Memory & Democracy in Latin America

By Paul Jeffrey

Published in response magazine in 2016.

Every week for 39 years, Nora Morales de Cortiñas has come to the center of Buenos Aires to walk slowly around the Plaza de Mayo while holding a photo of her son Carlos, who was disappeared by Argentina’s military in 1977. Accompanied by other mothers of the disappeared, each with a white pañuelo on her head, Ms. Morales has demanded to know the truth about what happened during the country’s Dirty War from 1976 to 1983, a period in which 30,000 people were kidnaped, tortured and disappeared.

At the heart of the women’s weekly vigil is a struggle over memory, which ultimately is a struggle about democracy.

“What we have lived in Argentina with the loss of our children must not be forgotten. And so we come here to remember,” Ms. Morales told response.

“Remembering is fundamental, because if there is no truth, there is no justice. And if there is no justice, there is no democracy. Otherwise we could be walking on the streets alongside those who stole our babies, alongside those who threw the bodies of tortured prisoners into the rivers and sea. And someone on the street would see them and seek revenge. Impunity encourages violence, but memory refreshes democracy.”

The battle over memory in Argentina, waged principally by the mothers and grandmothers of those who were disappeared and killed, is but one skirmish in a continent-wide struggle over who will control the dominant narrative about the region’s recent past. That struggle takes many forms, from digging the massacred out of clandestine graves in the mountains of Guatemala, to legal efforts to return the brutal killers of nuns and priests to El Salvador, to street protests in Mexico demanding the truth about what happened to the 43 poor and indigenous students at a teachers college who disappeared in 2014, to the Chilean women who craft quilt-like memorials–arpilleras–using pieces of clothing, locks of hair, and other everyday items that belonged to their loved ones who were disappeared during that country’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.

Those scraps of cloth and memory in Chile, first assembled on kitchen tables while the country remained draped in a fog of imposed silence, remain monuments to the courage of those who dared to challenge the culture of amnesia imposed by men with guns. There are many such monuments around the hemisphere, from the quiet rose garden in San Salvador where six Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, were lined up and assassinated, to the former Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires where political prisoners, weakened from weeks of torture, were drowned or electrocuted by officials with a penchant for Nazi-like medical experiments. Other prisoners held at the school were dragged onto aircraft from which they were pushed out high over the Atlantic Ocean or the nearby La Plata River.

A Space for Memory

The Naval Mechanics School was ground zero for a network of some 500 detention and torture centers established by Argentina’s military, but it was converted in the last decade into a “Space for Memory and the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights”—a museum that encourages reflection on memory. Of some 5,000 people detained in the school, only about 150 were spared death at the hands of the torturers, and visitors today listen to their recorded testimony in rooms where prisoners were kept in shackles with their heads shrouded. One room became a birthing center where women prisoners delivered their babies–which were then taken away to be adopted by military families and associates of the dictatorship, while their mothers were dispatched on the death flights.

Turning the school into a memorial wasn’t easy. Some in Argentina preferred to forget the bloody years of military dictatorship or else still believed that the state terrorism was justified. For years the military resisted turning over the complex, and destroyed several of the buildings before finally giving in. It was a battle that mirrored the national debate about whether to hold military officials responsible for their crimes against humanity during the Dirty War. In 1986, the government approved laws that put an end to the trials of military officials, effectively granting a blanket amnesty. Yet those laws were annulled by the Congress in 2003, beginning a new series of prosecutions of those responsible for the Dirty War.

Since 2006 a total of 514 cases of crimes against humanity have been brought before Argentine courts. A verdict was reached in 147 trials, some of them with multiple defendants, with 622 people found guilty, many of whom were sentenced to life in prison, though elderly prisoners are often allowed to live at home provided they wear tracking devices.

The trials took place during the presidency of Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his wife Cristina Fernandez (2007-2015). Mr. Kirchner publicly apologized in 2004 for the military’s brutal rule and the silence that had shrouded its history despite the return to democracy. Under Mr. Kirchner and Ms. Fernandez, scores of former torture and detention centers were converted into memorials, and March 24, the date of the 1976 military coup, was declared a special holiday to contemplate the country’s bloody past.

When Ms. Fernandez’ hand-picked successor lost a close vote last November to Mauricio Macri, a right-wing businessman, embattled former military officials felt a reprieve was coming. Although Mr. Macri had made no particular promises about ending the trials, the day after his election the daily La Nacion newspaper published an editorial entitled “No more revenge,” in which it called on the new government to put an end to the arrest and trial of hundreds of former military officers linked to the worst repression of the military dictatorship.

The editorial may have had the opposite effect, however, as dozens of employees of the newspaper repudiated the piece with a group photo that quickly spread through social media, with people holding signs saying, “I repudiate the editorial,” or bearing the hashtag #NuncaMas, or Never Again.

Ms. Morales was among those who responded angrily.

“The trials of those who committed genocide show before the world our path to justice, and we hope that this new government doesn’t throw to the ground all that we’ve achieved at great cost up to now, that it doesn’t turn its back on the people who remained in the hell of the concentration camps,” she said.

