A Reader on Reading

I can’t remember her name (so unfaithful are the promises of memory), but she was one grade below mine at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. I met her in my second year of high school, on one of the excursions our zealous monitors liked to organize for us during which we discovered the art of rigging up tents, a taste for reading around the campfire, and the mystery of politics. What exactly these politics were we never quite found out, except that at the time they echoed, somewhat bombastically, our vague notions of freedom and equality. In time, we read (or tried to read) arid books on economy and sociology and history, but for most of us politics remained a serviceable word that named our need for comradeship and our contempt for authority. The latter included the school’s conservative headmaster; the remote landowners of vast areas of Patagonia (where, at the foot of the Andes, we went camping and where, as I’ve mentioned, we saw peasant families living out their distant and for us inconceivable lives); and the military, whose tanks, on 28 June 1966, we saw lumber through the streets of Buenos Aires, one of many such processions towards the presidential palace on Plaza de Mayo. She was sixteen that year; in 1969 I left Buenos Aires and never saw her again. She was small, I remember, with black and curly hair which she had cut very short. Her voice was unemphatic, soft and clear, and I could always recognize her on the phone after just one syllable. She painted, but without much conviction. She was good at math. In 1982, shortly before the Malvinas War and towards the end of the military dictatorship, I returned to Buenos Aires for a brief visit. Asking for news of old friends, so many dead and disappeared in those terrible years, I was told that she was among the missing. She had been kidnapped leaving the university where she had sat on the student council. Officially, there was no record of her detention, but someone had apparently seen her at El Campito, one of the military concentration camps, in a brief moment when her hood had been removed for a medical inspection. The military usually kept their prisoners hooded so that later on they would not be able to recognize their torturers.

On 24 April 1995, Victor Armando Ibáñez, an Argentinean sergeant who had served as a guard at El Campito, gave an interview to the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa. According to Ibáñez, between 2,000 and 2,300 of those imprisoned there, men and women, old people and adolescents, were “executed” by the army at El Campito during the two years of his service, from 1976 to 1978. When the prisoners’ time came, Ibáñez told the newspaper, “they were injected with a strong drug called pananoval, which made a real mess of them in a few seconds. It produced something like a heart attack. [The injections would leave the prisoners alive but unconscious.] Then they were thrown into the sea. We flew at a very low altitude. They were phantom flights, without registration. Sometimes I could see very large fish, like sharks, following the plane. The pilots said that they were fattened by human flesh. I leave the rest to your imagination,” Ibáñez said. “Imagine the worst.”

Ibáñez’s was the second “official” confession. A month earlier, a retired navy lieutenant commander, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, had confessed (also in La Prensa) to the same method of “disposing of the prisoners.” In response to his confession, Argentinean president Carlos Menem called Scilingo a “criminal,” reminded the press that the commander had been involved in a shady automobile deal, and asked how the word of a thief could be counted as true. He also ordered the navy to strip Scilingo of his rank.