Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared 0374223505, 9780374223502

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: • >. s ' -* •coup. Many were trade unionists Journalists, or lawyers, others were Mends of these, or acquaintances, or people whose names had been given in Mght by those who had been arrested, or whose names were in their address books, or people against whom someone in power had a grudge, or who had prop­ erty someone in power wanted. Many were middle-class and professional people, or their children: no one could be sure that he or his family was safe. Families who had influence or connec­ tions were told to make no trouble, that if they kept quiet their son or daughter would no doubt be returned. They almost never were. The disappearances were no secret. Most people knew someone whose son or daughter or Mend had been sucked off the streets. In rare cases the military released someone it had taken; in other cases it acknowledged it had him, tried him on trumped-up charges, jailed him, and finally released him. Those who returned to society told their stories, and these circulated within Argentina and abroad. Jacobo Timerman, the highly influential editor of a leading news­ paper, was abducted, but his Mends within and outside the military were powerful enough to secure his exile to Israel. Timerman wrote a book reporting how he had been tortured, and the sickening conditions under which he and others had been kept. Not all Argentines were too shocked or Mghtened to protest. The English-language newspaper, the Buenos Aires Herald, reported dis­ appearances regularly and ran editorials demanding information from the military, though its editors were themselves threatened. An extraordinarily brave group of women, who came to be called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, demonstrated weekly in front of the Casa Rosada, demanding information about their disap­ peared children. (Several of them then disappeared too.) Concerned citizens, including a prominent lawyer, Emilio Mignone, whose own daughter had disappeared, formed human rights groups to try to monitor the repression. The Carter administration in the United States accused Argentina of human rights violations, and sharply restricted foreign aid. But though die evidence was soon undeniable that the junta had .been engaged in mass teror, most Argentines were satisfied with [*V]

its explanation that harsh measures were necessary to save the country; they told themselves that the army knew best, that their acquaintances who had disappeared were probably secret com­ munists after all. After 1979, in any case, the disappearances largely ceased. The junta's power was finally broken, not by any domestic or international concern about human rights, but by its own eco­ nomic and, in the end, military ineptitude. It had based its title to rule on the claim that no elected government could take the mea­ sures needed to restore economic health and political stability. After the coup, the junta had appointed a well-known banker, Martinez de Hoz, 2m advocate of a fiercely unregulated market economy, as finance minister. His programs of attracting foreign capital were successful in the short run - the Argentine peso increased in value so dramatically and quickly that middle-class Argentines traveled the world on their strong currency, and delighted in suddenly cheap imported goods of every kind. But the short-term success turned into economic disaster: domestic industries were ruined, the econ­ omy plunged, and inflation returned. By 1982 it was plain that the military would be unable to deliver the prosperity it had promised, and it suddenly seemed no better than the elected government it had replaced. Mass strikes began, and General Galtieri, who had become the army's representative in the junta, turned to the traditional remedy of unsuccessful ty­ rants: foreign war. Argentina had claimed title to the Falklands (which the Argentines call the Malvinas), an unpromising group of islands in the South Atlantic near Argentina that Britain had governed since 1833. Negotiations with Britain had dragged on for years, but Galtieri suddenly invaded the Falklands in April of 1982. He and his advisers fatally misjudged Great Britain's willingness to defend them, and his invasion ended in spectacular and humiliating defeat: the Argentine armed forces could not defend the small group of islands they had occupied, close to their shore, against an attack launched from half the world away. Galtieri resigned in disgrace, and was replaced by General Bignone, who realized that the mil­ itary could not continue to govern, and organized elections to install a democratic and civilian government. The final junta took the precaution, before those elections, of adopting a general amnesty purporting to immunize every member of the military from pros­ ecution for any crimes he had committed in the so-called war against subversion. [*vj

2

Raúl Alfonsín was the candidate of the Radical Civic Union party, the liberal party whose last president nominated by the full party, Yrigoyen, had been overthrown in the military coup of 1930. Al­ fonsín had been one of the few politicians who had protested, at some personal risk, against the military terror, and he made human rights the center of his campaign: he promised to investigate the disappearances and to bring the responsible officers to trial for their crimes. Though the rival and still-powerful Peronist Party was heav­ ily favored, its lackluster candidate, Italo Argento Luder, aroused little interest, and Alfonsín, and human rights, won. He immedi­ ately appointed a commission of distinguished citizens, under the chairmanship of a prominent writer, Ernesto Sábato, called the Commission on the Disappeared, with full powers to investigate and report. The commission's interviews were methodical and pain­ staking; its members visited and explored the detention sites the witnesses they interviewed had mentioned, cross-checked the sto­ ries of each, created charts and flow charts of events, and confirmed the most pessimistic speculations about the fate of the thousands of people who had been bundled into the Ford Falcons with no license plates. Nunca Más is the report of the Sábato Commission. Its story has two themes: ultimate brutality and absolute caprice. People taken off the streets were driven to one of the many detention centers established by each of the military services, and sometimes trans­ ferred from one of these to another. Their houses were looted and their property stolen. Most of them lived the rest of their lives in the detention centers, hooded or blindfolded, forbidden to talk to one another, hungry, living in filth. The center of their lives dominating the memories of those who survived-w as torture. They were tortured, almost without exception, methodically, sa­ distically, sexually, with electric shocks and near-drownings and constant beatings, in the most humiliating possible way, not to discover information - very few had any information to give —but just to break them spiritually as well as physically, and to give pleasure to their torturers. Most of those who survived the torture were killed. Disposing of the bodies presented a tactical problem. First they were buried in mass unmarked pits, but later a more efficient final solution was discovered. The disappeared were loaded ,

[*w]

into planes with an open door, flown over the sea, and then thrown out. Most of them were first drugged or killed, but some were alive and conscious when they left the plane. The original point of the "dirty war" - to create a climate of fear in which subversion would be impossible - was superseded, for the officers who actually carried it out, by an even more repellent pur­ pose: the perverse exhilaration of absolute, uncontrolled dominion over others, which became an end in itself, a way of life. Nothing can seem out of bounds in a room where people are deliberately made to suffer excruciating pain. Every instinct of dignity was vio­ lated there: nuns and pregnant women were tortured with special glee, husbands and wives and children tortured in each other's presence, and babies taken from their mothers for military families who wanted children. Timerman had written about anti-Semitism in the detention centers; Nunca Más documents that anti-Semitism in the special pain and indignity reserved for Jews by torturers who strutted their Nazi sympathies. The military had created for itself a world with no rules or restraints. At the height of the terror, ac­ cording to a book by two BBC reporters, bored junior officers in the torture squads roamed the streets in their Falcons looking only for pretty girls to take back to camp to torture and rape and then kill.* Alfonsin had made two commitments to the nation: to investigate the disappearances, and to prosecute those responsible. The Sábato Commission was charged only with the former: it was not a judicial body, and its report. Nunca Más, made no judgments of individual responsibility. The new government had to decide how to proceed with criminal prosecution, and it faced a variety of problems, both legal and political. Alfonsin was anxious that the process vindicate not only justice but the rule of law. The accused were to be treated with every courtesy, and the strictest standards of evidence and procedure were to be applied. Above all, the trials were to respect an important jurisprudential distinction: they were not to be trials in the style of Nuremberg, prosecutions by a conqueror imposing a new code of rules on a defeated regime, but acts of a constitutional government prose­ cuting past officials for acts that were criminal when they were per­ formed. No new retrospective criminal laws were needed because * See J o h n Sim pson an d Jan a B ennett, The Disappeared and the Mothers o f the Plaza (New York: St. M artin's Press, 1985).

[xvii\

the outrages the Sábato Commission had documented were plainly illegal under the law of Argentina as it stood during the military rule. The military had not enacted special laws permitting kidnap­ ping, or torture, or detention without trial, or theft, or murder. It had, as I said, awarded itself an amnesty just before it handed over power, but that self-amnesty was unconstitutional, according to Alfonsinas legal advisers; the new Congress had already repealed it, and the Supreme Court had held this repeal valid. Two further crucial decisions were necessary, however, and both were politically sensitive. First, who should be prosecuted? Alfonsin, at the same time as he appointed the Sábato Commission, had in his capacity as commander in chief ordered the arrest and trial of the military men at the top: the nine commanders who formed the three ruling juntas from 1976 to 1982. But should the govern­ ment also prosecute the staff and junior officers who supervised the abductions and detention centers and the torture, or the thousands of ordinary soldiers who participated in these crimes? Argentine law provided a defense for military subordinates who were merely following orders. But how should this defense be interpreted? Should it protect soldiers who followed orders that were, in fart, illegiti­ mate? Should it protect those who, following orders, committed obvious atrocities? Second, in which courts should those who were prosecuted be tried? It was at least arguable that, as many Argentine lawyers believed, the law required that military men be tried only in military courts for crimes committed in connection with their duties. It would violate the spirit of due process the government was anxious to reinforce to change that jursidictional rule retrospectively and try miliary men in civilian courts. But the military court - the Su­ preme Council of the Armed Forces - was unlikely to condemn the military structure as a whole, as it would have to do if it accepted the claims of Nunca Más. The government was subject to intense political pressures on both sides of these two issues. The human rights community, and par­ ticularly the Mothers of the Plaza, were outraged at the possibility that the army could be left to judge itself, or that those who had actually butchered and tortured their fellow citizens might escape condemnation altogether. But Argentina needed to bury its past as well as to condemn it, and many citizens felt that years of trials would undermine the fresh sense of community Alfonsinas victory [xviii]

had produced. And any general program of prosecution, reaching far down the command structure, might anger the military and make it regard the new government as its enemy, which would be unwise in a nation where military coups had become almost a ritual. The new government formally declared its intentions in a com­ prehensive statute. Law 23.049 of February 14,1984, drafted mainly by one of Alfonsinas advisers, Carlos Nino, a legal philosopher from the faculty of the Law School of the University of Buenos Aires. The statute resolved the issue of jurisdiction in this way: all pros­ ecutions of the military for alleged crimes committed under cover of a war against subversives, including both those brought by the public prosecutor and those initiated by private citizens, were to be tried in the first instance by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces under its "summary proceedings" jurisdiction. But the de­ cisions of the Supreme Council were subject to automatic review by the civilian Federal Chamber of Appeal, which could consider new evidence if it thought this necessary. If the Supreme Council did not complete its hearing of any case within six months, more­ over, it was required to notify the Federal Chamber of its reasons for not having done so, and the Federal Chamber then had the option of either sending the case back to the Supreme Council, subject to a further time limit, or assuming original jurisdiction itself, using the procedural rules of the Supreme Council to try the case. The law also resolved the issue of criminal responsibility. It pro­ vided, in Article 11, that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, any member of the military who acted "without decision­ making capacity" would be presumed justifiably to have regarded all the orders he received as legitimate orders, except that this presumption would not hold if the acts he committed were "atro­ cious" or "aberrant." That provision created, in effect, three cate­ gories of defendants: high-ranking officers, who were not entitled to the defense that they were merely following orders; junior officers and servicemen, who could use that defense because they were deemed entitled to treat the orders they had received as legitimate; and those of any rank who committed atrocities and were denied the defense for that reason. It was widely understood that abduc­ tion, for example, was not atrocious, so that the junior officers who formed the abduction squads would not be guilty under these stan[xix]

dards, but that torture, rape, murder, and robbery were atrocities, so that those who could be proved to have committed those offenses would not be excused just because they had been ordered to do so. Law 23.049 was attacked by the human rights groups as much too lenient; they saw it as a capitulation to the military for political reasons.* They feared that the military court would acquit all de­ fendants, and that the civilian court would not reverse the military court on appeal. They also doubted that it would be possible to prove which junior officers or servicemen were actually guilty of atrocities, since most of the victims who had been tortured were dead, almost all victims were blindfolded, and the torturers used code names in their victims' presence. The first of these fears has so far proved ungrounded. The Supreme Tribunal of the military refused to participate in the trial of the nine commanders, which was transferred to the civilian court, and has also been unwilling to participate in any of the other prosecutions that have already been brought.

3 The trial of the nine commanders in the civilian court began on April 22,1983, and held the nation enthralled for five months. The state prosecutors had charged each of them with very specific crimes: with the abduction or torture or murder of a specified number of victims. The trial was held in a dark-paneled and somber courtroom in the middle of Buenos Aires, before a panel of six judges, who took turns presiding.! These judges had been appointed by the government from a wide variety of backgrounds, and from different parties, so as to emphasize the court's independence from the Alfonsin administration. Security at the trial was fierce. Anyone wanting to attend needed a special pass, and was checked for weapons at several stages on * Sec, e.g., Emilio M ignone, Cynthia L. Estlund, and Samuel Issacharoff, "Prose­ cution of H um an Rights Violations in A rgentina," Yale Journal o f International Law 10, p. 101. Carlos Nino replied to th a t article in "The H um an Rights Policy of the Argentine Constitutional Governm ent: A Reply," Yale Journal o f International Law 11, p. 217. f Andres J. D'Allessio, Guillermo A. C. Ledesma, Ricardo R. Gil Lavedra, Joige A. Valerga Araoz, Jorge Edwin Torlasco, and Leon Carlos Arslanian.

[XX]

the way to the courtroom. Nevertheless, the room was crowded to overflowing, day after day, with mainly young Argentine men and women, whose generation had suffered most from the terror and who seemed to feel that the prosecution spoke for them. The pro­ ceedings were taped for television, and portions of the evidence and argument were broadcast on the evening news each night. The press box was filled with both Argentine and foreign reporters, a special newspaper reporting the trial was published and sold weekly, and the daily papers published pages of testimony after each session. Argentine criminal trials are conducted on what is called the prosecutorial model rather than on the adversary model of AngloAmerican practice. Questions are put to witnesses not by the pros­ ecuting lawyers or the lawyers for the defense but by the presiding judge, though many of the questions he puts have been requested by the lawyers. Most of the witnesses had much the same story to tell the court: the story of abduction and torture made familiar by Nunca Más. The grim and shocking details were in turn reported to the nation later, in the daily papers and special journal, and on television. The judges sought information, not just about the wit­ nesses' own experiences, but about other disappeared persons they had met or seen in the centers, those who never returned. I attended the trials for a day with a small group of British and American philosophers and lawyers who had come to Buenos Aires to discuss human and civil rights with members of Alfonsin's gov­ ernment. We heard two pieces of testimony in that single day that confirmed the arbitrary and absolute lawlessness, and the sexual violence, of the world the torturers had created for themselves and their victims. A young woman testified that after she had been held blindfolded and tortured for months she and the others in her group were allowed to clean themselves, in preparation for a visit to the center by General Galtieri, who was then army commander of the local district. Galtieri asked if she knew who he was, and if she understood his absolute power over her. "If I say you live, ym^ live," he said, "and I f l say^TOu^die^yoru^efAs it happens, you have the same ChristiarTname as my daughter, and so you live." Another young woman testified that one of the young officers who had tortured her asked her whether he might write to her after he was transferred to other duty. "I like to keep in touch with all my girls," he said, and he has sent her Christmas cards for years. The commanders' trial ended and the court gave its verdicts on [xxi\

December 9, 1985. Though the military rules under which the civilian trial had been conducted allowed for capital punishm ent the prosecutor had asked only for life imprisonment for five of the nine defendants, fifteen-year sentences for two of them, and twelveand ten-year sentences for the remaining two. Only two of the defendants were in fact given life sentences: Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera, who were in command of the army and navy, which had committed the most outrages during the worst period of repression, from 1976 to 1979. Ramón Agosti, who was in charge of the air force, which was much less involved in repression during that period, was sentenced to fifty-two months in jail. Roberto Viola, who had replaced Videla, was sentenced to seventeen years, and Armando Lambruschini, who had replaced Massera, to eight. The four remaining defendants - Leopoldo Galtieri and Jorge Anaya, who commanded the army and navy after the policy of wholesale abductionhadbeen abandoned, and Omar Graffigna and Basilio Land Dozo, who presided over the air force after Agosti - were acquitted. (Galtieri has recently been convicted, in a separate trial, on charges arising out of his conduct of the Falklands/Malvinas war, and will be tried for crimes committed while a corps commander before he became army chief.) Some Argentines were disappointed by these results. Many be­ lieved that all the defendants should have been convicted and jailed for life. But the court's policy of making distinctions among the defendants, acquitting four and giving lighter sentences to some of the others, was valuable in several ways. It showed the court's political independence from the government and from the prose­ cution, which had demanded much heavier sentences, and in that way reinforced the character of the trial as an exercise in due process of law rather than political vengeance. And it avoided any sug­ gestion that there cannot be degrees of guilt in crimes against hu­ manity, that those who have committed some outrages have noth­ ing to fear, by way of future punishment, if they commit more. The court's opinion defending its various decisions is volumi­ nous: hundreds of pages long. Its main argument begins with an important distinction. The commanders did not themselves, as in­ dividuals, abduct or torture anyone. The charges against them as­ sumed their responsibility for the acts of others. But for whose acts were each of the commanders to be held responsible? The prose­ cutor had asked the court to find each of the three juntas collectively [**H]

responsible for all acts committed by any of the three military ser­ vices under its administration. That would have made the com­ mander of the air force, for example, which was much less involved than the other services, equally responsible for the outrages com­ mitted by the army and navy. The court declined to accept this argument. It studied the power structure of the junta, and accepted the defense's argument that the commanders of the separate services remained autonomous, not subject to any general orders of the junta as a whole. The history of power struggles within the three juntas supports the court's conclusion.* There was no evidence of any coordination of the dirty war at the junta level, and many of the abductions and arrests carried out during the first junta (including, perhaps, Timerman's arrest) were understood as challenges to the overall authority of the nominal president. General Videla, rather than as flowing from itf But the court nevertheless insisted on the responsibility of each member of the junta for the outrages committed by members of the military service he commanded. It rejected the defense counsel's argument that the abductions, tortures, and murders were acts of excess by individual servicemen for which their commanders could not be held responsible. It cited an impressive variety of arguments for that conclusion, th e convicted commanders had issued general instructions calling for extraordinary measures to be used not only against terrorists but against subversives more generally, and Gen­ eral Videla had publicly defined subversion to include subversive thought. The publicity within Argentina about the disappearances, and the diplomatic inquiries from abroad, could have left the com­ manders in no doubt about how these general instructions had been interpreted. (Indeed, at the height of the terror, the Supreme Court, even though it had been appointed by and was faithful to the military, had finally, in a consolidated action on some four hundred habeas corpus petitions, called upon the commanders to investigate the fact that their subordinates had solemnly declared no knowledge of the disappeared.) * T hat history is w ell reported in The Disappeared by Simpson and Bennett. f The first ju n ta declared th e intention of appointing a fourth mem ber, w ho w ould serve as a coordinating adm inistrative head of the services as a whole, but political disagreem ent w ith in th e ju n ta prevented any such appointm ent, in the form originally intended.

