The terrifying revelations made by a navy captain of the “death
flights” carried out during Argentina’s dirty war show that
memory will always fight to come to the surface. Consigning it to
oblivion is pointless, hypocritical and perverse.
A scandal was unleashed in Argentina in March in the
wake of the terrifying reve-
lations made by corvette-ship cap-
tain Adolfo Scilingo of the practice
of throwing men and women to
their death from airplanes during
the military dictatorship (1976-83).
That scandal gives rise to more than
Mario Benedetti is a distinguished Uruguayan poet and novelist His most recent work is La Borra del Cafe (Nueva
Imagen, 1993). Translated from the Spanish by N4ACLA
one interpretation. Of course, the
first of these has to do with horror.
Just months earlier, in October,
1994, two captains (Antonio
Pernias and Juan Carlos Rol6n) ad-
mitted before the Argentine Senate
that torture had been frequently em-
ployed in interrogations of political
prisoners. They referred to these
punishments, though, in a generic
way, giving few details, character-
istics, or other particulars.
They thus provoked in the imagi-
nation of every citizen images of
kicks, slaps, the plant6n (being
forced to stand up for hours on
end), the “submarine” (being held
under water until near suffocation),
the electric wire, and other varieties
of excessive cruelty. It is true, how-
ever, that these declarations did not
shock anyone. It is public and noto-
rious that here, there and every-
where, human rights are violated,
preferably those of human beings
on the left.
Even so, the case of Captain
Scilingo is something quite differ-
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 10ESSAY / THE DISAPPEARED
ent. In his by now well-known con-
fession to journalist Horacio
Verbitsky, which was disseminated
not only in Verbitsky’s book, The
Flight, but also in the press and on
television, Scilingo doesn’t just talk
about the obvious and routine
generalities of torture. He goes into
details, characteristics, and other
particulars.
Prisoners were notified of a sim-
ple and even promising transferal.
They were given strong sedatives
that they were told were vaccines,
and then put on a plane. After being
injected with even stronger seda-
tives, they were thrown, uncon-
scious but alive, into the ocean.
The testimony of the corvette-
ship captain is one of flabbergast-
ing realism. He himself was so in-
volved in the actual operation that
during one of the flights, in the
midst of throwing prisoners out of
the plane, he slipped near the small
door and was close to accompany-
ing them in the lethal fall to the sea.
I The irony does not end there.
After each of the punitive flights,
priests “comforted the officials
with scripture from the Gospels
about the necessary separation of
the wheat from the chaff.”
Everything was so peculiarly ethi-
cal that the doctor who adminis-
tered the soporific injections did
not participate in the act of letting
the bodies fall into space in order
not to violate the “Hippocratic
oath” (which is not, as one might
think, the father of hypocrisy, but of
medicine).
At the same time, the captain
knows how to use his computer to
do the calculations. He personally
participated in two of these lethal
flights, but he says that other simi-
lar flights were carried out every
Wednesday over the course of two
years. If 15 or 20 prisoners were
eliminated in this way every
Wednesday, the total number of
victims would be around 2,000.
As is to be expected, different
sectors have reacted to the disturb-
ing revelation in different ways.
Suddenly, the various human rights
organizations, the Mothers of the
Plaza de Mayo, relatives of the dis-
appeared, intellectuals, artists and
even bishops see all their denuncia-
tions confirmed. They are demand-
ing that the armed forces provide a
complete list of those killed in the
lethal flights.
President Carlos Sadl Menem,
by contrast, chooses to describe the
corvette-ship captain as “wicked,”
but he does not deny the terms of
the confession. The highest naval
authority, Admiral Enrique Molina
Pico, disqualifies Scilingo because
on a certain occasion he purchased
a stolen car, but he too does not
deny the terms of the confession.
Another high navy official attribut-
es to him the epithet “traitor and
ungentlemanly,” but he doesn’t
deny the terms of the confession
either.
The permanent commission of
the Argentine episcopate, for its
part, clarified that “neither the
Argentine episcopate nor its au-
thorities were ever consulted about
the correctness or viability of the
denounced procedures for the
elimination of the detained, nor
did they ever give any form of
consultation.” The second vice-
president of the same episcopate, however, admitted that “the
Church has always accepted that, while it is holy, it may give shelter
to sinners who are in need of re-
pentance.”
The second and perhaps most
important reading of the sur-
prising and self-incriminat-
ing testimony is that from now on,
no one can any longer close their
eyes before the evidence of a mon-
strous collective blame. The much
sought-after amnesty laws of “due
obedience” or “full stop,” passed
under President Radl Alfonsin in
1984 and 1987 respectively, are
now confirmed as a flagrant injus-
tice that can never be erased.
Given the connivance and the
fraternal alliance between the re-
pressive forces of Argentina, Chile,
Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and
Bolivia, Scilingo’s revelations also
implicate the entire region. A case
in point is Uruguay’s sadly
renowned Law of Termination of
the Punitive Pretension of the State
(a true verbal macrame to cloak an
amnesty law for the torturers). The
true character of that law-which
was sponsored and implemented
during the first government of cur-
rent president Julio Maria
Sanguinetti (and approved in a
contentious plebiscite in 1989)-
becomes clear thanks to the cap-
tain’s testimony.
