God's Spies
"They're
putting down their names," the Gryphon whispered in reply, "for fear
they should forget them before the end of the trial."
Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland,
Chapter II
AS OUR
READING TEACHES US, our history is the story of a long night of
injustice:
Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, the South Africa of apartheid,
Ceausescu's
Romania, the China of Tiananmen Square, Senator McCarthy's America,
Castro's
Cuba, Pinochet's Chile, Stroessner's Paraguay, endless others form the
map of
our time. We seem to live either within or just on this side of
despotic
societies. We are never secure, even in our small democracies. When we
think of
how little it took for upright French citizens to jeer at convoys of
Jewish
children being herded into trucks, or for educated Canadians to throw
stones at
women and old men in the reservation of Oka when the natives protested
the
building of a golf course, then we have no right to feel safe.
The
trappings with which we rig our society so that it will remain a
society must
be solid, but they must also be flexible. That which we exclude and
outlaw or
condemn must also remain visible, must always be in front of our eyes
so that
we can live by making the daily choice of not breaking these social
bonds. The
horrors of dictatorship are not inhuman horrors: they are profoundly
human -
and therein lies their power. "There is a remedy in human nature
against
tyranny," wrote optimistically Samuel Johnson, "that will keep us
safe under every form of government." And yet any system of government
based on arbitrary laws, extortion, torture, slavery lies at a mere
hand's
grasp from every so-called democratic system.
Chile has a
curious motto, "By Reason or by Force." It can be read in at least
two ways: as a bully's threat, with an accent on the second part of the
equation, or as an honest recognition of the precariousness of any
social
system, adrift (as the Mexican poet Amado Nervo said) "between the
clashing
seas of force and reason." We, in most Western societies, believe we
have
chosen reason over force, and for the time being we can depend on that
conviction.
But we are never entirely free from the temptation of power. At best,
our
society will survive by upholding a few common notions of humanity and
justice,
dangerously sailing, as our Canadian motto has it, "A mari usque ad
mare," between those two symbolic seas.
Auden
declared that "Poetry makes nothing happen." I don't believe that to
be true (nor, probably, did he). Not every book is an epiphany, but
many times
we have sailed guided by a luminous page or a beacon of verse. What
role poets
and storytellers have on our precarious journeys may not be immediately
clear,
but perhaps some form of an answer emerged in the aftermath of one
particular
dictatorship, one that I followed closely over the bloody decade of its
rule.
I can't
remember her name (so unfaithful are the promises of memory), but she
was one
grade below mine at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. I met her in
my
second year of high school, on one of the excursions our zealous
monitors liked
to organize for us during which we discovered the art of rigging up
tents, a
taste for reading around the campfire, and the mystery of politics.
What
exactly these politics were we never quite found out, except that at
the time
they echoed, somewhat bombastically, our vague notions of freedom and
equality.
In time, we read (or tried to read) arid books on economy and sociology
and
history, but for most of us politics remained a serviceable word that
named our
need for comradeship and our contempt for authority. The latter
included the
school's conservative headmaster; the remote landowners of vast areas
of Patagonia
(where, at the foot of the Andes, we went camping and where, as I've
mentioned,
we saw peasant families living out their distant and for us
inconceivable
lives); and the military, whose tanks, on 28 June 1966, we saw lumber
through
the streets of Buenos Aires, one of many such processions towards the
presidential palace on plaza de Mayo. She was sixteen that year; in
1969 I left
Buenos Aires and never saw her again. She was small, I remember, with
black and
curly hair which she had cut very short. Her voice was un-emphatic,
soft and
clear, and I could always recognize her on the phone after just one
syllable.
She painted, but without much conviction. She was good at math. In
1982,
shortly before the Malvinas War and towards the end of the military
dictatorship,
I returned to Buenos Aires for a brief visit. Asking for news of old
friends,
so many dead and disappeared in those terrible years, I was told that
she was
among the missing. She had been kidnapped leaving the university where
she had
sat on the student council. Officially, there was no record of her
detention,
but someone had apparently seen her at El Campito, one of the military
concentration camps, in a brief moment when her hood had been removed
for a
medical inspection. The military usually kept their prisoners hooded so
that
later on they would not be able to recognize their torturers.