[xxiii]

The detention centers had to be financed and staffed centrally, and it was impossible for the commanders not to have been aware of their activities, and of the numbers of persons who passed through them and never reappeared. Many of the abductions had been carried out after the police in the district had been notified not to interfere - they were fold the district had been designated a "green light" area, meaning they were to assume that anything that hap­ pened had been authorized by the military - and this would have been impossible without knowledge throughout the structure of command. But the most powerful evidence of complicity throughout the structure of command of each of the armed services was simply the sustained pattern of abduction, torture, and murder, a pattern that could not possibly be explained as the work of a few aberrant officers. The court explicitly relied on Nunca Más as evidence of this pattern, though it added that the evidence it had heard directly was sufficient to establish the pattern of outrage on which its verdict was based, even without that report. It rejected the defense's absurd argument that the commission contained untrustworthy members, and its even more ludicrous argument that the witnesses, both before the commission and before the court, were biased against the military because of the outrages they or their relatives had suffered. 4 The commanders who were convicted have appealed, but it is un­ likely that the convictions will be changed on appeal. So the trial of the commanders is over, and it was an event of immense im­ portance. It explored, judicially, in general and in detail, the entire network of official lawlessness and outrage; the publicity the trial attracted served as a national catharsis. The verdicts vindicated the fundamental principle that government cannot be above law, and have largely satisfied the world that Argentina has returned to respect for human rights and the rule of law. In many ways, how­ ever, the trial of the commanders was legally much easier, morally less perplexing, and politically less dangerous than the further trials, of those lower in the structure of command, which advocates of human rights hope will now follow. There were no serious problems of proof in the commanders' trial. It was only necessary to show what Nunca Más had already

established, that the pattern of terror was so consistent and orga­ nized that those ultimately in charge must have known of and endorsed it. There could be no moral objection to holding them responsible for what they had directed or allowed. There was no question of their acting under orders of anyone superior to them. Nor were the present armed forces likely seriously to object, or to be demoralized, by the trial and conviction of commanders who had already either retired or resigned, and of whom several had anyway been discredited by the Falklands war. The trial of junior officers - those who actually supervised or car­ ried out torture and murder - would be a very different matter in all these respects. Problems of proof would be formidable. The question would be raised whether it was fair to convict even tor­ turers who could claim they were following orders. A large part of the present army and navy would feel threatened by any general program of prosecution, moreover, and although another military coup seems unlikely in the near future, the armed forces remain an important and entrenched institution in the Argentine com­ munity, and many political leaders believe that it would be both socially divisive and politically unwise to alienate them from the democratic government. About seventeen hundred prosecutions have been filed against about five hundred other members of the military, and some of these, including the case against the notorious General Camps, who directed a large detention center, have now begun to be heard in the same civilian court that convicted the commanders. In spite of the blindfolds and code names, solid evidence exists, both in the files of the Sábato Commission and in those compiled by the pros­ ecutors preparing for the trial of the commanders, implicating many more, including hundreds of junior officers and servicemen. Never­ theless, it is still unclear how many of these prosecutions will be pursued to trial, how many of the defendants would actually be convicted, and how many of those who are convicted will be sen­ tenced to jail. Each defendant must be tried in the jurisdiction of his alleged crimes, and the judges in some places may prove to be more sympathetic to the military than those in others. The officials of the Alfonsin government have said they are determined to respect the independence of the judiciary - it counts the domination of judges by the junta leaders as among their most serious breaches of constitutional principles - and that they will not try to influence either decision or sentencing. [XXV]

It has become dear, moreover, that some offidals of the present government do want a general amnesty for junior servicemen. Last April, Germán López, the minister of defense, issued a general directive to military prosecutors not to pursue any cases against junior officers who thought they were following legal orders, which was widely understodd to bar charges even against those who had committed atrodties. An army prosecutor. Brigadier General Héctor Canale, said that the directive was necessary because the growing number of prosecutions was ''harming the morale of the ranks, and generating the possibility of projecting an image of collective trial against members of the armed forces." The minister's order would not bar dvilian prosecutors from instituting charges the mil­ itary prosecutors declined to bring, and Alfonsin took the occasion of his state of the nation address to Congress a few days after the order had been issued to reaffirm his policy of bringing anyone guilty of torture or other atrodties to justice. But there will no doubt continue to be political pressure on him to modify that policy. The arguments I have mentioned in favor of some general amnesty are powerful and in no sense illegitimate. It is des­ perately important, not only for Argentina but for Latin America generally, that the Alfonsin government succeed. It is one of the few governments in the region firmly committed to constitu­ tional democracy in our own sense, one of the few we can respect unreservedly. But it is vulnerable to a variety of economic and political forces. Argentina's economy remains fragile, even though the austere new economic plan Alfonsin instituted last summer brought down the rate of inflation and secured some monetary stability. The plan has so far not succeeded in stimulating economic growth. Real wages have fallen by about 30 percent since it was adopted, and the economy continues to be burdened by a top-heavy public sector, uncompetitive heavy industry, capital shortage following large flights of capital abroad during the military rule, a gigantic $30 billion foreign debt - 50 percent of export earnings are now required sim­ ply to meet interest payments on that debt - and, according to latest reports, a new rising rate of inflation that some economists predict will settle at 5 percent a month. Argentina remains overdependent on agricultural exports, which are particularly vulnerable to pro­ tectionist barriers. Nor is the new government yet fully confident >

[xxvi]

of political stability. The congressional elections last autumn were marred by bombings attributed to the right, and Alfonsin thought it necessary to declare a state of emergency for a short period to meet what he called a serious threat of disturbances. (In fact, how­ ever, none of those who were arrested under the special emergency powers was convicted and they were all released.) In May, the local police discovered a bomb along the route Alfonsin was to take to visit an army headquarters; according to The New York Times of June 12, the route was ''supposedly under strict army security." In these circumstances, the government has good reason to avoid divisive policies that might alienate the armed forces. Nevertheless, we must hope that the Alfonsin government will take that risk and prosecute anyone it can prove tortured or killed civilians, even under orders, though it may turn out that only a relatively small number can be convicted. The world needs a taboo against torture. It needs a settled, undoubted conviction that torture is criminal in any circumstance, that there is never justification or excuse for it, that everyone who takes part in it is a criminal against humanity. Argentina will serve the cause of human rights best by not losing a dramatic opportunity to endorse that conviction. Torture is al­ ready almost everywhere condemned; even the youngest Argentine soldiers apparently knew that what they did was illegal and wrong, that they had to protea their anonymity with blindfolds and code names. But torture is also almost everywhere used, and the dis­ crepancy is partly the result of a widespread opinion that it is justifiable sometimes, that it is defensible when carefully aimed only at extracting information needed to save lives from terrorism, for example. The Argentine nightmare shows one of the several fallacies of this view. Torture cannot be surgically limited only to what is necessary for some discrete goal, because once the taboo is violated the basis of all the other constraints of civilization, which is sym­ pathy for suffering, is destroyed. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the others who call for prosecution of all torturers and mur­ derers in the military ranks, are right—not because they are entitled to vengeance, but because the best guarantee against tyranny, everywhere but especially in countries like Argentina where tyr­ anny has often seemed acceptable to the majority, is a heightened public sense of why it is repulsive. Trials that explore and enforce [xxvii]

the idea that torture can have no defense may encourage that sense. Allowing known torturers to remain in positions of authority, un­ challenged and uncondemned, can only weaken it. N

Ronald Dworkin July 1986

Prologue

During the 1970s, Argentina was tom by terror from both the extreme right and the far left. This phenomenon was not unique to our country. Italy, for example, has suffered for many years from the heartless attacks of Fascist groups, the Red Brigades, and other similar organizations. Never at any time, however, did that country abandon the principles of law in its fight against these terrorists, and it managed to resolve the problem through the normal courts of law, guaranteeing the accused all their rights of a fair hearing. When Aldo Moro was kidnapped, a member of the security forces suggested to General Della Chiesa that a suspect who apparently knew a lot be tortured. The general replied with the memorable words: Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of tor­ tu re/ The same cannot be said of our country. The armed forces responded to the terrorists’ crimes with a terrorism far worse than the one they were combating, and after 24 March 1976 they could count on the power and impunity of an absolute state, which they misused to abduct, torture and kill thousands of hum an beings. Our Commission was set up not to sit in judgment, because that is the task of the constitutionally appointed judges, but to investigate the fate of the people who disappeared during those ill-omened years of our nation’s life. However, after collecting several thousand statements and testimonies, verifying or estab­ lishing the existence of hundreds of secret detention centres, and compiling over 50,000 pages of documentation, we are con­ vinced that the recent military dictatorship brought about the greatest and most savage tragedy in the history of Argentina. Although it must be justice which has the final word, we cannot remain silent in the face of all that we have heard, read and [1]

recorded. This went far beyond w hat might be considered crimi­ nal offences, and takes us into the shadowy realm of crimes against humanity. Through the technique of disappearance and its consequences, all the ethical principles which the great reli­ gions and the noblest philosophies have evolved through cen­ turies of suffering and calamity have been trampled underfoot, barbarously ignored. Throughout the ages there have been many pronouncements on the sanctity of individual rights. In modem times, these have ranged from the rights enshrined in the French Revolution to those expressed in the universal declarations of hum an rights and the great encyclicals of this century. Every civilized nation, including our own, has laid down in its constitution guarantees which can never be suspended, even in the most catastrophic state of emergency: the right of life; the right to security of person; the right to a trial; the right not to suffer either inhuman conditions of detention, denial of justice or summaiy execution. From the huge amount of documentation we have gathered, it can be seen that these hum an rights were violated at all levels by the Argentine state during the repression carried out by its armed forces. Nor were they violated in a haphazard fashion, but systematically, according to a similar pattem, with identical kidnappings and tortures taking place throughout the country. How can this be viewed as anything but a planned campaign of terror conceived by the military high command? How could all this have been committed by a few depraved individuals acting on their own initiative, when there was an authoritarian mili­ tary regime, with all the powers and control of information that this implies? How can one speak of individual excesses? The infor­ mation we collected confirms that this diabolical technology was employed by people who may well have been sadists, but who were carrying out orders. If our own conclusions seem insuffi­ cient in this respect, further proof is furnished by the farewell speech given to the Inter-American Defence Junta on 24 January 1980 by General Santiago Omar Riveros, head of the Argentine delegation: ‘We waged this war with our doctrine in our hands, with the written orders of each high command.’ Those members of the Argentine military juntas who replied to the universal outcry at the horror by deploring 'excesses in the repression which are inevitable in a dirty w ar’, were hypocritically trying [2]

to shift the blame for this calculated terror on to the individual actions of less senior officers. The abductions were precisely organized operations, some­ times occurring at the victim’s place of work, sometimes in the street in broad daylight. They involved the open deployment of military personnel, who were given a free hand by the local police stations. When a victim was sought out in his or her home at night, armed units would surround the block and force their way in, terrorizing parents and children, who were often gagged and forced to watch. They would seize the persons they had come for, beat them mercilessly, hood them, then drag them off to their cars or trucks, while the rest of the unit almost invariably ransacked the house or looted everything that could be carried. The victims were then taken to a chamber over whose doorway might well have been inscribed the words Dante read on the gates of Hell: ’Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’. Thus, in the name of national security, thousands upon thou­ sands of hum an beings, usually young adults or even adoles­ cents, fell into the sinister, ghostly category of the desaparecidos, a word (sad privilege for Argentina) frequently left in Spanish by the world’s press. Seized by force against their will, the victims no longer existed as citizens. Who exactly was responsible for their abduction? Why had they been abducted? Where were they? There were no precise answers to these questions: the authorities had no record of them; they were not being held in jail; justice was unaware of their existence. Silence was the only reply to all the habeas corpus writs, an ominous silence that engulfed them. No kidnap­ per was ever arrested, not a single detention centre was ever located, there was never news of those responsible being pun­ ished for any of the crimes. Days, weeks, months, years went by, full of uncertainty and anguish for fathers, mothers and children, all of them at the mercy of rumours and desperate hopes. They spent their time in countless attempts at wringing information from those in authority: whether officers in the armed forces who were recommended to them, bishops, military chaplains or police inspectors. They received no help. A feeling of complete vulnerability spread throughout Argen­ tine society, coupled with the fear that anyone, however inno­ cent, might become a victim of the never-ending witch-hunt. [3]

Some people reacted with alarm. Others tended, consciously or unconsciously, to justify the horror. ‘There must be some reason for it/ they would whisper, as though trying to propitiate awe­ some and inscrutable gods, regarding the children or parents of the disappeared as plague-bearers. Yet such feelings could never be wholehearted, as so many cases were known of people who had been sucked into that bottomless pit who were obviously not guilty of anything. It was simply that the ‘anti-subversive' struggle, like all hunts against witches or those possessed, had become a demented generalized repression, and the word ‘sub­ versive' itself came to be used with a vast and vague range of meaning. In the semantic delirium where labels such as: Marxist-Leninist, traitors to the fatherland, materialists and atheists, enemies of Western, Christian values, abounded, anyone was at risk - from those who were proposing a social revolution, to aware adolescents who merely went out to the shanty towns to help the people living there. AU sectors feU into the net: trade union leaders fighting for better wages; youngsters in student unions; journalists who did not support the regime; psychologists and sociologists simply for belonging to suspicious professions; young pacifists, nuns and priests who had taken the teachings of Christ to shanty areas; the friends of these people, too, and the friends of friends, plus others whose names were given out of motives of personal vengeance, or by the kidnapped under torture. The vast majority of them were innocent not only of any acts of terrorism, but even of belonging to the fighting units of the guerrUla organiza­ tions: these latter chose to fight it out, and either died in shootouts or committed suicide before they could be captured. Few of them were alive by the time they were in the hands of the repressive forces. From the moment of their abduction, the victims lost aU rights. Deprived of aU communication with the outside world, held in unknown places, subjected to barbaric tortures, kept ignorant of their immediate or ultimate fate, they risked being either thrown into a river or the sea, weighed down with blocks of cement, or burned to ashes. They were not mere objects, however, and still possessed all the hum an attributes: they could feel pain, could remember a mother, child or spouse, could feel infinite shame at being raped in public. They were people not only possessed of [4]

this sense of boundless anguish and fear, but also, and perhaps indeed because of feelings such as these, they were people who, in some comer of their soul, clung to an absurd notion of hope. We have discovered close to 9000 of these unfortunate people who were abandoned by the world. We have reason to believe that the true figure is much higher. Many families were reluctant to report a disappearance for fear of reprisals. Some still hesitate, fearing a resurgence of these evil forces. It is with sadness and sorrow that we have carried out the mission entrusted to us by the constitutional President of the Republic. It has been an extremely arduous task, for we had to piece together a shadowy jigsaw, years after the events had taken place, when all the clues had been deliberately destroyed, all documentary evidence burned, and buildings demolished. The basis for our work has therefore been the statements made by relatives or by those who managed to escape from this hell, or even the testimonies of people who were involved in the repres­ sion but who, for whatever obscure motives, approached us to tell us what they knew. In the course of our investigations we have been insulted and threatened by the very people who committed these crimes. Far from expressing any repentance, they continue to repeat the old excuses that they were engaged in a dirty war, or that they were saving the country and its Western, Christian values, when in reality they were responsible for dragging these values inside the bloody walls of the dungeons of repression. They accuse us of hindering national reconciliation, of stirring up hatred and re­ sentment, of not allowing the past to be forgotten. This is not the case. We have not acted out of any feeling of vindictiveness or vengeance. All we are asking for is truth and justice, in the same way that the churches of different denominations have done, in the understanding that there can be no true reconcilia­ tion until the guilty repent and we have justice based on truth. If this does not happen, then the transcendent mission which the judicial power fulfils in all civilized communities will prove completely valueless. Truth and justice, it should be remembered, will allow the innocent members of the armed forces to live with honour; otherwise they risk being besmirched by an unjust, allembracing condemnation. Truth and justice will permit the armed forces as a whole to see themselves once more as the true [5]

descendants of those armies which fought so heroically despite their lack of means to bring freedom to half a continent. We have been accused, finally, of partiality in denouncing only one side of the bloody events which have shaken our nation in recent years, and of remaining silent about the terrorism which occurred prior to March 1976, or even, in a tortuous way, of presenting an apology for it. On the contrary, our Com­ mission has always repudiated that terror, and we are glad to take this opportunity to do so again here. It was not our task to look into the crimes committed by those terrorists, but simply to investigate the fate of the disappeared, whoever they were, and from whichever side of the violence they came. None of the relatives of the victims of that earlier terror approached us, because those people were killed rather than ‘disappeared’. Also, Argentinians have had the opportunity of seeing an abundance of television programmes, of reading countless newspaper and magazine articles, as well as a full-length book published by the military government, in which those acts of terrorism were listed, described, and condemned, in minute detail. Great catastrophes are always instructive. The tragedy which began with the military dictatorship in March 1976. the most terrible our nation has ever suffered, will undoubtedly serve to help us understand that it is only democracy which can save a people from horror on this scale, only democracy which can keep and safeguard the sacred, essential rights of man. Only with democracy will we be certain that NEVER AGAIN will events such as these, which have made Argentina so sadly infamous throughout the world, be repeated in our nation. Ernesto Sabato

Authors*Note

The cases outlined in this report are drawn from the documents and evidence we received. They have been selected solely in order to substantiate and illustrate our main arguments. These in turn were formed on the basis of all the material in our possession - the evidence given by first-hand witnesses of the events described. We can discount neither the possibility of oc­ casional errors, nor the existence of many other cases which might have illustrated our points more adequately. As regards any persons named here according to the function they were carrying out, or who are included in the transcription of statements which implicate them in events that may have legal consequences, the National Commission in no way seeks to imply their responsibility for any of the cases mentioned. The Commission has no competence in this respect, since authority for this belongs to the judicial power, in accordance with the statutes of the constitution of Argentina.

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PART ONE

The Repression

GENERAL INTRODUCTION Many of the events described in this report will be hard to be­ lieve. This is because the men and women of our nation have only heard of such horror in reports from distant places. The enormity of w hat took place in Argentina, involving the transgression of the most fundamental hum an rights, is sure, still, to produce that disbelief which some used at the time to defend themselves from pain and horror. In so doing, they also avoided the responsibility bom of knowledge and awareness, because the question necessarily follows: how can we prevent it happening again? And the frightening realization that both the victims and their tormentors were our contemporaries, that the tragedy took place on our soil, and that those who insulted the history of our country in this way have yet to show by word or deed that they feel any remorse for what they have done. With this first stage of investigations complete, the Commis­ sion on Disappeared People takes the weighty but necessary re­ sponsibility for affirming that everything set out in this report did indeed happen, even if some of the details of individual cases may be open to question. These questions can only be resolved conclusively by the testimony of those who took part in the events. Month after month of listening to accusations, testimonies and confessions, of examining documents, inspecting places, and doing all in our power to throw light on these terrifying occur­ rences, has given us the right to assert that a system of repres­ sion was deliberately planned to produce the events and situa­ tions which are detailed in this report. The typical sequence was: abduction - disappearance - torture. Each of the testimonies in­ cluded in this report is representative of the thousands of cases [9]

which tell a similar story. Our selection represents only a tiny fraction of the material collected. A single one of these testimon­ ies would in itself be enough to permit the moral condemnation which the Commission has expressed; but it is the sheer number of similar and inter-rebated cases which makes us absolutely con­ vinced that a concerted plan of repression existed and was car­ ried out. The cases highlighted in the report were not due to any ‘ex­ cesses’, because no such thing existed, if by ‘excess’ we mean isolated incidents which transgress a norm. The system of re­ pression itself, and its planning and execution, was the greatest ‘excess’ - transgression was common and widespread. The dread­ ful ‘excesses’ themselves were the norm. It has repeatedly been claimed that those members of the security forces who committed any kind of ‘excess’ during the anti-subversive campaign were properly brought to justice on the initiative of their commanders. This Commission wishes to deny strongly any such assertion. From the information we have collected, there is not a single instance of any member of the security forces being charged with involvement either in the forced abduction of a person, with the use of torture, or with causing the death of anyone held in the secret detention centres. The military commanders of the Process of National Reorgani­ zation reserved the term ‘excess’ for any offence committed by military or police personnel for their own ends, without the authority of their superiors. It was not related to the repression itself. As the report shows, murder, rape, torture, extortion, looting and other serious crimes went unpunished, as long as they were carried out within the framework of the political and ideological persecution unleashed during the years 1976 to 1982. ABDUCTION There are some 600 instances of abductions recorded in the Commission’s files which are said to have taken place prior to the 24 March 1976 coup. After that date the number of people who were illegally deprived of their liberty throughout Argentina rises to the tens of thousands. Eight thousand, nine hundred and sixty of them have not reappeared to this day. [10]

The method used was tested in the Independencia' operation in Tucumán before the military government took power. It differs from the methods used in other countries because it was carried out in total secrecy, with regard to a person's arrest, disappear­ ance. and the persistent official refusal to admit responsibility. This repression took place over an extended period and affected the whole nation. The statistics we have compiled, based on information received, give the following percentages: People, detained in front of witnesses, who have still not reappeared: %

Detained in their own homes Detained in the street Detained at work Detained in their place of study People who disappeared while legally detained in military, penal or police establishments

62 24.6 7 6 0.4

Anonymous groups or gangs who forced their way into homes at night The first act in the drama of disappearance, which involved both the victims and their relatives, began with the sudden bursting into their homes of the group responsible for the abduction. From the thousands of testimonies in the Commission's files, we have concluded that these operations, as part of the use of kidnapping as a form of detention, took place at night or in the early hours of the morning, and usually towards the end of the week, so that it would be some time before the relatives of the person abducted could take any action. It was usually a group of five or six people who forced their way into homes. Sometimes several different groups were in­ volved, and in some special cases up to fifty people took part. The members of the gang always had with them a weaponry that was totally disproportionate to the supposed threat posed by the victims. The gang would threaten them, their families and their neighbours with both revolvers and heavier weapons. Often prior to the gang’s arrival the electricity supply to the area where the raid was being carried out was cut off. [11]

The number of vehicles involved varied. In some cases, several private cars were used (usually without licence plates); in others, when members of the regular armed forces were involved, some­ times in uniform, trucks or vans which could be identified as belonging to one or other of the forces were brought in. Occa­ sionally, helicopters circled over the neighbourhood where the victims lived. This intimidation and terror was employed not merely to fore­ stall any possibility of response by the victims. It was also aimed at achieving a similar effect on all those living nearby. Traffic was frequently brought to a halt, loudhailers, searchlights, bombs and grenades used in an excessive show of force. In file No. 3860, Alberto Santiago Bumichon’s disappearance is described by his wife as follows: At 12.30 a.m. on 24 March 1976, our house in Villa Rivera Indarte in Córdoba province was broken into by men in uniform carrying rifles. They identified themselves as belonging to the Army, and were accompanied by a number of youths in casual dress. They trained their guns on us while they stole books, objets d'art, bottles of wine, etc., which the uniformed men carried out­ side. They did not talk to each other, but communicated by snap­ ping their fingers. The looting of our house lasted for over two hours; before the raid there had been a blackout in all the neigh­ bouring streets. My husband, a trade union official, my son. David, and myself were abducted. I was freed the next day. My son was freed some time later, after being held in the La Ribera camp. Our house was completely destroyed. My husband's body was found with seven bullet wounds in the throat

Lucio Ramón Pérez, of Temperley in Buenos Aires province (file No. 1919), describes his brother's abduction in the following way: My brother was kidnapped on 9 November 1976. He was asleep with his wife and five-year-old son when they were wakened at about 2 a.m. by a loud explosion. My brother got out of bed, opened the front door, and saw four people jumping over the fence. They were in civilian clothes; one of them had a moustache and a Jersey wrapped round his head like a turban; they all carried rifles. Three of them burst into the flat and ordered my sister-inlaw and the boy not to look. The neighbours say that two of them dragged out my brother and forced him into a Ford Falcon. That's the last we heard of him. They also say there were several cars [12]

and a truck on the scene» and there were a lot of men with rifles behind the trees. The traffic had been halted, and a helicopter was circling over the house.

