From dirty war to genocide: Argentina’s resistance to national reconciliation

Guerrilla insurgency, military rule, and repression

Civil wars, military coups, violent social movements, and economic exploitation have sharpened political divisions in Argentina since its independence from Spain in 1810. The military overthrow of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 led to a worker resistance movement that evolved a decade later into a small guerrilla insurgency inspired by the Cuban Revolution. These guerrillas interpreted the massive street protests of 1969 against the dictatorship as a portent of revolution, and undertook their first armed operations in 1970. At its peak in 1972, there were around 600 Marxist and Peronist guerrilla combatants. The military junta pursued them effectively but could not stop the protest movement that demanded Perón’s return from exile. National elections were held, and Perón assumed Argentina’s presidency in October 1973 (Rock, 1987).

Democracy did not end the violence. The Marxist ERP or People’s Revolutionary Army continued to attack the armed forces, and a deadly power dispute arose among Peronists. Perón’s death in July 1974 increased the political violence even more as the left-wing Peronist guerrilla organization Montoneros fought it out with right-wing Peronist unions and ultraright death squads. In February 1975, the armed forces entered into offensive operations against a budding rural insurgency of 100 Marxist guerrillas in Tucumán province. On 6 October 1975, the Peronist government ordered the armed forces to annihilate the insurgency. By this time, the right-wing hit squads consisted of at least 1000 persons, while the guerrilla insurgency counted around 5000 combatants. The number of political assassinations between May 1973 and March 1976 by the extreme right has been estimated at 1165, while 480 assassinations have been attributed to the revolutionary organizations (Moyano, 1995: 56, 82, 105). The military took charge of the country on 24 March 1976, to stamp out Argentina’s culture of political mobilization, thoroughly reform the country, and protect its western, Christian culture against the revolutionary onslaught (Robben, 2005a: 171–189).

The Argentine military destroyed the insurgency and political opposition in a systematic manner. Captives disappeared into hundreds of secret detention centers, were tortured, assassinated and their bodies discarded. Around 10,000 disappearances have been officially documented but human rights organizations claim that 30,000 civilians were disappeared between 1975 and 1983. The guerrillas assassinated 508 members of the armed and security forces between 1960 and 1989 (Díaz Bessone, 2001).

The disastrous 1982 Falklands War against the UK ushered in the fall of the military regime. General elections brought Raúl Alfonsín to the presidency in December 1983. He inherited a country stupefied by the repressive dictatorship, anxious about the disappeared, and at a loss about how to make sense of the years of massive violence.

Accountability, amnesty and failed reconciliation among former belligerents

The political violence of the 1970s is commonly known outside Argentina as the ‘dirty war’; a short-hand for the torture, disappearance and assassination of tens of thousands of civilians by the military regime. The etymology is more complex. The term ‘dirty war’ appeared first in the 7 March 1974, issue of an ultranationalist magazine to describe the Marxist guerrilla insurgency (Curuchet, 1974: 3), and was adopted in late-August 1974 by the Peronist left to denounce the right-wing death squads. The term’s meaning shifted again after the March 1976 coup d’état when the Montoneros accused the armed forces of war crimes. ‘This is a dirty war, like all wars waged by reactionary armies. It is not just dirty because it uses the people’s sons to fight against their brothers and their interests, but because it doesn’t even respect the war conventions. The enemy assassinates the wounded, tortures and executes prisoners, and turns its brutality against the people’s relatives’ (Evita Montonera, 1976).

The term dirty was soon used by the Argentine military to describe the unconventional methods deployed by both belligerents. General Vilas (1976: 9) emphasized: ‘This is a dirty war, a war of attrition, dark and sly, which one wins with decisiveness and calculation …’ General Camps explained: ‘The subversives made it dirty. They chose the forms of combat and determined our actions’ (Duhalde, 1983: 83). The term dirty war had become a self-referential discourse that represented the armed violence as a just war fought with indiscriminate means against so-called subversives who threatened the Argentine national being and its western, Christian culture. The Argentine military had learned their repressive practices in the 1960s from French instructors who had fought in the Algerian War, and exported their own experiences to Central America in the late-1970s (Armony, 1997; Robin, 2005). The guerrilla insurgency also believed itself to be waging a just war, namely against a praetorian military that protected an exploitative ruling class. The term dirty war was thus embedded in two Manichaean world-views in which all means were allowed to determine Argentina’s future. Here, we can notice how the interpretation of armed violence as a messianic or utopian just war influenced their remembrance of the past and vision of the future. The armed forces claimed to have sacrificed their lives for a Christian Argentina based on a divinely inspired social hierarchy, while the guerrilla commanders were determined to face a militarily superior enemy for the benefit of a socialist Argentina free of exploitation and social inequality (Robben, 2005a: 171–189).