On 24 April
1995, Victor Armando Ibanez, an Argentinean sergeant who had served as
a guard
at El Campito, gave an interview to the Buenos Aires newspaper La Prensa. According to Ibanez, between
2,000 and 2,300 of those imprisoned there, men and women, old people
and
adolescents, were "executed" by the army at El Campito during the two
years of his service, from 1976 to 1978. When the prisoners' time came,
Ibanez
told the newspaper, "they were injected with a strong drug called
pananoval, which made a real mess of them in a few seconds. It produced
something like a heart attack. [The injections would leave the
prisoners alive
but unconscious.] Then they were thrown into the sea. We flew at a very
low
altitude. They were phantom flights, without registration. Sometimes I
could
see very large fish, like sharks, following the plane. The pilots said
that
they were flattened by human flesh. I leave the rest to your
imagination,"
Ibanez said. "Imagine the worst."
Ibanez's was
the second "official" confession. A month earlier, a retired navy
lieutenant commander, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, had confessed (also in
La Prensa) to the same method of"
disposing of the prisoners." In response to his confession, Argentinean
president Carlos Menem called Scilingo a "criminal," reminded the
press that the commander had been involved in a shady automobile deal,
and
asked how the word of a thief could be counted as true. He also ordered
the
navy to strip Scilingo of his rank.
Since his
election in 1989, Menem had been trying to shelve the whole question of
military culpability during the so-called "dirty war" that ravaged
Argentina from 1973 to 1982, and during which more than thirty thousand
people
were killed. Not content with the deadline for filing charges against
the
military (which his predecessor, Raul Alfonsin had set as 22 February
1988), on
6 October 1989 Menem had offered most of the military involved in human
rights
abuses a general pardon. A year later, three days after Christmas,
Menem issued
a general amnesty to all involved in the events that had fled the
country for
nine long years. Accordingly, he released from prison Lieutenant
General Jorge
Videla (who was later re-arrested) and General Roberto Viola, both of
whom had
been appointed to the presidency by the military junta, from 1976 to
1981 and
for ten months in 1981, respectively. In legal terms, a pardon implies
not exoneration
or acquittal but only a relief from punishment. An amnesty, on the
other hand
(such as the military had granted itself in extremis in 1982, and which
was
repealed by Alfonsin), is, in effect and intention, recognition of
innocence
that wipes away any imputation of crime. After the declarations of
Scilingo and
Ibanez, President Menem briefly threatened the military with a
retraction of
the 1990 amnesty.
Until the
confessions of 1995, the Argentinean military authorities had
recognized no
wrongdoing in their so-called anti-terrorist activities. The
extraordinary
nature of guerrilla war demanded, the authorities said, extraordinary
measures.
In this declaration they were well advised. In 1977, following a joint
report
from Amnesty International and the US State Department's Human Rights
Bureau
accusing the Argentinean security forces of being responsible for
hundreds of
disappearances, the military hired an American public relations
company,
Burson-Marsteller, to plan its response. The thirty page memorandum
presented
by Burson-Marsteller recommended that the military "use the best
professional communications skills to transmit those aspects of
Argentine
events showing that the terrorist problem is being handled in a firm
and just
manner, with equal justice for all." A tall order, but not impossible
in
the Age of Advertising. As if moved by the hackneyed motto "The pen is
mightier than the sword," Burson-Marsteller suggested that the military
appeal for "the generation of positive editorial comment" from
writers "of conservative or moderate persuasions." As a result of
their campaign, Ronald Reagan declared in the Miami News of 20 October
1978
that the State Department’s human rights office was "making a mess of
our
relations with the planet's seventh largest country, Argentina, a
nation with
which we should be close friends."
Over the
years, others answered the advertisers' appeal. In 1995, shortly after
Ibanez's
and Scilingo's confessions, an article appeared in the Spanish
newspaper El Pais, signed by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Under the title "Playing with Fire," Vargas Llosa argued that,
horrible though the revelations might be, they were not news to anyone,
merely
confirmations of a truth "atrocious and nauseating for any half-moral
conscience." "It would certainly be wonderful," he wrote,
"if all those responsible for these unbelievable cruelties were taken
to
court and punished. This, however, is impossible, because the
responsibility
far exceeds the military sphere and implicates a vast spectrum of
Argentinean society,
including a fair number of those who today cry out, condemning
retrospectively
the violence to which they too, in one way or another, contributed."