These gangs did not bother to conceal their faces when carry­ ing out the abductions. In the capital and the other large urban centres, their anonymity was guaranteed by the number of in­ habitants. In the provinces, where they might have been identi­ fied, some attempt was made at disguise. They often used bala­ clavas, hoods, wigs, false moustaches, glasses, and so. on. The only region in which this was not always the case was Tucumán province, where the repressive forces acted with even greater impunity, and the inhabitants were even more defenceless. María Angélica Batallán, from Tucumán province (file No. 5794) speaks of her son Juan de Dios Gomez’s abduction: At 6 p.m. on 10 August 1976, a group of soldiers under the com­ mand of Lieutenant Flores went in a truck to the Santa Lucia sugar mill and arrested my son, who was working in the store there. They brought him to our home, where they threatened me and his father. They searched everywhere, then left with my son. We never heard anything more of him.

The green light (or 'free zone’) It is clear that when the gang or 'task force’ had to carry out an operation, they had been given the 'green light’. If any neighbour or caretaker of the building involved got in touch with the local police headquarters or with a radio patrol-car asking for help, they would be told that the police were aware of what was going on, but could do nothing. In order to overrule police authority, the forces taking part in raids would ask for a 'green light’, which they did either by radio, or by parking for a few minutes outside the corresponding police station or central police head­ quarters. Adolfo T. Ocampo (file No. 1104) describes how his daughter, Selma Julia Ocampo, was abducted: At 2 a.m. on 11 August 1976, several men entered the building where my daughter lived, broke down her door and forced their way in. Others stayed outside to keep watch. This episode was witnessed from the flat opposite by naval Captain Guillermo An113]

drew. He made a telephone call, and as a result two army trucks arrived at the scene. The two groups Immediately began an intense gun battle (bullet-holes can still be seen on the building). The shooting stopped when the troops who had arrived in answer to Captain Andrew’s call heard the others shout: ’We’ve been given a free zone.’ On hearing this the troops withdrew, allowing the gang to get on with their business. They ransacked the flat and stole possessions, then took away Selma and a friend of hers, Inés Nocetti, neither of whom have been heard of since...

Abductions in the presence of children When a family which was to be chupadd* had children, the fol­ lowing methods were employed: 1 The children were left with neighbours to be looked after until a family relative arrived. 2 They were sent to children’s homes. These would hand them over to relatives or have them adopted. 3 The children might themselves be abducted and eventually adopted by a member of the armed forces. 4 They might be taken directly to the victim’s relatives, often in the same vehicle used to abduct their parents. 5 They might be left abandoned in the place from which the group had kidnapped their parents. 6 They could be taken to the secret detention centre, where they would witness the tortures inflicted on their parents, or might themselves be tortured in front of their parents. Many of these children are now among the lists of ‘disappeared’. In her statement on the disappearance of her son, Simón Antonio Riquelo (file No. 1743), his mother tells how he was abducted: Between 11 and 11.30p.m. on 13 July 1976, I heard a loud knocking at the door of my home in Belgrano, Buenos Aires city. I was just finishing breast-feeding my son, Simón. The door was broken down, and between ten and fifteen men dressed in everyday clothes burst in. They identified themselves as members of the Argentine and Uruguayan Armies. One of the officers said his name was Major Gavazzo, of the Uruguayan Army. They found written material which showed I was working for the cause of freedom in Uruguay; they then began to torture and interrogate me. When they took me away, I asked what would happen to the boy. They * A slang term , literally m ean in g 'sucked u p ’, 'sw allow ed'.

[14]

told me not to worry, that he would stay with them, that they had no war against children. That was the last time I saw Simón or have had any news of him.

Hostages and 'mousetraps’ If the armed assailants did not find their intended victim at home, they prepared what was known as a 'mousetrap’, and stayed on the spot until the person they sought returned. This led to the kidnapping going on for many hours or even days, with changes in the personnel involved. In all of these cases the relatives were used as hostages, and often submitted to brutal pressure and attacks. The kidnappers would steal all the food and drink they needed, searching and almost invariably looting the properties. If anyone happened to come to the house, they were also taken hostage. If the originally intended victim did not appear, the attackers often took away someone else (a relative or other person staying in the house at the time). This is what happened to the Barroca family, according to their father (file No. 6256): At 10.15 p.m. on 15 July 1977 my wife, my daughter, Mirta Vi­ viana, and I were at home, when we heard someone shouting through a megaphone that they knew I was a petty officer in the Navy, and that we were to come out with our hands up, because they had placed explosives at the front of the house. We did as ordered, and saw that the delinquents’ were eight in number, not in uniform, and heavily armed with automatic weapons typical of the paramilitary forces. They took us back inside and interrogated us about the family’s activities. My other daughter, Graciela Mabel, arrived home at 11 p.m. from a friend’s house where she had been studying for an exam she was due to take in the science faculty the following day. They stopped her in the hallway, but we do not know what they did to her, as my other daughter was being interrogated blindfolded in the dining-room, and my wife, also blindfolded, was in the bedroom. At 1a.m. on Saturday 16 July, before the end of the operation, the man who appeared to be the second-in-command told me they were taking Graciela away to be interrogated -by a ’captain’. He said they had found nothing, but that she had been a member of the JUP (Juventud Universitaria Peronista: Peronist Uni­ versity Youth) and that we must know what that meant. He also said we should pray that Graciela had not been involved in any­ thing, and that if this were so she would be set free within five or six days. When I reported her abduction to the Villa Martelli police [15]

station» I was told confidentially that my daughter had not been kidnapped» but had been arrested by members of the Army and of the Federal Police.

The operation which ended with the abduction of Roque Núñez (file No. 3081) was a grotesque nightmare» as can be seen from his daughter’s testimony: At 4 a.m. on 21 April 1976, several men in civilian clothes forced their way into my house. They were heavily armed and identified themselves as belonging to the Navy and the Federal Police. Their commander said he was Inspector Mayorga. They took away my father, who was sixty-five at that time. The following day my brother Miguel presented a writ of habeas corpus at the San Isidro court. At 9 p.m. on that same day they came back to my house, this time taking away my mother, hooded. They took her some­ where she has never been able to identify, and for five days sub­ jected her to a violent interrogation. Following her capture, the members of the Armed Forces stayed on in my house. On 23 April my brother Miguel was kidnapped as he entered. During these operations, which lasted for four hours on 21 April, and thirty-six hours from the 22nd onwards, those involved would not allow anyone to give me assistance, although I am a quadriplegic. I had to remain in the same position without eating or having my phys­ ical needs attended to. They were constantly trying to force me to telephone my sister, Maria del Carmen. At one point the telephone fell to the floor and they brought another one, which is still in my house. When they finally left, they drove off in a Ford Falcon car that I had bought. My mother was set free, blindfolded, two blocks from our house. My father and brother have never reappeared. I was later told that my sister, Maria del Carmen Núñez, her husband, Jorge Lizaso, and one of his brothers, Miguel Francisco Lizaso, were also abducted, and their flat completely ransacked in the process. They are also among the lists of the disappeared.

‘War booty* The robberies carried out in the homes of those abducted were considered by the forces involved as ‘war booty*. This looting was often part of the kidnapping, but in many other cases took place during a later operation in which another gang removed the victims* possessions. This meant there was considerable teamwork, with the division of tasks organized by a unified com­ mand. [16]

The testimony of Jorge Eduardo Alday’s wife (file No. 4512) is typical: My husband, Jorge Eduardo Alday, was kidnapped between 11 and 12 a.m. on 22 August 1977, as he left Carlos Calvo Ltd, after collecting his pay. A group of men in civilian clothes knocked him unconscious, forced him into a private car without number plates, and drove him off to an unknown destination. At 4 p.m. the same day both my house and my parents’ house in Valentin Alsina, Buenos Aires province, were raided with a similar display of force and brutality, including breaking into neighbouring houses and surrounding several blocks. When I returned home, I was captured at the door by these people, who were holding my mother as a hostage ’in case I didn’t turn up’. They blindfolded me and tied my hands. I was taken to a place I haven’t been able to identify, where 1 was subjected to all kinds of physical and moral torture, while they put me through an incoherent interrogation. They set me free four hours later near Villa Dominico. While they kept me detained and held my mother hostage, I saw them looting all our goods and belongings and piling them on to trucks. The house was left with­ out any trace that people had lived there. When we went to regis­ ter a complaint at the Villa Diamante and the No. 3 Valentin Alsina police stations, we were told that the ’Combined Forces’ had taken part in the operation, and that they had been given a ’free zone’.

In these cases, toó, the corresponding police headquarters were warned not to intervene or to accept any complaints about ab­ ductions or robbery. The looting, as well as signifying economic gain for the members of the gang and their commanding officers, also had the motive of ’punishing’ the relatives of the dis­ appeared, thus spreading the terror still further. This was what happened to the relatives of Rita Verónica Eróles Turucz (file No. 3351): On 21 May 1978, at 1.30p.m., seven or eight private cars and a delivery van arrived at the weekend house we have in Homos, Buenos Aires province. More than thirty men got out, dressed in civilian clothes, though they were wearing military shirts under their jackets. They broke in by leaping over the fences and smash­ ing in windows. Others forced all the villagers to gather at the railway station. They did everything by force. They made them lie on their stomachs and wouldn’t allow them to look or to move. They were brutal with everyone. When they left, they took my children, Ronaldo and Verónica, my daughter’s husband, Daniel Bidón Chanal, and a Uruguayan citizen who worked for us, Luis [17]

Carvalho. None of the four has ever been seen again. While they were in our house, they destroyed many things and stole an antique edition of Don Quixote, a restored Latin bible from the year 1400, a 7000-page bilingual dictionary, a collection of the Caras y Caretas magazine from the nineteenth century, an antique English whip with a forked silver handle, a Mauser rifle from the Argentine-Paraguayan War, electrical goods such as radios and recorders, and several silver picture frames.

Torture in the victim’s home There were occasions when interrogation of the victims began in their own home, before the transfer to a secret detention centre, and was carried out in front of their relatives, who were also subjected to this merciless treatment. Carlos Alberto Campero (file No. 1806) relates the following unforgettable episode: My mother was taken to the shop and. threatening her life, they beat her in a way that should not even be used on wild animals. In the shop we had a ventilator fan. They cut the cable, plugged it in and used it to give her electric shocks. So that it would have more effect, they poured mineral water over my mother, whom they had tied to a chair. While they were committing this savagery, another one of them was hitting her with a belt until her body was bleeding and her face disfigured. After some considerable time they decided to take us all with them, except for the six-month-old Viviana, who was left behind with Griselda, my thirteen-year-old sister.

César Casalli Urrutia (file No. 3889) states: On 10 June I was kidnapped from my house in Martin Coronado. About ten men broke in and. pressing a revolver to my head, began to wreck the house looking for arms. At one point, they threw me to the floor and began to torture me with the cable from an electrical appliance. My wife was also being badly treated and beaten in another room. After an hour and a half in my house, they took me out and made me lie on the floor of a car while they went to look for a friend of mine.

End of the kidnapping The first stage in this sinister journey ended with the transfer of the victims to a secret detention centre. Threatened and bound, [18]

they were put in cars, on the floor of the back seat or in the boot, thus adding the fear of enclosure and death to their ordeal. In this way the terror was not known of beyond the immediate area in which the operation had taken place. Mixta Caravelli de Mansiila (file No. 4073) states: At 3 a.m. on 3 July 1976, I was carried off by a group of fifteen heavily armed men in civilian clothes. I was blindfolded, gagged and handcuffed, with a pullover wrapped around my head for the Journey in a Renault 12, and was probably taken to La Perla because of the time and the route taken.

The victims were taken not only from their homes or their places of work, as is shown by the denunciation of Juan di Bernardo’s disappearance (file No. 4500): My son was in the Hospital Alvear after being hit by a car. He was to have an operation on 15 May 1978. [hiring die night of 12 May, a number of men in white coats appeared. They were armed. They forced the other patients in Ward 14 to stay in their beds and to cover their faces with the sheets. These men put Juan on a stretcher, covered him and took him away in an ambulance.

‘Walling up’ In every abduction, the victim was prevented from seeing. In the language of the repressive forces, the expression ‘walling up’ was used for the blindfolding. This was usually done at the place where the person was kidnapped. The captors either brought their own blindfolds, or used the victim’s own clothes - shirts, pullovers, jackets, etc., or sheets, towels and so on. Marcelo Daniel Vilchez (file No. 7001): I was working in Pavón Ltd, in Rosario, Santa Fe province, when my boss, Miguel Pavón, called me into his office. I went in and found two men in plain-clothes who identified themselves as police­ men. They grabbed hold of me and took me out of the office, where a third man was waiting. They threatened to kill me and pushed me into a Renault 12 estate car. Inside the car they forced my head down and covered it with a pullover. They took me to the police station where, shouting and hitting me, they removed the pullover and put a blindfold over my eyes ... [19]

When the victims entered the secret detention centres, the decisive stage of their disappearance was reached.

TORTURE

v

If when I was set free someone had asked me: did they torture you a lot? I would have replied: Yes, for the whole of the three months ... If I were asked that same question today, I would say that Ifve now lived through seven years of torture. (Miguel D'Agostino - file No. 3901.)

In nearly all the cases brought to the attention of the Commis­ sion, the victims speak of acts of torture. Torture was an impor­ tant element in the methodology of repression. Secret torture centres were set up, among other reasons, to enable the carrying out of torture to be carried out undisturbed. The existence and widespread use of different forms of torture is particularly frightening because of the perverse imagination demonstrated, and the character of the people who carried it o u t as well as of those who supported its use and employed it as a means to an end. In drawing up this report, we wondered about the best way to deal with the theme so that this chapter did not turn into merely an encyclopedia of horror. We could find no way to avoid this. After all, what else were these tortures but an immense display of the most degrading and indescribable acts of degradation, which the military governments, lacking all legiti­ macy in power, used to secure power over a whole nation? We have included the full version of the first of these cases, since it is typical of all of them. From it we can understand both the physical and mental suffering inflicted on the victims. We are quoting it in full to show the extent to which it affected the personality of the person whom the torturers were trying to destroy. In the other cases we mention, we have kept only those parts describing the methods of torture used. Lastly, we are well aware of, and share, the feeling of dismay which the bald narration we set down here will arouse in torture victims and their families, who were made to suffer so much. We know only too well the anguish that a detailed knowledge of this barbarity causes. Dr Norberto Liwsky (file No. 7397) is a doctor, married to [20]

Hilda Norma Ereñu. They have two small daughters. In 1976, he lived in a community housing estate in La Matanza, Buenos Aires, and worked in the medical dispensary there. Following complaints and action by residents of the housing estate to get legal recognition for their community, there was a raid on the night of 25 March 1976. During this, Cirila Benitez, the wife of the neighbourhood association’s president, was arrested. The next day, uniformed forces wrecked several houses and Dr Liwsky’s dispensary. They abducted Mario Pórtela, a housing association representative. He was found dead twelve hours later. Two years afterwards, when a mass was called to celebrate the freeing of Señora Benitez, several people were kidnapped. On 5 April 1978, at approximately 10 p.m., Dr Liwsky arrived at his flat in Flores, in Buenos Aires city: As I was inserting the key in the lock I realized what was happen­ ing, because the door was pulled inwards violently and I stumbled forward. I jumped back, trying to escape. Two shots (one in each leg) stopped me. However, I still put up a struggle, and for several minutes resisted, being handcuffed and hooded, as best I could. At the same time, I was shouting at the top of my lungs that I was being kidnapped, begging my neighbours to tell my family, and to try to stop them taking me away. Finally, exhausted and blindfolded, I was told by the person who apparently was in command that my wife and two daughters had already been captured and 'disappeared'. They had to drag me out, since 1 couldn’t walk because of the wounds in my legs. As we were leaving the building, I saw a car with a flashing red light in the street. By the sound of the voices and commands, and the slamming of car doors, interspersed with shouts from my neighbours, I presumed that this was a police car. After several minutes of heated argument, the police car left. The others then took me out of the building and threw me on to the floor of a car, possibly a Ford Falcon, and set off. They hauled me out of the car in the same way, carrying me between four of them. We crossed four or five metres of what by the sound of it was a gravelled yard, then they threw me on to a table. They tied me by my hands and feet to its four corners. The first voice I heard after being tied up was of someone who said he was a doctor. He told me the wounds on my legs were bleeding badly, so I should not try to resist in any way. Then I heard another voice. This one said he was the ’Colonel’. He told me they knew I was not involved with terrorism or the [21]

guerrillas, but that they were going to torture me because I opposed the regime, because: 1 hadn’t understood that in Argen­ tina there was no room for any opposition to the Process of Na­ tional Reorganization.’ He then added: ’You’re going to pay dearly for i t ... the poor won’t have any goody-goodies to look after them any morel’ Everything happened very quickly. From the moment they took me out of the car to the beginning of the first electric shock session took less time than I am taking to tell it. For days they applied electric shocks to my gums, nipples, genitals, abdomen and ears. Unintentionally, I managed to annoy them, because, I don’t know why, although the shocks made me scream, jerk and shudder, they could not make me pass out. They then began to beat me systematically and rhythmically with wooden sticks on my back, the backs of my thighs, my calves and the soles of my feet. At first the pain was dreadful. Then it became unbearable. Eventually I lost all feeling in the part of my body being beaten. The agonizing pain returned a short while after they finished hitting me. It was made still worse when they tore off my shirt, which had stuck to the wounds, in order to take me off for a fresh electric shock session. This continued for several days, alternating the two tortures. Sometimes they did both at the same time. Such a combination of tortures can be fatal because, whereas electric shock produces muscular contractions, beating causes the muscle to relax (as a form of protection). Sometimes this can bring on heart failure. In between torture sessions they left me hanging by my arms from hooks fixed in the wall of the cell where they had thrown me. Sometimes they put me on to the torture table and stretched me out, tying my hands and feet to a machine which I can’t describe since I never saw it, but which gave me the feeling that they were going to tear part of my body off. At one point when I was face-down on the torture table, they lifted my head then removed my blindfold to show me a blood­ stained rag. They asked me if I recognized it and. without waiting for a reply - Impossible anyway because it was unrecognizable, and my eyesight was very badly affected - they told me it was a pair of my wife’s knickers. No other explanation was given, so that I would suffer all the more ... then they blindfolded me again and carried on with their beating. Ten days after I entered this ’pit’, they brought my wife, Hilda Nora Ereñu, to my cell. I could scarcely see her, but she seemed in a pitiful state. They only left us together for two or three minutes, with one of the torturers present. When they took her away again, I thought (I later learned that both of us had thought the same) that this would be the last time we saw each other. That it was [22]

