newspaper and you were confronted with the Fascist magazine Cabildo serializing a biography of Benito Mussolini, a series of paperbacks called Freemasonry and Other Conspiracies, and comic books featuring Nazi spies as heroes—all scattered among Marie-Claire, the Economist, Time, and other seeming indicators of sanity...
...Did they hear the cicadas singing a few hundred feet away, outside what were really the gates of Hell...
...No hubo perjuicios policiales...
...So Harguindeguy (one presumes reluctantly, since he was no friend of the Jews) sent in his own gunmen to kill young Resnizky's captors and free him...
...Feitlowitz' book, though, appears to have taken on a momentum of its own and expanded beyond its intended parameters...
...More important, it begins to ask about Argentina the familiar, still unanswered question about Nazi Germany: What did ordinary people know, and when did they know it...
...There the fight against "subversion" conveniently dovetailed with the economic interests of the tobacco barons...
...The father immediately turned for help to U.S...
...Note the sinister verb ultimar, "to ultimate," a coinage that predated the Process...
...The man in the street did not openly question this...
...It is called "Como la Cigarra" ("Like the Cicada"), and it uses the life cycle of that insect as a vivid metaphor for resistance and survival: So many times they killed me So many times I died Yet here I am reviving...
...Seven delinquents killed by gunfire...
...Neither did it spare the editor and writer Jacobo Timerman from torture when elements in the regime supposedly wanted information from him about his sometime partner, the mysterious David Graiver...
...She came to the subject in 1985, while translating a hitherto unpublished play concerning state terrorism by the playwright Griselda Gambaro, whom the military regime had forced into exile eight years earlier...
...I myself saw descriptions like "Siete delincuentes ultimados a balazos...
...Not many who disappeared into the maelstrom of Right-wing repression known officially as the Process of National Reorganization returned...
...Begun as an investigation of the perversion of language in the service of repression, A Lexicon of Terror is, in the end, a spotty, eclectic, frequently compelling narrative of a personal voyage of discovery in very dark places...
...In 1991 she published the title essay in a quarterly journal called The American Voice...
...The distortions of meaning the piece catalogued obviously were too fascinating for her to simply let go of them and move on...
...Four days after the kidnapping Marcos was delivered home by Interior personnel, and shortly thereafter he flew into exile in Israel...
...Feitlowitz documents how such stories were usually a planted cover for extrajudicial executions...
...In discussing the complicity of much of the Catholic hierarchy in the terror, the author tells of a murderer absolved in the confessional by his priest, who invoked the Biblical parable of the tares and wheat —the victims being the weeds that needed uprooting...
...Marcos, it developed, had been taken— and tortured—by the First Army Corps, which did not want to give him back...
...But she misses a few important elements of the story...
...The real terrorist threat was crushed quite early on, Feitlowitz demonstrates, but the regime continued to exploit it long after it was irrelevant...
...Yet after more than a decade of government efforts to repress the accounts of those who did and of some conscience-stricken perpetrators, after multiple attempts to thwart justice by law or executive decree, the truth is coming out as never before...
...University of California, Davis For a generation of Argentines who were students at the time of the "Dirty War" (1976-1983)—and for me, having traveled among them—there is a song guaranteed to make tears and memories well up...
...Although there was a very widespread awareness that something evil was taking place, most people would only say that the (Leftist) terrorists had made life intolerable, that something needed to be done, and that for the majority life was returning to normal...
...Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, and next to Argentine Interior Minister Albano Harguindeguy...
...That this did not always work for individuals we know from the Resnizky episode...
...Emilio Mignone's Witness to the Truth, cited by Feitlowitz in the original Spanish, covers some of this ground and anyone interested should consult it...
...Cloaked in double-talk and the product of a dictatorship-by-committee, it certainly was marked by internal conflict and chaos...
...If there ever was a master ?lan, it quickly became encumbered with petty local agendas...
...Indeed, the government may well have fabricated terrorist incidents to justify its seemingly open-ended program of repression— even though it is unclear whether the Process was the result of a coherent policy...
...But it is the first to include the revelations of repentant torturers and murderers...
...Despite her great skill and sophistication as a translator, Feitlowitz fails to put the language of the Dirty War in any cultural-linguistic context...
Vol. 81 • May 1998 • No. 6