The term dirty war fell into disuse when the military lost power in 1983. The Alfonsín government emphasized that the Argentine military and the guerrilla insurgents were two evils who had been equally responsible for the escalating violence. The Argentine people bore the brunt of their terrorist practices. This conceptual framework became known as the two-demon theory (la teoría de los dos demonios), and undergirded two presidential decrees that ordered the prosecution of seven guerrilla commanders and nine junta leaders. Argentina’s decade of political violence became reduced to the confrontation of two armed opponents that had terrorized the Argentine people.

This rendition of the Argentine people’s victimhood was reinforced by the National Commission on Disappeared Persons (CONADEP), installed in December 1983. The truth commission emphasized that the disappearances had been aimed principally at unsuspecting civilians. ‘The vast majority of them were innocent not only of any acts of terrorism, but even of belonging to the combat units of the guerrilla organizations: these latter chose to fight it out, and either died in shootouts or committed suicide before they could be captured’ (CONADEP, 1986[1984]: 4). The CONADEP report constructed its narrative around a moral contrast between innocent victims and abusive state authorities. The majority of the disappeared belonged in fact to left-leaning opposition groups, labor unions, and front organizations of the guerrilla forces.

The Argentine military continued to speak in dirty war terms of a fight between good and evil, and considered their operations as the legitimate defense of Argentina’s sovereignty. They drew comparisons with the Allied bombardments of Dresden and Hiroshima to justify the use of unconventional measures to achieve victory, and spoke of having fought a decisive battle in the Third World War between capitalist and communist ideologies. Former guerrilla insurgents also criticized the two-demon theory. Some spoke of a civil war harking back to Argentina’s 19th-century civil wars, while others compared Argentina’s anti-imperialist struggle to that of Vietnam and Nicaragua. They rejected a moral and political equation of military and insurgents because revolutionary violence was a response to the exploitation of Argentine society (Cazes Camarero 1986). Finally, the human rights movement rejected the idea both of a war and of two terrorisms, preferring the term state terrorism instead (Frontalini and Caiati, 1984; Paoletti, 1987).

The conviction of Lieutenant-General Videla, Admiral Massera and three other junta commanders in December 1985 for organizing a criminal plan to combat the insurgency, as well as the 30-year sentence of Montonero commander Firmenich in May 1987, gave further credence to the two-demon theory. More officers and guerrillas were convicted in the months thereafter, including retired Police Commissioner-General Etchecolatz who received a 25-year prison sentence. The growing disgruntlement in military ranks about the ongoing trials, and Alfonsín’s desire to reconcile Argentine society, made him pass in December 1986 the Full Stop Law through Congress that imposed a statute of limitations on new indictments. Nevertheless, hundreds of complaints were filed and six army bases rose in mutiny by April 1987 to end the dictatorship’s divisive sequels. A second amnesty law was passed in June 1987 that freed most suspects from prosecution, unless they were guilty of theft, rape or the kidnapping of babies. Alfonsín’s successor, Carlos Saúl Menem, completed these reconciliatory policies by pardoning hundreds of indicted officers, policemen and guerrillas in 1989, and freeing the convicted junta members and Montonero commander in 1990.

Former Montoneros proposed to reconcile with the armed forces during a Catholic Mass to be held in August 1989 but the military refused to attend. Instead, retired officers published books about the gestation of a revolutionary war in Argentina between 1959 and 1978 (Díaz Bessone, 1988), and masses were held to commemorate fallen comrades. The solidarity organization FAMUS, or Relatives and Friends of the Victims of Subversion, was founded in 1987 to hold commemorations at the Plaza de Mayo.

