One of the angels carrying out this humanitarian mission on earth with the greatest fervor is a South African specialist named Vernon Joynt, who has spent his life designing antipersonnel mines and other deadly contraptions. This man is in charge of clearing Mozambique and Angola of the thousands of mines he invented for the racist army of South Africa. His task is sponsored by the United Nations.
CRIME AND REWARD
General Augusto Pinochet raped, tortured, murdered, robbed, and lied.
He violated the constitution he had pledged to respect. He was the strongman of a dictatorship that tortured and murdered thousands of Chileans. He sent tanks into the streets to discourage the curiosity of those who wanted to investigate his crimes. And he lied every time he opened his mouth to talk about these things.
Once the dictatorship was over, Pinochet stayed on as head of the army. And in 1998, when he was to retire, he stepped onto the country’s civilian stage. As I write these lines, he has, by his own order, become a senator for life. Protest has erupted in the streets, but the buoyant general, deaf to anything but the military hymn praising his achievements, proceeds to take his seat in the Senate. He has plenty of reason to turn a deaf ear: after all, the day of the 1973 coup d’état that ended Chile’s democracy, September 11, was celebrated as a national holiday for a quarter of a century, and September 11 is still the name of one of downtown Santiago’s main thoroughfares.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
In the middle of 1978, while Argentina’s soccer team was hosting and winning the World Cup, the country’s military dictatorship was busy throwing prisoners into the ocean alive. The planes bearing them took off from Aeroparque airport, a stone’s throw from the stadium where the sports event was under way.
Not many people are born with a conscience, that inconvenient gland that haunts your nights and disturbs your sleep worse than the mosquitoes of summer. But sometimes it happens. When Captain Adolfo Scilingo told his superiors he couldn’t sleep without pills or drink, they recommended therapy. At the beginning of 1995, Captain Scilingo decided to make a public confession: he said he had thrown thirty people into the sea. Over the course of two years, he added, the Argentine Navy had thrown between fifteen hundred and two thousand political prisoners to the sharks.
After his confession, Scilingo was imprisoned. Not for having murdered thirty people but for having passed a bad check.
CRIME AND SILENCE
On September 20, 1996, the U.S. Defense Department also made a public confession. The story earned little or no coverage from the major news media. That day, the highest military authorities acknowledged that they had made “a mistake”: from 1982 to 1991, they had trained Latin American military officers in the arts of threat, extortion, torture, kidnapping, and murder at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and at the Southern Command in Panama. The “mistake” lasted a decade, but they didn’t say how many Latin American officers received the mistaken training or what the consequences had been.
In reality, the Pentagon’s classes for future dictators, torturers, and criminals have been denounced a thousand times in the past half century. Their Latin American students numbered some sixty thousand. Many of these same students became dictators or public executioners and left a permanent bloodstain south of the Rio Grande. To cite just one country, El Salvador, and to offer no more than a few examples from an endless list, nearly all the officers responsible for the assassinations of the archbishop, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, and four U.S. nuns were graduates of the School of the Americas. So were those who carried out the murders of six Jesuit priests riddled with bullets in 1989.
The Pentagon has always refused to collect author’s royalties on the training manuals it finally acknowledged as its own. The confession ought to have been a big story, but few heard it and many fewer were angered: the greatest power in the world, the model, the democracy that inspires the most envy and imitation, acknowledged that its military nurseries had been growing specialists in the violation of human rights.
In 1996, the Pentagon promised to correct the “mistake” with the same seriousness as it had made it. At the beginning of 1998, twenty-two culprits were indeed found guilty and sentenced to six months in jail plus fines. These twenty-two U.S. citizens had committed the atrocity of sneaking into Fort Benning to hold a funeral procession in memory of the victims of the School of the Americas.
CRIME AND ECHOES
In 1995, two Latin American countries, Guatemala and Chile, attracted the attention of the U.S. press, something not at all common.
It came out that a Guatemalan colonel accused of two crimes had for many years been on the CIA payroll. The colonel was charged with the murder of a U.S. citizen and the husband of a U.S. citizen. The press ignored the thousands upon thousands of other crimes committed by the military dictatorships the United States had imposed and removed in Guatemala ever since the day in 1954 when the CIA, with the approval of President Eisenhower, overthrew the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz. The long cycle of horror reached its peak in the massacres of the 1980s. That’s when soldiers who brought back a pair of ears were given a necklace with a golden oak leaf as a reward. But the victims of that over-forty-year process—the greatest number of deaths in the second half of the twentieth century anywhere in the Americas—were Guatemalans, and to top off their unimportance, most of them were Indians.