the end for both of us. Despite the fact that I was told she had been set free with some other people, the next news I had of her was after I had been put into official custody at the Gregario de Laferrère police station, and she came at the first visiting time with my daughters. On two or three occasions they also burnt me with a metal instrument. I didn’t see this either, but I had the impression that they were pressing something hard into me. Not like a cigarette, which gets squashed, but something more like a red-hot nail. One day they put me face-down on the torture table, tied me up (as always), and calmly began to strip the skin from the soles of my feet. I imagine, though I didn’t see it because I was blindfolded, that they were doing it with a razor blade or a scalpel. I could feel them pulling as if they were trying to separate the skin at the edge of the wound with a pair of pincers. I passed out. From then on, strangely enough, I was able to faint very easily. As for example on the occasion when, showing me more bloodstained rags, they said these were my daughters’ knickers, and asked me whether I wanted them to be tortured with me or separately. I began to feel that I was living alongside death. When I wasn’t being tortured I had hallucinations about death - sometimes when I was awake, at other times while sleeping. When they came to fetch me for a torture session, they would kick the door open and shout at me, flailing out at everything in their way. That is how I knew what was going to happen even before they reached me. I lived in a state of suspense waiting for the moment when thèy would come to fetch me. The most vivid and terrifying memory I have of all that time was of always living with death. I felt it was impossible to think. I desperately tried to summon up a thought in order to convince myself I wasn’t dead. That I wasn’t mad. At the same time, I wished with all my heart that they would kill me as soon as possible. There was a constant struggle in my mind. On the one hand: T must remain lucid and get my ideas straight again’; on the other: ‘Let them finish me off once and for all’. I had the sensation of sliding towards nothingness down a huge slippery tube where I could get no grip. I felt that just one clear thought would be something solid for me to hold on to and prevent my fall into the void. My memory of that time is at once so concrete and so per­ sonal and private that the image I have of it is of an intestine existing both inside and outside my own body. In the midst of all this terror, I’m not sure when, they took me off to the ‘operating theatre’. There they tied me up and began to torture my testicles. I don’t know if they did this by hand or with a machine. I’d never experienced such pain. It was as though they were pulling out all my insides from my throat and brain down­ wards. As though my throat, brain, stomach and testicles were [23]

linked by a nylon thread which they were pulling on. while at the same time crushing everything. My only wish was for them to succeed in pulling all my insides out so that I would be completely empty. Then I passed out. Without knowing how or when, I regained consciousness and they were tugging at me again. I fainted a second time. At that moment, fifteen or eighteen days after my abduction, I began to have kidney problems, difficulties with passing water. Three-and-a-half months later, when I was a prisoner in Villa Devoto prison, the doctors from the International Red Cross diag­ nosed acute renal failure of a traumatic origin, which could be traced to the beatings I had undergone. After being held for twenty-five days in complete isolation, I was thrown into a cell with another person. This was a friend of mine, a colleague from the dispensary. Dr Francisco García Fernández. I was in very bad shape. It was Fernández who gave me the first m in im a l medical attention, because in all that time I had been unable to think of cleaning or looking after myself. It was only several days later that, by moving the blindfold slightly, I could see all they had done to me. Before that it had been impossible, not because I didn't try to remove the blindfold, but because my eyesight had been so poor. It was then for the first time that I saw the state of my testicles ... I remembered that as a medical student I saw, in the famous Houssay textbook, a photograph of a man who, because of the enormous size of his testicles, wheeled them along in a wheelbar­ row! Mine were of similar dimensions, and were coloured a deep black and blue. Another day they took me out of my cell and, despite my swollen testicles, placed me face-down again. They tied me up and raped me slowly and deliberately by introducing a metal object into my anus. They then passed an electric current through the object. I cannot describe how everything inside me felt as though it were on fire. After that, the torture eased. They only gave me beatings two or three times a week. Now they used their hands and feet rather than metal or wooden instruments. Thanks to this new, relatively mild policy, I began to recover physically. I had lost more than 25 kilos and was suffering from the kidney complaint I've already mentioned. Two months prior to my abduction, in February 1978, I had suffered a recurrence of typhoid fever. Somewhere between 20 and 25 May, in other words forty-five or fifty days after my capture, I fell ill again with typhoid owing to my physical exhaustion.

In addition to the physical torture employed from the very beginning, torture of a psychological nature (already mentioned [24]

to some extent) was used throughout the period of imprison­ ment, even after the interrogations and physical torture had ceased. There were also countless attempts to humiliate and de­ grade the prisoner. The normal attitude of the torturers and guards towards us was to consider us less than slaves. We were objects. And useless, trouble­ some objects at that. They would say: ‘You’re dirt.’ ‘Since we “disappeared” you, you’re nothing. Anyway, nobody remembers you.’ ‘You don’t exist.’ ‘If anyone were looking for you (which they aren’t), do you imagine they’d look for you here?’ *We are everything for you.’ ‘We are justice.’ ‘We are God.’ Phrases like these, repeated endlessly. By all of them. All the time, and often accompanied by a slap, trip, punch or kick. Or they would drench our cell, mattress and clothes at two in the morning, in winter. As the weeks went by, I began to identify voices and names among them: Tiburón (Shark), Víbora (Snake), Rubio (Blondie), Panza (Potbelly), Tete (Dummy). Also the sound of movements (to­ gether with my previous idea about the route I was sure we had taken) gradually led me to believe that the detention centre must be police premises. Piecing together the clues (there was also a police station close by, and a school - I heard girls singing - and a church, from the sound of the bells) it appeared that the place was the detective squad headquarters in San Justo. Among those kept prisoner with me, whom I could identify because I heard their voices and they told me their names, despite being in separate cells, were: Aureliano Araujo, Olga Araujo, Abel de León, Amalia Marrone, Afilio Barberan, Jorge Heuman, Raúl Petruch and Norma Ereñú. On 1 June, the day the World Cup football began, I was blind­ folded and taken with six more of the detained-disappeared prison­ ers in a van (piled like sacks one on top of the other) to a place which turned out to be the Gregorio de Laferrère police station. One of the most enthusiastic torturers took part in our transfer. I am also certain that he was the person who shot me when I was kidnapped. The route and time taken confirmed my hypothesis as to the location of the detention centre. A fact which became extremely important later on, was my professional participation from 1971 in a Model School for the Social Integration of Handicapped Children, set up in 1963. The school was in Hurlingham, part of Morón, Buenos Aires province. On 18 August, after spending two months in a police cell (one night they made me sign a piece of paper - with my eyes blind­ folded - which was later used as my initial statement to the Regular Court Martial 1/1), they took me to the regimental head­ quarters at Palermo, Buenos Aires. There the magistrate informed [25]

me of the charges against me. Among them was the fact that I had worked at the Model School in Hurlingham. At my trial I denounced all the violations of my rights, including torture, the looting of my home, and having been forced to sign a statement without being able to read it. \

Dr Norberte Liwsky was brought before a military court: the Military Tribunal. This court declared itself incompetent to judge the case as it had no charges to bring. He was then handed over to the civilian courts, who immediately dismissed the case. All the martyrdom related here was suffered by someone against whom no charges were ever brought. With Oscar Martin Guidone, resident in Luján de Cuyo, Mendoza province (file No. 6837), we can see another consequence of torture. He states that he was arrested by an army patrol and taken to the regimental headquarters. There, on 2 June 1976, after a week: ... they handcuffed him to a wall, with his arms spread o u t so that he was only able to stand on tiptoe. They threatened and insulted him constantly. They began to hit him with something hard, like boxing gloves but larger, covering over half his abdomen every time they hit him. This lasted for about three hours. They questioned him about names and people. That was called a 'soften­ ing up session'. They took him to the cell in such a terrible state that people who were being held in the block began banging on the bars, demanding that he be seen to immediately. He was taken to the military hospital where he was seen by doctors. Armed guards were stationed at the door. Their orders were that not even the President of the Republic was to enter. Ex-Governor Martínez Baca was next door. Later the doctors told him that they knew he had studied med­ icine, so that he would know what a secondary rupture of the spleen was, and that they would have to operate. They operated on him in that hospital the next day, performing a laparotomy. They gave him medical treatment while he was tied up. After twenty days he was sent back to the 8th Regiment (which is next door to the military hospital). They even allowed him to continue reading medical books. Because of his knowledge, he helped other prisoners after the torture sessions. Forty-five days after his opera­ tion, they tied his hands and blindfolded him, taking him by truck on a very short journey to a torture centre. One of those taking him was very short of breath, as though drugged. They got him [26]

down from the truck and one of them said to him, ‘We’re off to a bad start,’ as Guidone had trodden on his foot. They questioned him about his ideology; he replied that he didn't have any. With each negative reply they made him remove an item of clothing, until he was completely naked. After that they bound him with chains, face up on a table, his limbs spread apart. They began to torture him with electric prods, blaming him for the dismissal of two colleagues who, when they had tortured him earlier, had caused the physical problems which led to his operation. They fired shots over his body and constantly threatened to take his life and kill his family. This torture lasted for some two or three hours. In the last part of the torture they applied a huge voltage which made his body contract so violently that he broke the chains holding him down. They taunted him, saying that his moustache was more like that of a Fascist than a Communist, and that he had chosen the wrong ideology. The effects of this session lasted for several days, causing a deep de­ pression with physical after-effects. In August 1978 he was released.

Luis Alberto Urquiza, a psychology student, joined the NCO Training School of the Córdoba Provincial Police on 1 November 1974. He was repeatedly harassed about his university studies by the training officer. Subsequently, following many episodes related at length by the witness, he graduated and began to work in various sections covering ’intelligence’, and was then himself taken prisoner. Señor Urquiza’s testimony (file No. 3847) was made on 22 March 1984 in Copenhagen, at the Embassy of the Argentine Republic in Denmark. His arrest took place in Córdoba on 12 November 1976. He suffered tortures which will be detailed in our discussion of w hat is generically termed submarino (immer­ sion) and simulated execution. ... then the beatings began. The next, day I was again beaten up by several people. I recognized the voice of Chief Inspector Roselli, who went to visit the office because of our arrest, and I was able to recognize the voice of the adviser to the Chief of Police, a lieutenant-colonel who also hit me. Throughout the day I was punched and kicked by people going past. On the third day I was beaten up in the afternoon by several people, one of whom asked me if I recognized him. He was Warrant Officer Dardo Rocha, ex­ instructor at the Police Training School and at that time carrying out duties in Signals Division. From the sharp pain I experienced [27]

in breathing, I could feel I had several cracked ribs; I asked the officer on duty for a doctor, but this was refused. On 15 November I was again beaten up, especially at night, by a group of men from the Intelligence Squad. They stood me in the middle of a circle of people and I would be propelled by punches and kicks towards the group, and from there back to the centre of the circle. If I fell I was trodden on and pulled up again by the hair. In the early hours of the 16th I was taken to the toilet by the officer on duty, Francisco Gontero, who. from a distance of four or five metres, loaded his 45-calibre gun and fired three shots, one of which went through my right leg at the height of my knee. I was left standing bleeding, for some twenty minutes. The same person then ripped my trousers and poked a stick and then his finger into the wound. When other people arrived, this officer said that I had tried to grab the gun from him and escape. I was separated from the rest of the prisoners and put in a dark room. I was not allowed to go to the toilet, having to perform my natural functions in my trousers. I was examined by a doctor, who gave me an injection and tranquillizers. I was given no other medication, though my leg was bandaged. This doctor was the forensic doctor on duty at the police clinic that day. Throughout the 16th I was hit. especially on the wounded leg. I spent two days on the floor, unable to recall anything else because of the intense pain and my state of semi-consciousness.

Luis Alberto Urquiza was released in August 1978 for lack of evidence, remaining in Argentina until September 1979. Dr Teresita Hazurun (file No. 1127), Argentine, a lawyer by profession, was abducted at 11 a.m. on Saturday 20 November 1976. She was taken by the Chief of Police himself, making no attempt to resist, believing that she was required professionally for a detainee. Dr Hazurun was subjected to the usual tortures (beatings and the electric prod) as well as other new procedures which she saw applied to others, such as the 'burial' she describes in her account. She was taken to the offices of the State Intelligence Services in Calle Belgrano in the town of Frias, Santiago del Estero province. On the 22nd (Monday) at 8 p.m., two people came and took her to a room behind the offices. They began punching her in the sto­ mach and face. She was interrogated by Musa Assar (whom she recognized by his voice). They asked her about her ex-boyfriend Hugo Iibaak, what he [28]

was doing, whom he met. Unable to get any reply, they laid her down on a bed, where they applied the electric prod to various parts of her body. When people arrived at the offices they would be taken to pits which had been dug in the ground; they were buried there up to the neck, sometimes for four days or more, until they asked to be taken out, having decided to talk. They were kept without food or water, in the sun and rain. When they were dug out (they were buried naked) they would be infested with sores from insect and ant bites. From there they would be taken to the torture chamber (next door there was a room where the torturers lived). Prisoners there said that the torturer was the captain of the Rural Infantry. They had an instrument of torture known as the 'telephone* (an electric prod applied simultaneously to the ears and teeth).

Sometimes the victims were not only taken to the limits of endurance, but did not even understand what they were being asked - as could happen to anyone who was totally unfamiliar with the jargon used by the torturers. Antonio Horacio Miño Retamozo (file No. 3721), was abducted from his workplace in Buenos Aires on 23 August 1976. It was the usual sequence of events. First they took him to Police Station No. 33. Then he tells us: In the station, things began normally. I was first questioned about my full name, nom de guerre (I didn't know what that was), my rank in the orga (again, I didn’t know what they were talking about) and then I was offered a passport, flight ticket and a thou­ sand dollars to leave the country. Not knowing what they were asking me about and refusing to reply, the dialogue came to an end and 'persuasion* began. I was blindfolded and the beatings started. Three or four people surrounded me and blows and kicks started raining down all over my body. When I remained firm in my refusal, they resorted to sticks and rubber truncheons. They re­ peated the sequence of questioning followed by blows until they lost patience and, in order to achieve better results, took me, wrapped in something thick, which could well have been a carpet, to the Federal Security Headquarters. They put me on the floor in the back of a police car. Two or three people trod on me so that I wouldn’t move. At the headquarters I was taken straight to the parilla (grill). That is, I was tied to the metal frame of a bed, electrodes were attached to my hands and feet, and they ran an electric [29]

prod all over me, with particular savagely and intensity on the genitals. Despite the bonds, when on the 'grill' one jumps, twists, moves about and tries to avoid contact with the burning, cutting iron bars. The electric prod was handled like a scalpel and the 'special­ ist' would be guided by a doctor who would tell him if I could take any more. After a Seemingly endless session they untied me and resumed their questioning. They would plague me with questions about the cap of the mir. I hadn’t the faintest idea what cap of the mir could be. I couldn't understand any of their jargon. And immediately I was on the 'grill' once again, and the questioning-electric prod-grill sessions recommenced. They would repeat the same questions, changing the order and wording to obtain answers and find contradictions. It was only a year later that I learned from another prisoner that cap of the mir referred to the capture of the 29th Rural Infantry Regiment, which occurred on 5 October 1975 in Formosa, a town I had lived in all that year. The interrogation sessions later became shorter, but the electric prod was more intense, savagely seeking out the sphincters. The worst was having electrodes on the teeth - it felt as if a thunderbolt was blowing your head to pieces - and a narrow string of beads, which they put in my mouth and which were very difficult to swallow because they induced retching and vomiting, thus inten­ sifying the ordeal, until finally they forced one to swallow them. Each bead was an electrode and when they worked it seemed like a thousand crystals were shattering, splintering inside one and moving through the body, cutting everywhere. They were so ex­ cruciating that one couldn’t even scream or groan or move. They produced convulsions which, if one hadn’t been tied down, would have forced one into a foetal position. This left one shaking for several hours with all one’s insides one huge wound and an un­ bearable thirst, but the fear of more convulsions was stronger, so for several days one didn’t eat or drink, in spite of their trying to force one to do so. Every day they invented new things as collective p u n is h m e n t. Once it was really horrific. A person calling himself ‘Lieutenant’ came and said that he was giving us military training, which wasn’t true - we were tightly blindfolded and couldn’t talk. There were nearly always guards there and they were always coming and going, bringing people in and taking them away. They took us to what I imagine was a large room; they sur­ rounded us and began to hit us all over, but especially on the elbows and knees; we would crash into each other, blows were coming at us from all sides, we would trip and fall. Then, when we were completely prostrate on the floor, they started throwing ice-cold water over us and with electric prods they would force us to our feet and take us back to the place we had come from. They [30]

left us all together, shaking, wet, shivering, huddling together for warmth. We could hear them playing cards, their voices raised to drown out the constant screams of somebody being tortured. When they finished the game they would amuse themselves by illtreating us. When they took us from the 'lion's cage*, to the questioningtorture room, we would have to climb three steps and go down two, or vice versa, go up two and down three, and they would make us turn round so as to disorientate us. The night of Wednesday 1 September was transfer night for some, and with it came additional fear and insecurity, for in' those days it was well known that they would kill prisoners during the transfers, inventing 'shoot outs'. We were taken to a transit camp, for 'softening up’ before being disposed of. There the torture was such that we had no name or surname but a number. Mine was number 11. It was like a cellar, there were fifteen of us; I recognized Puértolas’s voice by its highpitched intonation, which still haunts me. The punishment was brutal. On Thursday they took me for two sessions, and on Friday I received the most horrific beating I've ever had. There was somebody on the 'grill*; it sounded like Puértolas, although it was very difficult to recognize his voice, we were in such a sorry state. They put me on the bed on top of him and when they applied the electric prod to me, he would jump too. My feet were close to a wall and if I touched or dirtied it, or moved at all, they would beat me on the legs.

Following continuous ill-treatment and death threats, Miño Retamozo was taken to the 29th Rural Infantry Regiment. I arrived with a star billing, since in their view I was the one who had planned the attack on the regiment. They began to work on me early on Monday, and continued morning, noon and night. For the first few days, in between ses­ sions, I was tied naked to a bed, with a guard beside me and without food. At night I would be taken to a corridor and thrown down alongside the other prisoners, who didn't know what to do, wanting to move away from me through fear of being mistaken for me and taken away in my place. At night the ‘female voice' would arrive, a well-known officer of the Gendarmeríaf who spoke in falsetto. The first thing he would do was to stroke one’s testicles in anticipation of the pleasure of his task. This went on for three weeks. They suffocated me with plastic bags or by putting my head under water. They tore me apart with * A rm ed border police used in r u ra l areas.

[31]

the ‘helmet of death* (a horrendous device full of electrodes placed over the head), which doesn’t even allow you to say no. Your body is racked with screams. One night they amused themselves with a boy from Las Palmas (Chaco province) and myself. The soldiers were whiling away the time listening to the i^adio; the local team Patria and Rosario Cen­ tral were playing football. Throughout the match they used the helmet on the boy, which left him crazy for about two weeks afterwards. Then it was my turn. During the interrogation sessions there was always someone who would smash the joints of one’s hands and feet with a piece of wood.

Regarding his subsequent transfer to Formosa, Miño Retamozo adds: As Formosa was a town with a population of about 100,000, most of those there knew the identity of the torturers, such as Sergeant or Top Sergeant Eduardo Steinberg, Second Commander Domato, and the man known as ‘Death with a female voice’, also Second Commander of the Gendarmería. When the guards were a little more lenient, we would ask for a bucket of water so we could wash. I nearly died the first time I had a bath. When I took off my blindfold I could hardly recognize myself. I was black with marks, as if Td been rolling in barbed wire, covered in bums from cigarettes and the electric scalpel; I was the picture of misfortune. The 'electric scalpel’ cuts, burns and cauterizes. They hardly used it on me, compared with Velázquez Ibarra and other prisoners. I still have scars from it on my back. Electrodes or scalpel? As my back was raw, my shirt would stick to it. With the heat and dirt it had started to fester and I hadn’t noticed. My companions, who took such care of me. called a soldier from the infirmary to disinfect the wound. One day I finally understood the reason for my misfortunes, if one can use the word in these cases. At break-time, someone from the cell opposite told me that Marta Infran had talked. They had caught her and her husband. First they tortured her husband until he was completely broken, and then killed him. Then they started on her. At some stage she cracked, tried to save herself, or was driven to the edge of insanity and began to invent the most far­ fetched things. She sent over fifty people to prison. She said that I had planned the attack on the regiment, that I was active in the ‘Montoneros’ organization and that they had offered me logistic backing. I had met Marta Infran in 1975, when she was nineteen a n d working in a law court. We both attended the same course, in the first year of Forestry Technology, and we were casual acquaint­ ances. [32]

I was released on 6 June 1977.