"It
would certainly be wonderful": this is the rhetorical topos of false
regret,
denoting a change from shared indignation at the "atrocious and
nauseating"
facts, to the more sober realization of what they "really" mean-the
impossibility of attaining the "wonderful" goal of impartial justice.
Vargas Llosa's is an ancient argument, harking back to notions of
original sin:
no one soul can truly be held responsible because every soul is
responsible
"in one way or another" for the crimes of a nation, whether committed
by the people themselves or by their leaders. More than a hundred years
ago,
Nikolai Gogol expressed the same absurdity in more elegant terms: "Seek
out the judge, seek out the criminal, and then condemn both."
Using the
case of his own country as a history lesson, Vargas Llosa concluded his
cri de
coeur: "The example of what has happened in Peru, with a democracy
which
the Peruvian people have distorted - because of the violence of
extremist
groups and also because of the blindness and demagogy of certain
political
forces - and which they let fall like a ripe fruit in the arms of
military and
personal power, should open the eyes of those imprudent justice seekers
who, in
Argentina, take advantage of a debate on the repression in the
seventies to
seek revenge, to avenge old grievances or continue by other means the
insane
war they started and then lost."
Burson-Marsteller
could not have come up with a more efficient publicist for its cause.
What
would a common reader, confident in Vargas Llosa's intellectual
authority, make
of this impassioned conclusion? After hesitating, perhaps, at the
comparison
between Argentina and Peru (where the novelist turned-politician
thundering
lost the presidential election), which seems to protest too much, too
obviously, the reader is led into a far subtler argument: these
"justice-seekers," the seekers of that justice which, according to
Vargas Llosa, is desirable but utopian - are they not in fact
hypocrites who
not only must share the guilt for the atrocities but are also to blame
for
starting a war which they then lost? Suddenly the scales of
responsibility are
tipped ominously to the victims' side. Not a need for justice, not an
urge to
acknowledge wrongs officially, but an itch for revenge or, even worse,
sheer
spite apparently drives these so-called justice-seekers. The thirty
thousand
disappeared are not to be lamented; they were troublemakers who started
it all.
And those who survived-the Mothers of plaza de Mayo, the thousands
forced into
exile, the hundreds of tortured men and women who crowd the pages of
the 1984
Report on the Disappeared by the National Commission on Disappeared
People,
with their sober accounts of utterly indescribable sufferings-should
not seek redress
lest they themselves be called to judgment. And furthermore, the
seventies are
now so long ago ... Would it not be better to forget?
Fortunately,
there were readers who were not so confident. Mario Vargas Llosa's
article was
reprinted in Le Monde on 18 May 1995.
A week later (25 May), the Argentinean writer Juan Jose Saer published
an
answer in the same newspaper. After correcting a number of important
factual
errors in Vargas Llosa's piece-calling Isabel Peron's presidency a
"democratic government," ignoring the fact that between 1955 and 1983
Argentina enjoyed barely six years of freely elected leaders-Saer notes
that
Vargas Llosa's arguments coincide, point by point, with those of the
military
leaders themselves, who argued that the official tactics of murder and
torture
had not been their choice but the choice of those who provoked them and
forced
them to make use of "extreme measures." Saer also points out that
Vargas Llosa's notion of "collective responsibility" might place
Vargas Llosa himself in a delicate position since, at a time when
Argentinean
intellectuals were being tortured or forced into exile, the Peruvian
novelist
continued to publish willingly in Argentina's official press.
Saer
responded to Vargas Llosa's role, accusing him of being a spokesman for
the
military: he dismissed or ignored his arguments, which are based on a
number of
false assumptions. And yet, since these arguments must stand, thanks to
Vargas
Llosa's craft, as the most eloquent of those penned by the defenders of
a
military amnesty, they deserve, perhaps, a closer examination.