While the story of the Guatemalan colonel was breaking, the U.S. papers reported that two high officials of the Pinochet dictatorship had been sentenced to prison in Chile. The assassination of Orlando Letelier constituted an exception to the norm of impunity in Latin America, but one particular detail caught the journalists’ attention: the dictatorship had assassinated Letelier and his U.S. secretary in Washington, D.C. What would have happened if he had been killed in Santiago or any other Latin American city? Of the death of Chilean general Carlos Prats, murdered with his Chilean wife in Buenos Aires in an attack identical to the one that killed Letelier, we’ve still had no news twenty years after the fact.
HUNTERS OF PEOPLE
Note to criminals starting out: to murder timidly won’t do. Like business, crime pays, but only when it’s done on a grand scale. The top brass who gave the orders to kill so many people in Latin America are not in jail for murder, even though their service records would make gangsters blush and criminologists go bug-eyed.
We are all equal under the law. Under what law? Divine law? Under earthly law, equality grows less equal every day and everywhere, because power usually sinks its weight onto only one tray on the scales of justice.
OBLIGATORY AMNESIA
Inequality before the law lies at the root of real history, but official history is written by oblivion, not memory. We know all about this in Latin America, where exterminators of Indians and traffickers in slaves have their statues in city plazas, while streets and avenues tend to bear the names of those who stole the land and looted the public purse.
Like the buildings in Mexico City that came tumbling down in the 1985 earthquake, Latin America’s democracies have been robbed of their foundations. Only justice could give them a solid base from which to stand up and start walking; instead, we have obligatory amnesia. As a rule, civilian governments are limited to administering injustice and dashing hopes for change in countries where political democracy keeps crashing into the walls erected by economic and social structures that are democracy’s enemy.
In the sixties and seventies, Latin America’s military leaders took power by assault. To put an end to political corruption, they stole much more than the politicians, an achievement made possible only because they exercised absolute power and started work each day at reveille. Years of blood and dirt and fear: to put an end to the violence of local guerrillas and international red phantoms, the armed forces tortured, raped, or murdered as many people as they could get their hands on, in a vast manhunt that punished every expression of the human desire for justice, no matter how inoffensive.
The Uruguayan dictatorship tortured a lot and killed little. The Argentine one, in contrast, practiced extermination. Despite their differences, the many Latin American dictatorships of those years worked together and were quite similar, as if cut by the same shears. What shears? In the middle of 1998, Vice Admiral Eladio Moll, once chief of intelligence for the Uruguayan military regime, revealed that U.S. advisers had encouraged the regime to eliminate subversives after extracting whatever information it could from them. The vice admiral was arrested—for the crime of candor.
A few months before that, Captain Alfredo Astiz, one of the Argentine dictatorship’s chief slaughterers, was demoted for telling the truth: he declared that the navy had trained him to do what he had done and, in a flight of professional arrogance, added that he was “technically the best prepared in this country to kill a politician or a journalist.” At the time Astiz and other Argentinean officers had been charged or tried in several European countries for the murders of Spanish, Italian, French, and Swedish citizens, but the murders of thousands of Argentines had been pardoned by laws intended to wipe the slate clean.
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The Devil Was Hungry
El Familiar is a black dog that breathes fire from his nose and ears. At night his fires roam the cane fields of northern Argentina. El Familiar works for the Devil, giving him rebel flesh to eat, keeping watch on and punishing the peons of sugar. Its victims leave this world without saying good-bye.
In the winter of 1976, under the military dictatorship, the Devil was hungry. On the night of the third Thursday in July, the army entered the Ledesma sugar refinery in Jujuy. The soldiers took away 150 workers. Thirty-three disappeared, never to be seen again.
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The laws of impunity also seem cut by the same shears. Latin America’s democracies were resuscitated only to be condemned to paying debts and forgetting crimes. It was as if the new civilian governments were thankful for the efforts of the men in uniform: military terror had created a favorable climate for foreign investment and paved the way for selling off countries at the price of bananas. It was under democracy that national sovereignty was fully abandoned, labor rights were betrayed, and public services were dismantled. All this was done, or rather undone, with relative ease. Accustomed to surviving amid lies and fear, the societies that recovered their civil rights in the eighties were drained of their best energies, as sick from discouragement as they were needy of the creative vitality that democracy promised but couldn’t or didn’t know how to deliver.
For the elected governments, justice meant vengeance and memory meant disorder, so they dribbled holy water on the foreheads of the men who had waged state terrorism. In the name of democratic stability and national reconciliation, they passed laws that deterred justice, interred the past, and preferred amnesia. Several of these went beyond even the most horrific precedents in other parts of the world. In its haste to absolve, Argentina’s government passed a “due obedience” law in 1987 (repealed a decade later when it was no longer needed), exonerating soldiers following orders from any responsibility for what they had done. Since there is no soldier who doesn’t follow orders, whether from the sergeant, the captain, the general, or God, criminal responsibility ended up in heaven. The German military code that Hitler perfected in 1940 to serve his deliria was in fact more cautious: in article 47 it established that a subordinate was responsible for his acts, “if he knew that the superior’s order referred to an action that was a common or military crime.”