In this instance, a chance acquaintance, a denunciation made in a state of delirium during the torture inflicted on Marta Infran, was enough for Miño Retamozo to suffer the ordeal described. Equally significant is the testimony of Oscar Alberto Paillalef (file No. 6956) of General Roca (Río Negro province). Señor Paillalef was summoned by the local police to report to the headquarters of the 6th Brigade in Neuquén. As he had a company car they let him drive home in it. He was told to return because he would have to be questioned by Major Reinhold of Intelligence. He went back on the 19th of the same month. I was taken to a place which apparently was next door to the building I had been in. I was put on another bed there. Two people were facing me, one asked questions and the other supposedly acted as his assistant. They continued to hit me as I was being questioned, and they attached what they called 'the wires’, which was the electric prod, to me, on the inside of my arms and then under the blindfold, on my temples. After a long while I was taken back to where I’d been originally. This treatment continued. There were guards who would bit and kick me and tighten the handcuffs until they cut my wrists. The interrogation sessions continued until the 29th, roughly every other day. Several times they played a macabre game with me: they would put the barrel of a gun to my head and pull the trigger, but it didn’t go off. At night when it was quieter I could hear lorries passing fairly close by, which led me to suppose that we were very near Highway 22 and. in my opinion, we were in the 181st Battalion barracks. Every time they took me for an interrogation session, in addition to questioning, I would be taken to and from that room and beaten up again. One night, threatening to finish me off, they put cigarette ash under my blindfold so that, they said, 'Your eyes will rot.’

In some cases, such as that of José Antonio Giménez (file No. 3035), aged fifty-three, living in Centenario, Neuquén, arrested on 10 January 1977 outside his house, they used a slight vari­ ation: ... I was blindfolded, and had cotton wool over my eyes so that I wouldn’t see anything, which didn’t stop the blindfold from slip133]

ping at times and letting me see that some of the guards were wearing army boots. What’s more, on one occasion when they tried to get me to sign a statement - which I did not - they removed my blindfold and I saw that the person speaking to me. a young man, was dressed in military uniform and wore a gas mask which entirely covered his face. I was subjected to torture, which consisted in being hung by the arms from a wall behind me with my legs hanging from another wall, that is, with my body suspended in the air. They had attached electrodes to my temples, under the blindfold, and applied current through those electrodes. This was carried out at another centre, built of zinc sheets and a wooden frame, like shelters found in railway stations. These sessions were repeated several times with­ out my being able to say exactly how often, interspersed with interrogation sessions limited to ordering me to ’sing’, that is. to tell what I knew, though they did not ask me any specific questions about any event, circumstance, place or date, nor regarding any person in particular. When they finally demanded that I write in my own words a description of my actions during the period im­ mediately before my abduction. I started to do so, but was inter­ rupted before I could sign it, evidently because it was no use to them.

As he was having dinner on 20 January 1976, Santos Aurelio Chaparro was abducted from his house in Ingenio la Florida, Tucumán province. The kidnappers were in three cars. Some were in military uniform, others were dressed in civilian clothes. He recognized the place they took him to as the Tucumán Police Headquarters. He says they kept him in a room with other pri­ soners, and declares (file No. 5522): ... That on the second day of being illegally held in those condi­ tions, two people, who had not been involved in his abduction, took him to a smaller room where they stripped h im and tied him to a bed known as the ’grill’. They attached wires to his head and began to torture him with electric current. They applied the electric prod all over his body, with preference for the genital and pectoral areas, and on the head, mouth, gums. etc. He was tortured for about two hours, then they took h im away to another room in the same building, where a group of people subjected him to a brutal beating. This continued for several hours, until he lost conscious­ ness. He was then taken to the room where he had first been held. This form of torture was carried out every day for twenty days. (File No. 5522.)

[34]

Señor Chaparro was taken to a 'recuperation* camp to recover from his injuries. After twenty-five days he returned to Police Headquarters and was tortured to a lesser degree for five days. They promised to release him but cancelled the order as soon as they had signed it. This took place in the School of Physical Education on 24 March 1976. He goes on: After this period he was again taken to a little room and tortured. On this occasion, he was made to drink large amounts of water whilst being tortured with the electric prod. They put a bottle to his mouth, telling him they would make him drink all the water in the River Salí. He drank two bottles of water. He was repeatedly tortured with the electric prod. After this he was brutally beaten, passing out again, bathed in blood. Water was oozing out of differ­ ent body orifices and they were apparently scared by his condition, since after this they tried to rehabilitate him. He remained here for about twenty days and then they transferred him to another place which he cannot identify precisely. There he was tortured on a table with the electric prod. He was also subjected to the submarino, in a 200-litre tub. While he was in it. they banged on the sides of the tub and applied elec­ tricity. He was told he was going to be killed. They took him out and subjected him to a brutal session of torture with the electric prod, and after this he was made to stand against a wall. An officer of the Gendarmería (whom he had seen wearing a military cap) gave him a karate kick in the back, following which he says he passed out. He was subsequently brutally beaten, with sticks. He thinks they cracked his sternum and broke bones in his fingers. The blows caused his chains to break and he lost consciousness. He was left with permanent disabilities, such as a buzzing in the left ear, no feeling in his toes, etc. He was then transferred to La Plata Prison, being released on probation on 23 March 1982.

We will omit the details of the arrest in Santa Fé province of Orlando Luis Stimemann, of Rio Gallegos (file No. 4337), and only mention w hat one of his kidnappers said. At the time of the arrest, when asked why the victim w asn't being hooded, he replied: ‘It’s not necessary and he knows it. He’s “got his ticket”.’ After being held for a fortnight in that detention centre, I was transferred to another one, presumably in the same army region. [35]

They would employ torture to interrogate prisoners* including the electric prod, for which they used a high-voltage device which, when applied, would cause the tongue to contract, so that it was impossible for the prisoner to scream. Another method was to put a cat inside the clothes of the person being interrogated, then to give it electric shocks so that it would react violently and injure the prisoner.

In the testimony by Enrique Rodriguez Larreta (file No. 2539) we find new ways of applying torture. We will include only the essential paragraphs of his statement: The following night it was my turn to be taken to the top floor, where I was interrogated under torture, as were all the men and women there. I was stripped naked and was hung by the wrists with my arms behind me some 20 or 30 centimetres from the ground. At the same time they put some kind of underpants on me, which had several electrical terminals in them. When they were connected, the victim received electric current in several places at once. This device, which they called the ‘machine*. was switched on during questioning, while they hurled threats and abuse at me. hitting me in the most sensitive parts. The ground below where the prisoners were suspended was very wet and covered in coarse salt ciystals, with the aim of intensifying the torture should the person manage to rest his feet on the floor. Several of the people held there with me slipped from their bonds and knocked themselves against the floor, getting seriously hurt. I especially remember the case of somebody whom I later knew to be Edelweiss Zahn de Andrés, who suffered deep cuts about the head and ankles which later became infected.

Antonio Cruz, Argentine, married, resident in Buenos Aires, was a member of the Gendarmería between 31 December 1972 (when he joined up, according to Confidential Bulletin 1460, paragraphs 3-6) and 31 December 1977 when he left, according to the JMM (Joint Military Message - SD5289/77). We will transcribe the most important parts of his testimony (file No. 4676): Here I must refer to the PAC (Prisoner Assessment Centre) known as La Escuelita. It was located in Famaillá, about two or three blocks away from the railway to San Miguel de Tucumán. [36]

At the time of our arrival, this was the ‘dogs of war* section. I will proceed to describe the interrogation room. This was in the last classroom in the school, and in it there was a military-type iron bed, a table and photographs of the prisoners. ... There was also a battery-operated field telephone which would generate an electric current when the handle was turned. The voltage produced depended on the speed at which it was turned. The interrogators had a rubber truncheon similar to that used by the Federal Police, with which they would beat the prisoners to ‘soften them up' as soon as they were brought in.

Cruz then refers to the fate which befell a prisoner placed in his charge: The next day the interrogation of this person began. First he was tied down to a bed - he couldn't be handcuffed because there weren't any handcuffs large enough to fit his wrists. He was beaten with a rubber truncheon but, seeing that they were not getting any results, they began using the telephone wire on him. One of the wires was tied to the foot of the bed and they applied the other to the most sensitive parts of his body, and to his back and chest. As they still couldn't make him talk, they started hitting h im again, until at one point the prisoner asked to go to the toilet, which request was granted. I was put in charge of guarding him person­ ally, which terrified me. I noticed then that he was passing blood, that is, he seemed to have sustained serious internal injuries. When I handed him back to the interrogators I mentioned this, but they dismissed it. Before the torturers went off that night, they left him tied to a pillar in the open air with strict orders not to feed him and to give him only water to drink. He died hanging there in the early hours of the morning. He had been so badly beaten that he had been unable to withstand the punishment. When they came back to question h im the interrogators were told what had hap­ pened, and they regretted having been unable to obtain any precise information. Women were interrogated in the same manner. They were stripped naked, laid down on the bed, and the torture session would begin. With women, they would insert the wire in the va­ gina and then apply it to the breasts, which caused great pain. Many of them would menstruate in mid-torture. With them they only used the telephone, no other device. On one occasion they brought in a wounded prisoner. One day, out of curiosity, I went up to his window, since I was alone and you could see in through the gap. As I got closer, I saw his head had been split open, and when I looked at his hands I noticed that they were full of maggots. This turned my stomach because the poor bloke was becoming infested with maggots. [37]

With the testimony of Carlos Hugo Basso (file No. 7725), Ar­ gentine (currently in exile), we return to the now notorious La Perla and La Ribera ¿amps. Basso was abducted on 10 November 19 76 in the Alto Alberti district of the town of Córdoba. Following the usual procedureNwith blows and a journey on the floor of a car under his captors' feet, they arrived at the secret detention centre. They opened a door which, from the noise it made, was probably metal. One of those taking me warned me that I was shortly to meet the ‘Priest’, who would be in charge of ‘taking my confession'. This person they called ‘Priest’ must have been quite big since as soon as I went in he grabbed me by the sides and lifted me in the a ir ... Afterwards they beat me with sticks and a hammer which they used to smash my fingers whenever my hands were on the floor. They undressed me and tied my hands and feet to a bed-frame they called a ‘grill’. For what must have been about an hour they applied electric current to the most sensitive parts of my body: genitals, hips, knees, neck. gums. ... For the neck and gums they used a tiny instrument with several points, directly connected to the mains supply of 220 volts. I could see under my blindfold that every time a discharge was produced, the light of a small bulb over the ‘grill’ dimmed. During this time I heard one of the torturers being addressed as ‘Gringo’. Afterwards somebody applied a stetho­ scope to my chest and they untied me. I found I couldn’t walk, but they dragged me 20 or 30 metres to a mattress in a large room, against a wall, where I remained until the following day.

Teresa Celia Meschiati was abducted in the town of Córdoba on 25 September 1976 and taken to the La Perla centre (file No. 4279). She tells us: Immediately after my arrival at La Perla I was taken to the torture room or ‘intensive therapy’ room. They stripped me and tied my feet and hands with ropes to the bars of a bed. so that I was hanging from them. They attached a wire to one of the toes of my right foot. Torture was applied gradually, by means of electric prods of two different intensities; one of 125 volts which caused involuntary muscle movements and pain all over my body. They applied this to my face, eyes, mouth, arms, vagina, and anus; and another of 220 volts called la margarita (the daisy), which left deep ulcerations which I still have and which caused a violent contrac­ tion, as if all my limbs were being tom off at once, especially in [38]

the kidneys, legs, groin and sides of the body. They also put a wet rag on my chest to increase the intensity of the shock. I tried to kill myself by drinking the foul water in the tub which was meant for another kind of torture called submarino, but I did not succeed. The gradually increasing intensity of the electric prod was matched by the sadism of my torturers. There were five of them, whose names were: Guillermo Barreiro, Luis Manzanelli, José López, Jorge Romero, and Fermín de los Santos.

Nélson Eduardo Dean, Uruguayan, married, abducted at 10 p.m. in the Almagro district of Buenos Aires on 13 July 1976 (file No. 7412), says in the essential parts of his testimony: Once there, we were put in various rooms. With my wrists hand­ cuffed behind my back, eyes blindfolded, and bleeding profusely, a new wave of blows began. After half an hour I was taken to a room on the top floor. There they stripped off all my clothes, hand­ cuffed my wrists behind my back again and began to throw buckets of water over me. Next they put wires around my waist, thorax and ankles. They tied a rope or chain to the handcuffs and pulled my arms up as high as they could without dislocating them. I was in that position, literally hanging at a distance of about 30 centi­ metres from the floor, for a period of time which is not possible to determine in hours, only in terms of pain. Because of the great suffering induced by this form of torture, one loses all track of formal time. Later the torturers slackened the rope some 20 centimetres, enough to enable me to touch the ground with some difficulty and rest my arms a little - actually, any notion of rest was illusory, since when I tried to touch the floor and succeeded I started to receive electric shocks. It's really very difficult to express in words all the agony these shocks produce. I think it's only possible to offer a tragic caricature of what it was like. Two things might prove useful as examples and give some idea: some actual physical events and some sensations. As to the physical effects, I feel there are two which will show you the extent of the torture: (a) After torture, the soles of the feet were burnt and layers of hard skin would form, which peeled off later. Obviously the skin was burnt from the electric shocks. (b) During the application of electricity, one would lose all con­ trol over one's senses, such torture provoking permanent vomiting, almost constant defecation, etc. As for sensations, electricity begins to rise up the body. All the parts with wires attached to them feel as though they are being tom from the body. Thus, at first, it's the feet which feel as though they are being tom off, then the legs, testicles, thorax, etc. [39]

These torture sessions went on for a period of five days, increas­ ing in intensity. During the last few days they repeated all the above methods and. in addition, inserted wires into my anus, tes­ ticles and penis. These practices were carried out in a diabolical setting; the torturers, some drinking, others laughing, hitting and insulting, tried to extract from me the names of Uruguayans living in Argentina who opposed the current regime governing my coun­ try. I noticed that officers of the Uruguayan Army participated directly in these interrogation and torture sessions. Some said they belonged to a group called OCOA (Anti-subversive Operation Co­ ordinating Organization).

Raúl Esteban Radonich (file No. 6956) was arrested in Neuquén on 13 January 1977 and released in Senillosa on the 19th. He was arrested at half-past eight in the morning at his office. They took him on a roundabout route in order to disorientate him: ... to premises of the 161st Engineers Battalion, to a place called La Escuelita, which was actually the pick-up centre operating in the area. There I was handcuffed to the sides of a bed for a while, before being transferred to another place. They made me walk in a squatting position all the time in order to prevent me making out the various installations. Once again I was handcuffed to a bedframe, this time by the hands and feet They put two wires under the blindfold on my temples. They asked me for personal details, which were typed on to what looked like a file card. This done, a totally different interrogation session began. The first question they asked me was my rank and nom de guerre, to which I replied that I had neither. That was when I received the first discharge of electricity. Their questions centred around my participation in pol­ itics, from my role in an organization to my inclusion in student election lists. They also asked me if I had any idea where I was. This clearly worried them a lot since they kept on repeating it - I had done my military service in that same military unit in 1976. As I continued to reply in the negative, they increased the frequency, duration and intensity of the discharges, which were always to the head. I lost track of time, although several hours seemed to go by. In between questions and my screams they made various kinds of threats. Blood was pouring from my mouth, as my muscles contracted during the discharges and I clenched my jaws with my tongue protruding, so that I virtually bit through it. As my condition got progressively worse, they threw a bucket of water over me to revive me, and eventually suspended the session. They told me that it would start again in the afternoon, and that it would depend on [40]

me, and the answers I gave, whether or not they continued to torture me. The interrogation session was conducted by at least three people, and was attended by the head of the group who had arrested me. He took on the role of the ‘kind-hearted’ one, sug­ gesting I talk as it wasn’t worth sacrificing myself for the sake of others. The rest, on the other hand, used a threatening, com­ manding tone.

In the case of Juan Matías Bianchi (file No. 2669) there was a double simulation: of incineration and of execution: They made him smell a liquid, asking him if he knew what it was that they were making him smell, to which he replied yes, that it was a solvent. They asked him if he had anything to say, to come out with it, because they were going to burn him, all the time rustling papers for him to hear. They also simulated execution by putting a gun to his head. Just as they were pretending they were going to bum him alive, he heard a car draw up, someone approached him and said, ‘Look, you’d better resign your position as union delegate’. After that there was silence, and then he heard the car pulling away. He stood still for a time, until he realized that there was nobody there and they had removed the handcuffs.

Daniel Osvaldo Pina (file No. 5186) also went through the terrifying experience of simulated assassination. The whole con­ text was beyond belief. He describes it thus: From there they took us to two other places, where they continued to torture us and, in the second one, after torturing Arra, they took Moriña away. Koltes and I awaited our turn. Suddenly Moriña’s screams stopped, and I could hear running and voices calling for a doctor. After that, they came to fetch us and, without questioning us, they put Koltes and me in a lorry and took us somewhere else which I assumed was in the mountains. Moriña was no longer with us. I spent two or three days in the new place. It was almost a month since my abduction, though since I was permanently blind­ folded, it was difficult to be specific. On one of those days I heard people going near the place where, from noises, I had judged they were keeping Arra. I heard their boots marching, then they ordered him to ‘Get u p ... W alk. . . ’ I heard the sound of feet dragging towards the door and two or three minutes later, four shots rang out. Then they went to where I had guessed Koltes was, and exactly the same thing happened. When my turn came they didn’t say anything. I heard the sound [41]

of the gun as they prepared to shoot, then they fired four shots close to my head. The next day they took me away again but this time on my own, in what I think was an ambulance from the army block. Then I was transferred to a van belonging, I think, to the Mendoza police. I was put on ¿he floor and they kicked and spat on me as well as continually threatening to kill me, until eventually we arrived at the prison.

There are testimonies of other kinds of torture, such as being hung from a tree or beam. As an example of this 'system' we transcribe the relevant part of the statement of one of the victims. Enrique Igor Peczak (file No. 6947). I was arrested on 15 October 1976 by an army unit, which sur­ rounded and raided my mother’s house, where I was living. Jorge Armando González was arrested with me. We were tied up and blindfolded, then I was suspended from a tree with my hands behind me and beaten from noon until evening. I could hear my mother’s screams as she begged them not to kill me. I could also hear them hitting González. At one stage they filled a container with water, hung him up by the feet and submerged him head first That was repeated several times. As one of them was beating me, he told me that if they hadn’t forgotten the electric prod I would already be talking. Then sud­ denly he punched my ears with both hands, causing me intense pain and a loud buzzing which lasted for several months. In the evening they took us down and took us to what I later found to be the provincial police headquarters where they separated us and beat me again ... ... and hung me by the throat, until I passed o u t I began to lose track of time and my memories became confused, so that I can’t be sure of the order of events, but I’m almost certain that they took a photo of me and then used the electric prod on me on the floor... They took me to a house ... in one of the places they suspended me by the hands in such a way that I could only touch the floor with my toes. By then my thirst was unbearable and I shouted for a glass of water; somebody came and stuffed a gag in my mouth. Since I passed out, I can’t figure out how long I was hanging for.

