Dictatorships, Castration and Vélez Sársfield

The military dictatorship and Dirty War of 1976-1983, never far from the surface of the Argentine discussion, has risen very much to the fore in recent weeks with the first trials of “repressors” since the Argentine Supreme Court repealed the amnesty laws in June 2005, especially with the first completed trial—the recent conviction and 25-year sentence for Julio “Turco Julián” Simón (right), a former federal police officer charged with kidnapping and torturing a Chilean/Argentine couple and “stealing” their eight-month-old child. A federal judge recently issued 16 more arrest warrants and three people—a former intelligence agent and two retired military officers—were arrested last Wednesday on Dirty War charges.

Putting the effects of the dictatorship and those it killed into context is difficult for anyone, much less a foreigner whose experience is third hand. The numbers are both horrible and small in comparison to other mass killings—the Khmer Rouge regime was said to have led to the death of 1.7 million Cambodians, or 24% of the population, while those killed in Argentina amounted to about 0.1% of the population. But the afterglow shines everywhere, in ways both big and small. The first head of the junta, General Videla, still lives in an apartment in Belgrano (Buenos Aires’ Riverdale, in a way). Many of the jobs in the state bureaucracy and city services that one might expect to be staffed by members of this missing 45-50 year old generation are staffed by people 10 years their junior. The defanged military clashes with the President not over its power and menace, but over whether it has the right to honor those who were killed before the dictatorship. And a generation of intellectuals and leftists was, at least in part, killed or exiled abroad. What those killed would have done is something that will never be known; but the speculation over it will spring eternal and always carries the grim headshake of lost potential.

It is into this soup, that of a country reopening the wounds of a 25-year-old civil war, that Wall Street Journal editorial writer and resident “Latin America Expert” Mary Anastasia O’Grady jumped (as she so often does) a few weeks ago. Her basic schtick, to reduce it to its minimum, is that the real problem wasn’t the military dictatorship but the left-inspired and Soviet/Cuban/Palestinian-backed civil war it was trying to “save” Argentina from, that it's best to let bygones be bygones, and that President Nestor Kirchner is just angry because his side lost to the military. Now, admittedly there is some kernel of truth in each of these assertions, but because O’Grady argues with such disingenuousness and elides so many salient facts it's impossible to take her as anything more than a partisan hack—and easy to understand why she apparently so pisses off the Kirchner regime and expats like this one, who writes:

A typical grotesque distortion from the WSJ's notoriously reactionary editorial pages. The writer is an apologist for the late junta. She asserts that Kirchener is the very equal of Castro (the first four paragraphs of her piece), glosses over the murderous state terrorism of the dirty war in one sentence, and invokes Menem's discredited blanket pardon as a just model for reconciliation. Reprehensible.

What exactly did she say? Well, here’s her summary of what happened when the military took over in the midst of a leftist insurgency that she says ended up killing 1,500 people:

According to newspaper accounts, when the military took over the government, Argentine society was greatly relieved. Tragically, the military went on to use extreme measures to restore order. In 1983 civilian government returned.

To reply to that in short form: 1) While many people may have been relieved to have some semblance of order restored, that relief no doubt evaporated when the military moved from going after the small number of revolutionaries present and began killing everyone it disagreed with; 2) The military didn’t just “tragically” go on to use “extreme measures to restore order,” it killed between 9,000 and 30,000 people (depending on whose count you believe); 3) Yes, in 1983 civilian government returned—after inflation bounced to about 200% in 1982 (and more later) and the junta lost a disastrous war with Britain over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. And to her using of the 1,500 number (both here and in a previous article), Martin Edwin Andersen, the author of Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War”, wrote:

First Ms. O’Grady gilds the lily by saying that, during the 1970s Argentine leftist guerrillas “rack(ed) up over 1,500 victims,” when the number of those actually killed was around 600, if that. Bandying about inflated numbers about the size of the guerrilla threat is one way apologists for the former Argentine military dictatorship justify why some 25,000 people, including hundreds of senior citizens, pregnant women and children, were tortured and killed in secret concentration camps.

To round out this ramble on Dirty War politics, I would be remiss if I didn’t relate it to Argentina’s two favorite sports—soccer and psychology. To whit, here’s a conversation (translated into English) I had a week or so ago with Ale as we drove down a deserted 9 de Julio to a once-famous nightclub in El Centro called El Dorado. As one does, we discussed the advantages and foibles of Buenos Aires’ dearth of in-city highways (lack of visual pollution: good; shit-tastic traffic circulation: bad), the difficulties of dating when you only spend a third of your time in any one country (the theme is his; I both spend 90% of my time here and am married) and our ongoing argument over whether I must join his tribe of Vélez Sársfield soccer faithful (his theory) or can maintain a kind of journalistic objectivity that allows for a pan-equipo love of all teams in the top league. In the end, Ale is correct: one must pick sides. But taking such a blood oath daunts me in the face of all the socioeconomic, political and historical loyalties one onloads when choosing a team—for as everyone knows, while Racing and Independiente stadiums may sit within sight of one another, they are worlds apart. River says talent and wealth that don’t always make it (the 90s Atlanta Braves, perhaps); Boca says choosing the perennial winner, the blue-collar team that ironically has plenty of money (a psychic twin to the Oakland Raiders of the late 70s); Vélez has an image as the club that wins without money, by bringing up its own stars through its junior ranks (the Oakland A’s of Moneyball fame); and so on. Team is not only neighborhood identification, but also class identity, meaning, community.

But as such conversations do, at that time of night before the action but after the food, frivolous turns to politics. “What do you think of this new push for trials for people from the Proceso [the dictatorship]?” I ask.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently,” Ale says. “Fabián Bielinsky’s death hit me really hard because of that, because I felt like we lost one of the only big brothers we had.”

“How so?”

“Our generation of artists and film makers don’t have many older siblings,” he says. “The Proceso cut off the head of the generation of artists and filmmakers and syndicalists and anyone else who might have been on the left. They died in a religious war.”

“I though the dictatorship at least pretended it wasn’t tied to the Catholic Church.”

“Sure, but the thing is, the previous ones helped the traditional powers—the landowners, the Church, people like that—protect their power, but they weren’t so ideological. This one, you see, was a religious one, part of the whole worldwide anti-communist religious war, and it killed off the head of a whole artistic generation. It left a castrated generation behind.”

“Castrated?”

“Yeah, because the leaders, the most forceful artists and filmmakers and people who you would have expected to lead the generation were killed. It was castrated. Fabián somehow survived, and he was one of our few big brothers. So his death is so tough. Because so many were killed in his generation is why a new wave of Argentine film is only now just coming back. The post-dictatorship generation is now in its 30s. Their generation was castrated, and ours had no older brothers to lead the way.”