A Step Toward Sanity

By George Russell

Facing the skeletons of the "dirty war"

A regenerated force shook the foundations of Argentina last week: civil justice. No one felt its tremors more acutely than the country's former President, Reynaldo Bignone, 55, as he emerged from a four-hour judicial interrogation in the imposing, gray-stone federal court building in central Buenos Aires. The civilian-clad retired army general slid expressionless into the back seat of an unmarked gray military limousine. A three-car escort revved its engines, and the caravan sped past waiting photographers in the direction of the sprawling Campo de Mayo garrison on the western outskirts of the capital. Only a month after handing on the presidential baton to his civilian successor, Raul Alfonsin, Bignone was under arrest as part of an investigation into the 1976 disappearance of two army draftees from the country's National Military College at a time when Bignone headed the school.

Bignone has also been cited in a case involving the 1978 disappearance of an industrial technician who was caught in a military dragnet for suspected subversives. Members of the technician's family named the former President along with a handful of other generals who, they said, should be made to disclose the whereabouts of their relative.

The former President is not alone in facing the prospect of court appearances. For Argentina's former military rulers, the awakening of justice has brought the advent of a nightmare: the probability that they will be held to an unprecedented accounting for the bloody excesses that scarred the country after the armed forces took power in March 1976. Argentina's highest military tribunal was being reconstituted last week to begin court-martial proceedings against three other military Presidents and six members of the rotating junta that had ruled the country for the previous 7 1/2 years. The charges against the nine: responsibility for homicide and torture.

Elsewhere in the country, there were equally dramatic, if more somber stirrings. In the lush Buenos Aires suburb of San Isidro, a judge ordered the disinterment of 41 nameless bodies at a cemetery in the nearby town of Boulogne. At a second cemetery in San Antonio de Padua, police announced that they had found records of another 63 graves marked NN (name unknown). During the previous three weeks, 238 other anonymous corpses had been recovered from burial sites across the country.

The director of the municipal cemetery in the provincial capital of La Plata, Oscar Nicolletti, reported last week that 482 unidentified corpses had been placed in local plots between 1976 and 1982. In the city of Dolores, forensic experts were said to be examining the contents of 16 plastic bags containing dismembered human remains. According to the local Noticias Argentinas news service, the remnants had been found floating in the South Atlantic or washed up on Argentine beaches between 1976 and 1979.

However grim last week's events are, they represent the beginnings of a new awakening for Argentina. And as agonizing as the process of discovery may prove to be, thousands of citizens are at last in a position to learn the fate of their kin, those among the 6,000 to 30,000 Argentines who disappeared during the welter of abduction, torture and murder, known as the "dirty war," waged by the military against terrorism from 1974 to 1980. Even confirmation of worst fears is a step toward national sanity for Argentina, a country that has been haunted for years and deeply lacerated by the unexplained absence of the desaparecidos (see ESSAY). At his first presidential news conference last week, Alfonsin set a tone and a course: "We are taking stock of all this horror, and it is necessary that we learn the necessity of overcoming all this. I believe that we have to think in terms of reconciliation, a reconciliation directly tied to truth and justice."

Argentina's stocktaking is a daring and risky initiative on the part of the new President. Only days after assuming office on Dec. 10, the energetic former country lawyer has made a bid to change the unhealthy imbalance between civilian and military authority that has long prevailed in Argentina, a relationship in which the armed forces habitually placed themselves above the country's U.S.-inspired constitution. Now Alfonsin is attempting to reintroduce a novelty, the rule of law. Says Buenos Aires Newspaper Columnist J. Iglesias Rouco: "Alfonsin is trying to get the country to talk a new language."

The election of Alfonsin and his center-left Radical Civic Union party last November was a sign that Argentine citizens wanted to break with the political language of their distressing past. From 1946 to 1974, politics in Argentina revolved around the personality and fascist-inspired policies of the country's most famous dictator, the late Juan Domingo Peron, and the labor-based mass movement that remained loyal to his name. Peron's return to Argentina in 1973 after 18 years of exile was the centerpiece of the crisis that sparked the dirty war. As part of his strategy for regaining power, Peron encouraged both right-and left-wing violence, plunging Argentina into virtual anarchy. After Peron's death in 1974, his widow and successor, Maria Estela (called Isabel) Martinez de Peron, proved incapable of managing the forces unleashed by her late husband's demagoguery. When the military men stepped into the vacuum in 1976, they were hailed as the country's saviors.

