Argentina - MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
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Tue, 23 May 1995 17:51:52 -0500
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Copyright 1995 Educational Broadcasting and GWETA
TheMacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
May 15, 1995, Monday Transcript #5227
MR. LEHRER: Now a Charles Krause report on Argentina.
Yesterday, Carlos Menem was re-elected president of
Argentina, following a campaign dominated by economic issues.
But the country is also involved in the human rights debate
over what happened to thousands of people during military
rule between 1976 and '83. Our correspondent, Charles Krause,
reported from Argentina during that time for the Washington
Post.
CHARLES KRAUSE: Every Thursday, for nearly 20 years,
relatives of "Los Desaparecidos," the thousands who
disappeared in Argentina, have demonstrated in front of
government house in Buenos Aires. Known as the "Mothers of
the Plaza De Mayo," the demonstrators, mostly women,
originally banded together in 1977. Military rule was at its
height. The disappearances were widespread. It was a time
when protest of any kind most often met with brutal
repression. Between 1976 and the early 1980's, some nine to
twenty thousand Argentines were taken away and never seen
again. Still, their mothers, daughters, and wives continued
to demonstrate each Thursday, demanding to know what happened
to their loved ones. Specific information was not
forthcoming, even after the so-called "Dirty War" came to an
end and the military was forced from power in 1983. Then in
March of this year, retired Navy Captain Adolfo Scilingo
stunned Argentina with a shocking revelation: on orders from
his superiors, the captain admitted that he and other
officers had dumped planeloads of the disappeared, still
alive, ^Linto the South Atlantic. Andrew Graham-Yool is editor
of the "Buenos Aires Herald." He was in Charleston, South
Carolina recently, where he told us Scilingo's admission has
had an enormous impact.
ANDREW GRAHAM-YOOL, Buenos Aires Herald: Scilingo has been
the first man to come forward and say, "I did it." And that
is why he's important. He's the first member of that regime
who puts a face by self-confession to the murderers. We knew
this was happening. We published this at the time, but it was
not attributable. Suddenly, here we have a junior officer who
said, "I did it. I threw sedated bodies into the sea. I
killed. There were 2,000 people or thereabouts who were
dumped into the sea, and I was one of the officers who threw
them out." This is the importance: you suddenly have a face
to the murderers.
MR. KRAUSE: F. Allen "Tex" Harris, now the president of
the U.S. Foreign Service Association, was a political
officer at the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires in charge of
reporting on human rights abuses in the late 70's. Despite
his best efforts, Harris says that many of the details of
what happened during the Dirty War are still unknown.
F. ALLEN HARRIS, Former U.S. Embassy Official: For the
most part, the state terrorist system worked with a kind of
numbing, brutal efficiency. People were -- disappeared by
what was called the left hand. They were tortured for
information, they were identified for extermination, and they
disappeared. There were occasional reports that we had of
some sort of a mass grave or bodies washing up on some remote
beach in the South Atlantic, but for the most part, the, the
state terrorist apparatus moved with silent, brutal
efficiency, and the people disappeared forever.
MR. KRAUSE: One of those who disappeared forever was
Monica Mignone, a 24-year-old educational psychologist who
was abducted from her parents' apartment in Buenos Aires on
May 14, 1976. Scilingo's revelations have had a particularly
devastating impact for Isabel Mignone, Monica's sister, who
now lives and works in Washington. She and other members of
the family believe Monica's captors took her to the navy
mechanics school in Buenos Aires. It's the place where Buenos
Aires worked during the Dirty War and where he now says
prisoners were put on planes and then dumped into the sea.
ISABEL MIGNONE: We haven't been able to find anyone that
was able to see her or we don't know how her last days were
there. All we know now with the declarations, statements that
have been made by Mr. Scilingo and other army and navy
people that she's probably one of the people that were thrown
into the ocean alive. And, again, that's one of the things
that we want to find out, you know, how were her last days,
what she did, how was she killed, it's the right to be able
to mourn a person, to be able to bury that person once and
for all, because it's like an eternal grieving in a way.
MR. KRAUSE: At first, Argentina's current president,
Carlos Menem, tried to discredit Scilingo and his claim that
thousands of the disappears were dumped into the sea. But the
revelations continued, and finally, Gen. Martin Balza, the
current commander of the Argentina Army, confirmed that what
Scilingo claimed was essentially correct. Still, there were
no names. Alicia Partnoy was kidnapped in 1976 and held for
more than two years in a secret detention center before she
was finally released and allowed to leave Argentina for the
United States. Partnoy says the military's blanket
confirmation of the atrocities is ^Lnot enough.
ALICIA PARTNOY, Kidnap Victim: We don't need only the
apology or the acknowledgment of army. We need to know the
whereabouts of our friends and, and of the disappeared. We
need to know who killed them, when, how, where their bodies
are. It's very important to know where the bodies are to be
able to mourn, because we need a measure of justice, and it
hasn't been done.
MR. KRAUSE: The origins of the Dirty War lie in the
turmoil and chaos that followed the death of Argentina's
legendary strongman, Juan Peron, in 1974. The nation wept as
the general was laid to rest. It then watched with horror as
his widow and successor, Isabel Peron, failed to take control
of growing guerrilla violence from the left, and the right
wing terrorism that came from within her own government.
After less than two years as president, she was overthrown by
the military in March of 1976. At first, the coup was
welcomed by most Argentines -- that according to Robert Cox,
one of the country's most courageous journalists who was then
editor of the "Buenos Aires Herald."
