Carta Abierta de un Escritor a la Junta Militar

[edit] Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta

1. The censorship of the press, the persecution of intellectuals, the raid on my house in Tigre, the murder of dear friends and the loss of a daughter who died fighting them, are some of the acts that force me to use this form of clandestine expression after having expressed my opinions freely as a writer and journalist for nearly thirty years.

The first anniversary of this Military Junta has provoked an assessment of the government's actions in documents and official speeches, in which what you call good decisions are errors, those that you recognize as errors are crimes, and those that you omit are calamities.

On March 24, 1976, you overthrew a government of which you were a part, to whose discredit you contributed as executives of its political repression, and whose end was signaled by elections called for nine months later. From this perspective what you destroyed wasn't the transitory mandate of Isabel Martínez, but the possibility of a democratic process in which the people would remedy evils that you continued and aggravated.

Illegitimate in its origin, the government that you practice could legitimize its acts by re-instating the program that eighty percent of Argentinians voted for with in the elections of 1973, and which continues to stand as an objective expression of the will of the people, the only possible meaning of the "national being" that you invoke so often.

Reversing this path you have restored the current of ideas and interests of the defeated minorities who hold back the development of productive forces, exploit the people and divide the Nation. A politics of this type can only impose itself temporarily, prohibiting political parties, taking control of the unions, gagging the press and instigating the most profound terror that Argentinian society has ever known.

2. Fifteen thousand disappeared, ten thousand prisoners, four thousand dead, tens of thousands of exiles are the naked figure of this terror.

The ordinary jails being full, you created virtual concentration camps in the main garrisons of the country in which no judge, lawyer, journalist, or international observer may enter. The military secrecy of proceedings, invoked as a necessity of investigation, turns the majority of detentions into kidnappings that permit torture without limit and shootings without justice. ^[1]

More than seven thousand appeals to habeas corpus have been denied in the last year. In thousands more cases of disappearance an appeal hasn't even been presented, because it is known in advance to be pointless, or because no lawyer can be found who would dare present one after the fifty or sixty who we doing so have in turn been kidnapped.

In this manner you have stripped torture of its time limit. As the arrested does not exist, there is no possibility of presenting him to a judge within ten days, according to a law that was respected even at the repressive height of previous dictatorships.

The lack of a time limit has been complemented with the lack of a limit on the methods used, recalling an era in which the joints and flesh of victims were operated on directly, but now with surgical and pharmacological aids that weren't available to those torturers. The rack, the drill, skinning alive, the saw of the medieval inquisition reappear in testimony along with the prod and the "submarine", the blowtorch of contemporary times. ^[2]

Through successive concessions to the supposition that the aim of extermination of the guerilla justifies all the methods that you use, you have arrived at absolute torture, atemporal, metaphysical, in that the original aim of obtaining information has been lost in the disturbed minds you condition to give in to the impulse to crush human substance until it breaks and make it lose the dignity that the torturer has lost, that you yourselves have lost.

3. The refusal of this Junta to publish the names of the prisoners is also the cover of a systematic execution of hostages in the early morning and in waste lands with the pretext that they are hatching battle plans and imaginary escape attempts.

Extremists who distribute pamphlets in the countryside, paint irrigation ditches or pile by the tens into vehicles that are set on fire are stereotypes of a script that isn't made to be believed, but to mock the international reaction to executions in order, while internally stressing the character of reprisals unleashed in the same places and on the same dates as guerrilla actions.

Seventy shootings after the bomb in Seguridad Federal, 55 in response to the explosion in the La Plata Police Department, 30 for the attempt on the Ministry of Defence, 40 in the New Year's Massacre that followed the death of colonel Castellanos, 19 after the explosion that destroyed the Ciudadela comisariat, form part of 1,200 executions in 300 supposed encounters in which the opponent had no injuries and the forces at your command had no deaths.

Depositaries of a collective guilt that is abolished in the norms of civilized justice, incapable of influencing the policies that dictate the acts for which they are detained, many of these hostages are union delegates, intellectuals, family members of guerrillas, unarmed opponents, simple suspects who are killed to even the balance of deaths according to the foreign "body-count" doctrine that the SS used in occupied Europe and the invaders in Vietnam.