The Argentine military’s vocal denial that systematic disappearances had taken place impelled the human rights movement to prove the repression’s magnitude. This dynamic of denial and disclosure positioned the two in an adversarial opposition when it came to influencing the national remembrance of a traumatic past. The contesting parties were held hostage to each other’s conflicting recollections, and relived the past by continuously articulating their own experiences, making it impossible to consider national reconciliation (Robben 2005b). This dialogical dynamic marked a shift away from the two-demon theory and towards state terrorism as the dominant historical interpretation of past violence.

State terrorism and criminal prosecution

During the dictatorship state terrorism was already a preferred term among Argentines living in exile, used to differentiate the political violence inflicted by non-state insurgents from the illegitimate violence employed by an authoritarian state (Duhalde, 1983: 19). The term state terrorism did not become dominant in Argentine public discourse after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983 because of the government’s two-demon theory. Nevertheless, the military’s denial of torture and disappearances motivated survivors to substantiate the repression, and accumulate proof in support of the charge of state terrorism. Numerous testimonies appeared in magazines, books and the media. This narration became affirmed during the 1985 trial against the junta leaders. Months of painful testimonies by survivors of clandestine detention centers, mothers searching for their disappeared children and grandmothers trying to recover their grandchildren contrasted with the curt answers and lapses of memory on the part of military officers.

The disbelief was therefore great when, in 1986 and 1987, President Alfonsín unfolded a reconciliation agenda of sweeping amnesties, and President Menem stayed the course with two presidential pardons. These political measures were accompanied by economic reparations to the victims of state terrorism. Public servants, teachers and bank employees who had been dismissed from their jobs during the dictatorship were reincorporated through laws passed in 1984 and 1985. Pensions were given to spouses and children of the disappeared in 1986, and reparation payments to former political prisoners were made in 1991. The 1994 law that regulated the economic reparation of family members of the forcibly disappeared touched an open nerve in Argentine society. The law did not include a presumption of death, and only acknowledged the abduction, but many relatives had emotional difficulty in speaking on behalf of the disappeared, felt guilty about accepting payments, and feared that the law would discourage the prosecution of the perpetrators. Despite these misgivings, 8000 claims were approved by 2004. One faction of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo rejected the payment as hush money (Guembe, 2006).

Deeply shaken by the so-called impunity laws and without much power of political mobilization for what most Argentines considered a closed chapter, as indicated by the poor attendance at annual commemorations of the coup d’état between 1989 and 1995 (Lorenz, 2002), human rights activists turned to memorialization as a strategy to imprint on the Argentine people that they had been the victims of state terrorism, while lawyers searched for alternative judicial paths to hold the military accountable.

The unexpected confession in March 1995 by Navy Captain Francisco Scilingo about having thrown sedated captives from a plane flying across the South Atlantic Ocean stirred up a popular resentment smoldering in Argentine society about the impunity of human rights offenders. The 20th anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état became a massive manifestation that included a new human rights group called HIJOS or Children for Identity and Justice, against Oblivion and Silence (Lorenz, 2002). HIJOS consists of the adult children of disappeared parents. In December 1996, the group organized the first of their numerous escraches or street happenings intended to stigmatize perpetrators by spray-painting their homes with slogans and denouncing their atrocities by megaphone (Kaiser, 2002). The escrache tried to mobilize the neighborhood against perpetrators by turning them into social outcasts and meting out a punishment that the judiciary could not provide.

Scilingo’s confession made human rights lawyers appeal successfully to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for the right to information about crimes committed by the Argentine state, irrespective of the amnesty legislation. In April 1998, so-called historical truth trials (juicios por la verdad histórica) were held. These trials were court hearings at which amnestied officers were summoned, at the risk of perjury, to testify under oath about the predicament of the disappeared (Roht-Arriaza 2005: 101–5).

The memory politics, truth trials and Congressional initiatives to derogate the amnesty legislation prepared the ground for the public outcry at Army Commander Balza’s remark in June 1998 that the Argentine military had used a standard operating procedure to separate children from their abducted parents and give them to military families. The pardoned Lieutenant-General Videla was arrested on 9 June on the charge of baby theft, and many other officers would follow. The human rights movement sought the derogation of the amnesty laws and presidential pardons. Army commander Brinzoni proposed a round table dialogue of armed forces and human rights organizations to resolve the issue of the disappeared and bring about national reconciliation. The suggestion was vehemently rejected by the human rights movement because, as Nora de Cortiñas of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Founding Line declared: ‘in no way whatsoever are we going to sit with the military, with genocidal perpetrators and repressors’ (Clarín, 2000).

