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Argentina's Missing Bones. James P. Brennan
Читать онлайн.Название Argentina's Missing Bones
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520970076
Автор произведения James P. Brennan
Серия Violence in Latin American History
Издательство Ingram
FIGURE 4. La Perla death camp as seen from Highway 20.
Kidnapping and holding such large numbers of prisoners, and their subsequent mass executions and disposal of the bodies, required a complex internal structure and even a bureaucratic process. The military’s systematic destruction of its archives related to the dirty war deprives historians of ever fully reconstructing this essential component of its history and deciphering all its meanings but the recollections of formers prisoners, court testimony, and fragmentary information from military sources of various kinds give some idea of both the conditions in and functioning of the camp. Disappearances in Córdoba followed the general pattern found elsewhere in the country of abductions, torture, and death. Upon arrival, prisoners were assigned a number and subject to extensive interrogations with extensive files with personal data compiled for each. A torture session was invariably a prisoner’s introduction to the camp, but unlike the case of the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) and many other camps, in La Perla torture sessions would often be repeated after initial interrogation, if it was discovered that a prisoner withheld information or had been uncooperative.4 In other aspects, greater similarities existed with large camps such as ESMA, including a deliberate, purposeful approach to the torture, a search for useful information and intelligence rather than simply the sadistic infliction of pain, though wanton cruelty was certainly not unknown. To goad the tortured into compliance, the torturers would often hold out the possibility of survival in return for information, even introducing them before the torture sessions to militants who were presumed dead by their comrades outside the camp but whose continued existence was proof of the possibilities of survival in return for cooperation.5
FIGURE 5. Entry gate to La Perla death camp.
La Perla stands as one of the most notorious of these detention centers turned death camps. The only such camp in the country’s interior, it held during its roughly three years of operation, between 1976 and 1979, some 1,000 prisoners. The vast majority of those detained there were murdered and entered the ranks of the disappeared, but more than one hundred survived.6 In the months leading up to the 1976 coup, the army’s Servicio de Inteligencia (SIE) under the command of captain Héctor Pedro Vergez, a shady character later to be involved in the contraband of prisoners’ personal property and with close ties to the right-wing death squad the Comando de Libertadores de América, worked with the military police (Gendarmería Nacional) in identifying so-called subversives.7 Lists were drawn up, individuals were subject to surveillance, and abductions were set in motion. Menéndez made the decision to convert La Perla into a detention center and move some prisoners there from the Campo de La Ribera camp already in existence, largely due to the notoriety Campo de La Ribera had acquired by the end of the Peronist government and requests from the International Red Cross to inspect its premises. Henceforth, Campo de La Ribera, nicknamed La Escuelita (Little School) by the military, would function as a temporary detention center, either as a prelude for transfer to La Perla or to process prisoners regarded as less dangerous and whose status was to be legalized and their captive status formally recognized, by transfer to one of the federal penitentiaries, including the local UP1. Legal status also on very rare occasions could imply a formal trial by a military tribunal, a guarantee of a conviction and a prison sentence but certainly preferable to the alternative of assignment to the La Perla death camp.
Though some deaths did occur at Campo de la Ribera, generally detention in La Escuelita versus La Universidad (La Perla) served as a transit point. Incarceration in La Perla usually meant death. The army already had a small administrative building on the site that Menéndez had hurriedly constructed in the first months of 1976, built by a private contractor, Carusso S. A., a more elaborate compound whose specific purpose was to hold, torture, and murder political prisoners. Surrounded by several smaller buildings with offices and living accommodations for the military personnel stood the cuadra or stable, a long rectangular building measuring fifteen by forty meters with a height of approximately four to five meters, flanked by toilets and shower stalls at one end and offices for military personnel at the other. There the prisoners slept side by side on straw-filled mattresses.8 Prisoners were held there, never more than one hundred at a time, most for relatively short periods of time—days, weeks, at most at several months—at which point they would be executed and a new contingent arrived.
Adjacent to the cuadra was a large patio where the prisoners ate. Nearby were two large sheds that served as garages for military vehicles as well as those stolen from the prisoners in the raids on their homes. In one of these was the small room, dubbed by the military captors as the “intensive therapy ward,” in which the prisoners were tortured with the so-called margarita, the electric generator and prod used by the torturers to apply electric shocks to the prisoners. The entire compound was surrounded by barbed wire, with sentries posted on its perimeter, a duty facilitated by the open surrounding fields that provided maximum visibility from the hill’s crest.9
FIGURE 6. The cuadra, where prisoners were held in the La Perla death camp.
FIGURE 7. La Perla shower stalls for prisoners.
FIGURE 8. La Perla former torture chamber.
As with other camps, La Perla had its collection of particularly brutal torturers, usually known by the nom de guerre and nicknames they had adopted to hide their true identity, such as a sergeant, it was later learned, with the name of Elpidio Rosario Tejeda, known in the camp as “Texas.” The Contepomis’ memoir of life in the camp relates the horrors of Texas’s torture session, blows with a paddle applied with methodical efficiency to the body’s extremities and most sensitive parts. Found there was another torturer known as the “Priest” with a predilection for torturing radical clergymen from the Third World Priests movement, and yet another, “Uncle,” a balding, middle-aged torturer obsessed with the excrement and stench of the torture room that he attempted to camouflage with flowers and aromatic herbs, as well as prints to cover the blood-stained walls.10 There was camp commandant Menéndez himself, who went by the moniker of “Mutt” for his hound-dog face, given to outbursts of rage and also the organizer of strange, solemn ceremonies before the removal and execution of the prisoners, executions in which Menéndez on a number of occasions personally took part. False surnames were also used: Major Ernesto Barreiro, a member of the Destacamento 141 de Inteligencia del Tercer Cuerpo assigned to the camp and a figure of great authority there in its early months, had several nicknames (Nabo, Rubio, Gringo) and also went by the false surname of Hernández.11 Anonymity was an obsession among the torturers.
FIGURE 9. La Perla sentry tower.
The Contepomis’ memoir relates other details about the camp: rivalries between the