A Reader on Reading

Since his election in 1989, Menem had been trying to shelve the whole question of military culpability during the so-called “dirty war” that ravaged Argentina from 1973 to 1982, and during which more than thirty thousand people were killed. Not content with the deadline for filing charges against the military (which his predecessor, Raul Alfonsin had set as 22 February 1988), on 6 October 1989 Menem had offered most of the military involved in human rights abuses a general pardon. A year later, three days after Christmas, Menem issued a general amnesty to all involved in the events that had bled the country for nine long years. Accordingly, he released from prison Lieutenant General Jorge Videla (who was later re-arrested) and General Roberto Viola, both of whom had been appointed to the presidency by the military junta, from 1976 to 1981 and for ten months in 1981, respectively. In legal terms, a pardon implies not an exoneration or acquittal but only a relief from punishment. An amnesty, on the other hand (such as the military had granted itself in extremis in 1982, and which was repealed by Alfonsin), is, in effect and intention, a recognition of innocence that wipes away any imputation of crime. After the declarations of Scilingo and Ibáñez, President Menem briefly threatened the military with a retraction of the 1990 amnesty.

Until the confessions of 1995, the Argentinean military authorities had recognized no wrongdoing in their so-called anti-terrorist activities. The extraordinary nature of guerrilla war demanded, the authorities said, extraordinary measures. In this declaration they were well advised. In 1977, following a joint report from Amnesty International and the U. S. State Department’s Human Rights Bureau accusing the Argentinean security forces of being responsible for hundreds of disappearances, the military hired an American public relations company, Burson-Marsteller, to plan its response. The thirty-five-page memorandum presented by Burson-Marsteller recommended that the military “use the best professional communications skills to transmit those aspects of Argentine events showing that the terrorist problem is being handled in a firm and just manner, with equal justice for all.” A tall order, but not impossible in the Age of Advertising. As if moved by the hackneyed motto “The pen is mightier than the sword,” Burson-Marsteller suggested that the military appeal for “the generation of positive editorial comment” from writers “of conservative or moderate persuasions.” As a result of their campaign, Ronald Reagan declared in the Miami News of 20 October 1978 that the State Department’s human rights office was “making a mess of our relations with the planet’s seventh largest country, Argentina, a nation with which we should be close friends.”

Over the years, others answered the advertisers’ appeal. In 1995, shortly after Ibáñez’s and Scilingo’s confessions, an article appeared in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, signed by Mario Vargas Llosa. Under the title “Playing with Fire,” Vargas Llosa argued that, horrible though the revelations might be, they were not news to anyone, merely confirmations of a truth “atrocious and nauseating for any half-moral conscience.” “It would certainly be wonderful,” he wrote, “if all those responsible for these unbelievable cruelties were taken to court and punished. This, however, is impossible, because the responsibility far exceeds the military sphere and implicates a vast spectrum of Argentinean society, including a fair number of those who today cry out, condemning retrospectively the violence to which they too, in one way or another, contributed.”

“It would certainly be wonderful”: this is the rhetorical topos of false regret, denoting a change from shared indignation at the “atrocious and nauseating” facts, to the more sober realization of what they “really” mean — the impossibility of attaining the “wonderful” goal of impartial justice. Vargas Llosa’s is an ancient argument, harking back to notions of original sin: no one soul can truly be held responsible because every soul is responsible “in one way or another” for the crimes of a nation, whether committed by the people themselves or by their leaders. More than a hundred years ago, Nikolai Gogol expressed the same absurdity in more elegant terms: “Seek out the judge, seek out the criminal, and then condemn both.”