In December 2001, a severe economic crisis led to food riots, a state of siege, and the death of 34 protesters by police bullets. The repression echoed the dictatorship. Calls for the derogation of the amnesty legislation became louder, and strengthened the determination of the human rights movement to inculcate a collective memory of Argentina’s state terrorism. The day of the 1976 military coup, 24 March, became a holiday in Buenos Aires in 2001. A Memory Park, founded in 1998, was inaugurated in 2001. The Institute Space for Memory (Instituto Espacio para la Memoria) was created in December 2002 in Buenos Aires involving most human rights organizations in the attempt to preserve and transmit the history and memory of state terrorism. A memorial wall was revealed in 2007 that contained 8727 names of the ‘victims of state terrorism’, including guerrilla insurgents who had died in combat. By 2009, there were around 200 sites of memory in Buenos Aires city alone as visible signs of state terrorism (Memoria Abierta, 2009).

The demand for the derogation of the amnesty laws had been embraced in 2003 by President Kirchner who argued that reconciliation could only be achieved through accountability. The Supreme Court overturned the amnesty laws in 2005, and ruled in 2007 that the presidential pardons had been unconstitutional. By August 2011, 198 persons had been convicted of human rights violations, 16 persons were acquitted, 762 were on trial and 299 had been accused or indicted (CELS 2011).

The memorialization and judicial efforts by the human rights movement had paid off, and state terrorism had become the dominant public discourse by the turn of the 20th century. Not the political violence of the 1970s but the crimes against humanity by the military stood at the center of Argentina’s public recollection of the past. Furthermore, the shifting interpretive frameworks had turned the guerrilla insurgents from subversives into terrorists and non-state armed actors, and by now into civilian victims of state terror. It is indicative of the multidirectionality of Argentina’s memory that the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association no longer regarded the guerrilla insurgents as victims of the Argentine dictatorship but praised them as having been heroic revolutionaries.

Genocide and collective responsibility

Despite their successful memory politics, the human rights movement began replacing the term ‘state terrorism’ by ‘genocide’ in the mid-2000s, even though there was no compelling judicial reason to do so because crimes against humanity were without a statute of limitations. The use of the term genocide was not new. Already in 1977, the Argentine military had been denounced by exiled Argentines as genocidal perpetrators, while the human rights lawyer Emilio Mignone had argued that the legal definition of genocide applied to Argentina because the military ‘committed a true genocide, that is to say the assassination en masse without any trial of a sector of society’ (Frontalini and Caiati, 1984: 7).

The use of the term genocide received a decisive boost through the 1998 legal opinion of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón that genocide had taken place in Argentina when the military decided to establish a new social order, eliminate a national group opposed to Argentina’s Christian culture, and specifically target Argentines belonging to Latin America’s largest Jewish community (Roht-Arriaza, 2005: 47). This interpretation resonated with the genocide discourse common in certain human rights circles, and gave rise to a multidirectional dynamic in which Argentine history was articulated in terms of the Holocaust (Rothberg, 2009: 6). The Argentine military were denounced for their anti-Semitism (Paoletti, 1987; Timerman, 1984), Jewish captives had been treated with particular cruelty (CONADEP, 1986: 67–72), and the network of clandestine detention centers was likened to that of Nazi concentration camps (Calveiro, 1998).

The comparison of the Nazis and the Argentine military was given a conceptual foundation by Argentine scholars (Feierstein, 2006, 2008; Mántaras, 2005). ‘Argentine perpetrators identify with Nazi perpetrators, no matter how we try to explain the differences between the two. And the Jews themselves suffered because of these models of identification, these genealogies, in the Argentine concentration camps’ (Feierstein, 2006: 159–60). Feierstein (2008: 26) compared Nazi Germany and authoritarian Argentina on the basis of ideological, structural and processual equivalences, and similar ‘genocidal social practices’ to annihilate particular groups. Critics argued that the term genocide was inappropriate because the Argentine military did not assassinate a defined group of people for what they were but targeted specific individuals for what they did and thought politically (Lozada, 2008: 73–5; Vezzetti, 2003: 154–64). Nevertheless, the scholarly debate turned out to be of less importance than the term’s utility for a human rights movement eager to prosecute other social categories than the military. The comparative interplay of the Holocaust and Argentina’s disappearances disclosed neglected remembrances and unmasked perpetrators by altering ‘who counts as a subject of justice, and what is the appropriate frame’ (Fraser, 2005: 80; Rothberg, 2009: 19–21).

