The New Dictator on the Block: The Ongoing Fight Against Impunity in Argentina
by Wes Enzinna
Today, March 24th, 2006, marks the thirty year anniversary of the coup that brought to power one of history’s most sanguinary regimes, Argentina’s infamous military dictatorship, “El Proceso.” About a week earlier, on March 18, a milestone of a related yet more inspiring sort took place—the biggest Escrache in Argentine history. If you had been sitting in one of the residential buildings that line the 600 block of Avenida Cabildo in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires this past week, watching this escrache unfold in the street below, it might have seemed pure anarchy, a perfect portrait of Bakhtiniana carnivalesque: 10,000 revelers dancing, singing, throwing eggs and paint. Yet this escrache, like previous ones, was actually somber in intent, meticulously organized and poignantly purposeful. So what exactly is an escrache? First, a little history.
On December 10, 1983, the Argentine dictatorship that had for the previous seven years kidnapped, tortured, and murdered its way into history (and 30,000 Argentine citizens out of history), collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. Democratic governance was swiftly restored under president Raúl Alfonsin, yet like so many other “transitions to democracy” very few of those responsible for the crimes committed during the previous regime were brought to trial or punished.
President Alfonsin established CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) to try and punish the nine leaders and other important officials of the military juntas, yet, while the Prosecutor in the case, Dr Julio Strassera, concluded that the Armed forces had committed crimes against humanity and amounted to “State Terrorism,” only five of these nine were sentenced to prison terms. Thousands of others involved in the dictatorship went free, and the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, passed in 1986 and 1987 respectively, guaranteed this—as Human Rights Watch explains, “The Full Stop Law prevented the hearing of cases filed with the courts after a deadline of 60 days. The Due Obedience Law granted automatic immunity to all members of the military except those in positions of command.” If Alfonsin had left open any possibility of punishing ex-members of the Juntas, the following President-elect, Carlos Menem, closed them: in 1989, he pardoned almost all military officials implicated in the dictatorship, including those punished by CONADEP.
Enter HIJOS and the escrache. In order to counter Alfonsin, Menem, and the general Democratic government’s policies of indifference and impunity, the groups HIJOS and H.I.J.O.S.(henceforth referred to as HIJOS), formed in 1995 and composed entirely of children of persons murdered and/or disappeared during el proceso, invented the escrache. The goal of the escrache was to expose those ex-torturers, murderers, or otherwise architects of death who had gone un-punished to the public, and to call attention to the Democratic government’s inadequate pursuit of justice.
An escrache (the word literally means something like “exposé”) targets a specific ex-member of the dictatorship living un-punished and in freedom and involves a march to that person’s doorstep. Once at the home of the culprit, HIJOS and their many supporters hold a demonstration, where by way of dancing, singing and theater, paint flinging, and handing out pamphlets and holding banners, their target is called out. One of the group’s first escraches focused on Leopoldo Galtieri, the “Majestic General,” as Reagan’s Security Advisor described him, who led the Dictatorship from 1981 to 1982—it drew about 400 people. Another escrache targeted Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, Police Commissioner of Buenos Aires during “el proceso,” and the man responsible for the “Night of the Pencils,” the name given to an incident in which sixteen high school students were kidnapped and tortured, six of them murdered, for protesting cutbacks in their school’s budget. In total, there have been about thirty escraches, and in stark contrast to the crimes they denounce, they have all been peaceful (that is, the demonstrators have always been peaceful—various escraches have been brutally dispersed by the police).
Really, it is shocking there hasn’t been more violence. If anyone, instead of targeting ex-members of the dictatorship for escraches had targeted them for assassination, it is doubtful many tears would have been shed. Yet, despite their nation’s bloody past, Argentineans have overwhelmingly rejected violence and demonstrated a commitment to peaceful solutions. HIJOS and the escrache is a testament to this commitment, as is the whole of the Argentinean Left’s refusal to perpetuate politics-cum-violence. For, while on the Right the national legacy of violence is indelibly strong, on the Left the legacy of violence is no less rich. The intrepid PRT-ERP and Monteneros guerilla movements of the 1970’s offer strong historical traditions from which today’s justice movements could draw. Yet, while perhaps agreeing with their cause, HIJOS and others have rejected their violent methods. The escrache signifies a dedicated effort to deal peacefully with the collective wounds of living in a post-dictator society, where the guilty have gone unpunished, where there always exists the possible encounter with your parents’ executioner at the corner store.
