LITMIR.BIZ

MAP 1. Sites of disappearances and deaths by neighborhood and number.

      Abductions took place most frequently in private homes but also in the streets (en la vía pública was a common claimed point of disappearance) and even at factory gates. Detention then followed, sometimes prolonged but more often brief, a matter of days or weeks, a torment of torture and interrogation that made captivity seem much longer than it really was. For the vast majority, death followed, generally in Córdoba by gunshot. Bodies of the disappeared throughout the country were disposed one of four ways: dumping them from airplanes (sometimes drugged and alive) into the sea, buried as N. N. (Ningún Nombre or “Without Name”) in municipal cemeteries, cremated, or buried in clandestine, often mass graves.³ Such violence was calculated in its purpose, not merely for intimidation and certainly not for “spectacle” but to annihilate what the military perceived as the subversive threat.⁴ First to acquire the intelligence needed to defeat the armed Left while it still posed a legitimate threat and then to eliminate any sympathizers who remained in society at large, and ultimately to erase entirely the Left’s cultural influence. The military government perhaps adopted the precise method of the disappearance to create a culture of fear, but more tangibly to insulate it from foreign scrutiny and possible criticisms, even sanctions, that would result from a less concealed state violence. Disappearances rather than mass executions were the chosen method to prevent such consequences.⁵ The decision to eliminate an initial estimate of six to seven thousand “subversives” had been taken at the highest levels of the military leadership in the immediate aftermath of the coup. The failure of the court system to prosecute and punish such individuals during the 1973–76 Peronist government persuaded the military to adopt the practice of the disappearances, a “final disposition” for such individuals at the national level.⁶ The junta’s general policy of a violent, clandestine campaign to eradicate the so-called subversive threat nonetheless was decentralized in its application, with local commanders given near complete freedom on the precise tactics on how to wage it and even the ultimate decision of how to dispose of bodies that were to disappear without a trace, whether to cast them into the sea, to be buried in a secret sites, or cremated in ovens.⁷

      The military government’s attempts to terrorize and purge Córdoba of all its perceived radical elements, indeed to transform it socially, politically, and culturally, became apparent at the outset, as did the role that the army’s Third Corps would play in the effort.⁸ Plans were laid for undertaking a violent campaign against the “subversives” months before the March 1976 coup. The military’s so-called Comunidad Informativa met weekly in Córdoba, each Thursday, for months prior to and after the coup to work out precise tactics and assign responsibilities for conducting the guerra sucia in the city. These meetings took place at either the headquarters of the Third Corps, commanded by General Menéndez, or the IV Brigada de Infantería Aerotransportada, the principal combat unit in the province and the Third Corps’ operative wing under the command of General Juan Sasiaiñ. Also attending were the commanders of all those responsible for intelligence gathering and security: the Third Corps’ Destacamento de Inteligencia 141, the Secretaría de Seguridad de Córdoba, the Gendarmería Nacional, the Servicio de Inteligencia de la Aeronáutica, Inteligencia de la Agrupación Escuela de Aviación, the provincial police’s Jefatura de Inteligencia (D-2), the Estado Mayor del Tercer Cuerpo, and Córdoba’s delegations of the Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado (SIDE) and the Policía Federal.⁹

      Documents recovered from the delegation of the Policía Federal on the activities of the Comunidad Informativa revealed the precise methodology of the state terrorism before and after the coup. A December 20, 1975, memorandum showed Menéndez creating a separate interrogating group and conferring interrogation responsibilities to the police. The memorandum emphasized the continued responsibilities assigned to the police, but only in coordination and with the authorization of the army. In keeping with the future violation of legal norms, current prisoners under the presidential authority of the Poder Ejecutivo Nacional (PEN) were to be denied judicial proceedings that might lead to their release, while another of the Comunidad Informativa’s memoranda just weeks after the coup asserted Menéndez’s authority over the removal or hiring of individuals in the public administration while determining a “background check” of those abducted in operations and determination of arrest or “elimination” (aniquilamiento). Most interestingly, an assessment of the Montoneros calculated their operative capacity at 90 percent and of the ERP at 70 percent, well above what is generally believed to be their fighting strength by the time of the coup.¹⁰

      Immediately following the coup, the second in command of the Third Corps, General José Vaquero, was named “interventor” of the province, thereby giving him unlimited executive powers. Several weeks later, General Carlos Chasseing replaced Vaquero as a designated “military governor.” Both were in reality subordinate to the individual who would wield real power and oversee zealously, with maniacal resolve, the antisubversive campaign in Córdoba: commander of the Third Corps, General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez. Menéndez’s biography is inseparable from that of the story of state terrorism in Córdoba, indeed has become the very symbol of its crimes and excesses. Menéndez emerged as a prominent national figure in the very first days of the dictatorship when he gave the personal order for the public burning of banned books in Córdoba. Subversive influences in Menéndez’s Córdoba had their broadest meaning of anywhere in the country. Menéndez forbade even the teaching of modern mathematics in Córdoba’s high schools and universities for its relativism and its corrosive questioning of axiomatic logic and therefore, it can be assumed, accepted, eternal truths.¹¹

      Born in 1927 to a military family, Menéndez had graduated both from the Colegio Militar and the Escuela Superior de Guerra (ESG), thus anointed for a future distinguished military career. Menéndez entered the ESG as part of the same class as Jorge Rafael Videla and other future key members of the military dictatorship such as Roberto Viola, Ramón Díaz Bessone, and Albano Harguindeguy, among others. After a series of desk jobs, Menéndez finally received a field assignment in 1970, appointed second in command of the Fifth Brigade of Infantry of the army’s Third Corps stationed in Tucumán province, replacing Videla in that post. The assignment was fortuitous. The recently established ERP had just begun planning and preliminary training for a rural insurgency in Tucumán. Two years later in December 1972, Menéndez received his promotion to general and assignment as commander of the brigade.

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