LITMIR.BIZ

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      The Tucumán campaign comprised two facets. The army undertook sweeps through the countryside to search out and destroy the ERP focos at the same time that, in tandem with the Tucumán provincial police firmly under his authority, Menéndez targeted political and union activists in the provincial capital viewed as the urban cells supporting the rural insurgency. At first military operations proved improvised and took place in competition with the actions of the Federal Police. In December 1974 this changed with the secret plan known as Operación Independencia, in which the army asserted full control of the military operations in Tucumán, but that same month Menéndez was transferred to Buenos Aires as a member of the Estado Mayor (Chiefs of Staff). Six months later in May 1975, he was appointed second in command of the army’s Third Corps based in Córdoba, and in August promoted to commander-in-chief.

      Within weeks of his new assignment, Menéndez had authorized the Intelligence Battalion 141 and the D-2 provincial police force to undertake clandestine operations in the city, leading to the detention, torture, and murder of dozens of political and union activists. Beginning in October 1975, six months before the March 1976 coup, the practice of the disappearances was already being implemented. In that month, Menéndez centralized all the intelligence service of the military and police in the Comunidad de Inteligencia, which worked out of the offices of the Destacamento de Inteligencia 141 in the Parque Sarmiento.¹² The following month, Menéndez opened the first of the two major detention centers in the city, the Campo de la Ribera, a former military prison built in 1945 and converted to a clandestine detention center. Prisoners began arriving there soon thereafter. At the same time, as commander of the Third Corps, Menéndez had ongoing responsibility for waging the counterinsurgency war in Tucumán, where he employed similar methods. By the time of the coup, the Left’s ranks in both Córdoba and Tucumán had suffered enormous, irreparable losses.

      Under Menéndez’s iron hand, a thorough militarization of Córdoba took place following the coup. Military personnel and individuals with close links to the Third Corps colonized university administration, the public bureaucracy, judiciary, even the local media. Despite the repression and state-sanctioned violence that accompanied the final years of the Peronist government, civil society maintained enough resilience, and intimidation was not yet so absolute, that the local press still denounced such arbitrary acts and covered public protests by unions and student groups that continued to take place. That was not the case after the 1976 coup. Newspapers were strictly censored and Córdoba’s main television channel, Channel 10, transmitted with relentless monotony images and disseminated ideas glorifying the armed forces, urging adherence to the regime, and excoriating all those believed unwilling to offer it. Public ritual involving the military such as parades, flag and memorial ceremonies, and speeches on patriotic holidays became routine throughout the year. In the annual Día del Ejército, made a national holiday, in the city’s largest park, the Parque Sarmiento, children could stroll the grounds and visit exhibits of weapons and army equipment.¹³ At the same time Menéndez oversaw the secret creation and administration of six major clandestine detention centers in and around the city. In addition to the Campo de la Ribera, a detention center already in operation and under the command of General Juan Bautista Sasiaiñ, five additional centers were established: the premises of the police intelligence service’s (D-2) “Office of Information” located in the cabildo in the town center facing the city’s imposing colonial cathedral staffed by the police but under the command of the army, serving as a temporary processing and torture center through which a steady stream of political prisoners passed through between 1974 and 1979; La Perla, the main detention center just twelve kilometers outside the city on the main and well-traveled highway to the Cordoban sierras; a much smaller nearby center called La Perla Chica (also Malagueño, from the name of the small hamlet where it was located); the offices of the “Dirección Provincial de Hidráulica” administered directly by the police of the D-2 rather than the army. Located on the shores of the San Roque dam, this camp provided a convenient place to dispose of evidence (and perhaps bodies) by casting them into the dam’s waters. Southeast of the city, in Pilar, a former trucker’s stop turned detention center held small numbers of prisoners, almost none of whom survived (Map 2).

MAP 2. Clandestine detention centers in Córdoba.

      Prisoners were also held, processed, and murdered in numerous smaller places such as police commissaries and local jails and prisons. The federal penitentiary system was fully integrated into the repressive apparatus. Unidad Penitenciaria No. 1 (UP1), the site of an execution of some thirty prisoners discussed in chapter 6, held many political prisoners, as did the women’s prison, the Buen Pastor, in the city center.

      FIGURE 1. Buen Pastor (Good Shepherd) women’s prison, street view.

      FIGURE 2. Buen Pastor women’s prison, front entrance.

      FIGURE 3. Buen Pastor women’s prison, columns with photos of desaparecidas.

      Generally, prisoners held in federal penitentiaries enjoyed some privileges denied to those held in the clandestine death camps, such as conjugal and visitation rights. But their freedom was limited, and wardens were given precise instructions on the treatment of all prisoners arrested for “subversive behavior.”¹⁴ Prisoners were segregated according to their perceived degree of importance, or rather their level of political militancy, a characteristic of practices in other federal prisons intended to isolate the influence of the militants on those prisoners deemed recuperables (“salvageable”).¹⁵

      The architecture of state terrorism mirrored that found elsewhere in the country. Menéndez described the military’s tactics as “low-intensity warfare,” in other words an intelligence war with carefully targeted victims, not random violence, though in practice either the intelligence did not prove precise enough or the execution of its operations was so sloppy that random victims did occur. Special task forces (fuerzas de tareas) divided into operational task forces (grupos de tarea) undertook their actions separate from the larger contingent of the Third Corps conscripts. Menéndez and a select group of officers oversaw this parallel force with its specialized military intelligence personnel and the local police well integrated into its structure. It was this parallel force that most actively perpetrated the dirty war in Córdoba. Regular army troops were employed in guard and sentry duties in the camps, but not involved in the urban abductions.

      The “mode of destruction” in Córdoba also resembled that found in other parts of the country, but with some distinguishing peculiarities.¹⁶ Córdoba’s delegation in the truth commission charged with investigating the crimes of the dictatorship, the CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas), published a separate report on human rights violations there, benefited by the unique good fortune of actually acquiring some military files on the prisoners held in several of the detention centers. These and the oral testimonies of survivors relate over and over again the same pattern of nighttime raids, unmarked police cars, masked gangs, ransacking, abductions, detentions, and torture. For those who did not live to tell their tale, violent death was the final stage. Some of the disappeared such as the trade union leader and close collaborator of Tosco in the local light and power workers union, Tomás Di Toffino, and SMATA secretary-general René Salamanca, were prominent figures. Most were anonymous workers, students, lawyers, university professors, and others with suspected left-wing ties. The demographic profile of the disappeared in Córdoba resembled that of other parts of the country but with some variations peculiar to the province. One was the scale of the terror relative to its size. The CONADEP report placed Córdoba third, some 9 percent, in the total number of desaparecidos nationally, trailing only the more populous province of Buenos Aires and the federal capital.¹⁷ As in the rest of the country, males comprised

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