• The notion
of guilt shared between the military government, which came to power by
force
and used torture and murder to fight its opposers, and the victims,
including
guerrilla fighters, political objectors, and ordinary civilians with no
political associations, is fallacious. While it could be argued that in
a sense
the army of insurrectionists and the official Argentinean army were
equal
forces (though, even here, the numbers appear to be on the order of I
to
1,000), no argument can find a balance of power between the organized
military
forces and the intellectuals, artists, union leaders, students, and
members of
the clergy who expressed disagreement with them. The civilian who
voices an
objection to the actions of the government is not guilty of any crime;
on the
contrary, vigilance is an essential civic duty in any democratic
society, and
every citizen must become, as it were, God's spy. "And take upon's the
mystery of things," says King Lear, "As if we were God's spies; and
we'll wear out / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones /
That ebb
and flow by th' moon."
But the
repression overflowed even the realm of civilian opposition. The
National
Commission on Disappeared People, led by the novelist Ernesto Sabato,
concluded
its report in September 1984: "We can state categorically-contrary to
what
the executors of this sinister plan maintain - that they did not pursue
only
the members of political organizations who carried out acts of
terrorism. Among
the victims are thousands who never had any links with such activity
but were
nevertheless subjected to horrific torture because they opposed the
military
dictatorship, took part in union or student activities, were well-known
intellectuals who questioned state terrorism, or simply because they
were
relatives, friends, or names included in the address book of someone
considered
subversive."
• Any
government that uses torture and murder to enforce the law invalidates
both its
right to govern and the law it enforces, since one of the few basic
tenets of
any society in which citizens are granted equal rights is the
sacredness of
human life. "Clearly," wrote G. K. Chesterton, "there could be
no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that
murder
was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram." Any
government that does not recognize this truth, and does not hold
accountable
those who torture and murder, can make no claims for its own justice.
No
government can rightly mirror the methods of its criminals, responding
in kind
to what it might deem an act against the nation's laws. It cannot be
guided by
an individual sense of justice, or revenge, or greed, or even morality.
It must
encompass them all, these individual deeds of its citizens, within the
parameters established by the country's constitution. It must enforce
the law
with the law, and within the letter of the law. Beyond the law, a
government is
no longer a government but a usurped power, and as such it must be
judged.
• Trust in
the ultimate power of the law sustained many of the military
dictatorship's
victims during those terrible years. In spite of the pain and the
bewilderment
caused by the officialized abuses, the belief remained that in a
not-too-distant future these acts would be brought to light and judged
according to the law. The wish to torture the torturer and to kill the
murderer
must have been overwhelming, but even stronger was the sense that such
acts of
revenge would become indistinguishable from the acts that caused them
and would
be transformed, in some abominable way, into a victory for the abusers.
Instead, the victims and their families continued to believe in some
form of
ultimate earthly judgment, in which the society that had been wronged
would
bring the guilty ones to trial according to the laws of that society.
Only on
the basis of such justice being done did they believe that their
country might
have another chance. Menem's amnesty denied them that long-awaited
possibility.
• This
"absence of justice" was reflected with ghoulish symmetry in the
"disappearing" tactics employed by the military, by which their
victims - kidnapped, tortured, thrown from airplanes, dropped into
unmarked
graves-became not officially dead but merely "absent," leaving the
anguished families with no bodies to mourn. Julio Cortazar, speaking in
1981,
described in these words the dictatorship's method: "On the one hand, a
virtual or real antagonist is suppressed; on the other, conditions are
created
so that the family and friends of the victims are often forced to
remain silent
as the only possibility of preserving the life of those whom their
hearts won't
allow them to presume dead." And he added, "If every human death
entails an irrevocable absence, what can we say of this other absence
that continues
as a sort of abstract presence, like the obstinate denial of the
absence we
know to be final?" In that sense, Menem's amnesty didn't heal the
sickness
of the past - it merely prolonged that sickness into the present.
• Menem's
revisionist attempt is not original. One of the earliest instances of
perfecting the present by erasing the tensions of the past took place
in the
year 213 B.C., when the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi ordered that every
book in
his realm be thrown into the fire so as to destroy all traces (as one
legend
has it) of his mother's adultery. But no deed, however monstrous or
trivial,
can ever be abolished once committed - not even by a Chinese emperor,
even less
by an Argentinean president. This is the adamantine law of our life.
The immutability
of the past does not depend on the volubility’s of government, nor on
cravings
for revenge or for diplomacy. No deed can be undone. It can be
pardoned, but
the pardon must come from the offended person and from no one else if
it is to
have any emotional validity. Nothing changes in the deed itself after a
pardon:
not the circumstances, not the gravity, not the guilt, not the wound.
