A Reader on Reading

Using the case of his own country as a history lesson, Vargas Llosa concluded his cri de coeur: “The example of what has happened in Peru, with a democracy which the Peruvian people have distorted — because of the violence of extremist groups and also because of the blindness and demagogy of certain political forces—and which they let fall like a ripe fruit in the arms of military and personal power, should open the eyes of those imprudent justice-seekers who, in Argentina, take advantage of a debate on the repression in the seventies to seek revenge, to avenge old grievances or continue by other means the insane war they started and then lost.”

Burson-Marsteller could not have come up with a more efficient publicist for its cause. What would a common reader, confident in Vargas Llosa’s intellectual authority, make of this impassioned conclusion? After hesitating, perhaps, at the comparison between Argentina and Peru (where the novelist-turned-politician thunderingly lost the presidential election), which seems to protest too much, too obviously, the reader is led into a far subtler argument: these “justice-seekers,” the seekers of that justice which, according to Vargas Llosa, is desirable but utopian—are they not in fact hypocrites who not only must share the guilt for the atrocities but are also to blame for starting a war which they then lost? Suddenly the scales of responsibility are tipped ominously to the victims’ side. Not a need for justice, not an urge to acknowledge wrongs officially, but an itch for revenge or, even worse, sheer spite apparently drives these so-called justice-seekers. The thirty thousand disappeared are not to be lamented; they were troublemakers who started it all. And those who survived — the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the thousands forced into exile, the hundreds of tortured men and women who crowd the pages of the 1984 Report on the Disappeared by the National Commission on Disappeared People, with their sober accounts of utterly indescribable sufferings — should not seek redress lest they themselves be called to judgment. And furthermore, the seventies are now so long ago … Would it not be better to forget?

Fortunately, there were readers who were not so confident. Mario Vargas Llosa’s article was reprinted in Le Monde on 18 May 1995. A week later (25 May), the Argentinean writer Juan José Saer published an answer in the same newspaper. After correcting a number of important factual errors in Vargas Llosa’s piece — calling Isabel Perón’s presidency a “democratic government,” ignoring the fact that between 1955 and 1983 Argentina enjoyed barely six years of freely elected leaders — Saer notes that Vargas Llosa’s arguments coincide, point by point, with those of the military leaders themselves, who argued that the official tactics of murder and torture had not been their choice but the choice of those who provoked them and forced them to make use of “extreme measures.” Saer also points out that Vargas Llosa’s notion of “collective responsibility” might place Vargas Llosa himself in a delicate position since, at a time when Argentinean intellectuals were being tortured or forced into exile, the Peruvian novelist continued to publish willingly in Argentina’s official press.

Saer responded to Vargas Llosa’s role, accusing him of being a spokesman for the military: he dismissed or ignored his arguments, which are based on a number of false assumptions. And yet, since these arguments must stand, thanks to Vargas Llosa’s craft, as the most eloquent of those penned by the defenders of a military amnesty, they deserve, perhaps, a closer examination.

•The notion of guilt shared between the military government, which came to power by force and used torture and murder to fight its opposers, and the victims, including guerrilla fighters, political objectors, and ordinary civilians with no political associations, is fallacious. While it could be argued that in a sense the army of insurrectionists and the official Argentinean army were equal forces (though, even here, the numbers appear to be on the order of 1 to 1,000), no argument can find a balance of power between the organized military forces and the intellectuals, artists, union leaders, students, and members of the clergy who expressed disagreement with them. The civilian who voices an objection to the actions of the government is not guilty of any crime; on the contrary, vigilance is an essential civic duty in any democratic society, and every citizen must become, as it were, God’s spy. “And take upon’s the mystery of things,” says King Lear, “As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by th’ moon.”