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Catholic human rights advocate who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize, said he wasn’t concerned. “Governments come and go but the people remain. And the people have memory, a memory which illumines the present. It doesn’t matter that we now have a government which isn’t interested in human rights, because the people have memory and we’ll continue struggling,” he told response.

“Macri has always considered human rights to be a worthless stupidity,” Mr. Pérez said, but claimed the new president would be unable to block the continuing trials because he lacks a parliamentary majority. He and other activists do worry, however, that President Macri will replace the public prosecutor who has played a pivotal role in the Dirty War trials, ostensibly blocking a widening of the trials to include business owners suspected of illegal enrichment and collaboration with the dictatorship, a group that includes Mr. Macri’s own father.

President Obama visit

President Macri finally visited the Naval Mechanics School for the first time in February, reportedly worried that a planned March visit by U.S. President Barack Obama might include a stop there, leaving the Argentine president flatfooted if he hadn’t previously seen it for himself.

Mr. Obama’s visit, which coincided with the 40^th anniversary of the military coup, provoked initial resistance from human rights activists who said his presence would encroach on a day of painful remembrance for many.

“It’s a provocation. It’s our date,” said Ms. Morales.

Mr. Pérez, who was tortured and held without trial for 14 months in the late 1970s, wrote an open letter to President Obama asking him to postpone his visit.

“In 1976, while you were only 14 years old, and your country was celebrating two centuries of independence, we were starting the most tragic period of our history, with the implementation of state terrorism that subjected our people to prosecution, torture, death, and forced disappearance of persons in order to deny them their rights to freedom, independence and sovereignty,” Mr. Pérez wrote.

“I am writing as a survivor of this horror who, like many others, was a victim of persecution, imprisonment and torture in the defense of human rights against the Latin American military dictatorships imposed by the Doctrine of National Security and by Operation Condor, with financing, training, and coordination by the United States.”

Operation Condor was a region-wide campaign of political repression and state terror in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, in which the U.S. government played a key role. Its poster boy was General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, whose September 11, 1973, coup thrust the country into a 17-year long nightmare of terror. A 2000 report from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency admitted the United States “actively supported” the terrorists and that some of the worst human rights offenders were paid directly by the CIA.

The U.S. was less directly involved in Argentina’s coup three years later, but Argentina’s generals–many trained at the U.S. government’s infamous School of the Americas–unabashedly modeled their own regime on the Chilean dictatorship. And former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Argentine regime in 1976 that “the quicker you succeed, the better,” words the junta took as blanket approval for their murderous policies. Mr. Kissinger’s hurry grew from his concern that human rights activists would over time gain traction in criticizing the dictatorship. “Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement,” he said shortly after the coup. “Because I do want to encourage them. I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”

Forty years later, with families of the military’s victims still demanding justice, Mr. Pérez told President Obama that he would be welcomed to Argentina if he came to “acknowledge . . .that your country was an accomplice of coups d’état in this region in the past and currently;” if the United States would ratify international human rights accords it has so far failed to join; if the successors to School of the Americas would be closed; and if the United States would close military bases in Latin America.

President Obama, who began the March trip with a historic stop in Havana to up the ante in the Vatican-mediated rapprochement with Cuba, did not postpone the trip, but he did visit Buenos Aires’ Remembrance Park, where a grey stone wall is engraved with the names and ages of 20,000 victims of the dictatorship, with 10,000 blank spaces for those who have yet to be identified. He and Mr. Macri each cast white roses into a nearby estuary where some of the victims’ bodies had been cast by their torturers. Although he didn’t satisfy many of Mr. Pérez’s demands, Mr. Obama did acknowledge the ongoing debate over memory in Argentina, and said the U.S. “has to examine its own policies as well, and its own past. We’ve been slow to speak out for human rights, and that was the case here.”

Mr. Obama also announced that the U.S. would declassify secret military and intelligence records related to the Argentinian dictatorship. In 2002, more than 4,600 documents related to the dirty war were released by the U.S. government, the result of an earlier order by President Bill Clinton. But records from U.S. military and intelligence agencies were left out of the release.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, said President Obama should be praised for engaging in “declassified diplomacy” that “not only provides a historical atonement for early US support for the coup and the repression in its aftermath, but also can provide actual evidence and answers to the families of human rights victims who continue to search for their missing loved ones in Argentina, 40 years after the coup took place.”

Mr. Obama’s promise to release the documents proved contagious, as the Vatican quickly announced that it too would release secret documents from the era. Pope Francis, an Argentinian, had earlier released some documents related to particular cases. The country’s Catholic bishops quickly chimed in, issuing their own statement condemning the “state terrorism” of the dictatorship, which they said led to “torture, murder, disappearance, and the kidnaping of children”–a position the country’s staunchly conservative church authorities had never before articulated.

Boxes of yellowing paper

Unlike the arpilleras of Chile, which carry the memories of state terror as woven by the hands of grieving mothers and grandmothers, the once secret documents from U.S. archives relay the unemotional details of daily repression, of who did what to whom. As trials move forward and historians seek lessons to learn, such files—along with more personal accounts—can fuel the recovery of memory.