The escrache, then, is a symbol of the Argentinean people’s efforts to deal with the wounds of “el proceso,” to bring its leaders to justice, and their commitment to do so peacefully. And it appears these efforts have had an effect on the Argentine government. Beginning around 2001 and continuing up to the present, beneath the banner of President Nestor Kirchner’s vow to end the “Culture of Impunity,” a series of rulings by Congress and the Supreme Court have repealed the previous Impunity laws and reversed the longstanding ban on extradition of ex-Junta members (Spain, among other nations, has long sought to extradite them for crimes committed against Spanish citizens), leading to the arrest of 40 alleged Argentine human rights violators. As one government official proclaimed, “The era of sweetheart deals for the military, extracted at gunpoint from democratic leaders, is over.” These actions seem to echo HIJOS’ calls for justice and punishment.
Yet, it remains to be seen if this is just an attempt to pacify criticism and garner political support, or if it is a genuine effort to pursue justice. As David Sax points out, “Spain never formally requested the extraditions [from Argentina], the 40 prisoners were freed after only six weeks in custody, and the repeal of the amnesty laws has only led to wrangling within the judicial system.” Sax goes so far as to suggest that “much of Kirchner's supposed fight against the past is merely window dressing designed to shore up political support.”
Indeed, HIJOS and its supporters have a right to be suspicious. The escraches have never been supported by the government, and in fact they have “always existed in a state of illegality,” as Eduardo, a member of H.I.J.O.S., points out. Frequently, in fact, the public denunciations have been maliciously repressed by the police, and the organization and its supporters have encountered brutal violence not just during actions but in the home and on the streets. In fact, just this Monday in Cordoba, following a celebration for a recently recovered child kidnapped during the dictatorship (a celebration that itself received various death threats), Sonia Torres, an elderly female teacher, member of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and associate of HIJOS, was brutally beaten in her home by three men—the three men stole nothing. The next day members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires received threats from someone calling himself the “Commando of March 24th.” The government has never made any serious attempt to investigate such cases. So while the Kirchner government is quick to pat itself on the back for its recent efforts, bombarding the city this month with billboards reading “The guilty are being punished,” perhaps they are getting ahead of themselves. In a country where the government’s commitment to justice wavers as much as its flag, no one is certain if Kirchner or the Courts will make good on their promises to end the impunity—that the escrache remains illegal to this day, and that a blind eye has been turned to past repression suggests that they won’t.
If you had been sitting inside one of those posh homes on Avenida Cabildo, watching the escrache take place in the street below, the revelers singing and dancing, it may have looked like chaos. But if you listened to the words of the songs being sung, or read the phrases on the banners—Videla Asesino…Videla the Killer—this escrache would not have looked like chaos, but rather a denunciation of your murderous neighbor, and a peaceful cry for justice. And if you had been sitting at a window watching this spectacle unfold, and recognized your own name on the signs—Videla Asesino—you surely would have known the escrache was not chaos, but rather a highly organized effort to call you to account for the unremorseful barbarity you unleashed on “your” country only thirty years ago—for the pregnant women whose fetuses, still in utero, you electrocuted to death, or the teenagers you stripped naked, drugged, and threw from planes to their deaths in the filthy River de la Plata. Indeed, it is from this perspective that Videla and his neighbors passed that otherwise quiet Saturday, almost thirty years to the date from the coup that initiated the darkest seven years of Argentine history, their wealthy neighborhood transformed into a sort of International Military Tribunal in the streets, doing what the Argentine government, if not in words then in action, refuses to do.
*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wes Enzinna is from upstate New York. He currently lives in Buenos Aires.