Daniel Eduardo Fernández (file No. 1131) was eighteen when he was abducted. He was a secondary school student. At that age he came to know all kinds of torture: punches, kicks, death threats and what was known as submarino in both its forms, 'dry' and 'wet'. [42]

The idea was to leave the victim without any kind of psychological resistance, until he was at the mercy of the interrogator, and thus obtain any answer the latter wanted, however absurd. If they wanted you to reply that you had seen San Martin on horseback the previous day they succeeded. Then they would tell us we were liars, until you really felt it was true, and then they carried on with the torture... ... They would make us stretch our hands out and hit us on the fingertips with a sort of truncheon. Afterwards we couldn’t move our hands. Others were beaten until their mouth or eyes bled. They even went as far as putting a plastic bag over our heads and tying it tightly round the neck until we ran out of air and were about to pass out. Another method was to tie us to a board and put a container full of water at one end. The victim’s head would be submerged in it and they wouldn’t pull him out until he let out the last bubble of air; as soon as he took a mouthful of air they submerged him again. On 13 September 1977 I was released, blindfolded, my hair badly cut, wearing jeans and a T-shirt on a very cold day. They left me on Avenida Vêlez Sarsfield, near a railway crossing.

In file No. 5604, Lidia Esther Biscarte describes her abduction and subsequent martyrdom. It shows the ingenuity the interro­ gators brought into play in applying new methods of torture in addition to the usual tools of their trade. She was abducted from her home (Zárate, Buenos Aires province) in the early hours of the morning of 27 March 1976. They covered her head with the sheet she had been using. She was kidnapped barefoot and in her nightdress. She heard from the radio that she was in Zárate police station. Without asking her anything, they applied the electric prod, stripped her and applied the prod again in the anus, vagina, mouth and armpits. They threw water over her and tied her to a leather armchair. The sheet had been tied over her head. Somebody came up to her and started to twist her nipples, causing her intense pain since they had also applied the electric prod to them. There were another two abducted men in the same room. Somebody came in and told the other character to leave her alone, ‘they are going to take them for a walk’. The deponent knows that the place she was transferred to later with the other two people was the Zárate naval base since she lived a block and a half away, and from the way the boat berthed. They [43]

could hear the shouts of the deckhand and the shock as the boat bumped against the dock. They were taken off the boat in Zárate arsenal. Stakes were ham­ mered in, and they were stretched out, and left all day. They were tortured with the electric prod. When evening came they were put on board a boat and handcuffed together, that is to say, the de­ ponent’s arm was handcuffed to someone else’s. On the boat, they hung her by the feet and gave her the sub­ marino treatment in the river. With her were Señor Iglesias, Teresa di Martino, with whom she was subsequently in prison. Blanda Ruda, a Dr Marta and her husband, the former being brutally tortured and her husband raped by the torturers, a lad called Fernández who is now abroad, in Switzerland she believes, and Tito Cono or Aniconi or something similar, now free. They spent about two days on the boat during which time they were tortured and hung from a crane... They loaded them into prison vans and took them to a place she believes from the Esso factory whistle was Tolueno, in Campana. After two or three days they were put on board a raft and taken across what was probably the Tigre. The raft was steered by a soldier in green uniform. They left them on the craft on the shore of an island. Later, she was taken and put into an Army truck, with lots of other people. They were driven to a torture house, where they could hear the noise of cars and aeroplanes. In the house they were put into an empty swimming pool with high-powered searchlights trained on them. In the pool there were hundreds of dead bodies. She was moved into the house and tor­ tured. It was a house with a bathroom and two large bedrooms. She heard a guard saying, 'These have had it. they stay here, take them to rooms 1 and 2.’ The guards would call each other by animal names: ‘Tiger’, 'Puma', 'Viscacha', 'Rattlesnake'.

In the testimony of Juan Matías Bianchi (file No. 2669), resi­ dent in Campana, Buenos Aires province, we find a new sadistic variant of sexual perversion: On 4 March 1977 at 3 a.m., four individuals claiming to be mili­ tary personnel appeared at the victim's house, with black stockings covering their faces. At one point he was lifted up, taken along a corridor and ordered to undress. He was thrown on a bunk and told: ‘Listen, I’m "The German".’ He could hear women and men screaming. 'The Ger­ man’ tried to stick a length of pipe in his anus. He heard another voice telling the German to leave him alone, then this person said to him: 'See, I’m "The Spaniard" and I rescued you from this fellow busting you by sticking the bar up you.’ They stretched him out naked and tied him down with leather [44]

thongs. ‘The Spaniard* told him to talk, applying electric current to his ankle, burning his muscles so badly that he still bears the mark. He was also questioned by a woman. 'The Spaniard' then applied the prod to his armpits, where he also still has scars. 'The Spaniard' was laughing and said to the woman, 'Since you like the privates, you carry on.’ Then he felt the woman grab his penis and pour in a sort of caustic liquid, as a result of which he has had problems with micturition.

In the following extracts from testimonies, there » appear amongst other tortures various forms of rape. The victims in each case will remain anonymous. C.G.F., Argentine, married, (file No. 7372) was abducted out­ side her workplace in the centre of Buenos Aires at 5 p.m., the time she usually leaves work. The usual procedure followed car without markings ... blindfolded ... ending up in an un­ known place... tied to a b e d ... ... and five men proceeded to question me for about an hour, roughing me up and insulting me. They obtained my in-laws’ address and decided to go there, leaving me alone for several hours. When they returned from my in-laws' house they were furious. They tied me with my arms and legs spread out, and interrogated me again with worse treatment and insults than before. They said they had taken my two-year-old son prisoner so that I would cooperate; soon afterwards they took that back. Then they proceeded to insert what I afterwards knew to be a police truncheon into my vagina. Then they took me to another room, where they tried to force me to eat handcuffed to a table. When I refused they moved me again and they stood me in a corner while they interrogated me once more, hitting me on the head and threatening to stick the truncheon into my an u s... Within what could be called the daily routine, I remember the door of the room was locked from the outside. We were fully dressed all the time, even when we slept. In the sleeping quarters, on trips to the bathroom and to the kitchen, my eyes were uncovered. They would make some or all of us wear a blindfold 'wall up’ - whenever members of the force other than the usual guards came in. In these cases it was routine for them to intimidate us with their guns, pushing them into our bodies, neck or head ... On two occasions they took me blindfolded to another building, where I was made to strip against a wall. Shouting abuse they pushed me down on the metal frame of a bed and tied me with my limbs apart. Then they 'prodded' me in the lower abdomen and [45]

vulva while questioning me. On the second occasion they told me they had A.G.P. with them, who worked in the same department as me and was office representative. She had been abducted on 28 March 1977, outside the institution. Alter these sessions they would make me dress, and politely, with words of consolation, they would take me to the sleeping quarters and tell another woman prisoner to come and comfort me. This they also did when they brought one of the other woman prisoners from their sessions. I asked for medical attention, and they did give me some treatment for my palpitations ... One day they took me blindfolded from the dormitory to a room I recognized as the place where I had been 'prodded*. They made me take off my blindfold, and I was left alone with a man who. offering me cigarettes, politely asked me to tell him everything they had done to me. As I described the events to him, he pointed out one I had missed, which showed that he had witnessed all the interrogation and torture sessions or, at least, that he was fully aware of them. At the same time, he tried to instil in me the idea that nothing which had happened to me there had really been that serious, nor had the blows been as heavy as I imagined. He told me they would release me and that I wasn’t to tell anybody what had happened to me during that time. Blindfolded once again, they took me back to the dormitory. At midnight on 14 June they announced that they would let me go and gave me back some of the belongings (watch, bracelet, money) I had had with me at the time of my abduction. They took me blindfolded out of the building and put me in a car in which there was only the driver (who turned out to be the same person who had kindly tried to show me that all that had happened was trivial) and myself. After driving over a rough, potholed terrain, he stopped the engine. He told me he had orders to kill me, guiding me with his gloved hands to touch the guns he had in the glove compartment He offered to save my life if in exchange I would agree to have sexual relations with him. I agreed to his proposal, in the hope of saving my life and of having the blindfold removed... He started the car and after we got on to an asphalted surface he told me to remove the blindfold. He drove the car to a motel; he told me that he was taking a big risk and that if I did anything suspicious he would kill me immediately. We entered the motel. I carried out his demands under threat of death, so I felt and consider myself to have been raped. On leaving, he drove me to my in-laws’ house.

A seventeen-year-old adolescent, then a secondary school stu­ dent, refers in the following statement to the outrage to which [46]

she was subjected. A.N. (file No. 6532) reports that she was abducted from her home in Buenos Aires on 9 May 1978. She was taken along a motorway to a secret detention centre. They followed the usual procedure. She goes on: ... in the early hours of the morning she was taken to another room where she was tied to a bed with wooden slats. She was surrounded by The Basque’, three or four other men subordinate to him, and a woman nicknamed ‘La Negra'. She was stripped of her clothes, tied to the bed and interrogated with the application of the electric prod and blows to her body.' The interrogation concerned her school companions (she was attending the Carlos Pellegrini school), particularly M.W. and who she afterwards learned were already being held in that detention centre and are still ‘disappeared’. She was also interrogated about two boys, L.Z. and G.D. and a young woman, M.G.; as it turned out, they were also being kept there and were afterwards released. For a time, the duration of which was impossible to ascertain, the deponent was taken to various places in the secret centre ... One night a man came to her cell. He tied her up and beat her, then raped her amid threats, forbidding her to tell anybody what happened. After that he took her to a bathroom to get cleaned up. As a result of the above, her feverish state worsened and she became delirious, begging not to be raped. When they heard her, ‘The Guaranf and others of higher rank, ‘The Frenchman’ and ‘The Basque’, appeared in her cell, questioned her and began a supposed investigation since, so they said, ‘rape was forbidden’ in that place. Once recovered, she was transferred to another ‘house’. Prior to her transfer, her handcuffs and hood were exchanged for a blindfold and her hands were tied. She was led, together with the youths C.N., S.Z. and G.D., to a car in which they set off, stopping shortly afterwards. They were warned not to move or a bomb would explode. Soon afterwards, uniformed army personnel approached the car, made the four prisoners get out, untied them and transferred them to the 10th Ordnance Battalion in Villa Martelli. She records that when the above occurred she was seventeen years old, as were her three companions. They were all students at the Carlos Pellegrini Commercial High School. In the battalion barracks they were examined by a doctor and put in adjacent cells in a ramshackle building. They were guarded by conscripts, a corporal and a sergeant. After they had been there a few days, Colonel Hernán Teetzlaff came to her cell, bringing with him a statement which she had to sign under duress. This was during her captivity in the SDC which she now recognizes as El Vesubio. [47]

On 30 or 31 August 1978, she was transferred to Villa Devoto Prison together with her companions, to be tried by the Military Tribunal. In October, this Tribunal declared itself incompetent to judge the case. They were passed to the civil court presided over by Dr Giletta, being released for lack of evidence on or about 30 October, first going through Federal Police Headquarters.

The testimony we present next shows the state to which M. de M. was reduced by the ordeal she suffered (file No. 2356). Abducted in Buenos Aires she was taken for a long distance in a pick-up truck. Judging by the sound of crickets and other details, they took her somewhere in the country. It was like a camp, a provisional set-up, with canvas sheeting and tents everywhere. They left her in a sort of room where she felt terrified and started to scream. Thus alerted, her captors put her into a tank full of water. Her breasts were hurting a lot, as she was breast-feeding at the tim e... Then they bound her hands and feet with wires and passed electric current through them. She began to have convulsions. They said that was the breaking in she needed in order to confess. Then they stripped and raped her. She asked to go to the toilet. They took her naked along an open gallery full of soldiers. She remembers that they all laughed. She also recalls them taking a group of people and putting them into a helicopter: they were thrown out at the end of a rope, and each time they were raised again they were questioned. She asked them to send her to prison. She said she would sign anything; she couldn’t stand any more because she had a ruptured stomach and her ears hurt so much that she was continually fainting. When they took her back to the foot of the metal bed where they had applied the electric prod to her, they would make her touch the wires, passing an electric current through when she did so, which brought on more convulsions. Current was passed through her whole body by the same wires which bound her hands and feet. As she had those convulsions and her body writhed about, they would get more annoyed. The doctor would come and examine her, but time went by, until she lost all track of it. It was always the same, the same screams. Later they told her they’d brought her little boy, they made her listen to a recording, but she had become very obstinate, in a state of oblivion, and she didn't care any more. They would tell her that the recording was her son crying. As she was being given pills, apparently for the convulsions, which [48]

made her sleepy, she can’t remember everything. What she can remember is that at some stage she was given an injection, but she knew that after that the doctor would come, he was always there while she was being tortured. She also remembers very clearly that they would parade her naked along the gallery and that she was raped several times. She doesn’t remember whether they were conscripts or police. She re­ calls that at the time she bled a lot and by then didn’t care if she died, nothing mattered to her any more, she no longer even cried. Sometimes she felt that they were rewarding her by giving her cigarettes, later on even that was stopped. Afterwards she was put in with a girl who told her her name and surname, but she dôesn’t remember them, she can’t recall anything. One day she was summoned to make a statement; they sat her at a desk and took a written statement from her, asking the names of her parents, brothers and sisters, what they did, where they were bom, etc. She couldn’t see properly when they were taking her statement because, having been blindfolded for so long, the light bothered her eyes. She knows they made her sign three or four documents; they took off her blindfold to sign but told her not to look up. That night they put a lot of people into a lorry, which was continually stopping and dropping people off. She thought then that they were being killed, she had no idea what was going on. She knows she was last, but didn’t want to get down because she thought they were going to kill her, so a man with swarthy features and wearing what looked like a brown leather jacket said to her, ’Get down or I’ll kill you.’ She was convinced he was about to do so, and man­ aged to tug her blindfold off. When she saw his face, she became even more frightened. He got her down from the lorry and. putting his gun to her head, said, ’Don’t turn round.’ It was then that she thought she had died. She remained still for quite a while, so long that she didn’t even notice the man had gone, she was in a state of shock, she thought she had died... Before her parents died, her husband came out of prison. He had also been tortured, but they never talked about it, she in particular never told everything that had happened, as she felt embarrassed about it. He gradually got to know about it because she would become delirious and was scared of going to see a psychiatrist. Now though, she has begun treatment and is prepared to cooper­ ate, should her testimony be of any use.

Of a similar nature because of the sadism displayed is the testimony of Mirtha Gladys Rosales (file No. 7186). It transpires that she was arrested on 10 March 1976 at her workplace in the General Office of Penal Institutions. She was taken to the Federal Police station: [49]

When I arrived at the station I found my father, a lad called Mamondez and his sister, and a youth, Ramos, who, like my father, was from Quines; the Mamondez were from Candelaria. Later I learnt that they had all been savagely beaten up in Quines and subsequently at the station as well. Just then an officer called Borsalino appeared qnd, dragging me by the hair and kicking me. took me to the back of the building and beat me up in the kitchen, telling me, 'You're the one to blame for my having beat the shit out of those wretches.' After that he took me to the Chief Inspec­ tor’s office: the Chief Inspector, Deputy-Chief Inspector Censóla, Lieutenant-Colonel Lualdi, Inspector Visconti of the Provincial Pol­ ice and Borsalino were present. They blindfolded me and, with insults and death threats, gave me electric shocks while I was handcuffed to a chair, all the time interrogating me about my political activities. After this session I was beaten up on several occasions, as they kept me at the station for almost four months. It was always Borsalino who did it, in the presence of Inspector de Maria. In mid-June I was transferred to the Women’s Prison, where I stayed until 9 September, when I was taken away by Intelligence personnel from the Provincial Police and brought to Police Head­ quarters. After a while they got everybody out and the Assistant Chief of Police, Captain Pla, appeared with the Head of Intelligence, Inspec­ tor Becerra. The two of them started to interrogate me in between punches and kicks. Soon Captain Pla said to me that he’d 'try another kind of treatment since I don’t want to talk' and they took me to a police station on Calle Justo Durant, a block away from Avenida España. They took me in through a car entrance on the right and Becerra put me into a room where Domingo Qdegardo Chacón was tied up, obviously having been tortured. Later on, I saw Raúl Lima who was being beaten up, and Domingo Silva and a Señor Moyano, from Candelaria. Later they took me into the back, where I saw Hugo Velázquez, a driver. Rubén Lucero, and a police­ man by the name of Olguin, who subsequently committed suicide during a trial in the provincial courts. There I was savagely beaten up for about an hour. This was done completely sadistically and cruelly, since they weren’t even questioning me; they would only roar with laughter and insult me. After that I was taken back to the headquarters and left in the office, with Captain Rossi and a Lieutenant Marcelo Eduardo González. As he left, Officer Lucero, who had brought me along, said to them, 'She’s already been softened up.’ Punishment began once again, this time carried out by Rossi and González, who started to hit and insult me, each putting their gun to my temple and, cocking it. asking me 'who had the weapons', pressing me to sign some statements which had already been drawn up. Meanwhile Pla, Becerra. Velázquez and Luis Mario Calderón, another officer, turned up, and one of the worst [50]

torture sessions I had to bear began. I was put in the middle of them and they started to hit me all over, pulling my hair, giving me the ‘telephone’, which meant clapping both hands over my ears at once, maltreating me, twisting my breasts and other such atrocities. By the time they had finished with me or had had enough, I was disfigured from the blows. That night they gave me some ice to reduce the swelling on my face and neck in order to be able to return me to prison, which they only did two days later... On 12 or 13 November they again fetched me and brought me to Intelligence where I was beaten up again, with Franco, Pla, Becerra, Chavero, Ricarte, Luis Alberto Orozco and another indi­ vidual called Benitez taking part in the punishment. They all beat me up, they gave me the ‘telephone’ and kicked me. At one point Ricarte showed me a photo saying, ‘Tell us what you know, other­ wise you’ll end up like Ledesma, look what happened to him.’ In the photograph Ledesma was sort of lying face-down on a table or on the floor, with his chin up so that his face could be seen, arms spread out in a cross and blood pouring from his mouth; he appeared to be dead. They took me somewhere we had to cross railway lines and a barrier to get to. There were some steps at the entrance to the building or enclosure where they tortured me. They tied me up and laid me down on something made of metal, they hit me and put me head-first in a container of water until I was drowning. Soon I began to bleed (I was having my period), so they took me back to Intelligence. The same men who had beaten me up hours before at Headquarters were present at that session. In the early hours of the morning they decided to send me to prison, which they did mid-morning. When I arrived, as I was in such a pitiful condition, disfigured by bruises and swelling, and my old work colleagues had seen me, there was an argument between those who were taking me (Inspector Juan Carlos Pérez, Carlos Garro and Rubén Lucero, the driver) and prison staff.

SECRET DETENTION CENTRES (SDCs) General considerations The policy of the disappearance of persons could not have been carried out without the detention centres. There were about 340 of them throughout the country. Thousands of men and women illegally deprived of their freedom passed through them, often being kept in detention for years, sometimes never returning. This was where they lived through their 'disappearance'; this [51]

was where they were when the authorities would reply in the negative to requests for information in the habeas corpus ap­ peals. There they spent their days at the mercy of others, with minds twisted by the practice of torture and extermination, while the military authorities (who frequently visited these centres) would respond to national and international public opinion by asserting that the disappeared were abroad, or that they had been victims of feuding amongst themselves. (Statements of this nature are included in the answers given by the de facto govern­ ment to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS - see ‘Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Argentina', 1980.) The characteristics of these centres, and the daily life led there, reveal that they had been specifically conceived for the subjection of victims to a meticulous and deliberate stripping of all hum an attributes, rather than for their simple physical elimination. To be admitted to one of these centres meant to cease to exist. In order to achieve this end, attempts were made to break down the captives' identity; their spatio-temporal points of reference were disrupted, and their minds and bodies tortured beyond im­ agination. These centres were only secret as far as the public and the relatives and people close to the victims were concerned, inas­ much as the authorities systematically refused to give any infor­ mation on the fate of the abducted persons to judicial appeals and national and international hum an rights organizations. It goes without saying that their existence and operation were only possible with the use of the State's financial and hum an re­ sources, and that, from the highest military authorities down to each and every member of the Security Forces who formed part of this repressive structure, these centres were their fundamental basis of operation. The reality was continually denied, the military government also making use of the total control it exercised over the media, to confuse and misinform the public. It would subsequently be seen during the hostilities of the war in the South Atlantic, to what extent covering up the truth and misinformation were essential to the most important acts of the military governments between 1976 and 1983.

[52]

I categorically deny that there exist in Argentina any concentra­ tion camps or prisoners being held in military establishments be­ yond the time absolutely necessary for the investigation of a person captured in an operation before they are transferred to a penal establishment. (Jorge Rafael Videla, 22 December 1977, Gente maThere are no political prisoners in Argentina, except for a few persons who may have been detained under government emer­ gency legislation and who are really being detained because of their political activity. There are no prisoners being held merely for being political, or because they do not share the ideas held by the Government. (Roberto Viola, 7 September 1978.)