Gabriela Liguori has a storage room crammed with boxes of yellowing papers. She has protected them for decades, and is now beginning to prepare them for digitization by a museum.

Ms. Liguori is director of the Ecumenical Commission Supporting Refugees and Migrants, a United Methodist Women-supported organization in Argentina. In her dusty boxes are files on thousands of refugees that she and her colleagues helped in decades past, many of whom fled repression in Chile or elsewhere. It’s important evidence of how Operation Condor functioned at a regional level, of how militaries from different countries worked across borders to track down and eliminate political activists who sought safety in neighboring countries.

“It’s our memory that helps us as a society not to fall into the same errors as before. We want to have an active memory, a memory that serves the present moment, that supports human rights. That’s an important role for civil society that we don’t want to surrender,” she said.

Throughout Latin America, historians and activists are searching through such boxes of old paperwork for clues about how repression functioned and who was responsible. In Guatemala, some 80 million pages of secret records kept by the country’s national police were discovered in 2005 when investigators were searching for abandoned munitions in five decrepit buildings surrounded by junked cars inside a police compound on the edge of Guatemala City.

Much of the paperwork was the daily minutiae of bureaucracy: a register of when vehicles were checked in and out from the car pool, photos of bodies cataloged before burial, lists of payments to informers. In a country where a CIA coup inaugurated more than three decades of repression, the devil was literally in the details.

“To see our loved ones, to see friends from the university, their bodies disfigured by torture, with 15 or 20 bullet holes in them, to read lists of children who were captured and sent to live with military families or adopted to foreign couples, it’s all painful,” said Velia Muralles, an investigator for the government human rights agency which took charge of the archive. “And it’s amazing to see the comprehensive control the police exercised. They have photos of demonstrations. Details of killings. Lists of who came to the funeral, and what they said to each other. Who showed up at the Mass of Eight Days. There was a complete control before, during, and after each political killing.”

According to Gustavo Meoño, coordinator of the historical police archive, one question that always emerges when files like those in Guatemala are discovered is why those responsible for the repression didn’t do away with the evidence.

“Why did the Nazis not destroy their records? Why did Pol Pot hang on to documents that demonstrate the magnitude of that genocide? We’ve got to remember that no matter how atrocious the acts were, they were administrative measures. And administrative actions have to be documented,” said Mr. Meoño.

“The only way a state functionary can prove that they’ve done their job is to compile a written record and file it away. There’s a bureaucratic inertia in all this. But what are for us shameful crimes against humanity for the perpetrator are simply a matter of complying with patriotic duty. There’s a tendency to leave proof of their contribution, even in expectation of material or moral compensation. When these archives were compiled, those who elaborated these documents and filed them away felt all-powerful. They felt that their power was never going to end. And if the people changed, the system would remain. Impunity guaranteed that there would be no negative consequences.”

In neighboring El Salvador, thousands of files belonging to the Catholic Church have become the center of a legal fight over who controls memory. The church formed Tutela Legal in the 1980s as a place where ordinary people could come and report human rights violations. After the U.S.-financed war ended in 1992, those files–which documented tens of thousands of crimes–became a crucial element in the prosecution of offenders in Spain and the United States. In 2013, as hopes rose for an end to a national amnesty law which had prevented prosecutions at home, a new archbishop took over the legal office, and promptly closed it. Human rights activists worried that the church would destroy the records. The government’s ministry of culture quickly declared the archives part of the country’s cultural patrimony and prohibited the church from destroying the records. The church appealed, but the country’s Constitutional Court ruled against the church in February, ordering that the records be protected. What exactly will happen to them remains to be decided.

“It’s impossible to lose our memory”

Estela Carlotto is president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Her daughter Laura was three months pregnant when she was seized by the death squads in 1977. After giving birth, Laura was executed and her mutilated body returned to her family. Yet the baby boy disappeared into the clandestine network of families that adopted the children of Argentina’s political prisoners.

In 2014, Carlotto announced that she had located her long lost grandson, Ignacio, who was identified after he volunteered for DNA testing sponsored by the Grandmothers. A musician, he was the 114^th grandchild to be identified. By the end of 2015, the Grandmothers had found 119 grandchildren.

Carlotto, now 85, says the women won’t rest until they have identified some 500 grandchildren they believe were born in the torture centers.

“Some people tell us, ‘Enough, this has all passed, let’s forget about it and move forward.’ But it’s impossible to lose our memory,” she told response.

“A people that forgets its errors is a people in danger, a people who can suffer once again what it lived through. This story, if not remembered, will repeat itself. Forgetting would be condemning future generations to danger. Forgetting would mean that death will come again to all who believe differently than those who usurp power.”

Carlotto, whose emotional reunion with her grandson transfixed Argentinian society and reinvigorated the resolve of rights activists throughout the region to maintain their collective memory, says those who killed her daughter won’t escape responsibility.

“We will never permit the prisons to be opened and those guilty of genocide to walk alongside us on the streets,” she said. “That would be horrible for society, as it would mean there is no justice. So we will maintain our memory, and demand that history be recorded in all its fullness, without blank pages.”

Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary and senior correspondent for response. He lives in the Pacific Northwest and blogs at kairosphotos.com.