LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      The degree of complicity in these and other crimes stretched all the way to the top, to the government ministries and leading figures of the regime. The mechanism of deceit and denial became formulaic. During the worst years of the terror, from 1976 through 1978, individuals with missing family members wrote to the Ministry of Interior, requesting, often pleading, for information about their loved ones. In Córdoba, after reaching the ministry, such petitions would be remitted back to provincial authorities and have to pass through series of bureaucratic steps: first to the province’s Ministerio del Gobierno, then to the Jefe del Departamento Operaciones Policiales (D3), then to police’s Departamento de Inteligencia (D2), moving on to Jefatura de Policia de la Provincia, then to the Secretaría de Estado de Seguridad, and finally back to the Ministerio de Gobierno, at which point the Ministerio de Gobierno would remit a response back to Ministry of the Interior who would then inform the petitioner that the person in question was not in custody and the government had no knowledge of the individual. The Jefatura de Policía was the point at which official denial of knowledge of the prisoner’s whereabouts would begin. This bureaucratic maze allowed both for the fragmentation of responsibility and a belabored, drawn-out process meant to exhaust the petitioner and discourage continued inquiries. It also maintained the regime’s fiction of legality and rule of law. The final response was almost always the same, indeed employed identical language, effectively a canned response denying knowledge and any responsibility for the petitioner’s family member or loved one.³¹

      Since these letters date from late 1975 to late 1977, they do indicate the degree to which, in the very worst years of the disappearances and state terrorism, many were as yet unaware how extensive the state terrorist apparatus was and how complicit in it were the local police and provincial government authorities. A number of these same petitioners also submitted writs of habeas corpus to the local courts. The dictatorship oversaw a dismantling of constitutional guarantees of all sorts and, through decree, passed new laws in accordance with its antisubversive fixation, facilitated by an obliging judiciary. Among the most egregious abuses pertaining to the law was the systematic disregard of the right of habeas corpus. In courts all over the country, the judiciary cravenly accepted the military’s denial of knowledge of the individuals named in such writs and frequently resorted to procedural and jurisdictional excuses when a simple denial of knowledge of the individual in question was not sufficient. In other instances, the Supreme Court remitted cases to lower courts where they died a labyrinthine death in a jurisdictional buck passing that ultimately left the habeas corpus writs unattended.³² Such behavior contrasted with the courage of human rights lawyers who often paid with their lives for filing these writs and for their advocacy for political prisoners in general.³³

      Córdoba’s press was similarly cowed if not actually collaborative. The city’s leading newspaper, La Voz del Interior, parroted the language of the junta in the first days of the new military government and published the Third Corps’ communiqués as if they were mere news stories, neither questioned nor criticized by the newspaper’s editors. To mention just one example, the death, just days after the coup, of Mario Andrés Osatinsky, the eighteen-year-old son of Montonero leader Marcos Osatinsky, in nearby Alta Gracia, was reported as that of “extremists” killed while “trying to flee.”³⁴ The dubious veracity in the rendering of this particular incident becomes even more suspect with the content of news reporting in the weeks after the coup in which “extremists” invariably died in shootouts with the army and the brazen denial of abductions, at a time when Córdoba’s prisons and detention centers were overflowing with political prisoners. References to “guerrillas” gradually vanished from the newspaper’s pages to be replaced by terms such as “subversive delinquents” and “terrorists.”³⁵ In subsequent months, the newspaper failed to mention the abductions and disappearances and was silent on all matters related to the state terrorism, as was virtually all of the national press.

      The repressive apparatus stretched into the city’s oldest institution, one closely associated with its very culture and history. In Córdoba, as perhaps in nowhere else in the country, the complicity of the local Catholic Church, its hierarchy specifically, was deep and ongoing. Córdoba’s Catholic Church was wracked by internal factions in the years prior to the 1976 coup. The emergence of the powerful Third World Priests movement, which adhered to the positions of Vatican II, engaged in grassroots community work and maintained friendly relations with the Left, enraging the older, more conservative members of the local Church hierarchy, a number of whom were drawn from the ranks of Córdoba’s patrician families. That some of these activist priests were foreigners added nativist resentment to the generational and class one. The victims of state terrorism included priests and seminarians drawn from these progressive sectors of the church. The establishment of the Studium Teologicum in 1968, which gathered professors and seminary students from all the dioceses in the province of Córdoba, looms as a turning point. With a curriculum aligned with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, it offered classes in contemporary history, psychology, and sociology, among other subjects.³⁶

      One individual in particular, Archbishop Raúl Primatesta, stands as a key if controversial figure in the Church’s history in Córdoba during the dictatorship. Videla noted an early suspicion by the military government of Primatesta as a “progressive” prelate turned out to be inaccurate and the dictator eventually viewed the bishop a “reasonable man.”³⁷ Sociologist and Jesuit scholar of Córdoba’s Catholic Church Gustavo Morello has argued that Primatesta’s accommodation with the military regime was the result of fear rather than sympathy and moreover more apparent than real, and that privately he interceded on a number of occasions on behalf of Christian leaders in danger from Menéndez.³⁸ Such an interpretation is, however, a largely solitary one. As Morello himself notes, between 1972 and 1975 Primatesta restructured the curriculum of the Studium Teologicum away from subjects that might provoke the military’s suspicion. Even more damning, Primatesta appeared to forge a close personal relationship with Menéndez, defended the military government publicly on several occasions, and, as ample oral histories and witness testimony at the human rights trials insist, refused repeatedly to intercede on behalf of families seeking information on disappeared family members. Other priests, most of them military chaplains and priests associated with the Third Army Corps, were identified by former prisoners at the La Perla detention center as frequent visitors to the death camp, some reputedly even hearing confessions shortly before prisoners were executed.³⁹ The heroic defiance of the dictatorship by other Catholic churchmen such as Enrique Angelelli, the bishop of La Rioja, or Jaime de Nevares, the bishop of Neuquén, had no counterpart in Córdoba. Whatever Primatesta’s interest is in keeping the Church neutral and equidistant from both the revolutionaries and the repressors, his actions belied such neutrality during the dictatorship. He may have simply been afraid, but his fear overwhelmed his sacred oath.

      More difficult to corroborate is the degree of complicity of local business groups. Business was virtually unanimous in its support for the coup and showered the country’s new military leaders with fulsome praise. Given the social upheavals of preceding years, the two Cordobazos, the presence of the country’s most militant unions, a greatly radicalized local student population, and the recent emergence of the guerrilla organizations, it is not hard to imagine why military rule was accepted enthusiastically by some, with relief by many. Outright collaboration in the terror is not as clear. For other parts of the country, some have argued that management in some of the country’s leading industrial firms actively aided and abetted the military in identifying union militants, facilitating their abduction and murder.⁴⁰ The evidence offered for such a serious charge, one that would seem to warrant judicial proceedings and convictions against the individuals if not the firms involved, is largely circumstantial, mostly confined to the oral testimonies of workers in the plants, but compelling.⁴¹ The unhindered abduction of workers on company grounds, management’s providing of personnel files and home addresses of workers later abducted and disappeared, the cooperation between the plant security forces and the military happened so frequently that the only reasonable conclusion is collaboration by the companies. That the country’s leading firms had an interest in ridding themselves of union militants among an increasingly combative and in some cases politically radicalized working class, and took advantage of the new situation to remove bumptious individuals within

Скачать книгу