A Reader on Reading

But the repression overflowed even the realm of civilian opposition. The National Commission on Disappeared People, led by the novelist Ernesto Sabato, concluded its report in September 1984: “We can state categorically—contrary to what the executors of this sinister plan maintain—that they did not pursue only the members of political organizations who carried out acts of terrorism. Among the victims are thousands who never had any links with such activity but were nevertheless subjected to horrific torture because they opposed the military dictatorship, took part in union or student activities, were well-known intellectuals who questioned state terrorism, or simply because they were relatives, friends, or names included in the address book of someone considered subversive.”

•Any government that uses torture and murder to enforce the law invalidates both its right to govern and the law it enforces, since one of the few basic tenets of any society in which citizens are granted equal rights is the sacredness of human life. “Clearly,’’ wrote G. K. Chesterton, “there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.” Any government that does not recognize this truth, and does not hold accountable those who torture and murder, can make no claims for its own justice. No government can rightly mirror the methods of its criminals, responding in kind to what it might deem an act against the nation’s laws. It cannot be guided by an individual sense of justice, or revenge, or greed, or even morality. It must encompass them all, these individual deeds of its citizens, within the parameters established by the country’s constitution. It must enforce the law with the law, and within the letter of the law. Beyond the law, a government is no longer a government but a usurped power, and as such it must be judged.

•Trust in the ultimate power of the law sustained many of the military dictatorship’s victims during those terrible years. In spite of the pain and the bewilderment caused by the officialized abuses, the be lief remained that in a not-too-distant future these acts would be brought to light and judged according to the law. The wish to torture the torturer and to kill the murderer must have been overwhelming, but even stronger was the sense that such acts of revenge would become indistinguishable from the acts that caused them and would be transformed, in some abominable way, into a victory for the abusers. Instead, the victims and their families continued to believe in some form of ultimate earthly judgment, in which the society that had been wronged would bring the guilty ones to trial according to the laws of that society. Only on the basis of such justice being done did they believe that their country might have another chance. Menem’s amnesty denied them that long-awaited possibility.

•This “absence of justice” was reflected with ghoulish symmetry in the “disappearing” tactics employed by the military, by which their victims—kidnapped, tortured, thrown from airplanes, dropped into unmarked graves — became not officially dead but merely “absent,” leaving the anguished families with no bodies to mourn. Julio Cortázar, speaking in 1981, described in these words the dictatorship’s method: “On the one hand, a virtual or real antagonist is suppressed; on the other, conditions are created so that the family and friends of the victims are often forced to remain silent as the only possibility of preserving the life of those whom their hearts won’t allow them to presume dead.” And he added, “If every human death entails an irrevocable absence, what can we say of this other absence that continues as a sort of abstract presence, like the obstinate denial of the absence we know to be final?” In that sense, Menem’s amnesty didn’t heal the sickness of the past—it merely prolonged that sickness into the present.