In reference to the Scilingo case,
the March 10 edition of the
Montevideo weekly Brecha recalls
that 30 cadavers appeared on the
Uruguayan coast between 1976 and
1978. The pro-government press,
addicted to the dictatorship, claimed
that the cadavers were probably
Asians washed ashore after a
mutiny onboard a Japanese cargo
ship.
An orgy of blood and drugs, read
a newspaper headline from this
fearful time. It had been an orgy, it
is true, but one of cynicism and
vileness. Uruguayan public opinion
had no doubts that the cadavers
came from Argentina, but the only
journalist to initiate an investiga-
tion was pressured to abandon the
issue.
It is always a bad symptom when
a ruler tries to base his or her
power on collective amnesia. It
must be prohibited to look back-
ward, they decree; it is necessary to
always look forward. One should
not have “eyes in the back of one’s
head” (as President Sanguinetti
once said in reference to the orga-
nizers of the referendum campaign
against the amnesty law, whom he
accused of stirring up old hatreds
and conflicts).
The superficial meaning is that
we should not cultivate hatred or
VOL XXIX, No 3 Nov/Dsc 199511 VOL XXIX, No 3 Nov/DEC 1995 11ESSAY / THE DISAPPEARED
vengeance. That’s not bad.
But the hidden meaning is
that we should renounce
being just-that the essence
of justice should disappear
along with the disappeared.
No country, however, can
construct a true peace if it has
a sinister past pending.
From a psychological point
of view, the character of
Scilingo merits profound
study. The psychologist Laura
Bonaparte, one of the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo, over-
coming her own tragedy (the
military killed her ex-hus-
band, her two daughters, her
two sons-in-law, her son and
her daughter-in-law), offers
a profound analysis in the
March 12, 1995 edition of
the Buenos Aires daily
Pdgina/12. She tries to ex-
plain why Scilingo could re- One cuperate some elements of his sons
humanity: noto.
An ideology like a militarist one
forces you to encapsulate your
own subjectivity through rational-
izations that justify your actions.
They are inventions, let’s say, to
convince yourself. So all the char-
acteristics that make a military of-
ficer human are blocked out. The
history of each person may be dif-
ferent, depending on the sensibili-
ty with which he or she has been
raised. I doubt that the encapucha-
dos [“the hooded ones,” unidenti-
fied military personnel who have
violently protested the human
rights trials of military officials]
had been human at any time. The
person who was able to unblock
him- or herself was able to do so
because he or she had a human
drive to identify with another
human being.
She adds: “What Scilingo did can-
not be changed, but he did reveal
one great truth. He cannot give life
back to our loved ones. He has
proven us right. The human rights
organizations are no longer the
crazy men and women.”
of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo protest disappearance at the Navy’s School of Mechan
rious torture site during the dictatorship.
young Uruguayan poet,
Rafael Courtoisie, wrote
I this poem of just two lines
some time ago: “One day, all the
elephants met to forget/All of them,
except one.” Now it was Captain
Scilingo. On another occasion, it
could be someone else.
There will always be an elephant
who cannot bear the pressure of his
or her conscience and decides to
tell the truth. Society will have a
hard time forgiving that person but,
just the same, it will be grateful for
his or her sincerity. Society, or at
least its most dignified part, will
not demand revenge but justice
and, above all, information.
A few hours after the confession
of the corvette-ship captain, ten
young people who in the midst of
the military dictatorship had been
adopted by various couples called
for an investigation into their true
identities. The public debate made
them realize that they might be
children of the disappeared.
It is curious that the top mil-
itary hierarchy, as well as
President Menem, fervently
disqualify the testimony of
Scilingo only because at one
point he acquired a stolen car.
Yet they are not concerned
that hundreds, or perhaps
thousands, of officials who
stole lives are not in jail. Does
this mean that for the canons
(cannons) of a consumerist
and neoliberal society, the pur-
chase of a stolen automobile
represents a more treacherous
crime than the ominous throw-
ing into the ocean of 2,000 cit-
izens who had not even re-
ceived a trial?
The flights were based on a
fiction: that their existence
could be forgotten, and the
perpetrators exonerated of
blame. Four years ago, when
s her President Menem pardoned
ics, a Massera, Vida, Viola and
Camps–the leaders of the dic-
tatorship-I wrote that “the
pardoning of the crime reenacts the
crime.”
Fear may spread and even over-
come an entire society, but fear is
never democratic. Neither fear nor
amnesia is democratic. It was for a
reason that Jorge Luis Borges, who
lived through stages of incredible
blindness before the glare of the
sabers, nonetheless left this quota-
tion that is almost a revelation:
“Only one thing does not exist. It is
forgetting.”
From the well-known Dreyfus case
(it was recently the hundredth an-
niversary of his scandalous convic-
tion) to today, forgetting has always
been filled with memory. This mem-
ory has always fought to come to the
surface in order to show the world
that consigning it to oblivion is point-
less, hypocritical and perverse.
Memory is so important that, to
paraphrase Courtoisie, if just one
elephant remains that remembers,
that memory can change an entire
country’s history.
Menu