The figure of guerrillas injured or captured in real combat is also a piece of evidence that comes out of military communications, which in one year attributed 600 deaths and only 10 or 15 injuries to the guerrillas, a proportion unseen even in the most fierce conflicts. This impression is confirmed by a journalistic sampling in clandestine circulation that reveals that between December 18, 1976 and February 3, 1977, in 40 real actions, legal forces sustained 23 deaths and 40 injuries, and the guerrillas 63 deaths. ^[3]

More than one hundred have also been killed in escape attempts, the official story not intended to convince anyone, but instead to warn the guerrillas and the parties that the remaining prisoners are a strategic reserve, available to the commanding officers according to how the battles are going, tactical advisability or the mood of the moment.

In this manner General Benjamín Menéndez, leader of the Third Army Corps, won his laurels, before March 24 with the murder of Marcos Osatinsky, detained in Córdoba, after with the death of Hugo Vaca Narvaja and fifty other prisoners in various applications of the law of escape attempts, executed without mercy and related without decency. ^[4]

The murder of Dardo Cabo, detained in April 1975, shot on January 6, 1977, with seven other prisoners under the jurisdiction of the First Army Corps commanded by general Suárez Masson, reveals that these episodes aren't just a few soldiers going overboard, but in fact the same policies that you plan amongst your military staff, discuss in your cabinet meetings, put in charge of the armed forces and approve as members of the military junta.

4. Between one thousand five hundred and three thousand people have been massacred in secret, after you prohibited reporting of bodies that in some cases have anyway appeared, to affect other countries, for their genocidal magnitude or for the disgust provoked amongst your own forces. ^[5]

Twenty-five mutilated bodies surfaced between March and October, 1976, on the Uruguayan coast, a small part perhaps of the cargo of prisoners tortured-until-death by the Navy School of Mechanics, sunk in the Río de la Plata by boats from that same force, including a 15 year old boy, Floreal Avellaneda, bound hand and foot, "with injuries in the anal region and visible fractures", according to the autopsy.

A local diving in the Lago San Roque de Córdoba in August, 1976, discovered an underwater cemetery, and went to the comisariat but was unable to file a report, and then wrote to the newspapers who wouldn't publish it. ^[6]

Thirty-four bodies in Buenos Aires, between April 3 and 9, 1976, eight in San Telmo on July 4, ten in Río Luján on October 9, serve to mark the massacres of August 20 that piled up 30 deaths 15 kilometers from Campo de Mayo and 17 in Lomas de Zamora.

In your statements you repeat the fiction of right-wing groups, presumed inheritants of López Rega's 3 A, capable of entering the biggest garrison in the country in military trucks, filling the Río de la Plata with bodies, or throwing prisoners into the sea from First Air Brigade transports ^[7], without General Videla, Admiral Massera or Brigadier Agosti finding out. The 3 A today are the 3 Armed Forces, and the Junta that you govern isn't the guardian of the balance between "violence of distinct signs" nor the just arbiter between "two terrorisms", but instead the source of that same terror that has lost its direction, and can only babble the speech of death. ^[8]

The same historical continuity binds the assasination of General Carlos Prats, during the previous government, with the kidnapping and death of General Juan José Torres, Zelmar Michelini, Héctor Gutiérrez Ruíz and dozens of exiles in whom the aim was to murder the possibility of democratic processes in Chile, Boliva and Uruguay. ^[9]

The certain participation in these crimes by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Police, directed by officials mentored by the CIA through the AID, like commisioners Juan Gattei and Antonio Gettor, subject to the authority of Mr. Gardener Hathaway, Station Chief of the CIA in Argentina, is a seedbed for future revelations like those which are today shaking the international community, that won't die out even when the role becomes clear of that agency and the high chiefs of the Army, led by General Menéndez, in the creation of the Logia Libertadores de América, that replaced the 3 A until its global role was assumed by the Junta in the name of the 3 Armed Forces.

This leadership of extermination doesn't even exclude settling personal scores, like the assassination of captain Horacio Gándara, who for a decade investigated the business dealings of highly placed Marines, or of the "Prensa Libre" journalist Horacio Novillo, stabbed and burned to ashes, after that newspaper denounced the connections between minister Martínez de Hoz and international monopolies.

In light of these episodes the true meaning of the definition of war pronounced by one of your leaders becomes clear: "The battle that we fight recognizes no moral or natural limits, it takes place beyond good or bad." ^[10]

5. These acts, that shake the conscience of the civilized world, are not however the most severe suffering that you have brought upon the Argentinian people, nor the worst human rights violations that you have incurred. In the economic policies of this government one must look not just for the explanation of your crimes, but also a greater atrocity that punishes millions of human beings with planned misery.