Nothing
except the relationship between the torturer and the victims, when the
victims
reaffirm their sovereignty, "not weighing our merits," as the Book of
Common Prayer has it, "but by pardoning our offences." Pardon is the
victim's prerogative, not the torturer's right-and this Menem's
government and
his supporters, such as Vargas Llosa, have apparently forgotten.
• The pardon
granted by a victim - the dripping quality of mercy has no bearing on
the
mechanics of justice. Pardon does not change or even qualify the act,
which
will cast its shadow forward, throughout eternity, into every new
present.
Pardon does not grant oblivion. But a trial, according to the laws of
society,
can at least lend the criminal act a context; the law can contain it,
so to
speak, in the past so that it no longer contaminates the future,
standing at a
distance as a reminder and a warning. In a mysterious way, the
application of a
society's laws is akin to a literary act: it fixes the criminal deed on
a page,
defines it in words, gives it a context which is not that of the sheer
horror
of the moment but of its recollection. The power of memory is no longer
in the
hands of the criminal; now it is society itself that holds that power,
writing
the chronicle of its own wicked past, able at last to rebuild itself
not over
the emptiness of oblivion but over the solid, recorded facts of the
atrocities
committed. This is a long, dreary, fearful, agonizing process, and the
only
possible one. This sort of healing always leaves scars.
• Menem's
amnesty, bowing to the demands of acknowledged murderers and torturers,
has
postponed the healing for what appears to be a very long time. As it
stands
today, since all the torturers and murders in the military regime have
not been
brought to justice, Argentina is a country bereft of rights: its right
to
social justice ignored, its right to moral education invalidated, its
right to
moral authority forfeit. The need to "carry on," the need to
"reconcile differences," the need to "allow the economy to
flourish once again" have all been invoked by Menem and his successors
as
good reasons for forgiving and forgetting. Supported by literate voices
such as
that of Vargas Llosa, Menem apparently believed that history could be
paid off;
that the memory of thousands of individuals like my friend from school
could be
left to yellow on forgotten shelves in dim bureaucratic offices; that
the past
could be recovered without expenditure of effort, without making
official
amends, without redemption.
While
waiting for the act of justice now denied, the victims of Argentina's
military
dictatorship can still hope for another, older form of justice -less
evident,
but in the end longer-lasting. The maze of a politician's mind has
seldom held
the promise of redemption, but that of a gifted writer is almost
exclusively
built on such a promise, and in spite of Auden's dictum, it allows no
forgetting.
Thanks to
certain books (a catalogue too long and personal to be of use here),
both the
torturers and their victims may know that they were not alone, unseen,
unassailable. Justice, beyond the requirements of literary conventions
that
demand a happy ending is in some essential way our common human bond,
something
against which we can all measure ourselves. As the old English law has
it,
justice must not only be done but be seen to be done.
Auden's lack
of confidence in the writer's ability to change the world is apparently
a
modern perception. Robert Graves noted that the Irish and welsh
distinguished
carefully between poets and satirists: the poet's task was creative or
curative, that of the satirist was destructive or noxious, and both
changed the
course of worldly events. Even nature was supposed to bow to Orpheus's
words,
and Shakespeare recalled the power of the Irish bards, "rhyming rats to
death"; in the seventh century, the great Senchan Torpeist, having
discovered that rats had eaten his dinner, slaughtered ten on the spot
by
uttering a verse that began:
Rats have
sharp snouts
Yet are poor
fighters.
Whether
against rats or dictators, writers can bring about a wild form of
justice in
their role as God's spies. "Many brave men lived before Agamemnon's
time," wrote Horace in the first century B.C., "but they are all, un
mourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lacked a
poet." As Horace implied, we are luckier. Poems and stories that will
redeem us (or in which we will find redemption of a kind) are being
written, or
will be written, or have been written and are awaiting their readers
and,
throughout time, again and again, assume this: that the human mind is
always
wiser than its most atrocious deeds, since it can give them a name;
that in the
very description of our most loathsome acts something in good writing
shows
them as loathsome and therefore not unconquerable; that in spite of the
feebleness and randomness of language, an inspired writer can tell the
unspeakable and lend a shape to the unthinkable, so that evil loses
some of its
numinous quality and stands reduced to a few memorable words.