Ultimately, the generals proved to be as inept as Senora Peron had been in managing Argentina--and much more bloody-minded. Their counterterrorism campaign was successful, but it made Argentina an international human rights pariah. Argentina staggered further into economic ruin, amassing a $40 billion foreign debt, an unemployment rate of 15% and inflation that reached nearly 1000%. With the failure of their ill-fated Falklands adventure in 1982, the military was tarnished as never before in Argentine history.

By contrast, Alfonsin has offered Argentines a moral alternative: honesty and civic virtue as embodied in his middle-class Radicals. During his ten-month presidential campaign, Alfonsin strode the hustings with a copy of Argentina's 1853 constitution in his hand. In his homespun style, Alfonsin told the demoralized Argentines that their country need not be condemned to ridicule and self-doubt, that Argentina had a future. Says Edgardo Catterberg, a political scientist and campaign adviser to Alfonsin: "He reached for what was good in people."

One of Alfonsin's first moves was to weed out the top ranks of the bloated Argentine military establishment and appoint service chiefs with whom he felt secure. He began preparing budget cuts for presentation to Congress next month that could reduce military spending from 37% of the national budget to 12% or 13%. He also began considering plans to cut the draft of army conscripts by 20% this year, to 80,000.

The most spectacular of Alfonsin's early thunderbolts was an order to begin court-martial proceedings against the former junta members and the three former military Presidents considered chiefly responsible for the tactics of the dirty war: Jorge Rafael Videla, Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri. All three former leaders were forbidden to leave the country, with orders posted at airports and at the borders. Alfonsin also submitted a bill, swiftly passed by Congress, that repealed the so-called Law of Pacification, a last-minute junta decree intended to block prosecution of the military for their bloody counterterrorist activities.

Drastic as Alfonsin's measures may appear, they are intended to preserve the Argentine military as a professional institution, even while radically redefining its importance. By placing broad responsibility for the excesses of the dirty war on top military leaders, Alfonsin hopes to avoid recrimination against the bulk of the armed forces membership, which can claim it was merely following orders from above. He has also been careful to prosecute the military leadership using military law under standard courts-martial.

Former President Bignone's arrest, however, results from a civil action brought by relatives of the two missing draftees charging that Bignone failed to report their illegal detention. Other civil suits may follow, but for Alfonsin's purposes, a full-scale purge of the armed forces would risk both a military counterattack against the government and possible chaos among the citizenry.

So far, the military has accepted Alfonsin's actions with stoicism. Army Chief of Staff Jorge Arguindegui, one of Alfonsin's first new appointments, has stated that "the army will accept the orders of the Commander in Chief, who is Senor Alfonsin." Privately, a retired army major who worked closely with the country's last junta adds that "there is no regret that the junta leaders are in the position where Alfonsin placed them."

Where Alfonsin's maneuvering risks opposition is among the Argentine human rights supporters who helped vote him into office. Two weeks ago, several hundred civilian spectators jeered as the governing Radicals won a 129-115 vote in Congress to ensure that human rights charges against military personnel would be tried in military courts. Said a frustrated Hebe de Bonafini, president of the organization of mothers of the disappeared, known as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo: quot;With all those hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies appearing, why aren't the murderers in jail?" Said Emilio Mignone, one of Argentina's leading human rights activists: "The problem is that nobody in Argentina believes in military justice."

Despite such criticisms, Alfonsin's moves are producing signs of a catharsis in Argentina's resentment-ridden society. Newspapers, television and radio are filled with long-suppressed revelations about the "dirty war." Stories in sensationalist local magazines have related how desaparecidos were thrown into the sea, tied together "like a string of sausages," or how living and dead bodies were burned in an enormous pit nicknamed la parrilla (the grill). To Journalist Jacobo Timerman, an Argentine exile whose account of his arrest and torture at the hands of the military drew worldwide attention, the stirrings are "new expressions of life."

Meanwhile former President Bignone continues to pay the price for the old expressions of life. On Thursday, after one of his court appearances, Bignone was jostled in a fracas among newsmen, bystanders and his bodyguards. At his press conference, Alfonsin said of Bignone's detention: "I would have preferred if it hadn't happened. But we are absolutely respectful of the law.

--By George Russell. Reported by Gavin Scott/Buenos Aires

With reporting by Gavin Scott/Buenos Aires