In the wee hours of March 24, 1976, any Argentinos still awake and listening to the radio or watching television were informed that:
People are advised that as of today, the country is under the operational control of the Joint Chiefs General of the Armed Forces. We recommend all inhabitants the strict compliance of the provisions and directives emanating from the military, security or police authorities, and to be extremely careful to avoid individual or group actions and attitudes that may require drastic intervention from the operating personnel.
With their president, Isabel Perón, arrested and deposed and police forces under military control, Argentinos would have been wise to heed the warning above. The power of the state was in the hands of three men—General Jorge Videla, Admiral Emilio Massera and Brigadier Orlando Agosti—acting under the guise of patriotism but ruthlessly determined to impose their will on the people of Argentina. Their threat of "drastic intervention" would soon be realized as pitiless torment and wanton death for anyone even marginally suspected of opposition. Within the next 24 hours, hundreds of journalists, professors, trade unionists, and political activists would be kidnapped off the streets and out of their homes and transported to clandestine torture chambers for interrogation.
Perhaps it is incorrect to state, as I did in Part I of this article, that Argentina's reign of terror began the night that President Isabel Perón was deposed from office. The truth is that domestic terror had spread throughout the nation during the previous few years, with abductions and murder by factions of both the right and the left.
However, those were activities outside the norm, random and chaotic atrocities that were, in theory at least, disapproved by both society and the government. The Triple A, a rightwing paramilitary death squad, was organized by government officials and funded secretly with public monies but nevertheless it was an extralegal and illegal organization.
The night that Isabel was arrested changed all that. The new military junta that would rule the country for the next seven years instituted terror as a state policy and enlisted the full participation of the government to implement it. From that moment on, terror would be the officially sanctioned means of maintaining the power and rule of the military and the economic oligarchy. The scale of the atrocities would be ramped up to levels almost unimaginable in the years before. Technical and logistical expertise would turn the state into an efficient machine of merciless cruelty and depraved murders.
Although the junta passed legislation allowing its military tribunals to order death sentences, that procedure was seldom invoked. Instead, the security forces simply kidnapped, tortured, and killed their victims outside of all existing law, at their own discretion. [1]
It was the beginning of a mad reign of terror fully managed and perpetrated by the state against its own people.
The junta stated that its very reason for usurping power was to stabilize the country by suppressing left-wing violence (conveniently not mentioning the right-wing violence carried out by its subordinates and allies). It named the coordinated plan to impose socio-political control the National Process of Reorganization (Proceso de Reorganización Nacional), a seemingly benign title implying orderly tidying up of problems more administrative than policial.
In reality, El Proceso's goal was not merely to reorganize but to transform Argentine society totally, bringing back some mythical lost values and a rigid hierarchy with the military and the Church at the apex. The leader of the junta, General Jorge Videla,
… defined a “terrorist” as “not only someone who plants bombs but a person whose ideas are contrary to Western, Christian civilization.” [4]
The Montoneros, the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), and other violent leftist groups were already in dramatic decline after years of battles with police and the armed forces, as well as targeted actions by the secret paramilitary organizations like the Triple A. The internal threats to democracy from the left had largely been rendered ineffectual by the time the military seized power.
With the revolutionary left virtually wiped out, the junta theoretically should have restored democracy within a very short period. Instead, it expanded its operations under the Process, finding supposed enemies in every nook and cranny of society. Rather than dangerous armed rebels, authorities arrested journalists, writers, teachers, trade unionists, nuns, priests, peaceful protesters and anyone else they considered potentially subversive or even related to or acquainted with alleged enemies of the state. Many of the nation's largest business and industries worked closely with the military to "disappear" workers who wanted better conditions or higher pay; they not only informed the authorities of the so-called troublemakers but also supplied logistical support, such as automobiles for use to round up the victims.
No one was safe. Any disobedience to authority or deviation from social conformity was sufficient grounds for the paranoid regime to decide that individuals posed an existential threat, regardless of age or gender. The junta practiced guilt by association, no matter how remote or unlikely the relationship; simply being a co-worker, employee, student or teacher of a suspect might be reason enough for one to vanish permanently into the clandestine prisons.
Even well-behaved and socially prominent citizens learned to fear soldiers, police and intelligence agents. The junta wanted to squelch even the idea of dissent and for that it needed to totally intimidate and demoralize the populace. Cars were stopped at random, the occupants beaten, and the perpetrators simply left with no explanation; homes were randomly raided, valuables stolen, residents assaulted, and again the soldiers or police would vanish without a word. The message was being delivered: you have no power and no ability to resist us, at any place or time—your only hope for survival is absolute obedience and surrender.
Argentinos soon learned that there was no time—day or night—and no place—home, work, school, or on the street—that they could feel secure. The sight of a dark green Ford Falcon, the automobile favored by the security forces, would induce panic. If it stopped in front of their home, they might hurriedly whisper farewells to one another, uncertain who would be taken and who would be left behind. To protest the injustice done to a neighbor, request to see a warrant for invading one's workplace, or even linger too long in looking at the abduction of a stranger invited arrest of oneself as a sympathizer of subversives.