ROBERT COX, Former Editor, Buenos Aires Herald: And the
very day of the coup was like a wonderful holiday -- kids out
on the street roller skating, beautiful sun, everybody
thought that the horror was all over because there had been
horror before, and both sides had suffered enormously, people
on the left and people on the right. There were left-wing
journalists telling me, guard the military, you know, we need
them to save us, I never thought I'd say this, but -- and so
you had this enormous sense of relief, and wrote an editorial
which said, you know, it's as if the country sighed with
relief, an incredible situation. Sunny day, you know, and the
darkness was to come, and you
-- I think one had a sense that it could happen, but you
hoped that it wouldn't.
MR. KRAUSE: Whatever hopes there were, they were soon
shattered. Martin Andersen is the author of Dossier Secreto,
a comprehensive account of the coup and the Dirty War that
followed.
MARTIN ANDERSEN, Author: The disappearances as an
organized phenomena began in Tucuman Province in 1976, where
a general named Achtules, who was the military commander of
the region, borrowing methods that were used by the French
during their colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina, decided
that this was a very efficacious way of instilling terror in
the population and at the same time not having to assume
responsibility for extra-legal acts committed against a
civilian population.
MR. KRAUSE: Harris arrived at the height of the terror,
shortly after Jimmy Carter's inauguration in 1977.
F. ALLEN HARRIS: What I did when I got there was to insist
that the American embassy's doors be opened and that people
be given an opportunity to come directly to the embassy to
report on the losses of their family members. The people
queued outside the embassy, and they came through by the
hundreds each week.
MR. KRAUSE: Who was disappearing? Who was taken away?
F. ALLEN HARRIS: These were people I would say 85 percent
of whom
were law-abiding citizens and who, if you had sent them a
postcard and told them to report to a particular government
office, would have shown up. They were not ^Lin any sense
terrorists. They were people who had left-wing political
views, some very radical views, and who had very strong
feelings against the Argentine military dictatorship.
MARTIN ANDERSEN: In a very Catholic country -- Argentina's
by nature a very conservative Catholic country -- we saw a
lot of people who said they were acting in the name of
western christian civilization torture pregnant women, put
rats in the vaginas of women, torture fetuses by means of
electric devices. These were fairly standard techniques used.
Anything that was degrading and painful and could be used to
destroy the person psychologically before they were destroyed
physically were used.
F. ALLEN HARRIS: What was underway in Argentina was an
effort to eradicate the intellectual base on which this small
handful of active terrorists existed, and it got out of
control. And they spent hours trying to convince me, the
ambassador, and major policy figures from Washington, D.C.,
that their battle was really in the interest of saving
western civilization and that they should have been applauded
and rewarded and not distanced and not penalized for their
actions.
MR. KRAUSE: But Harris and in Washington, Assistant
Secretary of State Patricia Derian refused to go along.
Derian met with the Argentine Junta three times and made
Argentina a principal target of the Carter administration's
then revolutionary policy of concern for human rights.
PATRICIA DERIAN, Former Assistant Secretary of State:
Nobody likes to hear the truth. Nobody expects to be called
on it. It's sort of like wife beating in the old days.
There's a kind of gentleman's agreement that went on forever
where it didn't matter what you did to your own citizens. So
when they're confronted not only with the statement, the
cruel statement of what they're doing, but also the facts of
it, they're astonished.
MR. KRAUSE: But did you, in fact, go down there and say to
them, look, we know you are taking --
PATRICIA DERIAN: Sure.
MR. KRAUSE: -- people away, we know what you're doing?
PATRICIA DERIAN: Certainly. Certainly. I mean, you have to
say
that. That's -- no point in going, if you're not going to say
that.
MR. KRAUSE: Argentines credit pressure from the Carter
administration for decreasing the number of disappearances,
but it was Argentina's defeat in the Falklands in 1982 that
finally brought an end to military rule. Three years later in
1985, Argentina's elected president, Raul Alfonsin, ordered
trials of the nine admirals and generals who ruled Argentina
during the Dirty War. After months of testimony, five of the
nine were ultimately convicted and given sentences ranging
from several years to life imprisonment. But the wounds
caused by the Dirty War continued to fester, and in 1989,
Alfonsin's successor, Carlos Menem, pardoned the generals
already convicted and forbade any future trials. Argentina's
ambassador to Washington, Raul Granillo Ocampo, says Menem
feared continuing military unrest if the trials continued.
RAUL GRANILLO OCAMPO, Argentine Ambassador to U.S.: Well,
it continued being a devisory, a theme in the social and
political scheme, and the president believed that at that
time we needed to concentrate the efforts of society in the
challenges of the future and not to try to be all the time
working with the problem of the past, because he considered
-- and again I agree with him -- that we didn't have the
possibility to overcome the problem of the past, but we have
the possibility to over the problem of the future, and the
only way was to reconstitute the social fabric and to work in
this direction.
MR. KRAUSE: Nonetheless, many relatives of the disappeared
and other view the pardons as a grave mistake.
ALICIA PARTNOY: My biggest fear is for the future of the
country and if you don't do justice in these cases, things --
this is going to sound very trite it's been said so much --
but it sounds trite, but if you don't do justice, this can
happen again, and it will happen again. So in that sense,
there's a fear and there's a sense of, of having been
tortured or raped as a victim again. The trials, themselves,
demanded so much emotional energy from the victims and from
the relatives and then the military men are walking free.
MR. KRAUSE: Among relatives of the disappeared, there's
hope the recent revelations will force the military to
provide more information and force the country as a whole to
grapple with the enormity of what happened during the Dirty
War.
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