Families still grieving for disappeared of Argentina
LIKE THEIR fellow citizens, Argentina’s more than half-a-million Jews have greeted the seizure of power by a military junta with a long sigh of relief. They hope that the long nightmare of the past three years or so under the Peronist administration has ended.’’ So wrote a JC special correspondent from Buenos Aires in April 1976 . The misplaced hope was the culmination of a longing for law and order amid the instability of the Peron administration. The Montoneros guerrillas who took their inspiration from the Argentinian-born Che Guevara were increasing their attacks on the police and military. A thousand people had been killed since 1969, many more injured, the Sheraton hotel bombed in the Argentinian capital and business executives in the car industry targeted.
The Catholic Church in Argentina enthusiastically welcomed this new regime as the defender of God, the motherland and the family. Archbishop Adolfo Tortolo, the army’s spiritual mentor, was grateful and certain that the military would stop what he perceived to be the moral disintegration of Argentinian society.
After all, the junta’s head, Jorge Rafael Videla, commented that a terrorist was someone who spread ideas ‘‘contrary to western and Christian civilisation’’.
Within a few years, up to 30,000 people had been ‘‘disappeared’’. This included a disproportionate 10 per cent who were Jews — both assimilated sympathisers with the Montoneros and apolitical liberal members of the Jewish community. If the left had been the central target of the military’s policy of torture and execution, Jews – that “unpatriotic tool of the White House and the Kremlin, the agents of unbridled capitalism and unscrupulous communism” — came a close second.
The bodies of the desaparecidos were never found — hence no legal case could be brought. The Argentinian military pioneered new methods such as ‘‘the death flights’’ in which drugged victims would be dropped far out to sea. Inhabitants of the Paraná Delta, north of Buenos Aires, reported ‘‘bodies falling out of the sky’’. The babies of executed parents were handed over to ‘‘good’’ military families.
The military leadership and the Catholic hierarchy had been inspired by the ideology of Vichy France and Franco’s Spain — and acted accordingly. Initially, the Republican White House of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger supported this military dictatorship with the intention of suppressing leftist revolts and limiting Soviet influence in its own backyard. Funding, military parts and assistance was stopped only in 1978 by President Carter.
While there were ties between the Montoneros and Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the regime suspected ‘‘Zionists’’. When the Jewish editor of Opinion, Jacobo Timmerman, was arrested, his interrogators questioned him about an imaginary meeting that had taken place between Menachem Begin and Montoneros journalists in Buenos Aires in 1976. This had emerged because Begin’s book, The Revolt, had been discovered in a Montoneros hideout. It recorded the Irgun’s campaign against the British in Palestine in the 1940s. Interrogators often quoted from the Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and believed that the Jews wanted to establish the Republic of Andinia in Patagonia. ‘‘How many troops would the Israelis send to the new state,’’ asked Timmerman’s tormentor.
Antisemitism was such a feature of closed detention centres that a section on it was included in the official 1984 report of that period, after Argentina had returned to democracy. Nazi regalia and portraits of Hitler were often observed and antisemitic taunts often heard. Swastikas were painted on the backs of Jews while others were ordered to walk on all fours like dogs, bark and lick the boots of their torturers. Timmerman records that Jewish prisoners were given reduced