From the highest levels of the military government they attempted to present to the world a situation of maximum legal­ ity. Disregarding all limits - even the exceptional de facto legis­ lation - the dictatorship kept up a secret, parallel structure. At first categorically denied, later - faced with a mass of evidence resulting from accusations made by relatives and the testimonies of prisoners who were released - they had to admit the existence of this structure, though with false explanations. La Perla, did it exist? Yes. It was a meeting place for prisoners, not a secret prison ... the subversives were there but in the protection of each other’s company... (Luciano Benjamin Menéndez, 15 March 1984, Gente magazine.)

A substantial number of reports and testimonies received by this Commission corroborate the presence of high-ranking mili­ tary officials in the detention centres. Martha Alvarez de Repetto (file No. 7055) states: I was arrested in my house in the town of Corrientes, and taken to offices of the Federal Police in that town. There I was hooded and tortured, and later transferred to the officers’ mess of the 9th In­ fantry Regiment, where they set up simulated executions and also tortured people. One of the visitors I saw myself and was even interrogated by was the then Commander of the 7th Brigade, General Cristino Nicolaides. Another of the visitors was the then Commander of the 2nd Army Corps, General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri, who was there in mid-November 1976.

The prisons were crammed with political prisoners, whom the authorities tried to present as common criminals, avoiding any [53]

recognition that ideological persecution was reaching levels un­ heard of in our country before. This legal structure, however, was intimately connected to the other one, of darkness and death, where thousands of disappeared suffered without the slightest chance of protection. Thus, after lengthy periods in secret detention, many of those released would find their abduction made official by their transfer to public prisons or to police stations. Guillermo Horacio Dascal (file No. 6533) states: In the early hours of 11 May 1978 I was awakened in my bedroom by two or three men shouting orders. They carried rifles and wore civilian clothes. They ordered me to get dressed and then put a pillow-case over my head, like a hood, leading me out to a car and putting me in the boot. This car took a route which I cannot work out and, after passing through a gate or some place where they had to identify themselves, we came to a halt and I was taken o u t I remember that there were more people in the same place, about six in my situation. After some time, which I can't specify, I was led to a room where there was a table or bunk on which I was beaten up by two or three men who questioned me for the names of other ex-students of the Carlos Pellegrini School. I was held in this 'house', which I now recognize as the one known as El Vesubio on the Ricchieri motorway, for about forty days. Then with other prisoners I was called out by name and we were separated into groups of four. Our captors told us that until then we had been held at the disposal of the self-styled 'CALA' (Liberators of America Anti-subversive Commando) and that we were now to be handed over as prisoners to Army authorities. My group were put into the back seat of a car which was driven for about thirty minutes, after which I heard the kidnappers stop a taxi and put the four of us in it, after roughly forcing the driver to get out. We went a short distance in this second car and then were left inside it. a few metres from the 10th Ordnance Battalion in Villa Martelli. Our captors threatened that if we tried to escape they would detonate a bomb they had placed in the car. A few minutes later I heard one of the doors being opened by a man who removed our blindfolds. I could then see that he was wearing green military uniform. He took us into the Battalion. There we were put in cells, the men separate from the women. In the Battalion we had to sign a ratification of the statement that we had signed under duress at the secret deten­ tion centre. According to the evidence (of the second copy) issued by the Military Tribunal 1/1, my entry into the 10th Ordnance Battalion was on 19 June 1978.1 remained there until 31 August 1978, when we four prisoners were transferred to Villa Devoto Prison at the disposal of the same Tribunal until 3 October 1978, [54]

when my case was dropped. I was released on 5 October 1978. Despite being at the disposal of the Military Tribunal 1/1 since 19 June 1978, my family only learned of my arrest on 1 September 1978.

By the same token, prisoners in official penal establishments were abducted, and many of them are still to this day ‘dis­ appeared'. Others were returned to the prisons after months in the secret centres. Afterwards I was transferred to the place known as Puesto Vasco ... From there I went on, in September I think, to the Arana outpost ... In Arana I saw Camps and Inspector Miguel Etchecolatz, who often went there. In December 1977 I was transferred again to Unit 9, La Plata Prison, from where I was released on 24 July 1978.

The places mentioned in the preceding testimony by Dr Juan Amadeo Gramano (file No. 3944) after his transfer from La Plata Prison, operated as secret centres. He was held in them for seven months before being returned to the official establishment. Although the adaptation of premises to house prisoners in secret was intensified from the time of the coup d'état in 1976, this Commission has records which show that already in 1975 there were centres of this kind operating in the 3rd Army Corps region, in Tucumán and Santiago del Estero, which functioned as pilot centres during the ‘Independencia’ operation. Location of the Secret Detention Centres In some cases they were premises which already functioned as detention centres. In others, they were civilian buildings, police offices, and even the Armed Forces’ own establishments, adapted for use as SDCs. All these were handed over to the corresponding regional military authority. Examples include military premises such as the Navy Mech­ anics School in Buenos Aires; La Perla in Córdoba; the Mendoza Military School and Campo de Mayo. Those which were used most often as concentration camps were police stations and posts. This was the case with the 1st Army Corps, given that —in spite of the existence of testimonies showing that some disappeared persons passed through there [55]

between 1976 and 1979 they kept the majority of their prisoners in buildings controlled by the Federal and Buenos Aires Province Police. We are referring to COT I Martínez, Puesto Vasco, Pozo de Bánfield, Pozo de Quilmes, La Plata detective squad headquart­ ers, Arana, Atlético, Çanco, Olimpo, Monte Pelone, El Vesubio or Automotores Orletti, all within their area of operation. Amongst the exceptions to this general rule we can include that of Señor Federico Vogelius, Argentine, entrepreneur and landowner, who was kidnapped in September 1977, and was kept in the 1st Army Corps headquarters. He was released after spending twenty-five months in captivity in various SDCs and having been sentenced by a Military Court. In the case of premises used for the incarceration of common criminals before the sudden influx of people brought in by the gangs, the conditions of imprisonment worsened, turning those places into sheer hell. Adriana Calvo de Laborde (file No. 2531) states: We slept in the cells in groups of two, three or four, according to how many of us there were, on the concrete floor, without any kind of covering. In Police Station No. 5 of La Plata the doors were kept padlocked, each cell measured approximately 2 metres by 1.5. Later I was transferred to the Pozo de Bánfield ... There, the conditions of imprisonment were no better, on the contrary, the regime was much harsher than in the police station. We were only let out to eat once every two days. There were three or more women in each cell and the lavatoiy consisted of a bottle of bleach with the top cut off.

Living conditions in the detention centres 'Disappearance’ began with admission to these centres and the suppression of all links with the outside world, hence the name of pozos (‘pits’) used to designate many of the centres in the jargon adopted by the repressive forces. It was not just a case of deprivation of freedom which was not officially acknowledged, but a sinister form of captivity, which pushed daily existence to the limits of cruelty and madness. 4Walling Up4 The abducted person would arrive hooded - 'walled up’ - and [56]

would remain so throughout his stay. The purpose of this was to make him lose his spatial awareness, thus depriving him not only of the world outside the pozo, but also of everything imme­ diately beyond his own body. The victim might be assaulted at any time without the slight­ est chance of defending himself. He had to learn a new code of signals, sounds and smells in order to guess whether he was in danger or if the situation had eased. That was one of the heaviest burdens to endure, according to a number of testimonies re­ ceived. The psychological torture of the ‘hood* was as bad or worse than the physical, although the two cannot be compared since whereas the latter attempts to reach the limits of pain, the hood causes despair, anxiety and madness... With the hood on, I became fully aware of my complete lack of contact with the outside world. There was nothing to protect you, you were completely alone. That feeling of vulnerability, isolation and fear is veiy difficult to describe. The mere inability to see gradually undermines your morale, diminishing your resistance ... The ‘hood’ became unbearable, so much so that one Wednesday, transfer day, I shouted for them to have me transferred: ‘Me ... me ... 571’. The hood had achieved its aim, I was no longer Lisandro Raúl Cubas, I was a number. (File No. 6974)

To be 'transferred’ was considered synonymous with death. No less horrifying are the recollections of Liliana Callizo, who in page 8 of her testimony (file No. 4413), states: It’s very difficult to tell of the terror of the minutes, hours, days, months, years spent there... At first the prisoner has no idea what his surroundings were like. Some of us imagined it to be round; others, as a kind of football stadium, with the guards circling over our heads. We didn’t know which way up we were, which way our heads and feet were pointing. I remember grabbing hold of the mattress with all my strength, so that I wouldn’t fall, although I knew that it was on the floor. We would hear noises, footsteps, the sound of guns, and when they opened the grille we would prepare to face our execution. Military boots continued to circle around us.

Reconstruction of the SDCs was based on hundreds of testi­ monies given by released people who had spent differing lengths [57]

of time as disappeared prisoners. The astonishing similarity be­ tween plans sketched by the deponents in their files and the definitive ones produced under the direction of architects and technical teams who took part in the inspections and surveys carried out by the Coqamission can be explained by the necessary sharpening of the other senses and by a whole set of patterns meticulously stored in the memory, as a means of clinging to reality and life. The change of guard, the noise of planes and trains, and usual torturing times were an essential part of these ‘patterns’. As to space, ‘corporeal’ memory was a determining factor how many steps they had to take before turning to go to the toilet; the sound, the speed and the turnings taken by the car they were being driven in when entering or leaving the SDCs, etc. In some cases the abductors, who were aware of these tech­ niques, managed to disturb and even totally confuse memory by means of various tricks. Sometimes they would take unnecessary turnings in the car. The technique of taking the prisoners hooded to the toilet, in single file and constantly hitting them, made identification of the place very difficult. The same happened with the constant disruption of sleep patterns. Nevertheless, many of the prisoners still managed to piece together the jigsaw, in some cases from ordinary sounds such as the dripping of a water tank, the cleaning of a cesspit, the m urm ur of people eating, birdsong, or boats banging against a pier. On many of the inspections of the SDCs carried out by the Commission, witnesses would put on a scarf or bandage, or simply shut their eyes tight, in order to relive that time of terror and be able to remember the ordeal in detail. ‘Walling up’ tended to cause damage to the eyes, says Enrique Núñez (file No. 4846): ... They put a dirty blindfold on me. very tightly, which pressed on my eyes and cut my circulation. It seriously damaged my eye­ sight, leaving me blind for more than thirty days alter I was re­ leased from the Guerrero Centre, Jujuy ...

The commonest physical damage this form of torture produced was conjunctivitis. Another, less common, was the infestation of the conjunctiva by maggots. The deponent of file No. 2819 states: [58]

In Campo de Mayo, where I was taken on 28 April 1977, the treatment consisted of keeping the prisoner hooded throughout his stay, sitting, without talking or moving, in large rooms which had previously been used as stables. Perhaps this phrase does not ex­ press clearly enough what that actually meant, because you might think that when I say, ‘sitting, hooded, all the time’, it is just a figure of speech. But that is not the case: we prisoners were made to sit on the floor with nothing to lean against from the moment we got up at six in the morning until eight in the evening when we went to bed. We spent fourteen hours a day in that position. And when I say ‘without talking or moving’, I mean exactly that. We couldn’t utter a word, or even turn our heads. On one 'occa­ sion, a companion ceased to be included on the interrogators’ list and was forgotten. Six months went by, and they only realized what had happened because one of the guards thought it strange that the prisoner was never wanted for anything and was always in the same condition, without being ‘transferred’. He told the interrogators, who decided to ‘transfer* him that week, as he was no longer of any interest to them. This man had been sitting there, hooded, without speaking or moving, for six months, awaiting death. We would sit like this, padlocked to a chain which could be either individual or collective. The individual type was a kind of shackle put on the feet; the collective type consisted of one chain about 30 metres long, long enough to be attached at either end to opposite walls in the block. Prisoners were chained to it every metre and a half, as circumstances required, so that they were all linked together. This system was permanent.

Another example is provided by the testimony of Enrique Corteletti (file No. 3523), who was kept in the Navy Mechanics School after his abduction on 22 November 1976: They put a sort of shackle on my ankles and I was handcuffed the whole time. When they took me to the second floor, after being put through the ‘machine’ for a while, I could see that there were many people there. They put me between two not very high par­ titions. They laid me down on a kind of mattress. Because I was shackled, my right foot became infected, so they changed the shackle for another round my left foot, attached at the other end to a cannon b all...

Each prisoner would be given a number In the SDCs they used numbers, sometimes preceded by letters, to identify prisoners, as another way of suppressing the identity [59]

of the abducted persons. With respect to this, the testimony of M. de M. (file No. 2356) states: She realized then that they called them by number, they didn't call out names and surnames. She remembers her number 104. She recalls that when they called her it was to torture her ...

This is as moving as the case we have already mentioned, of Señor Lisandro Cubas when he said, 'M e... m e .. . 571 . . . ’ As soon as the victims were brought in they would be told to remember their number because it would be used to call them from then on, whether to go to the toilet, to be tortured or to be transferred. Apart from constituting yet another way of making the prisoner lose his or her identity, this method complied with the need that nobody - not even the guards or prison warders - should know the identity of the prisoner, to prevent their names from getting out.

Torture The SDCs were above all torture centres, with 'specialized' per­ sonnel and rooms adapted for such ends, euphemistically called 'operating theatres', and a whole range of instruments used in the various torture techniques. All this is analysed in detail in the relevant chapter, but some reference is necessary here insofar as this terrible experience was part of daily life in the SDCs. The purpose of the first torture sessions was to 'soften up' newly-arrived prisoners, and these were carried out by any of the personnel. Once it had been established that the prisoner had some information of interest to offer, sessions run by special interrogators began. In other words, there wasn't even a prior assessment made as to whether the person they were going to kidnap really knew anything of any interest to his captors. Because of these indiscriminate methods, not only members of armed groups but also their relatives, friends, colleagues at work or school, political party activists, priests and laymen committed to the problems of the poor, student activists, trade unionists, neighbourhood leaders and - in a remarkably high number of cases - people with no kind of trade unión or political activity at all, were all rounded up and tortured. It was enough to appear [60]

in somebody's address book to instantly become a target for the notorious 'task forces'. Thus it can be understood how many of those tortured would declare anybody guilty as long as their ordeal might end. Accord­ ing to information supplied by a member of Task Force 2 (file No. 7170), after 1977 there was no longer any need to carry out intelligence activity, as it simply became a matter of arresting those people named by the prisoners themselves in the torture sessions. That is why there are innumerable cases like that of Jorge Berstrin (file No. 2803) who reports: On 1 March 1977 I was at the house of a workmate, in the town of General Roca, Río Negro, when a group of armed men burst in, handcuffing both of us, hooding us and taking us in several cars to a detention centre near the town of Neuquén. I later found out why I had been arrested: the niece of the head of personnel in the factory where I worked, who lived in Bahia Blanca, had visited Roca and had been in the apartment from which we were ab­ ducted, as she had been introduced at that time to the owner, my colleague. The woman from Bahia Blanca, who had this apartment in her address book, was arrested in that town, turning up shortly after being 'killed in a shoot-out'. A few days after her arrest they arrested both of us, me because I happened to be there. When they realized their mistake, they released us, first me and five days later my colleague ...

In such a demented framework of persecution, to have too common a surname brought with it the possibility of falling prey to this kind of infamously arbitrary hunt. Raúl Romero (file No. 2590) reported: ... on 21 September 1977 at 19.30 hours he was arrested with his wife in his home ...

He describes the terrible conditions in which both were held in the SDC, later identified by him as the Pozo de Quilines, and the torture that went on there. He was released on 4 October that year when his captors realized that he wasn't Victor Hugo Rom­ ero, a previous inhabitant of the deponent’s house who unfor­ tunately had the same surname. Apart from 'softening up' and the extraction of information, prisoners in the SDCs were likely to suffer torture for entirely arbitrary reasons. Carlos Enrique Ghezan (file No. 4151) reports: [61]

We would be beaten up and tortured for the slightest transgression of certain rules of the detention camp. I saw this on numerous occasions. Any event related to repression outside the pozo, the death of a soldier, a gun battle, politically significant acts, events occurring in other parts of the world such as the advances of the Sandinista revolution, constituted a motive or pretext for intensi­ fying the repression ..

Ghezan was held in El Banco and Olimpo. Other testimonies outline the various reasons given for the cruelty. These included the mere fact of being held, for refusing to cooperate as expected, or events completely unrelated to the prisoner. In file No. 4152, Susana Leonor Caride tells us that she was arrested-abducted at 11p.m. on 26 July 1978 from her house, 551 Calle Fragata Presidente Sarmiento, Buenos Aires. They set up a simulated execution. They made her listen to a tape with children’s voices telling her that her mother and children were there: ... if I didn’t tell them where Dr Guillermo Diaz Lestrem lived, they were going to torture my daughter, then ten years old, saying that she was ’just right for the ’’machine ” ’ ... At about midday I gave them Dr Lestrem’s telephone number, but when they called he had already gone, so they beat me up again, questioning me about my activities and the names of people I didn’t know ... When I arrived they left me dumped in a yard and after a while they took me to the ’machine’, a name given to the electric prod, where they continued to torture me, I don’t recall for how long since I was in such a sorry condition. Once again they threw me down in the yard, leaving me there for a while until they took me to a small room, where a torturer known as ‘Julián the Turk’ began to hit and beat me with chains and then with a whip, swearing and shouting at me. Then they dumped me back in the yard again. I could feel my whole body stinging and hurting, made worse by the salt water they threw over m e ... I don’t know for how long I lay there; at some point I heard someone ask about the events which had occurred in the Planning Division of the Federal Police, where a bomb had exploded, while someone else replied that ’it had been a political act’. On hearing this, ‘Julián the Turk’ began to shout and swear at us and ‘chain’ us all. The scene was Dantesque, since we were handcuffed and blindfolded and had no idea where the blows were coming from. We fell over each other, screaming with pain and horror. I could [62]

tell that other people were also hitting and kicking us; they pulled us up by the hair when we fell down. When everything had calmed down we could hear moans and panting. After a while, I again had salt water thrown over my body, which was burnt and raw all over, hearing 'Julián* say that they had better take me away, or he would kill me.

A different external circumstance, no longer a terrorist attack but the instigation of judicial proceedings, would bring with it reprisals: Around the end of July or the beginning of August, as I'had completely lost track of time, I was dragged out of my cell and taken to the 'operating theatre', where they swore at me and told me that Dr Diaz Lestrem had presented a writ of habeas corpus for m e ... They beat me up and, when they were going to take me to the 'machine', one of them hit me so hard in the ribs that I couldn't breathe, so they left me alone. (Result: two cracked ribs.)

Personnel Conscripts were for the most part kept on the fringes of SDC activity. The centres at Formosa and El Palomar Air Base were exceptions, since some of them were made to participate in the camp’s operation. Nor did the whole of the military or security personnel take part. The order was to keep the SDCs isolated, as a secret structure. Personnel assigned to guard such centres com­ prised members of the Gendarmería, of the Federal Penitentiary system, or of the police, always under the command of armed forces officers. This guard personnel was not generally the same as those who tortured in the systematic interrogation sessions designed to obtain information. Testimonies have been gathered from which it is clear that some of the soldiers assigned to guard­ ing the camps demonstrated signs of humanity, showing concern for the appalling condition of the prisoners: I was abducted and held in the Pozo de Quilines from 12 November 1977. On one occasion, when they couldn't bring our daily rations as usual from a nearby army unit, the corporal on guard, nick­ named 'Chupete', bought food with his own money and cooked it for us himself. In addition, the corporal on duty, Juan Carlos, who seemed to belong to the Army, would give us cigarettes when conditions of imprisonment improved... (Fernando Schell, file No. 2825.) [63]

However, this is not the case with the majority of personnel attached to the SDCs, who generally contributed to the physical and mental breakdown of the prisoners, punish ing them un­ necessarily and capriciously justifying it. Food

The infrequency and inferiority of meals constituted another form of torment. Prisoners were fed - depending on the centre - once or twice a day, but on many occasions several days went by when they were given no food at all. At other times they were given water with flour or raw offal. In general, rations were barely enough, and anybody who tried to give some to another person in a worse state than themselves was severely punished. Solidarity was forbidden. In spite of all this, mealtimes were eagerly awaited since it meant not only eating but also the chance to lift one’s hood and possibly to establish contact with another person, although con­ versation between prisoners was brutally punished. In file No. 12 77, the testimony of Señor Héctor Mariano Ballent, we read: Treatment in COT I Martinez was brutal, not only physically but also psychologically. If someone asked the time, he would be asked if he had to go out; if they served soup it was in a flat plate with a fork. One day there was stew; made with corn-cobs from which the grains had already been eaten by the guards. Generally the food was boiled cornflour, a boiled mate drink and a piece of bread ...