In one year you have reduced the real salary of workers by 40%, diminished their share of national income to 30%, extended the number of hours per day that a worker needs to labour for the family basket from 6 to 18 hours ^[11], thus reviving forms of forced labour that have ceased to exist even in the last redoubts of colonialism.

Freezing salaries with pistol whips while prices rise on the points of bayonets, abolishing any form of collective bargaining, prohibiting assemblies and internal commisions, lengthening hours, raising unemployment to a record 9% ^[12], promising to augment it with 300,000 new redundancies, you have regressed rates of production to levels last seen at the beginning of the industrial era, and when workers have tried to protest, you have labeled them as subversives, kidnapping entire bodies of delegates that in some cases later surfaced dead, and in others didn't surface at all. ^[13]

The results of this policy have been withering. In this first year of government, the consumption of food has diminished by 40%, clothing by more than 50%, and that of medicine has practically disappeared among the working class. There are now areas of Greater Buenos Aires in which infant mortality is over 30%, a figure that makes us equal to Rhodesia, Dahomey or the Guayanas; illnesses such as summer diarrhea, parasitosis and even rabies in which figures are climbing towards world record levels and higher. As if these were goals to be desired and reached for, you have reduced funds for public health to less than a third of military spending, decreasing funds even for free hospitals while hundreds of doctors, professionals and technicians join the exodus provoked by the terror, decreases in salaries or "rationalization".

Walking for just a few hours in Greater Buenos Aires is enough to see the speed with which this policy has put ten million inhabitants into misery. Cities half-lit, entire neighbourhoods without water because the industrial monopolies tap the underground waterways, thousands of blocks converted into a single decaying patch because you only pave the military neighbourhoods and decorate the Plaza de Mayo, all the beaches of the world's biggest river contaminated because associates of minister Martínez de Hoz pour their industrial wastes into it, and the only measure your government has taken is to prohibit people from bathing.

In abstract goals of the economy, those that are generally referred to as "the country", you haven't been very fortunate either. A decrease in Gross Domestic Product of close to 3%, a foreign debt that reaches US$600 per person, annual inflation of 400%, a rise in circulation that in just one week in december reached 9%, a decrease in foreign investment of 13% including global brands, are the strange fruit of cold deliberation and crude incompetence.

While all the protective and social functions of the state atrophy, disolving into pure anaemia, only one is growing and becoming autonomous. US $1.8 billion, the equivalent of half of all Argentine exports, were marked for Security and Defense in 1977. Four thousand new positions for Federal Police agents, twelve thousand in Buenos Aires province, with salaries twice that of an industrial worker and triple that of a school director, while since February military salaries have secretly been raised by 120%, proving that there is no pay freeze or unemployment in the rein of terror and death, the only Argentine field of activity where production is growing and the value of a fallen guerilla rises faster than the dollar.

6. Dictated by the International Monetary Fund, according to a recipe applied indiscriminately to Zaire or to Chile, Uruguay or Indonesia, the economic policy of this Junta only recognises as beneficiaries the old ruling oligarchy, the new speculative oligarchy and a select group of international monopolies lead by ITT, Esso, automotive firms, US Steel and Siemens, to which minister Martínez de Hoz and all the members of his cabinet are personally linked.

A rise of 722% in the price of animal produce in 1976 highlights the magnitude of the restoration of the oligarchy created by Martínez de Hoz in keeping with the creed of the Rural Society, expounded by his president, Celedonio Pereda: "Amazed that certain small but active groups continue insisting that food must be cheap". ^[14]

The marvel of a Commercial Exchange in which in one week it was possible for some to make gains of one hundred and two hundred percent without working, where there are businesses that from night until morning double their capital, without producing any more than before, the crazy wheel of speculation in dollars, exchange bills, adjustable values, simple usury that calculates interest hourly, are strange practices indeed for a government that came to finish the "feast of the corrupt".

Denationalizing the banks puts national savings and credit in the hands of foreign banks, indemnifying ITT and Siemens favours the very companies that robbed the State, returning distribution centers increases the earnings of Shell and Esso, decreasing customs duties creates jobs in Hong Kong and Singapore, and unemployment in Argentina. Faced with the conjunction of all these facts, one asks oneself who are the unpatriotic referred to in official pronouncements, where are the mercenaries in the service of foreign interests, what is the ideology that threatens national being.