The genocide discourse, Garzón’s 1998 legal opinion, and Feierstein’s scholarly argument played crucial roles in the Etchecolatz trial. In September 2006, Judge Carlos Alberto Rozanski condemned Etchecolatz to life in prison for ‘human rights violations committed in the framework of a genocide that had taken place in the Argentine Republic between 1976 and 1983’ (Rozanski et al., 2006: 101). The Supreme Court ratified the verdict in March 2009. Although Etchecolatz was technically convicted for homicides and disappearances, the legal argumentation rested on a framework shift from state terrorism to genocide, and changed the remembrance of political violence among the human rights movement, former disappeared inmates, the relatives of the disappeared, and certain judicial and academic circles.

The Etchecolatz conviction provoked outrage among the hundreds of indicted officers, their relatives and comrades. Solidarity organizations arose of which the Association of Family and Friends of Argentina’s Political Prisoners became the most prominent. The group is headed by Cecilia Pando, who organizes protests outside the courts, paints slogans on walls and memorials, and holds a monthly protest at the Plaza de Mayo, resembling that of the Mothers. Instead of pictures of the disappeared, they carry photographs of the victims of guerrilla terrorism.

The circle around the pyramid where the Mothers traditionally keep their weekly protest was declared an official historical site in March 2005, and silhouettes of white scarves were painted on the pavement to commemorate their courageous resistance against the dictatorship. This location was the place of protest led by Pando that I attended on 9 March 2010. On that afternoon, Cecilia Pando painted black mourning bands next to the white scarves with the accompanying text ‘victims of Montonero and ERP terrorism’. The group had done this for the first time in October 2006, a few weeks after Etchecolatz was sentenced (Vales, 2010). Pando gave a speech in which she denounced the one-sided justice in Argentina. Why were only the military in prison, and not the guerrillas she asked rhetorically. What Argentina needed, she concluded, was a president like Nelson Mandela who would pacify the country and make the Argentine people look towards the future instead of the past.

Such pacification is not in sight because the reframing from state terrorism to genocide has amplified the criminal responsibility for the violent 1970s. In March 2010, questions were raised about the complicity of the press during the dictatorship, and in April a handful of prominent journalists was denounced through escraches and convicted by the Mothers during an ethics trial held at the Plaza de Mayo. Former economics minister Martínez de Hoz was arrested in May 2010 for his role in the disappearance of two businessmen, and in July three magistrates from Mendoza were accused for refusing to investigate the denunciation of disappearances, torture and sexual abuse during the dictatorship.

In the meantime, human rights activists have stated that they are pushing for a collective genocide conviction of the armed forces to prevent the Argentine people from remembering the dictatorship as historically external to them. Argentines will only realize that they were also affected by and implicated in the political violence when they see the massive disappearances as genocide.

This plea for national self-reflection recalls the question of guilt raised by philosopher Karl Jaspers after the Second World War. Jaspers (2000[1947]: 25–36) distinguished between criminal guilt (crimes committed by individuals in the name of the state), political guilt (the liability of all citizens for crimes committed by the state), moral guilt (the soul-searching about personal complicity with the criminal state) and metaphysical guilt (a human responsibility for deeds committed by others). Applied to Argentina, this line of reasoning suggests that individual perpetrators deserve criminal punishment, and that the Argentine people must provide reparations to victims of state terrorism. The genocide discourse raises the stakes for moral and metaphysical guilt, and exposes the limitations of criminal guilt. Whereas the two-demon theory confined the responsibility for the escalating violence to the military and the insurgency, and state terrorism held the armed forces alone accountable, the term genocide hints at the complicity of most Argentines through active support or passive acceptance.