And it was soon common knowledge that those who were abducted rarely were ever seen again. They became known as los desaparecidos (the disappeared).
One of the most bitter actions of the dictadura (dictatorship) is known as the Night of the Pencils, a reference to the writing implement common to school children. It was a series of kidnappings actually ranging over several nights, beginning on September 16, 1976. The junta was disturbed by demonstrations of the Union of High School Students (UES) which had peacefully protested on behalf of school reforms.
Ten boys and girls were stolen from their homes and families in the middle of the night and hustled off to detention centers. Stripped naked, they were tortured and interrogated about their suspected guerilla activities and revolutionary sympathies. According to one of the abductees,
They tortured us with profound sadism. I remember being naked. I was just a fragile small girl of about 1.5m and weighed about 47kg, and I was beaten senseless by what I judged was a huge man. [2]
The youths, all between 16 and 18 years old, were starved, beaten, given electric shocks on their genitals and inside their mouths, and toenails yanked out. Only four of them were released, months later; the other six are officially missing, with the presumption that they were murdered by their captors and the bodies disposed of.
These students were only a fraction of the hundreds of minors kidnapped, tortured and often executed—some as young as 13 years old. Dozens of high schoolers were arrested simply for joining their student council, hardly an act of insurrection in normal societies. At times, entire families were taken—mother, father, sons and daughters—never to be seen again. [3]
At least 340 detention centers were used, scattered throughout Argentina, from Buenos Aires to obscure hamlets in the middle of nowhere. The most notorious is ESMA, or Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (school for navy officers), located in northern Buenos Aires. Five thousand people entered its doors to be whisked off for barbarous torture, interrogation, and often, rape; only 150 of them survived the ordeal.
ESMA has a special place in the cruel annals of the Process. It was where babies were taken soon after birth, born to women in captivity (some were pregnant due to rape by their guards). There the dictadura briefly cared for them; military officers and supporters of the regime were then rewarded with the newborns to adopt, illegally. Although most of their mothers were murdered, all the infants had other surviving relations who should have gained custody but often had no idea of the baby's existence. [4] In at least one proven instance, a girl was raised by the very man who killed her mother and father.
Many of the horrific activities within ESMA and other centers are familiar to us today, thanks to Abu Ghraib and other facilities run by or for the U.S. once the Bush administration decided to dishonor our laws and treaties against torture: waterboarding, isolation, hooding, sleep deprivation, forced positions, and more. As bad as those things are, the Argentine military went far beyond them, especially in its creative methods for murdering its prisoners.
Victims were often electrocuted or drowned within the facilities and the bodies dumped into the ocean by plane. More cruelly, many were given sedatives to make them tractable, loaded onto the planes known as "death flights" and thrown out alive and often conscious high over the Rio de la Plata, where their corpses would wash out to sea.
Another pilot, Emir Sisul Hess, reportedly told relatives how sleeping victims "fell like little ants" from the aircraft. [5]
Some were used as amusement and recreation, dropped in the middle of forests or jungle, for soldiers to hunt and shoot to death. Others suffered the nightmare of bizarre medical experiments reminiscent of the Nazis as military doctors removed genitalia, arms, legs and organs to see what the effect would be.
It's impossible to fully know the extent of the crimes of the junta, its supporters, and its agents. Many detention centers kept records, including photographs, of their grisly work and they are now in the hands of competent authorities; others were either lax about record keeping or the perpetrators succeeded in destroying their archives before discovery, upon the end of the dictatorship. Estimates by those who have investigated this terrifying period of history generally assume that roughly 30,000 people were murdered by the state and many thousands more were assaulted, arrested, interrogated or tortured and released. Many thousands of families to this day still grieve their loved ones, with no bodies to bury and neither certainty of nor knowledge about the nature of their deaths.
The Argentine military had stepped into power at other times in the country's past, with tacit approval of the populace, as a last resort to protect the people's interest in the face of overly corrupt or dangerously incompetent civilian governments. That trust, that the military could be counted on to do the right thing when needed, was irrevocably broken by the 1976 junta: it had shown that absolute power indeed corrupts, creating monsters who would viciously destroy what they had promised to save.
Look for Part III of this series on Saturday or Sunday. In it we'll look at the United States' involvement in the dictatorship and examine the aftermath of the period known in English as Argentina's "Dirty War."
Update: Part III has now been published.
[1] The Last Military Dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983): the Mechanism of State Terrorism by Maria Soledad Catoggio, Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence
[2] Argentina marks 'Night of the Pencils' by Vladimir Hernandez, BBC News
[3] The Victims: Abducted, Tortured, Vanished at The Vanished Gallery
[4] Children of the Dirty War by Francisco Goldman, The New Yorker
[5] Victims of 'death flights': Drugged, dumped by aircraft – but not forgotten by Ed Stocker, The Independent (UK)