Today, March 24th, 2006, marks the thirty year anniversary of the coup that brought to power one of history’s most sanguinary regimes, Argentina’s infamous military dictatorship, “El Proceso.” About a week earlier, on March 18, a milestone of a related yet more inspiring sort took place—the biggest Escrache in Argentine history. If you had been sitting in one of the residential buildings that line the 600 block of Avenida Cabildo in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires this past week, watching this escrache unfold in the street below, it might have seemed pure anarchy, a perfect portrait of Bakhtiniana carnivalesque: 10,000 revelers dancing, singing, throwing eggs and paint. Yet this escrache, like previous ones, was actually somber in intent, meticulously organized and poignantly purposeful. So what exactly is an escrache? First, a little history.
On December 10, 1983, the Argentine dictatorship that had for the previous seven years kidnapped, tortured, and murdered its way into history (and 30,000 Argentine citizens out of history), collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. Democratic governance was swiftly restored under president Raúl Alfonsin, yet like so many other “transitions to democracy” very few of those responsible for the crimes committed during the previous regime were brought to trial or punished.
President Alfonsin established CONADEP (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) to try and punish the nine leaders and other important officials of the military juntas, yet, while the Prosecutor in the case, Dr Julio Strassera, concluded that the Armed forces had committed crimes against humanity and amounted to “State Terrorism,” only five of these nine were sentenced to prison terms. Thousands of others involved in the dictatorship went free, and the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, passed in 1986 and 1987 respectively, guaranteed this—as Human Rights Watch explains, “The Full Stop Law prevented the hearing of cases filed with the courts after a deadline of 60 days. The Due Obedience Law granted automatic immunity to all members of the military except those in positions of command.” If Alfonsin had left open any possibility of punishing ex-members of the Juntas, the following President-elect, Carlos Menem, closed them: in 1989, he pardoned almost all military officials implicated in the dictatorship, including those punished by CONADEP.
Enter HIJOS and the escrache. In order to counter Alfonsin, Menem, and the general Democratic government’s policies of indifference and impunity, the groups HIJOS and H.I.J.O.S.(henceforth referred to as HIJOS), formed in 1995 and composed entirely of children of persons murdered and/or disappeared during el proceso, invented the escrache. The goal of the escrache was to expose those ex-torturers, murderers, or otherwise architects of death who had gone un-punished to the public, and to call attention to the Democratic government’s inadequate pursuit of justice.
An escrache (the word literally means something like “exposé”) targets a specific ex-member of the dictatorship living un-punished and in freedom and involves a march to that person’s doorstep. Once at the home of the culprit, HIJOS and their many supporters hold a demonstration, where by way of dancing, singing and theater, paint flinging, and handing out pamphlets and holding banners, their target is called out. One of the group’s first escraches focused on Leopoldo Galtieri, the “Majestic General,” as Reagan’s Security Advisor described him, who led the Dictatorship from 1981 to 1982—it drew about 400 people. Another escrache targeted Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, Police Commissioner of Buenos Aires during “el proceso,” and the man responsible for the “Night of the Pencils,” the name given to an incident in which sixteen high school students were kidnapped and tortured, six of them murdered, for protesting cutbacks in their school’s budget. In total, there have been about thirty escraches, and in stark contrast to the crimes they denounce, they have all been peaceful (that is, the demonstrators have always been peaceful—various escraches have been brutally dispersed by the police).
Really, it is shocking there hasn’t been more violence. If anyone, instead of targeting ex-members of the dictatorship for escraches had targeted them for assassination, it is doubtful many tears would have been shed. Yet, despite their nation’s bloody past, Argentineans have overwhelmingly rejected violence and demonstrated a commitment to peaceful solutions. HIJOS and the escrache is a testament to this commitment, as is the whole of the Argentinean Left’s refusal to perpetuate politics-cum-violence. For, while on the Right the national legacy of violence is indelibly strong, on the Left the legacy of violence is no less rich. The intrepid PRT-ERP and Monteneros guerilla movements of the 1970’s offer strong historical traditions from which today’s justice movements could draw. Yet, while perhaps agreeing with their cause, HIJOS and others have rejected their violent methods. The escrache signifies a dedicated effort to deal peacefully with the collective wounds of living in a post-dictator society, where the guilty have gone unpunished, where there always exists the possible encounter with your parents’ executioner at the corner store.