The genocide discourse and the proliferating trials are heightening the existing social tensions in Argentine society through public intimidation and political violence. In July 2010, a military solidarity organization published hundreds of names and addresses of trial witnesses and alleged former guerrillas on the internet, accompanied by the threatening message: ‘Know the names of the terrorists and their addresses: They could be your neighbors and teachers and approach you as friends … They live among us.’ ¹ In fact, the tone had already been set on the final trial day of Etchecolatz when key witness Julio López failed to show up. Fear set in that López had been disappeared by retired policemen who intended to take revenge, threaten other witnesses, and prevent López from testifying in future trials against the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. More than two years went by without a trace of López until, in January 2009, an abandoned car was located in which López had been moved only hours after his disappearance. The car was found near the house of a close friend of Etchecolatz. The investigation failed, however, to yield new leads. In February 2011, forensic anthropologists examined a piece of waste land upon information that López was buried there. No human remains were found, and López remains missing.

Conclusion

This article has shown that Argentina’s multidirectional memories of the violent 1970s changed repeatedly because of new interpretive frameworks and shifting political opponents. These conflicting collective remembrances mobilized adversaries into action, and thwarted reconciliation policies. The guerrillas and the military were considered the only violent actors in the dirty war and two-demon theory frameworks. Key commanders of both groups were convicted during the first years of democracy, but growing military opposition made two consecutive governments implement amnesties and pardons in the late-1980s. Reconciliation initiatives between former guerrillas and retired military commanders also failed in 1989, and between the armed forces and the human rights organizations in 2000.

The recent conceptual reframing of state terrorism or crimes against humanity into genocide, and the explicit comparison with the Holocaust, are casting collective responsibilities that implicate many Argentines in the dictatorial repression and are changing the conditions for reconciliation. ‘Representations of the past … structure strategic interaction between adversaries. They open – and foreclose – opportunities for the peaceful resolution of disputes. The menu of choices available to victims and survivors – from reconciliation to revenge – is filtered through representations of the past’ (Meierhenrich, 2006: 320). ‘Genocide’ makes national reconciliation much harder than ‘dirty war’ because an armed confrontation between military and insurgents carries a certain war logic missing from the indiscriminate extermination of people. According to Ricoeur (2006: 473): ‘There is no punishment appropriate for a disproportionate crime. In this sense, a crime of this sort constitutes a de facto instance of the unforgivable.’

The trials have added another matter in dispute to the wider social tensions in Argentine society, attracting activists from other political struggles into the vortex of human rights protest. The human rights movement organizes street protests, files legal complaints against growing numbers of defendants, and creates incessantly new memory sites regarded as provocations by the military. The supporters of the indicted military and police hold protest rallies, intimidate witnesses for the prosecution, and are suspected of disappearances. Furthermore, a younger generation is now assuming the role of the aging historical protagonists. The children of the disappeared are organizing public shaming happenings against perpetrators and are active in the media, whereas young sympathizers of the military are maintaining polemic websites and publishing books about the victims of insurgency.

The legitimate demand for truth and justice by the broad human rights movement and part of the judiciary is seen by the military and their supporters as based on a vindictive misrepresentation of the past, while the former accuses the latter of reviving past repressive practices. Historical truth, legal evidence and the moral high ground are on the side of the human rights movement, even though the military’s persistence in denying their crimes against humanity against overwhelming proof is understandable for self-serving political and juridical reasons. This multidirectionality of memory does not necessarily forestall a coexistence mindful of each other’s radically different position. However, the death threats to judges, witnesses and accused, and the disappearance of witnesses, who unlike Julio López reappeared after days of mistreatment, have been corrosive of national coexistence. These echoes of dictatorial repression have resuscitated old fears but, in the end, only strengthened the resolve of the human rights movement, members of the judiciary, and survivors of military persecution to seek a genocide conviction within the rules of law for anyone who collaborated with the dictatorship. The charge of genocide is complicating the national reconciliation process by transforming individual culpability into collective responsibility because individual sentences have become unsatisfactory. The guilt of one implies the innocence of another, and this delimitation does not correspond to the infinity of the crime because only the recognition of the moral complicity of an entire society may balance guilt and suffering where genocide is concerned.