Searching for the truth along the Rio de la Plata

On 1 October 2010, after the meeting on Brazil, the Internazionale Festival hosted another talk on Latin America, this time on Argentina. For seven years, from 1976 to 1983, the country was ruled by one of the bloodiest military governments in the history of South America. This resulted in widespread human rights abuses, with the army’s guerra sucia (dirty war) campaign, targeting left-wing guerrilla members (the montoneros), students, intellectuals and civilians. The cruelties inflicted to those in the hands of the army were numerous, among them there were ‘the flights”, that is: being thrown alive in the middle of the Atlantic. The final death toll, according to human rights groups, amounts to 30,000 casualties, mostly civilians.

The panel was made by three people, two of which witnessed that era in first person: Horacio Verbitsky, journalist from Página 12, Miriam Lewin, an investigative journalist and  a survivor of the Escuela Superior de Mecanica de la Armada (ESMA), a detention centre managed by the navy, and Giancarlo Ceraudo, an Italian photographer who lived in Argentina and documented with Lewin a remarkable story for ascertaining the truth.

The military junta ruling Argentina fell when Britain won the Falklands war, but the arrival of democracy did not result in a reckoning with the past. While in 1985 there had been trials for some of the junta members for the crimes committed, in 1986 the president Raul Alfonsín approved two laws that blocked the whole process of holding the perpetrators accountable in front of the courts: Ley de Obediencia debida (Law of due diligence) and Ley de punto final (Full stop law), which paralyzed any attempt to establish justice. The first piece of legislation stated that the rank and file simply executed higher orders, while the second established the end of all criminal investigations and prosecutions against people suspected of political violence during the years of dictatorship. Only in 2003, during Nestor Kirchner’s presidency, the Senate declared null the amnesty laws.

Verbitsky narrated how in 1993, under the presidency of Carlos Menem (Argentina’s homegrown Berlusconi) two of the torturers from ESMA had been promoted in the army. The Senate asked for an inquiry and after a year, it refused this appointment. Menem sued Verbitsky for libel twice, alleging that he was waging a smear campaign, but lost. Within this context, something unprecedented happened. Verbitsky was approached in the underground in Buenos Aires by a stranger, who told him he had been at the ESMA. Verbitsky told him he was sorry, believing he was one of the many prisoners, but the man then revealed that he had been there as a torturer. The man, Adolfo Scilingo is currently serving a sentence in Spain for a crime committed during those years. He was the first one from the army that broke the silence and started narrating his version of those years to Verbitsky. In what had seemed unusual to many in that period, no one else in Argentina had publicly spoken about what happened. Verbitsky said that in other cases of gross abuses against human rights that had happened – and indeed I think of what happened in South Africa after 1994 with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Verbitsky ended writing a book about his interview with Scilingo, and the same thing happened the other way round. Initially the man denied any involvement with acts of torture, saying that he had been only an engineer, whose duty was to ensure that (torture) machines worked. After having been quizzed numerous times about the structure of ESMA, he suddenly changed behaviour and revealed that he had thrown thirty people in the Ocean. When Scilingo spoke, this had a huge impact on Argentine society: two competing version of history matched each other and became one.

Before, political activists from the left and human rights groups had been saying that the flights were a reality during the guerra sucia, but the army denied. This was no longer possible. The main trials for ascertaining the truth on the Proceso dictatorship have been held abroad, often because of the dual-nationality of the victims, such as in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. In the latter, in 1996 the prosecutor Carlos Castresana issued arrest warrants following the principle of universal jurisdiction, leading to the arrest of the general Jorge Videla in Argentina. Scilingo offered his testimony to the Spanish court, but once he was in Madrid he was sentenced for his role in the flight of death.

Lewin’s account was poignant: not only because she had been detained in ESMA, but also because she shared with the audience details that made the context even more clear.

According to her testimony, the left-wing militants held in the centre not only had to put up with torture and abuses, but were also obliged to work: from manual work to political work. This because the cream of the crop of the peronismo was held in the centre, and apparently the army official there had their own sub-agenda within the ruling junta so required labour force to analyze news and developments. People from the third floor, once a week, were drugged, taken to a truck and then taken for the flight. But there was still a question left unanswered: what had happened to the aircrafts?

In some of the detention centres, there were the airplanes’ travel logs in place that nobody had touched since the junta days, which she and Ceraudo started to investigate with the help of pilots. Starting from the travel logs, the Internet helped them to locate some of the aircrafts by simply searching for the registration numbers that the airplanes had: one plane is in Luxemburg; another in the UK, for a twist of fate being used by the same Royal Air Force that the Argentine army fought against in the Falklands, and the final one in Florida. By looking at the travel logs, another detail of the cruelty of the flights emerged: the pilots went further away from the coast, so that the streams could not send the corpses back to the shore.

These stories show how the search for truth and justice is a difficult process, where the determination of some, such as the families of the desaparecidos or good journalists, benefits a whole society.