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The Living Thought of Military Dictatorships
During the leaden years of late, Latin American generals managed to make their ideology heard despite the roar of machine guns, bombs, trumpets, and drums.
Carried away with bellicose exhilaration, Argentine general Ibérico Saint-Jean cried: “We are winning the third world war!”
Carried away with chronological exhilaration, his compatriot General Cristino Nicolaides shouted: “For two thousand years Marxism has threatened Western Christian civilization!”
Carried away with mystical exhilaration, Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt bellowed: “The Holy Spirit runs our intelligence service!”
Carried away with scientific exhilaration, Uruguayan rear admiral Hugo Márquez roared: “We have turned the nation’s history around by three hundred and sixty degrees!”
Celebrating that epic feat and carried away with anatomical exhilaration, Uruguayan politician Adauto Puñales thundered: “Communism is an octopus that has its head in Moscow and its testicles everywhere!”
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The rest of Latin America’s laws were not as fervent as “due obedience,” but they all agreed that civilians should bow to armed arrogance; mandated by fear, they placed massacres beyond the reach of justice and gave the order to sweep all the rubbish of recent history under the rug. Most Uruguayans supported impunity in the plebiscite of 1989, following a media blitzkrieg that threatened a return to violence: what triumphed was fear, which among other things is a source of law. Sometimes hidden, sometimes visible, fear feeds and justifies power throughout Latin America. And power has deeper roots and more lasting structures than the governments that come and go with each democratic election.
What is power? An Argentine businessman, Alfredo Yabrán, defined it unmistakably: “Power is impunity.” He knew what he was talking about. Said to be the visible head of an omnipotent mafia, Yabrán started out selling ice cream on the street and ended up making a fortune for himself—or for who knows whom. Not long after he uttered that sentence, a judge issued a warrant for his arrest for the murder of photographer José Luis Cabezas. That marked the beginning of the end of his impunity, the beginning of the end of his power. Yabrán put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Impunity is crime’s reward, openly promoting and encouraging more of the same. And when the criminal who has raped, robbed, tortured, and murdered without answering to anyone happens to be the state, a green light is flashed to all of society to rape, rob, torture, and kill. The same society that uses punishment like a scarecrow to frighten criminals at the bottom rewards them at the top with a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card.
Democracy pays the consequences. It’s as if any murderer, smoking gun in hand, could ask: “Why should I be punished for killing one person, when those generals killed half the world and are walking the streets proud as can be? They’re heroes in the barracks and on Sunday they take Communion.”
Under democracy, Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla took Communion in a church in the province of San Luis that refused entry to women in short sleeves or miniskirts. In the middle of 1998, he choked on the host: this pious fellow actually went to jail, though since he was a senior citizen he was soon granted house arrest. It was enough to make you rub your eyes: the exemplary obstinacy of the mothers, grandmothers, and children of the victims had wrought a miracle, an exception, one of very few. Videla, murderer of thousands, was not punished for genocide, but at least he had to answer for the children born in the concentration camps and kidnapped by officers who took them home as war booty after killing their mothers.
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Advertising
The Argentine military dictatorship had a habit of sending many of its victims to the bottom of the ocean. In April 1998, a brand of clothing called Diesel placed an ad in Gente magazine intended to prove that its pants would hold up to any number of washings. A photograph showed eight young men chained to cement blocks in the depths of the sea. The caption read: “They aren’t your first jeans, but they could be your last. At least you’ll make a lovely body.”
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Outlawed Memory
Bishop Juan Gerardi led a task force that rescued the recent history of terror in Guatemala. Bit by bit, through the testimonies of thousands of voices collected throughout the country, he and his colleagues gathered forty years of isolated memories of pain: 150,000 Guatemalans dead, 50,000 disappeared, 1,
000,000 displaced refugees, 200,000 orphans, 40,000 widows. Nine out of every ten victims were unarmed civilians, most of them Indians. And in nine out of every ten cases, the responsibility lay with the army and its paramilitary bands.
The Church released the report on a Thursday in April 1998. Two days later, Bishop Gerardi was dead, his skull beaten in with a chunk of concrete.
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Justice and memory are exotic luxuries in Latin America. The murderers of Uruguayan parliamentarians Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz stroll calmly down the streets that bear the names of their victims. Forgetting, the powerful say, is the price of peace, and they impose on us a peace based on accepting injustice as an everyday norm. They’ve gotten us used to a peace in which life is scorned and remembering prohibited. The media and the schools don’t do much to help us integrate reality and memory. Every fact appears divorced from the rest, divorced from its own past and the past of every other fact. Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe things just happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints the future as a repetition of itself; tomorrow is just another name for today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we have no choice but to accept.
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Broken Memory