All those released coincide in mentioning the appalling food, which, it should be borne in mind, remained unchanged throughout their confinement, causing the physical deterioration of the prisoners. In the recollections of Antonio Horacio Miño Retamozo (file No. 3721): Punishment was never-ending. Everything was scientifically arranged, from punishments to meals. In the morning they would bring boiled mate without sugar, and from time to time, a little piece of stale bread, which they threw at us and which we groped for desperately. There was no meat and the food had no flavour at all: [64]

sometimes it might be veiy salty, other times without any salt. One day they would bring polenta, another noodles, and the next chick­ peas in a plastic bowl. Each prisoner had to take a mouthful and pass it on to the next and so on to the end. If there was some left over, it went round again ...

Health conditions This very harsh system aggravated any diseases already suffered prior to abduction and brought on others as a result of'bums, bleeding and infection; many women had their menstrual cycles interrupted because of the conditions. These were imposed with the aim of destroying the individual identity of the prisoners, this being an essential objective of the methodology we have been analysing. Medical care, in many cases, ... was in the hands of prisoners with limited knowledge, which didn't prevent many people from 'expiring during torture’. (Testi­ mony of Mario Villami, file No. 6821.)

N.B.B. (file No. 1583), abducted and held in El Banco together with her husband Jorge, was repeatedly raped, which made her haemorrhage. She was taken to the infirmary at the pozo and later released: ... two days after being hospitalized I was checked by a doctor called Victor, himself abducted a year earlier, who had a Cordoban accent and treated the prisoners harshly. He prescribed coagulants. I learnt from Victor that, in spite of his status as a prisoner, he was transferred to different pozos to give medical assistance to the pri­ soners.

Lack of facilities and the precarious sanitary conditions were seen at their most dramatic in the case of women who gave birth in prison, as will be seen in Part Two.

Hygiene Conditions during the period of detention were deplorable. Pri­ soners were left lying on mattresses filthy with blood, urine, vomit and sweat. In some cases, they had to relieve themselves [65]

in pots, which were later removed. In others, they weren’t even given containers and had to relieve themselves on the spot. Dan­ iel Osvaldo Pina (file No. 5186), abducted in Mendoza, says: At one point when I was asleep they awoke me with a kick. I should explain that We slept on the floor, lying in urine.

Lack of hygiene would worsen in the over-populated premises improvised as SDCs. Again, Héctor Mariano Ballent reminds us that in COT I Martinez those who had been ‘picked up’ had to clean out the shed they were in, by shaking out the rags they had and the only (single) mattress there was for eight of them to sleep on, four with their heads on it and four with their feet on it. The prisoners had to ask permission of the guard, who waited until a lot of them had raised their hand so they did not have to go to the bathroom more than twice a day. They would be led in ‘a train’ holding the one in front by the waist or shoulders, as they couldn’t take the hoods off. This was repeated in nearly all the camps and was one of the occasions the guards took advan­ tage of to satisfy their sadistic impulses, hitting the prisoners indiscriminately. Both men and women had to shower or see to their bodily needs in the presence of their gaolers. In some camps the prisoners were hosed down in a group, always with their hoods on. Hygiene in the toilets and cells depended on the good or bad disposition of whoever was on guard duty. There were cases where the women were made to clean by hand the urinals in the men’s toilets. The extreme lack of hygiene would lead to infestation with lice and the prisoners would sometimes be sprayed with insecticide like cattle. Transfers In a large number of detention centres the word ‘transfer’ was associated with the idea of death. ‘Transfers’ were experienced by prisoners with simultaneous reactions of horror and hope. They would be told that they were to be taken to other centres or ‘rehabilitation’ farms, so that they would put up no resistance. They did not know where they would be taken, whether to [66]

another centre or to their deaths, which caused a constant and deep-rooted fear. For the 'transfers', prisoners were usually stripped of their clothes and meagre belongings, which were then incinerated. Sometimes they were given injections to make them drowsy. Their guards would try to calm them down by giving them a remote hope of living, a feeling which gained strength from the very fact that they were surrounded by death and horror. Numerous testimonies have been collected concerning the special treatment received by those who were later to be 'killed in gun battles'. Days before they were to be shot, these prisoners would be given better food, and were made to wash and have a bath, since it would have been difficult to explain to the public the appearance of 'extremists killed in shoot-outs' with skinny, tortured, bearded and ragged corpses. This constituted an indescribable cruelty, since it raised a per­ son's hopes that he would live, whereas his real fate was death. Anti-Semitism In statements made to the press in October 1981, the then Min­ ister for the Interior Albano Jorge Harguindeguy denied that the government of the Military Junta was involved in anti-Semitism, although he did admit that it was 'impossible to control all per­ sonnel [referring to the forces of repression] amongst whom there might be - as anywhere in the world - some sadistic or mentally ill person'. (Crónica, 1.10.81.) According to the testimony of R. Peregrino Fernández, a Federal Police officer and one of Minister Harguindeguy's advisers, it is known that: Villar (Alberto, later Chief of Federal Police) and Veyra Gorge Mario, Commander of the Federal Police) played the role of ideo­ logues: they would recommend literature and comment on the works of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi and Fascist authors.

This ideology led to a particular brutality in the treatment of prisoners of Jewish origin. In La Perla SDC, Liliana Callizo (file No. 4413) ‘could hear the screams of Levin when they hit and insulted him for being a Jew ...'. Alejandra Ungaro (file No. 2213) describes how after being beaten, especially on the back [67]

and head, 'They painted my body with swastikas using strong marker-pens/ In El Atlético SDC, ‘one of the military personnel who called himself ‘‘the Great Führer“ made the prisoners shout “Heil Hitler!”, and at night they could frequently hear recordings of his speeches/ (D. Barrera y Ferrando, file No. 6904.) In the survey of Ôlimpo secret centre carried out by this Com­ mission on 25 May 1984, witness Mario Villami (file No. 6821) pointed out the place where the operations room had been and said: 1 saw a swastika made of wallpaper on one w all/ Admiration of and identification with Nazism also emerges from other testimonies: ‘When they were beating us up they would say, “We’re the Gestapo!” ’ Gorge Reyes, 1st Regiment Patricios SDC, file No. 2563.) This admiration could be a reason for increasing punishment, as in the case of Elena Alfaro (file No. 3048), held in El Vesubio secret detention centre: If life in the camp for any prisoner was a nightmare, the situation was even worse for Jews. They were the victims of constant beat­ ings and other acts of aggression, to such an extent that many preferred to hide their origin, saying, for instance, that they were Polish Catholics.

Alternatively, this admiration could also be a motive for alle­ viation of the victims’ suffering, as occurred with Rubén Schell (file No. 2825), who was held prisoner in the Pozo de Quilines secret detention centre and who, because of his obvious German descent, received better treatment. After a long session of torture, ‘Coco’ or ‘the Colonel’ said to him while questioning him: ‘Listen, Flaco, what are you doing amongst this common scum? With looks like yours you should be an SS/ He showed him a swastika he had tattooed on his arm, giving orders that from then on Schell was to be well fed. 'From that day on I was no longer tortured,’ adds Schell. Anti-Semitism was presented as À component of a deformed version of what ‘being Christian’ or ‘religious’ signified. This was nothing other than a cover for political and ideological persecu­ tion. The defence of God and of Christian values was a simple ideological motivation which could be understood by the agents of repression, even at their lowest organizational and cultural levels. This necessary identification was made to instil a 'fighting spirit’ in all personnel involved in repression and to give them [68]

an objective which would relieve their consciences, removing the obligation to examine the causes and real ends for which they were persecuting and punishing not only a minority of terrorists but also people of different political, social, religious, economic and cultural backgrounds. In the raid on the home of Eduardo Alberto Cora (file No. 1955), abducted together with his wife, ‘after destroying every­ thing they found, the raiders wrote on the wall the words “Long live Christ the King“ and “Christ saves“.’ Some raids and opera­ tions were carried out with the battle-cry ‘For God and Country!’ The agents of repression thought of themselves as having the power of life and death over each prisoner: ‘When the victims besought God, the guards would reply with an irrational Messianism: “Here, we are God.” ’ Gorge Reyes, file No. 2563.) Prisoner Nora Iadarola (file No. 1471) was made to repeat 500 times, ‘Long live Videla, Massera and Agosti; God, Home and Country!’ Anti-Semitism came to be yet another manifestation of the repressive groups, within the totalitarian vision of society held by the ruling regime. Nora Stejilevich (file No. 2535) was just finishing packing for a trip to Israel, when a group of people entered her home looking for her brother Gerardo. She was trav­ elling with some professional people to work on a project. That day, 16 July 1977, after searching the whole house, removing books and papers and seeing that the person they wanted was not there, they took Nora. They threatened me for having uttered Jewish words in the street (my surname) and for being a bloody Yid, whom they would make soap out o f... They took me straight away to the torture room where I was subjected to the electric prod... They kept asking me for the names of the people travelling with me to Israel... they centred the interrogation around Jewish mat­ ters. One of them could speak Hebrew, or at least a few words which he could place in the correct order in a sentence. He tried to find out if there was any military training in the kibbutzim. They asked for a physical description of the organizers of the study tours, like the one I was on (Sherut Laam), a description of the building of the Jewish Agency (which I knew very well), etc. They assured me that they were primarily concerned with ‘the problem of subversion' but the ‘Jewish problem* was second in importance and they were gathering information for their files... [69]

During the interrogation session I could hear the screams of my brother and his girlfriend, Graciela Barroca, whose voices I could make out perfectly. In addition the torturers referred to a scar which both of us - my brother and I - have on our backs, which confirmed his presence there. I never heard of h im again. Days later, they told me my arrest had been a mistake, but not to forget that I had been there.

Juan Ramón Nazar (file No. 1557), ex-editor of the newspaper La Opinión of Trenque Lauquén, states with regard to one of the interrogation sessions to which he was subjected: The attitude of these people was strongly anti-Semitic. They asked me if I was familiar with the ‘Plan Andina', whereby Israel was to take over part of Patagonia.

Miriam Lewin de García (file No. 2365), secretly held in air force premises, said that: The general attitude was of deep-rooted anti-Semitism. On one occasion they asked me if I understood Yiddish. I replied thát I did not, that I only knew a few words. They nevertheless made me listen to a cassette they had obtained by tapping telephones. The speakers were apparently Argentine businessmen of Jewish origin, talking in Yiddish. My captors were most interested in finding out what the conversation was ab o u t... They collected the information obtained in files, including in them the names and addresses of people of Jewish origin, plans of synagogues, sports clubs, businesses, etc— The only good Jew is a dead Jew, the guards would say.

Daniel Eduardo Fernández (file No. 1131) was a nineteenyear-old youth in August 1977 and has the unwelcome privilege of having survived the Club Atlético SDC. From this unforgettable experience he recalls that during the interrogation sessions: They continually went on at me as to whether I knew any Jewish people, friends, shopkeepers, anybody, as long as they were of Jewish origin. There was a torturer there they called 'Kung-Fu', who would practise martial arts on three or four people at a time - they would always be prisoners of Jewish origin - who were kicked and punched. Jews were punished simply because they were Jewish. They would be told that the DALA (an Argentine Jewish organization) [71]

and international Zionism subsidized subversion, and that the or­ ganization of the pozos was financed by ODESSA (an international group which support» Nazism)... All kinds of torture would be applied to Jews, especially one which was extremely sadistic and cruel: 'the rectoscope’, which consisted of inserting a tube into the victim’s anus, or into a woman's vagina, then letting a rat into the tube. The rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the victim’s internal organs.

In the same centre of torture and extermination, Pedro Miguel Vanrell (file No. 1132) confirms that Jews were made to raise their hand and shout, 1 love Hitler!’ The torturers would laugh, take the prisoners’ clothes off and paint swastikas on their backs with spray paint. Afterwards the rest of the prisoners would see them in the showers, occasions on which the guards - pointing them out - would again beat them up and abuse them.

Vanrell remembers the case of a Jew nicknamed 'Chango', whom the guard would take out of his cell and force into the yard. He would make him wag his tail, bark like a dog, lick his boots. It was impressive how well he did it, he imitated a dog as if he really were one, because if he didn't satisfy the guard, he would cany on beating him ... Later he would change and make him be a c a t... There, 'Julián the Turk' always carried a key-ring with a swastika and wore a crucifix round his neck. This character would take money from the relatives of Jewish prisoners.

Collaboration of prisoners In most of the large detention centres, the authorities managed to obtain, through torture, various forms of collaboration by some of the prisoners. With them they created groups which, like auxiliary bodies, carried out maintenance and administrative tasks in the SDCs, or, to a much lesser degree, participated in tasks more directly concerned with repression. Thus many of them went out to 'cruise' - which in the jargon of repression meant touring the city with their captors to identify on the street other members of their political group. There have even been cases reported of members of these groups directly taking part in [72]

the torture of other prisoners. The authorities of some establish­ ments (e.g. El Vesubio SDC) housed these people in rooms desig­ nated as ‘broken persons’ ’ rooms. They were often exhibited to their superiors as trophies. Although these victims were on the whole treated better than the rest of the inmates of the SDCs, sometimes being allowed to visit their relatives and keep in touch with them by telephone, many of them are now listed as having disappeared. Architect Roberto Omar Ramirez (file No. 3524), who was abducted on 27 June 1978 in the Capitol Cinema in Buenos Aires, went through the El Banco, Olimpo and Navy Mechanics School SDCs, which meant that he became very familiar with the structure and operation of these bodies. He explains what the ‘Council’ or ‘Staff was: The abducted person, once admitted into the camp, immediately got a proposal of voluntary cooperation. For the repressive forces this meant the opportunity to save time, since any resistance to torture would get in the way of their plan of operation. Through psychological action based on terror and isolation, prisoners were constantly faced with the dilemma of improved living conditions in the camp in exchange for collaboration. This was a procedure which would generally begin at very subtle levels - cleaning the corridors and toilets - but essentially it led to the prisoners’ gradual loss of ideological reference. When cooperation turned into willing­ ness to carry out the role of interrogating and even torturing other prisoners, the repressors would have had their victory over people who could have been expected to find their own way out of the extreme situation in which they found themselves, at whatever the cost. In general, the military directed this psychological action at prisoners of a certain level of responsibility in a political organiza­ tion - a method with precedents in Nazi concentration camps and in all similar set-ups since then. Discipline in the El Banco and Olimpo camps, where operational requirements were taken care of by the prisoners themselves who were assigned to service and/or intelligence tasks, depended on differentiation. All those prisoners who were responsible for some task on a regular basis (cleaning, repairs, etc.) constituted a group called the ’Council'. This group comprised all those prisoners with a special skill (photography, drawing, mechanics, electronics, etc.) or who could carry out a task (washing, cooking, ironing, sewing, car-washing, etc.). The ’Council’ was also made up of prisoners who were members of the ’camp intelligence’ ... The composition of the ’Council’ would change after each trans­ fer, if some prisoner who was a member left the camp. The only [73]

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AOsaí uieä by -ike m'tlibury

ro u jk

Fig. 2 El Olimpo concentration camp

dU ßram

as

set* -/nowjL

stable ones were the collaborators belonging to ‘camp intelligence* and those working as doctors or forging documents. The other roles would be replaced several times... When prisoners reached the position of carrying out certain tasks, their meals and gradually their sleeping arrangements would improve considerably, with a progressive removal of the hood ... Freedom would be granted in stages. First there would be a period of communication by telephone, later the prisoner would be taken to see his family, accompanied by camp personnel. After a time, the prisoner would go ‘on leave* to join his family. At some stage, without prior notice, he would be conditionally released. Control consisted of weekly reports back at first, then fortnightly and finally monthly... Some ex-prisoners were authorized, after more than a year of this regime of freedom, to live abroad, in countries previously ap­ proved by the military command. There were some prisoners who spent more than three years in the condition of ‘hostage* of the camp. I spent two years before deciding to run the risk of arranging my exile.

So far we have presented a sketch of the main characteristics of the secret detention centres found during our Commission’s investigations. In the following pages there is a detailed descrip­ tion of some of these establishments. Likewise, we report on procedures carried out by the Commission on Disappeared People on the sites of these centres, with the participation of ex-prisoners who identified the installations, pointing out modifications which have been made. Others were dismantled or demolished prior to the 1979 visit by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS. All we know to date about many of them are fragmentary references, possibly because they were only used for very brief periods, which made pinpointing their location difficult. Their existence resolves the greatest question about the forced dis­ appearance of persons in recent years: this was where they had been. These centres had people running them; were part of operational areas; detailed lists were drawn up which recorded admissions, transfers, and departures of prisoners. Here we have the physical proof of the disappearances, and, consequently, the possibility of finding an answer to the fate of those who one day found themselves engulfed in a horror which still casts its sha­ dow over us today.

[75]

DESCRIPTION OF INDIVIDUAL SECRET DETENTION CENTRES We can distinguish two main categories of SDC from the testi­ monies presented to the Commission by people who had been secretly held and later regained their freedom. According to the classification used by the Armed Forces, in most areas of the country there were: Prisoner Assessment Centres (PAC) Centres where prisoners were held, generally for considerable periods of time, until their fate had been decided. Transit Camps (TC) With the odd exception, the duration of imprisonment here was short. The prisoner would arrive immediately after his abduction or, if it was so decided, just prior to being released or placed at the disposition of the National Executive.

Olimpo (PAC) Location: Calle Ramón Falco and Calle Olivera, Floresta, Buenos Aires city. Description: steel entrance gate, possibly red. A corrugated tin roof some 10 metres high covered most of the buildings. These were new, about 3 metres high, with flat concrete roofs, where there were two or three guards. The entrance was through the guards’ post. Prisoners were transferred through a double door. On the left there was a picture of the Virgin Mary. An isolation wing with large pointed windows, blocked with masonry, so that only their tops were left uncovered. Small torture room, latrines. On the other side another torture room, a cell, a photographic and fingerprint laboratory, a special operations office. A kitchen and dining-room opposite. One infirmary for treatment and an­ other for internment. Files and documentation office, another for X-rays. Three corridors of cells, each row of cells with a toilet with a curtain for a door, in the third row a wash-basin and showers. A guard room with a window on to the car park. A larger room was used for the repair of household, electrical and electronic goods stolen during the raids. [76]

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La Perla or La Universidad (PAC) Location: Province of Córdoba, on National Highway No. 20, approximately 12 kilometres from the provincial capital, on the stretch joining the latter with the town of Villa Carlos Paz, in the neighbourhood of Puente Nuevo adjoining the beginning of Mal­ agueño. Its buildings are on a hill on the right towards Carlos Paz, visible from the highway. Opposite is the Corcemar factory. Description: it had four brick buildings, three of them intercon­ nected by a gallery. Two were used by officers and non-commis­ sioned officers as dormitories and administrative offices, the third was the block where the prisoners were housed. At one end of the block were the toilets; at the other, four offices used for interrogation and torture sessions and one as an infirmary. The fourth building, detached from the other three, was used as a garage.

Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) Location: in Buenos Aires, with Avenida del Libertador to the west, Calles Comodoro Rivadavia and Leopoldo Lugones to the east and Calle Santiago Calzadilla to the south. On the north side it borders the Raggio industrial college. Description: the officers’ mess was the building allocated to Task Force 3.3.2. It was three storeys high, with a cellar and huge attic. Prisoners were housed in there, as well as on the third floor. The cellar had a large central corridor supported by concrete pillars. Between these columns were partitions, leading to a large green iron door, with an armed guard. The partitions were easy to dismantle. Before the entrance to the cellar itself one went through an armoury where there was emergency electrical equipment and several lockers with weapons. There was an armed guard there who would receive orders to open the door over an intercom. Stairs led down to the cellar. They could be seen on entering the Dorado (Gold Room), where operations were planned, and were part of the stairs which interconnected the whole building. There were two flights. Newly arrived prisoners would be brought here as the first stage in extracting information. [79]

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