If some bewitching propaganda, warped reflection of evil acts, could make the Junta appear to seek peace, General Videla defend human rights and Admiral Massera cherish life, one would still request that the commanders in chief of the armed forces consider the abyss towards which they are driving the country behind the illusion of winning a war that, even if it managed to kill the last guerilla, would simply reappear under new guises, because the grievances that for more than twenty years have provoked the resistance of the Argentine people will not disappear but instead will deepen for the memory of havok wreaked and the revelation of atrocities commited.

These are the reflections that on the first anniversary of their disgraceful government I want to make heard to the members of the Junta, without hope of being listened to, with the certainty of being persecuted, but faithful to the commitment that I assumed a long time ago of giving testimony in difficult moments.

Rodolfo Walsh. - C.I. 2845022 Buenos Aires, March 24, 1977

1. ↑ From January 1977, the Junta began publishing incomplete names of newly imprisoned and "freed", who mostly aren't actually free, but have been processed and are no longer within their reach, while continuing to be prisoners. The names of thousands of prisoners are still a military secret, and the conditions for their torture and subsequent execution remain intact.
2. ↑ The Peronist leader Jorge Lizaso was skinned alive, the radical ex-representative Mario Amaya died from beatings, the ex-representative Muñiz Barreto had his neck broken. Testimony of a survivor: "Shocks on the arms, the hands, the thighs, close to the mouth every time I cried or prayed... Every twenty minutes they opened the door and told me they were going to make mince-meat of me with the grinding machine that I could hear running."
3. ↑ "Cadena Informativa", Message Number 4, February, 1977.
4. ↑ An exact version appears in this letter from the prisoners of the Ecausado's Jail to the bishop of Córdoba, monsignor Primatesta: "On May 17, tricked into going to the infirmary, 6 inmates are taken away and later shot. They are Miguel Angel Mosse, José Svagusa, Diana Fidelman, Luis Verón, Ricardo Yung and Eduardo Hernández, whose death in an escape attempt was reported by the Third Army Corps. On May 29, José Pucheta and Carlos Sgadurra are taken away. The latter had been punished to the point at which he could no longer stand due to multiple limb fractures. Later they were found shot during an escape attempt."
5. ↑ In the first 15 days of the military government, 63 bodies appeared, according to the newspapers. An annual projection posits the figure at 1,500. The assumption that it could double is based on the fact that since January 1976 journalistic information was incomplete and on the general rise in repression after the coup. A realistic general estimate of the deaths caused by the Junta is the following. Deaths in combat: 600. Shot: 1,300. Executed in secret: 2,000. Various: 100. Total: 4,000.
6. ↑ Letter from Isaías Zanotti, distributed by ANCLA, Agencia Clandestina de Noticias.
7. ↑ "Program" directed between July and December, 1976, by Brigadier Mariani, chief of the First Ariel Brigade of Palomar. They used Fokker F-27 transports.
8. ↑ Chancellor Vice-admiral Guzzeti in a report published by "La Opinión" on 3/10/76 admitted that "right-wing terrorism is not actually such" but instead "an antibody".
9. ↑ General Prats, last minister of the Army of President Allende, killed by a bomb in September 1974. The Uruguayan ex-parliamentarians Michelini y Gutiérrez Ruiz were found machine gunned on 2/5/76. The body of General Torres, ex-President of Bolivia, was found 2/6/76, after the Minister of the Interior and ex-Chief of Police of Isabel Martínez, General Harguindeguy, accused him of "faking" his kidnapping.
10. ↑ Leutenant Colonel Hugo Ildebrando Pascarelli according to "La Razón", 12/6/76. Chief of Group I of the Artillery of Ciudadela. Pascarelli is assumed responsible for 33 shootings between January 5 and Feburary 3, 1977.
11. ↑ Union of Swiss Banks, data from June 1976. The situation then became even worse.
12. ↑ "Clarín" newspaper.
13. ↑ Amongst the national leaders kidnapped are Mario Aguirre of ATE, Jorge Di Pasquale of Farmacia, Oscar Smith of Luz y Fuerza. The kidnapping and murder of delegates have been particularly severe in Metallurgical and Maritime unions.
14. ↑ Prensa Libre, 16/12/76.