Picking Scabs From The Dirty War

Last week the anger recently reopened by new trials into the government-sponsored killings (up to 30,000) during the 1976-83 "Dirty War" jumped into journalism's backyard. On Friday, the Washingotn Post published a story by Buenos Aires correspondent Monte Reel about the reopening of the trials, framed as a pair of pro- and con- he-said/he-said profiles of atrocity trial judge Carlos Rozanski and former army lieutenant colonel Emilio Guillermo Nani. On Saturday, Argentine journalist (and former WaPo writer) Santiago O´Donnell responded with acid in Página/12, where he snidely suggestsed that Reel has never left Barrio Norte, noted that Reel reported alongside US GIs in Irak (presumably to suggest that he's pro-military), and said that via Reel, the WaPo published:

...una incalificable apología del terrorismo de Estado en la Argentina. Incluye referencias a desaparecidos que estarían en Europa y reflota la teoría de los “excesos” supuestamente cometidos en medio de una “guerra sucia”. Dice que “el Gobierno y sus tribunales” están poblados de ex guerrilleros y que ésta sería la causa por la que se reabrieron los juicios de derechos humanos, que no buscan justicia sino venganza. Sugiere que el juez de la causa Etchecolatz es casi un terrorista encubierto y que el pensamiento retrógrado del coronel retirado Nani representa a buena parte de los argentinos. Recomienda “no avivar las brasas” del pasado.

In the end, everyone comes out poorly. The article by Reel (who I should note I've met and liked) suffers from an extreme case of the injustice of Two-handed Journalism (one one hand...on the other), whereby a paper tries to be "evenhanded" by quoting examples of both sides of a debate but fails to note that one side is so much more morally tenuous than the other. A group that used the state aparatus to kill up to 30,000 people in "response" to rebels groups who killed maybe 1,500, and members of the society that suffered those killings--and, yes, may have sympathized with the rebels--don't deserve equal moral weight. Without enough context (especially for US readers who don't know history), it makes it seem like there is an actual debate about whether or not the dictatorship was a bad idea.

Then again, while Reel's piece may have lacked context, it seems to have correctly understand and quoted its actors. Weirdly for someone who obviously speaks fluent english, O'Donnell seemed to have mistaken Nani's words for Reel's (they're plainly in quotes) and taken them as a launching point for an emotional, ad hominem attack on what he calls Reel's "apology for state terrorism". While I didn't think Reel's piece was the greatest produced in the history of American journalism, he doesn't deserve that.