The escrache, then, is a symbol of the Argentinean people’s efforts to deal with the wounds of “el proceso,” to bring its leaders to justice, and their commitment to do so peacefully. And it appears these efforts have had an effect on the Argentine government. Beginning around 2001 and continuing up to the present, beneath the banner of President Nestor Kirchner’s vow to end the “Culture of Impunity,” a series of rulings by Congress and the Supreme Court have repealed the previous Impunity laws and reversed the longstanding ban on extradition of ex-Junta members (Spain, among other nations, has long sought to extradite them for crimes committed against Spanish citizens), leading to the arrest of 40 alleged Argentine human rights violators. As one government official proclaimed, “The era of sweetheart deals for the military, extracted at gunpoint from democratic leaders, is over.” These actions seem to echo HIJOS’ calls for justice and punishment.
Yet, it remains to be seen if this is just an attempt to pacify criticism and garner political support, or if it is a genuine effort to pursue justice. As David Sax points out, “Spain never formally requested the extraditions [from Argentina], the 40 prisoners were freed after only six weeks in custody, and the repeal of the amnesty laws has only led to wrangling within the judicial system.” Sax goes so far as to suggest that “much of Kirchner's supposed fight against the past is merely window dressing designed to shore up political support.”
Indeed, HIJOS and its supporters have a right to be suspicious. The escraches have never been supported by the government, and in fact they have “always existed in a state of illegality,” as Eduardo, a member of H.I.J.O.S., points out. Frequently, in fact, the public denunciations have been maliciously repressed by the police, and the organization and its supporters have encountered brutal violence not just during actions but in the home and on the streets. In fact, just this Monday in Cordoba, following a celebration for a recently recovered child kidnapped during the dictatorship (a celebration that itself received various death threats), Sonia Torres, an elderly female teacher, member of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and associate of HIJOS, was brutally beaten in her home by three men—the three men stole nothing. The next day members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires received threats from someone calling himself the “Commando of March 24th.” The government has never made any serious attempt to investigate such cases. So while the Kirchner government is quick to pat itself on the back for its recent efforts, bombarding the city this month with billboards reading “The guilty are being punished,” perhaps they are getting ahead of themselves. In a country where the government’s commitment to justice wavers as much as its flag, no one is certain if Kirchner or the Courts will make good on their promises to end the impunity—that the escrache remains illegal to this day, and that a blind eye has been turned to past repression suggests that they won’t.
If you had been sitting inside one of those posh homes on Avenida Cabildo, watching the escrache take place in the street below, the revelers singing and dancing, it may have looked like chaos. But if you listened to the words of the songs being sung, or read the phrases on the banners—Videla Asesino…Videla the Killer—this escrache would not have looked like chaos, but rather a denunciation of your murderous neighbor, and a peaceful cry for justice. And if you had been sitting at a window watching this spectacle unfold, and recognized your own name on the signs—Videla Asesino—you surely would have known the escrache was not chaos, but rather a highly organized effort to call you to account for the unremorseful barbarity you unleashed on “your” country only thirty years ago—for the pregnant women whose fetuses, still in utero, you electrocuted to death, or the teenagers you stripped naked, drugged, and threw from planes to their deaths in the filthy River de la Plata. Indeed, it is from this perspective that Videla and his neighbors passed that otherwise quiet Saturday, almost thirty years to the date from the coup that initiated the darkest seven years of Argentine history, their wealthy neighborhood transformed into a sort of International Military Tribunal in the streets, doing what the Argentine government, if not in words then in action, refuses to do.
*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wes Enzinna is from upstate New York. He currently lives in Buenos Aires.
posted by Alice at
Friday, March 24, 2006
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